Top ten games of 2016
Rhythm is not strictly a phenomenon of sound.
Built by a development team of just two designers, Overcooked squeezes a lot of juice from its simple premise, and it’s one of the most delightful, most unabashedly fun games of 2016. Expect yelling, stress, surprises, and your virtual kitchen to catch fire when someone accidentally forgets to take a meat patty off the stove. The challenge comes in getting up to four people in the same room (there’s no online multiplayer) to coordinate their movements in a way that doesn’t end up looking like a complete train wreck. The idea is straightforward enough: Customers order dishes and all the cooks in the kitchen - that is, you and whomever you recruit to join - work together to make those dishes. Joining classics such as Nidhogg, Monaco, Samurai Gunn, and Towerfall was the chaotic culinary high jinks of Overcooked.
While the past decade of multiplayer games has looked like one long march toward online play, a steady stream of new gems have aimed to re-create the magic of local multiplayer. Overcooked (PlayStation 4, Xbox One, Windows) Here are the ten games that helped expand the limits of their respective genres in a year when so many were striving toward the same goal.ġ0. On the other end of the spectrum, big-budget productions demonstrated a new willingness to experiment with modes of storytelling and interactivity. Titles that might have previously been ignored for their “indie” status were given the opportunity to shine in the mainstream, whether through viral appeal, or through production value driven by years of effort in newly accessible game-development platforms. That has made this an uncannily good year for video games across numerous genres. It may be easy to subsist on Overwatch alone, but anyone can set aside a couple of hours to play through Firewatch.
Whether you’re a die-hard follower of big-budget blockbuster games, an e-sports enthusiast, or an indie game aficionado, 2016 had a tendency to widen the gaps that separate different play experiences, as game genres forged out on their own in an attempt to work out what they do best.