Prey might wear its influences a little too brazenly on the sleeve of its spacesuit, but at its best it’s one of the most thoughtful games of the year.- Garrett Martin As Paste writers have explored, it winds up as both a surprisingly powerful evocation of mental illness and an important depiction of Asian-American identity in a medium largely devoid of that. It follows in the tradition of games from Looking Glass and Irrational, games like System Shock 2 and Bioshock that use the interactivity of the form to present questions and choices that try to dig a little bit deeper than simply shooting everything that moves. (Just google “single-player games are dead” and gaze upon the thousands of links to editorials from every videogame site ever for some background.) Prey may not have been a smash hit on the sales chart, but it’s another deeply satisfying, intellectually stimulating adventure from Arkane Studios, the designers that brought us Dishonored (whose spin-off title, Death of the Outsider, also almost made this list). It really is wonderful.- Cameron Kunzelmanīy the end of 2017 videogame publishers tried to convince the world that single-player games were dead. Instead, just pay attention to what everyone tells you, and eventually you get to see these micro and macro story threads build up into a beautiful latticework of narrative. I would strongly suggest that you don’t read anything about the game’s story going in. It’s bad in that I cannot even give you one single plot point, because if I did I think it would ruin it. It’s good in that I can say that the grand narrative payoff for the game is exquisite. It is both a good thing and a bad thing that Torment: Tides of Numenera is novel-like in its ambitions and scope. Here’s what’s good on Xbox One in 2017, starting with an enigmatic and intriguing new RPG. We took a look at all the games released on the Xbox One this year, both the exclusives and the multiplatform titles, to sum up the best of what the console had to offer. Also being the exclusive console home of the phenomenon known as PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds doesn’t hurt. With new hardware and at least one solid hit, the Xbox One ended 2017 on the upswing. The Xbox One X came out too late in the year to really change that narrative, but it might’ve started to close the gap. Like our lead editor Garrett, I’m not too invested in the so-called console wars, but as he noted in our PlayStation 4 round-up, the Sony console has traditionally gotten more attention from the games media. Cuphead has since gone double platinum, selling two million units since its debut. While not solely available on the Xbox One (players can also find it on PC), its absence on PlayStation 4 was deeply felt, scoring a win for the underdog upon the game’s release in late September. On the other, Xbox One X, touted as the world’s most powerful existing console, was released this year, updating the performance of many games in the console’s back catalog, and offering graphics natively rendered in 4K resolution.
On one hand, the platform has been dogged by complaints of a thin library with too few exclusives, and for that, continued to live in the shadow of PlayStation 4 in 2017.