Happy New Year, everyone! We have high hopes for 2018, and happily it's starting well with this, a list of the top 50 games of 2017 as decided by you. Thank you so much for all of your votes. Now, enjoy!

What we said: "The Sexy Brutale isn't quite an unqualified triumph - the puzzles are a bit too gentle towards the finish, once you've got the layout down pat, and the story ends with a slightly graceless dollop of extended exposition. But it's a dazzling show of how a game can benefit from taking time seriously, and a tale of bloodshed that is as gripping as it is ghastly."

"It's a close one but the 80's retro isometric gameplay, great story, gameplay that builds on itself and a brilliant alternate ending makes this the sleeper hit of the year," says Tmcd35, kicking us off with style.

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You've read Eurogamer's games of 2017 list, but how did we settle on the top 10? A mixture of science and alcohol, it turns out.

Our top 50 games list was compiled via a voting process. Eurogamer staff and contributors were asked to submit their top 10 games of 2017, and points were distributed accordingly. This process provided us with an initial top 50.

Then, we all popped along to our local here in Brighton to thrash it out, with a particular focus on the top 10. We thought it would be fun to let our dear readers in on the chat (complete with all the swearing - apologies for our filthy mouths).

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Hello! Welcome back to the final instalment of our top 50 games of 2017, as picked by the Eurogamer editorial team. Looking back, it's clear that 2017 in gaming was truly something very special - which is nice, frankly, because elsewhere the year had some serious problems. Anyway, here are our top ten games of the year!

Creative Assembly

Chris Bratt: At launch I was impressed by a new style of campaign that has players pushing forwards with some urgency, taking more risks, lest they lose the race for the Great Vortex to a faction they've barely encountered on the other side of the continent.

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The great Star Wars debacle - and I'm not talking about The Last Jedi's second act here - dominated video game headlines in the last quarter of 2017. But in truth the year was packed with depressing stories about loot boxes, so many in fact that it has at times felt like our beloved hobby was more about the chance to win a rare item than it was about the chance to play.

It all began with For Honor, Ubisoft's excellent but troubled melee combat game. Soon after For Honor came out in February, a redditor worked out how much money it would cost to unlock all 12 heroes in the game and their associated aesthetic items (2017 would see enterprising redditors work out how much things cost to unlock in a lot of games). It turned out it would cost an eye-watering 585. Ouch.

Ubisoft, sensing a growing resentment among players (growing resentment was a running theme of 2017), said it never intended for players to unlock everything in the game. That was a PR line that didn't go down well (PR lines that didn't go down well was another running theme of 2017).

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Welcome back! Here's what you've missed:

MachineGames

Edwin Evans-Thirlwell: The New Colossus is by turns a bloodthirsty shooter, a stylish satire of American fascism and a round of drunken chess-boxing at a Nazis-and-beatniks-themed fancy dress party. In one corner Ronald Reagan lies bleeding, his turtleneck sweater torn at by a robot dog who sings as sweetly as George Harrison. Across the room, an unending procession of stormtroopers emerges from a Portaloo, each pausing to waft the air theatrically before sauntering straight into a grinder. Out the window, Texan school children dance around a tree that is, on closer inspection, a mushroom cloud. Suddenly, series protagonist BJ Blazkowicz appears riding a pig to wild applause, shotguns coughing and spluttering in either hand. His mouth falls open and the voice of a senile Hitler issues forth: "do the Fall of the Berlin Wall next, MachineGames."

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Welcome back! Here's what you've missed so far:

EA Sports, EA Canada

Martin Robinson: It's not as good as PES. Sorry, Wes.

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Oh, hello you! Here's what you've missed so far:

Rebellion Developments

Martin Robinson: The Sniper Elite games might have started off as something of a guilty pleasure, but over time they've evolved into anything but; here's a stealth-led action game that can hold its own against the very best in the business, and it's all delivered with the verve and swagger of developer Rebellion at the top of its game. This is Metal Gear Solid 5 without all the bollocks, basically, and where you're actively encouraged to snipe away at Nazis' nutsacks too.

