As you've probably spotted, we've spent the last week since we broke up for Christmas publishing personal accounts of some of our favourite games of the last 12 months, and we've also named our overall Game of the Year for 2011: Valve's wonderful Portal 2.

Traditionally though we leave it to you to bring order to the chaos of the year just ended by voting for your top games and giving us your reasons. We take your top-five lists and scientifically jumble them all together to create the Eurogamer Readers' Top 50 Games, and then publish it all in one go along with a selection of your comments.

This year we had our largest ever response and we also received far more comments than before - and far more than we have been able to use here, so apologies if you submitted something that we weren't able to use. We did read all of them while compiling the list, and it was fascinating to see where you agreed and disagreed on the games included. The comments we did include are a snapshot of the range of views expressed.

One last thing - while the consensus around the game at the top of the list was huge, so it can reasonably be termed the Eurogamer Readers Game of the Year 2011, it's worth remembering that lists are just a bit of fun, and that at this merry time of year it is not worth getting hot and bothered about whether one game is definitively superior to another. Trust us - we learned that one the hard way.

Happy New Year! Here's the very best of the one to which we all just said goodbye...

Was 2011 a great year for gaming or wasn't it? Regardless of where you stand on that particular debate, it's been responsible for some of the medium's finest efforts. Going through our Games of 2011 has provided some heartening reading, and the likes of Bastion, Quarrel and Clash of Heroes HD go to show that when it comes to "Actual New Games" we've had our fair share over the last 12 months.

But it's the sequels and new instalments in long-running series that have, perhaps predictably, taken the limelight, and they've presented fascinating insights into how different developers approach the sometimes sticky business of iteration. Eidos Montreal pulled off a commendable balancing act with Deus Ex: Human Revolution, managing to replicate the 1999 original while offering an entirely new vision, while Nintendo once again revived and renewed its two most well-worn mascots with the dizzying one-two punch of Super Mario 3D Land and Skyward Sword.

Elsewhere, Dark Souls spread the punishing formula of its predecessor over a wider, more intricate world - and Skyrim trumped its own forebears by creating the most sumptuous and expansive world that the Elder Scrolls have ever unfurled in.

But our own game of the year was the only one blunt enough to carry its sequel status on its sleeve - though the game in question was bold enough to tinker with the very idea of what a sequel can be. And it had to really - what emerged from the test chambers the first time around flew close to perfection, a brilliantly judged and refreshingly small slice of first-person puzzling. Following that up felt like madness, but the result was a giddy and intoxicating madness that was the work of an undoubtedly special developer.

And so, for the third time in the 12-year history of Eurogamer, the honours go to Valve for Portal 2, our Game of the Year 2011.

Thanks to quirks of the calendar and the narrowing technological gap between the devices in our pockets and those lingering under our TVs, the latest instalment of the Uncharted action-adventure series arrives barely two months after we reviewed the last one, Drake's Deception, and doesn't look all that different. Even by the Call of Duty-regurgitating, never-knowingly-not-a-sequel standards of the modern video games industry, that's an impressive rate of iteration.

The difference, of course, is that Uncharted: Golden Abyss is one of the first games to be released for PlayStation Vita, and while the timing is perhaps unfortunate - even when Vita reaches Europe in late February, Drake's Deception will be barely four months old - you can understand the choice of talisman. If anybody is going to convince sceptical gamers that Sony's new handheld can deliver premium-quality gaming on the go, then surely it is Nathan Drake.

With original developer Naughty Dog sticking to the PS3 for the time being, Drake's latest fate is thrust into the hands of Sony's Bend Studio, and the team best known for the Syphon Filter games proves a fastidious steward, carefully ticking all the right boxes over the game's six-to-eight hour lifespan. There's a reluctant love interest, double crosses, fossils and relics galore, and an ancient city of gold to be found by jumping, shooting and dangling through jungles and ruins across South America.

So what's your favourite Christmas game? One you played at yuletide, rather than actually based on the festive season, that is. You have one, naturally. All gamers do.

The reasons are clear enough: 'tis the season to get games and consoles all wrapped up under the fake plastic tree, and 'tis generally the one time of year when the To Do list for every day is "Sweet FA".

For kids, the summer holiday may seem to stretch endlessly into an unimaginable future, but it's more likely to be spent outdoors, setting fire to things, shoplifting and suchlike; plus the games you really want aren't usually out until the weather turns blue and the afternoons go black.

I have very few detailed memories of my childhood - other than, strikingly, what games I was playing over the various Christmases of my youth. What makes games particularly wonderful in the winter months over other entertainment media (except novels, but then they've always had rubbish graphics) is how deeply you can submerge yourself in their world.

Christmas '89 was Ocean's Batman The Movie on Amiga, the computer itself memorably packaged in a cardboard sleeve with the Dark Knight's logo emblazoned on it, the game itself wowing before I'd even started playing, with its thrilling title screen exchange: "'What are you?!' 'I'm Batman'."

