Mary Kish is Head of Community at Twitch. She's @merrykish on Twitter and you can also find her on the Fire Escape Cast.
10. Toem
Toem is so cute and sweet and pure and I just think you should give it a whirl alright? A simple concept of taking photos of environments, selfies with animal friends, and just helping out the local kids capture their awesome skateboarding tricks in the city. You travel to locations like deep into the woods, long walks on the beach, and high on snowy mountain tops, each filled with a large variety of cute items and different characters like talking balloons and g- g- ghosts! You solve problems like finding lost dogs or helping a instagrammer take pics of hot dogs or whatever. Nothing feel imperative, but all the same still valuable. I wanted to assist, but was never stressed or concerned during my time. I casually strolled along and took some pics, and that was enough for me. Paired with a super adorable soundtrack, this game was easy to pick and easier to play until credits rolled.
9. Axiom Verge 2
Listen I like Metroidvania games, and I absolutely adored the original Axiom Verge so I was very much excited about this game. True to my expectations I traveled around many areas and had a really good time becoming a lil robot. In fact, I liked it so much that when I had an opportunity to return to my mortal self I preferred robot form. I believe this is likely true to how I would react in real life. I just prefer robots, they are more compact, lightweight, and get shit done. Efficient metal multi-legged web slinging crabs from the future. Where was I..
This game is a solid Metroidvania experience, the music and art go together incredibly well. There’s lots of good music in video games this year, but Ancient Armaments is such a dynamic and energetic track it got me boppin my head while playing every time. Tom Happ is a champ, making tracks filled to the brim with human culture, incorporating Eastern note values and instruments that truly brought the scenes to life. Bravo.
8. Forgotten City
This was a surprise for me! Hearing good things through the grapevine, I downloaded the Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim mod with low expectations. Hoping it would be a fun murder mystery to bide my time. The game starts out pretty talky, with everyone having long winded stories (some true some liar liars) that had me waving through possible outcomes of who’s a troublemaker. There's a real possibility that people playing this for the first time may be tempted to quit, because although it has a really intriguing plot where the world goes into chaos at the end of everyday due to a timed event of voting in the next president or whatever, you may think it's just a trial and error game. But it's more than that! If you can get to a cool twist and alter a fundamental change in the story line, it opens up a chain of events that really pick up the pace.
One of my favorite aspects of this game was how it solved the issue with looping games repeating themselves. There's a character you meet at the beginning with dialogue options. If you solve a puzzle one day, there will be a new dialogue option where the dude you talk to essentially takes care of that puzzle on your behalf. So now you can solve a different puzzle and not waste your time doing it again. It was a pretty ingenious way to stop that loop fatigue that plagued a lot of other games this year that were titled 12 minutes.
I was so into this game that after I got an editing I went back and got a different one, and then the really cool super secret one, which I won’t reveal in this GOTY list. But needless to say, it was super cool. The kind of ending that you wish you could spoil on the GOTY list, because it would be really fun to talk about. Alas, you’d have to play the game to find out for yourself, and when you’ve invested that much time in the game, you'll find that it is indeed, pretty cool stuff.
7. Chicory
Absolutely a wonderful experience from start to finish, but for me personally, the first hour of this game made me question if I would continue. How simple would the mechanics be? And even if I was intrigued by a plot about the main character reluctantly getting a valuable item that colored the world, the whole thing felt like it would be a bit slow. It wasn’t until the first ‘boss’ fight the game really clicked for me. It wasn’t going to be a walk in the park, and it was going much deeper into my emotional attachment to these characters.