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Hello! Chris Donlan here. I hope you had a lovely Christmas. Now we're almost certainly going to make you really angry, which is unfortunate really. Welcome to our list of the top 50 games of 2017, as chosen by the team at Eurogamer! Over the next few days we'll be counting down our choices, ten games at a time.

While publishing this list I re-read Eurogamer's top 50 games of 2008, just to see how things went the last time we handled a best-of this way - and to do a massive cut and paste so I didn't need to write any HTML from scratch, obviously. It turned out to be completely fascinating. What's clear is that, back then, editorial more or less played the same games as each other - it certainly seems that a lot of people could chime in with thoughts on a good proportion of the games in the list.

Games are more varied in 2017, and as players we're also far more scattered. When we all got together recently to argue out the top ten in the pub just down the road, it became clear quite quickly that, aside from a few mega-hits, most of us were arguing from our own comfortable niches.

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If you had asked me at the start of this year what I thought a year spent playing multiplayer games would look like, I probably would have talked about muting people and about the frustration of being shot from halfway across the map by someone I couldn't even see. Crucially, I wouldn't have thought of Hearthstone or Diablo or any of the other multiplayer games I have always loved, because multiplayer - online multiplayer - for me still meant the unexamined cliches I had carried with me for years. Multiplayer was something I did not do, so the multiplayer games I already played all the time must be something subtly different.

I would love to say that this year I had an awakening, but there is nothing personal about it. 2017! There have been cheap tricks and huge games sunk by loot boxes, but my colleagues will be covering that stuff. And it's worth remembering that 2017 is also the year that even a fool like me could not fail to notice that so many of the cliches surrounding online gaming - particularly online shooters - are no longer as firmly rooted in the ground as they once were. And maybe they haven't been for some time.

In fact, a lot of my year - a year spent playing multiplayer games, as it happens - looked nothing like I would have expected it to. For an awful lot of it, I was hidden in shrubbery or taking long walks in the wilderness. Then there was downtown, the lights, the stores, the sidewalk cafes. Then there were those crazy, telescoping limbs. Again: not just me. This has been an incredible year for multiplayer games, and it's all hinged on the sheer variety and invention that's out there right now.

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The truth can be hard to look at, is it really something you're ready for? Maybe the lies we tell each other are less horrible than the truths we keep hidden? In addition to these being the main questions Life is Strange: Before the Storm asks of its players, they were also, in a way, the questions those players asked of publisher Square Enix when Before the Storm was first announced. Why spoil the mysteries of the original Life is Strange by laying them bare for all to see? Why not let fans leave the words unsaid and the people never met to their imaginations? Why entrust these beloved secrets to a new development studio? But, despite those legitimate concerns from the Life is Strange community, since the first episode launched in August this year it's been apparent that Before the Storm is not only a worthy follow-up to the original Life is Strange, in some ways it surpasses the groundwork that has already been laid.

Before the Storm paints a more intimate picture of Chloe Price, hellraiser best friend of the original's protagonist Max Caulfield, three years before the events of Life is Strange, in the time Max moved away to Seattle and the two lost contact. Playing as Chloe is a markedly different experience to playing as Max, and given how much you know about Chloe's future at this point, it's remarkable how much freedom it feels like Before the Storm gives you in shaping her outlook and attitude.

Crucially, of course, Chloe does not have Max's mysterious ability to rewind time. This could have been regarded as a step backwards in the complexity of the game, but Before the Storm wisely plays to Chloe's strengths of perception and social manipulation, meaning there are plenty of opportunities to carefully explore your surroundings and approach altercations as a puzzle to be solved. And there's a very marked permanence to the responses you give and the reactions you have to the world around you, raising the stakes in a very real way.

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