Xenoblade Chronicles isn't the best-made game released this year. It's not quite my personal favourite, either. It's not the greatest role-playing game in what was surely a banner year for the genre; nor is it the most exciting new game from Japan or the most welcome comeback. It's not even the best Wii game of 2011. But it was something none of those games were: a lovely surprise.

We should have known better. It had been well received on its domestic release last year. So was it xenophobia that had led us to disregard the Japanese RPG's capacity for invention? Was it elitism that had written off the Wii as anything other than a home for curios, snack gaming and the occasional, dutiful prestige Nintendo release? No, it was bitter experience. The same experience that told us not to expect a game like Xenoblade to ever make its way to Europe, never mind releasing here before North America (where it will see the light of day next year) or selling out when it did so.

Unheralded (except by the fans who campaigned for its release), unsullied by hype, unburdened by expectation, Xenoblade Chronicles was a gift. And when you popped it in the machine, it was the gift that kept on giving.

Few games this year have been so faultlessly generous. It's a huge game and absolutely stuffed with collectables, side-quests and distractions, a teeming to-do list to rival a modern MMO. And in its later stages, where many single-player RPGs start to wear thin - or at least, start to narrow back down toward some climactic confrontation, leaving their other threads flapping aimlessly in the breeze - Xenoblade Chronicles establishes an end-game that may end up meaning more to you than its typically melodramatic plot.

A hazy myth, an elegant contraption, an eccentric vision, an unforgiving mistress: Dark Souls has many sides. All bear the fingerprints of creator Hidetaka Miyazaki, who in 2011 established himself as the most interesting designer working in blockbuster games today. Not that this, sequel to Sony-born Demon's Souls, has much aside from giant sales figures to identify it as a big hitter. In all other ways it eschews the churning mainstream, taking design decisions that are both unfashionable and, prior to its chart-dominating success, seemingly commercially unworkable.

Because it's a game that obscures its precise systems with the fog of misdirection, whispering clues that lead nowhere, forcing you to feel out its systems and geography, absent of any handholding. For players used to explicit goals with well-furrowed roads to reach them, this feels like play with the stabilisers removed. Indeed, when it comes to your task and the route by which you arrive at it, Dark Souls has nothing to say.

Its tutorials come as paper cut admonishments; training levels that suckerpunch you back to bonfire save points with nothing to show for your troubles but some muscle memory, a bruised ego and another plan that must be torn up and replaced with something better. Dark Souls has nothing to say to players who wish to succeed simply by showing up.

Did you know that there's a new Mission: Impossible film out this Christmas? I had no idea until the other day. I assume they must have masses of advertising running for that on TV, in cinemas, online and "outdoors" (I eventually spotted it on a train station poster), but despite spending most of my life hanging off the digital world like a conjoined foetus, somehow its existence had passed me by.

So that's something to say for video games in 2011, because if nothing else they have been very noticeable. Professional footballers spend their Saturday afternoons sprinting across pitches ring-fenced by ubiquitous adverts for FIFA 12, and we stare at them through screens adorned with ball possession statistics brought to us by EA Sports.

Meanwhile, every other ad break during the X Factor - you'd cry if you knew how much they charged for 30 seconds - is a succession of Wii and Kinect adverts, occasionally interspersed by Saints Row: The Third or Modern Warfare. Battlefield 3 was one of Google's fastest-rising search terms of 2011, and every bus shelter on my way to work shouts at me about Uncharted 3's "gripping" gameplay, and has done for the past four weeks.

In the UK at least, games - and a surprising range of them - have become an inescapable backdrop to mainstream life. Meanwhile, I didn't even know there was a new Mission: Impossible film.

It's Nottingham, the end of a crisp autumn day, and Eric Chahi's smile is as bright as the late October sun - although his is a face that seems reluctant to ever frown.

His eyes are permanently smiling and a playful grin is always ready to flicker across his features. His hair rinsed a blue that matches the shade of his suede shoes, he's delighting in the reactions of those sampling his own take on molecular gastronomy at this year's GameCity. It's another of Eric's many interests, and in the luminescent desserts and stereoscopic starters there's a combination of playfulness, curiosity and eccentricity that'll be familiar to anyone who's played his games.

When Heart of Darkness finally came out in 1998, six troubled years on from the game that made Chahi's name, it perhaps shouldn't be have come as a surprise that his next game was well over a decade away, that this talent would be lost to videogames for thirteen years.

It helped infuse his return, coming at the end of an Ubisoft E3 conference that until Mr. Caffeine pooped on our toothpaste earlier this year was one of the French company's most bizarre, with a certain mysticism. Sitting in on one of the show's demos, it was a mysticism amplified by Chahi's whispered presentations, roomfuls of people who had been beaten into submission by being drilled in the gameplay pillars of that year's new class of shooters now struggling to understand his gentle, splintered English, and struggling to comprehend this strange new game.

