The year 2015 may be over, but the games it premiered are still fresh in our minds and weighing heavy on our backlogs. Kotaku and Talk Amongst Yourselves readers cast a record-setting 19,000+ votes this last week and the result are in for round one.
If you’d have asked me at the start of the year what I thought my favorite games of 2015 would end up being, I would’ve guessed stuff like Fallout 4, Hotline Miami 2, and Just Cause 3. This year, though, a cool thing happened: most of my favorite games were ones I’d never even heard of until I played them.
2015 has been a weird year for me and video games. In one way, it’s been defined by the fact there’s been a shortage of games that I’ve found really memorable, to the point where picking out ten for this list was tough work. In another, that might be because I spent almost the entire year playing The Witcher 3.
It was a damn shame Rise of the Tomb Raider came out on the same day as Fallout 4, wasn’t it? Nevertheless, release schedules be damned, a lot of great games came out this year. Here are the ones I liked the most.
It was a hell of a year for video games, a wonderful mixture of long-awaited games living up to their potential, and unexpected delights that completely snuck up on me.
It’s late December with just days to go until the clock strikes the new year, which makes it the perfect time for Kotaku’s various editors to list their favorite games of 2015. I’ll go first, for I have no fear.
Now that the end of the year is here, everyone is starting to declare their "game of the year"—and Metacritic has now thrown its hat into the ring.
According to the Bureau of Completely Made-Up Statistics, nearly a bajillion games were released in 2014. Of those bajillion, only ten were good enough to make it onto this list.
No big upsets here: the Spike VGX named Rockstar's Grand Theft Auto V their game of 2013. Other nominees were not named Grand Theft Auto.
Though Speak Up on Kotaku became one with the Force back around September, the reader-voted GOTYs it spawned lived on in the second annual Speakys, which longtime reader GiantBoyDetective organized this year again.
The staff of Kotaku nominated nine games for 2012 Game of the Year. One game, XCOM: Enemy Unknown, blew the competition away.
The votes are in, and you have spoken. The second annual Speakys, the Kotaku community-voted awards organized by GiantBoyDetective, have named their individual category winners. From here, the category winners will be faced off in a vote to determine the Speakys' overall game of the year.
April 16, 2015
Location: Sapporo, Japan
Operation: Extraterrestrial Terrorism Response
Codename: Lost Spark
Mission Parameters: Failure will result in the immediate loss of resources and support from Japan. This would deal a devastating blow to the XCOM project.
Project Goal: Save the Earth, and all who call it home.
Earlier today, our own Luke Plunkett nominated Crusader Kings II for Kotaku 2012 game of the year, writing that it's "the only game on this list that's about sex and politics."
It's easy. Because it's the only game on this list that's about sex and politics.
The first time I played Journey, I thought, "Okay."
Papo & Yo did something that too few games manage to do: it let me step into the life of another, actual-living-breathing person. And once I did that, I played through an experience that showed me how that person got through a painful relationship and was left with a lesson that I too could pick and use if I needed…
On the surface, Spelunky is a roguelike platformer where you become like Indiana Jones, going farther and farther inside ancient caves holding untold riches and perhaps even lost civilizations. You have some rope, some bombs, a whip and whatever else you find along the way. It's a difficult game, and you will die a…
The Walking Dead is lovely in the most horrifying ways.
To describe why Zero Escape: Virtue's Last Reward was my favorite game of 2012 is to describe why I fell in love with games in the first place.
