What was 2017 game of the year

By , Spike TV announced it was ending the game awards. Unhappy with this decision, Keighley took it upon himself to reach out to several key entities in the industry to revive the awards. Hardware manufacturers including Sony, Nintendo, and Microsoft also threw their weight behind the event.

Thus, The Game Awards was born in December How are the Game Awards nominees and winners chosen? Instead, they have a series of committees.

The first is the advisory committee. Interactive Entertainment. The advisory committee chooses 51 influential global video-game news outlets to form a jury. The jury then selects its picks for the nominated games in each category. This is one of the categories that fans will get to vote on more on that later. Representatives from 51 global media outlets, including GameSpot and Giant Bomb, are voting to decide the winners of the mainline categories.

Alternatively, you can vote through the event's website. You can see a full roundup of the nominees below, as posted on The Game Awards website and compiled by Den Of Geek. In addition to awards, the broadcast will feature game announcements and new trailers, along with musical performances. New for the show is The Game Awards Orchestra, which is a group of "some of the world's most talented orchestral and rock musicians.

The sale will run in early December. Last year's event drew 8. Blizzard's hero shooter Overwatch took home the Game of the Year award in How refreshing to play a game that asks you to care for them, even after their life has left.

Portions of the story draw on shopworn themes of sports movies, but given the constraints Young and partner Adrian Todd Zuniga inevitably faced with an image-conscious licensing partner like the NFL, that they could deliver something as meaningful as Longshot is an underappreciated writing achievement. With a little patience and creative thinking, even the hardest puzzles are fun to figure out.

Unless, of course, your partner insists on snipping you to pieces. The Uncharted series has always been about relationships: the relationship between Nathan Drake and his criminal buddy Victor Sullivan, or his wife Elena, or his brother Sam.

Uncharted: The Lost Legacy pivots on this focus on relationships by removing Drake from the equation entirely. The puzzles and history remain the focus, while the combat never overstays its welcome. After four main Uncharted stories, we were ready for a new take on the story, and The Lost Legacy refreshes the gameplay, the puzzles and the banter in one perfectly packaged experience. Observer can be a nasty little virus of a game, infecting your mind with its sickly vision of a future.

An ingenious blend of Groundhog Day and immersive theater like Sleep No More , The Sexy Brutale requires the player to prevent a string of murders without ever being spotted. If you miss a moment of the story or the opportunity to stop a killing , you can stop and rewind time for another chance.

Despite the clever, mind-bending mechanics, what sticks months after playing The Sexy Brutale is its lovely story of forgiveness and redemption.

Yakuza 0 almost feels like the year's best minigame collection. In between its scenes about family loyalty and gangster drama, our hero Kiryu encounters one hilarious side quest after another. He even helps to produce a feature film. Never underestimate the power of local multiplayer. Splatoon 2 fixes the mistakes of its predecessor by embracing the couch — and reminds us how much fun we can have playing in the same room..

As much as the new characters, clothing options, Splatfests and soundtrack are wonderful additions to Splatoon 2 , nothing feels better than Salmon Run. The horde co-op mode creates for some of the most intense, heart-pumping, hilarious challenges found in any game this year. Nioh is what happens when you build an entire game around a nearly perfect combat system. The premise of the mechanics goes something like this: Ninja Theory took the fast-paced character action style that it perfected in the Ninja Gaiden series and mixed it with the precision of Dark Souls, then added fighting stances that made the whole thing four times as complicated.

But the game is neither as commercially crass nor artistically ostentatious as the premise suggests. Instead, Hidden Folks is confident, relaxed and charming. Previously, de Jongh operated within the studio Game Oven, where he created games that explored physical spaces.

Sadly, those projects have never found the mainstream audience they deserve. With Hidden Folks , de Jongh seems to accept that we now live within our screens. Rather than scold us for our obsession with screens, de Jongh creates a space free of gaudy color, notifications and noise. They have stretchy, springy arms.

And they come in oddball types. The game flips the script on how you fight. Punches unfurl like Slinkies. Unlike 2D fighters, Arms builds its combat on the quirkiness of 3D space. A punch can come from any direction.

What looks like another Nintendo party game is much deeper than the cartoony characters suggest. There is a hidden cost to doing things if you have social anxiety or depression. The point-keeping system assigns different costs or values to activities like making food or socializing at work. The challenge lies in balancing that point system in a way that leads to a tolerable existence. This is a gentle, caring game about a complicated subject. A joyous little cast of characters speak volumes without uttering a single meaningful word.

Last Day of June is also an object lesson in how creative indie developers are shaping worlds that feel like interactive works of art. You create a commodity, then sell it for cash to buy tools and machines to create more of that commodity, until you become the king of making of cookies or candy or, in this case, paper clips. It works just as well as a critique on capitalism. Who needs AI to destroy the world when you have Excel and middle management? The player users a sledgehammer to push, pull and pop a bald man in a cauldron up and over a mountain.

Ultra difficult games can be demoralizing, asking players to be fueled by little more than pride and determination. But Foddy converses with the player, encouraging them forward. Foddy is like a parent encouraging their kid as they learn to walk. Designer Jason Roberts has been crafting the puzzle game Gorogoa for over seven years, and yet it seemed to materialize in the world with minimal promotional fanfare. In the last decade, a handful of indie games have taken inspiration from artists who play with perspective, particularly the eye-contorting works of M.

Instead, it plays with visual perspective to explore what intellectual perspective provides us as humans. I think it has to do with the idea that there is hidden structure or meaning in the world.

That if you can look at an ordinary piece of the world and rearrange the parts of it in just the right way, you would discover some hidden structure. You unravel the context behind the lost phone through photo albums and calendar entries. But Another Lost Phone improves upon the original with a more careful and thoughtful story. They should be taken as a pair, showing the growth of an idea and its creator within a single year.

And who would have ever expected Mario to hold a gun? And yet, Kingdom Battle works. Cleverly disguised as a bit top-down role-playing game, Rakuen is an exploration of human frailty in the face of tragedy.

It takes place in a dichotomous world where a sick boy travels between his humdrum hospital ward and a colorful land of magic. The game delivers straightforward quests greatly illuminated by a range of characters whose lives represent the anxieties we all face: rejection, loneliness, guilt, fear and pride. Rakuen is a work of truth, elevated by a lovely musical score. Developer Nihon Falcom has always been talented, but Ys 8 represents a new high for the studio, a game where each piece comes together and interlocks in a way that feels damn near perfect.

Rather than just add new graphics to the original, Nintendo revamped every aspect of the game, adding new upgrades, boss fights and a reimagined world. Toss in some of the best-looking visuals in a 3DS game, and you begin to see why this is a must-play for any Metroid fan.

What if Sega had kept making 2D Sonic games? What if the bit era never ended? What if Sonic could be as joyful as we remember it, rather than a frustrating and imprecise platformer? Sonic Mania is the answer to those questions. It has all the polish and nostalgia to feel like one of the best early Sonic titles, but also enough Easter eggs and winks and nods to give it its own personality.

Unfortunately, Sonic Forces arrived a few months later and proved otherwise. Dirt 4 delivered the biggest surprise and best action in racing for There is a ton of variety in its six driving series, and infinitely more thanks to a breakthrough course creation tool that generates an all-new run in the blink of an eye.

Equally gorgeous and gritty, Dirt 4 finds that sweet spot where the driver is pushed to the limit while still feeling the challenge is fair.