SPOILER ALERT!: This piece contains story spoilers - from the very first sentence onwards.

My guilty little secret: I reloaded my quicksave about 30 times to try and save Faridah Malik when her helicopter's shot down and then assaulted by Belltower goons late in the game. Having played a stealthy, non-lethal character throughout the game, I was as much use as an asthmatic kitten in a straight-up firefight, so the rush of robots and heavily-armoured thugs that swarmed the downed bird made mincemeat of me the second I showed my goateed face. Trouble was, I couldn't sneak about doing careful silent takedowns, because after a few harrowing moments Faridah would be so much augmented toast. And while I did have the option of spamming the whole scene with explosives, I didn't want to compromise my 'no fatalities' ethos. What to do, what to do?

Well, cheat. Cheat within the confines of the game - quicksave, quickload, quicksave, quickload, incrementally creeping closer to an idealised set of circumstances wherein I'd made it to point X without being killed, had non-fatally taken out assault cannon-toting guard Y before he could pepper the chopper, hidden deftly at point Z then dropped an EMP grenade under robot Ω. No-one dead (unless you count robots), Faridah was rescued in time and I came it through it all with nary a scratch. That's my story. That's how the game records it. That's why I'm a bloody hero, right?

Of course, what I'd actually done was quicksave every second step, and quickload the second I was spotted or shot. Faridah died a good dozen times, as did I; the poor first guard to enter the scene, meanwhile, suffered 30 assorted fatalities and knock-outs as I experimented with everything in my arsenal in search of the most effect way to get a few steps closer to my desperate goal. It was shameful, it was pathetic, it was a distortion of Deus Ex: Human Revolution's concept that consequences matter. And I don't regret it for a second.

Why I don't regret it is braided in irretrievably in with why I enjoyed DXHR so much. Nominally, Human Revolution is the story of beardy, growly cyborg security guard Adam "I didn't ask for this" Jensen, but screw that guy, frankly. Screw him and screw his lost love and screw his double-dealing employers. This is about me - because DXHR, with its impressive freedom of action, is a soft, yielding material I wrap around my own brain so that it reflects me. Its reality is the reality I choose to give it - and I choose that Faridah lives, that she's rescued by me and that I do so without my ever breaking my own rules of engagement.

What my savegame abuse also achieved was to show off the game's combat flexibility and quite how spectacular a DXHR skirmish can be in the hands of a (cough) skilled player. This Jensen I'd built really could take out everyone in an open space filled with snipers and body-armoured shotgunners and rocket-spewing robots; leaping from cover to cover, a silent throttle here, a tranquiliser dart in that guy up there's face, a gas grenade at that clutch of thugs as they rush through the door, an EMP mine under that robot and then a stungun blast right to the belly of the last guard. Unconscious bodies and flaming robo-wreckage everywhere, and in the middle of it all lies one still-intact helicopter. I didn't ask for this, but goddamn if I'm not going to make the best of it.

I was Cyborg Batman, an unstoppable force of black-suited vengeance. I would love to see a recording of my 'perfect' playthrough, with the staccato, incremental interruptions of cheaty saving and loading excised. I'd look like a god of war. No wonder DXHR's populace is so alarmed by the increasing numbers of machine-men wandering the world's perma-gloomy streets.

For all the conspiracies and the moralising about bio-mechanical augmentation, DXHR is also an excellent combat game with an extensive, player-selected toolbox that's never guilty of boxing you into specific weapons or specific playstyles. It might not quite be the equal of its revered forebear in terms of emergent possibilities - its AI and physics are perhaps too machine-tight to allow the sort of flexibility and mad experiments that Deus Ex 1 did - but what a superhero simulator it is.

I could, if I'd have so chosen, saved Faridah by hiding behind boxes and methodically sniping everything that moved. If you want to play it like a boring grey-faced man would play a boring grey FPS with a boring grey machinegun, go ahead and be boring and grey. DHXR allows that too. Me, I wanted to be right in there, doing crazy stuff like plummeting off rooftops in slow-motion.

Despite the high-speed, high-gloss violence, Human Revolution achieved something I honestly wasn't expecting: it made me feel like I was playing Deus Ex again. I was back to 18 years old, the same unblinking, hunched abandonment to this game's world and the jigsaw pieces it gave me to build my path through it. Just as in 2000, I was consumed by the compulsive need to hack every door and terminal, to read every datapad, to steal every credit; to have a strict code of stealth and non-lethality; to become drawn into the paranoid guessing game about which of my assorted contacts and opponents was the real enemy, the true puppet-master of all this conflict and betrayal.

