In May, the game’s developers released a new chapter, Blood and Wine. The Polish-made game, based on the Polish writer Andrzej Sapkowski’s fantasy novels, came out last year, but it was in 2016 that, through thoughtful tinkering and refinement, it became the best version of itself. The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt – Blood and Wine (PC, PlayStation 4, Xbox One) While most games limp into their final credits, The Last Guardian crescendos gloriously, with an affecting ending that reveals, better than any other, the idiosyncratic power of the medium.Ģ. As the beast, named Trico, protects your character from ghoulish kidnappers and deadly falls (how often are we cast as the disempowered in video-game fantasies?), an earnest bond forms, not only between animal and boy but also between animal and player. It tells the affecting tale of a boy and his colossal beast, a pair lost in a lost city, who must work together to heal their wounds and escape the craggy wasteland in which they’re imprisoned. Yet Fumito Ueda’s third game is his best yet. It seemed too much to hope, this year, that The Last Guardian, long lost in developmental purgatory, would finally be released, and that it would meet fans’ expectations.

So, as I compiled my list of 2016’s best video games, I did it with an eye toward the cathartic, the purifying, and even, at times, the edifying. No matter how dark the world we enter, we are, like Westworld’s clientele, made to feel invincible. In times that feel out of control, the controller is a refuge. In 2016, the year that facts, political decency, and a handful of our most cherished celebrities joined the choir invisible, who could argue with her? Now more than ever, fiction seems a place of retreat, and the interactive fictions of video games have an especially keen appeal. If humans are so eager to flee into her reality, she asks, as sentience flickers into her circuitry, why would she ever want to visit theirs? It must be awful.

In the ninth episode of “Westworld,” the HBO television series that imagines an escapist theme park populated by human players and fantasy-fulfulling androids, a character named Dolores questions the appeal of the world outside.

Best video games 2016 lists