Literally and figuratively, prince Noctis and his crew can never go home again. The heart of Final Fantasy XV is a tale of brotherhood, an ersatz bachelor road trip marred by a massive familial loss. The game spends hours upon hours breezing past everything expected and easy about a Final Fantasy game. Its core mechanics, its graphics, even its story in spots all feel like a newer game built over the ruins of another. Playing Final Fantasy XV is almost like playing through the recent history of video games, spanning the full 10 years of the game’s development. Running a farm isn’t easy, but Stardew Valley makes it irresistible. The particulars of farm management, mining, and crop bundling will likely keep you occupied for weeks upon weeks, and that’s before you even try to start a family. Those of us looking for an escape from this year’s dire extremities might find solace in the titular valley, but good luck retrieving yourself when you’ve fully burrowed into it. But such a pedestrian label undersells developer ConcernedApe’s colossal achievement.

After all, the game painstakingly imitates Harvest Moon, a series that hasn’t reared its head much in recent years. It’s tempting to call Stardew Valley the most unlikely hit of 2016, considering its stunning success on the charts. The 25 games we named the best of the year are the most stellar examples of that, and the promise of progress we desperately needed to see in this of all years. This was the year of the sea change, a crucial moment where the medium found maturity and diversity, because of and occasionally in spite of its audience, which is what all good art does.

Meanwhile, stronger but less bombastic statements of artistic intent that would’ve gone quietly into the good night in years past became the massive success stories of the day. In fact, in most respects, it was the one area that managed to creatively thrive, where even typically under-ambitious annual mainstays like Call of Duty managed to perform strong pivots toward the new and fascinating. If there’s any one area of culture that didn’t suffer a crippling lesson in humility in 2016, it was video games.

The best games of 2016 pc