A world forever on the brink of chaos, but one that I could nonetheless dictate the rules of. That's why I couldn't let Faridah Malik die. This was my reality and my story, and I had the tools and the ability to keep it that way. Consequences? Hah. They answer to me.

About 20 years ago, "closure" became a thing that we wanted after something bad happened. When someone dies, we are told that the grieving parties desire closure - that they want to take the death, put it in a box, and tape the edges shut on that sucker until it is good and sealed.

There's no closure in Bastion. The loss that opens the game is too huge to contain. The hero, a stoic white-haired boy named The Kid, wakes up from a night's sleep to find that the world outside his bedroom has vanished, replaced by a three-dimensional fog of emptiness.

Practically everyone is dead, but that's mere prologue. You're alive. So it's a question of what you're going to do with yourself. As you look past the threshold of your bedroom doorway into the void, the only reasonable option is to walk out there. The perverse reality is that even when the path ahead appears to hold literally nothing for you, you've got to go there anyway. That's The Kid's lot, the burden of the living.

And when you walk out that door, fragments of the world assemble themselves beneath your feet. It's the signature visual effect of a pretty game, and there's a parallel in another landmark 2011 game, Catherine. Both games have you navigate a world that floats amid a backdrop of indeterminate space. In Bastion, chunks of terrain rise up as you go. In Catherine, the chunks fall away as you go.

The basic message is the same. Standing still is not a viable option. In every game, as in every life, there are choices that lead to success and lead to failure. If that's the first law of gaming, then Bastion and Catherine explore the unspoken zeroth law: you've got to choose something.

The difference between the two games is that Catherine emphasises the negative consequences of the zero law - if you don't keep your life moving forward, your own fears and insecurities will grow and consume you - while Bastion focuses on the affirmative side. When The Kid advances in Bastion, his world comes alive with every step. It's not like you keep going in spite of the fact that there's nothing there - you keep going because there's nothing there.

In other words, the world of Bastion is one where living is a fundamentally creative act. The Kid "makes" the journey in more than sense of the word. I know because Rucks told me.

Rucks is the leathery old guy who narrates all of the action in the game. I say he's old, but Rucks has an ageless quality. He speaks with the weight of someone who's always been there and plans to stick around for a while because hell, why not? Maybe somebody will show him something he hasn't seen before. It could happen.

The timeworn sage comments on your exploits, in the present tense, as if we're all sitting around a campfire listening to him weave The Story of The Kid. He fills in the backstories of each world, tells us where the monsters come from, sets up major battles, and so on.

As with all good storytellers, Rucks makes the smaller moments as vivid as the big ones. One of his most memorable lines comes early in the game. If you take a break from demon slaying to bust up some nearby crates with your new hammer - and c'mon, nobody can resist a pile of smashable junk - Rucks says, "Kid just rages for a while."

The line is funny because we consider crate smashing to be an extracurricular activity of sorts. We don't expect Rucks to pipe up here, because we're not "advancing the story." Except of course we are. The occasional inanimate-object assault is just as much a part of The Kid's story as a frenzied boss fight. We never stop creating.

The Kid's creations carry an extra portent because they come in the aftermath of that huge, world-obliterating loss, which Rucks calls The Calamity. The specific details of The Calamity are hard to discern for much of the game, but we do know it's the disaster that blew The Kid's universe into wisps.

As it happens, this aspect of Bastion's story resonated with real-world events, as the game was released just a few months after the Tohoku earthquake and tsunami disfigured huge swaths of Japan's eastern coast. The tangled debris fields of The Kid's realm often evoke the before-and-after photos that were splashed across news coverage of the tragedy-the ones that showed homes, roads, farmland, and industry in the "before" shot, replaced by nothing in the aftermath. It was a real-life Calamity, made all the more inconceivable by its actuality, and its survivors were left staring into nothingness.

This is where The Kid lives, wading through the detritus of catastrophe. You spend most of the game battling demons of the past - spectres driven by some lingering anguish or bitterness. But then, after all the fighting is over, the true reckoning arrives.

History happens, and then we make something of it. When people die, and all their worldly vestiges crumble or fade away, whatever spirit remains must be the soul of the past. And in one of the universe's strangest ironies, the nature of that soul is determined by the living. The Kid lost almost everyone; that happened. By choosing what to do next - what lesson to draw from The Calamity - he determines what it all means.

So in the final moments on the hovering island called The Bastion, you face a choice in which you essentially decide which parts of the past to carry forward. Is your patch of grass the last bastion of the old ways? Or is it the seed of something new?

It's the essential quandary of the survivor, and none of the options offer a certain future. When we make a choice like this in real life, we call the moment of decision "closure." Yet the moment after this last decision is the most ambiguous part of the game. Bastion maintains that there is no such thing as closure. Instead, the past keeps extending its tendrils into the future, and we decide what to make of it in a terrifyingly, enthrallingly open world.