To some, this might just be another fish in the genre’s ocean, but to me, Stellaris has opened my eyes to a whole new world of videogames.
In two days this game managed to transform me from someone who didn’t care about strategy games, to someone who wants to play them all, starting with this one. When we were told to leave the game, all I wanted to do was steal the computer in front of me and go and start Stellaris all over again. Darkest Dungeon makes us confront the idea that we are complicit in these systems, or that we’re even willing to contribute to them ourselves. It can feel like (and it may be the case that) this is a world that doesn’t have the infrastructure to help these people, nor the desire to build it.Īnd there is a second, deeper anxiety, too. Marginalized communities struggle through systemic oppression only to receive lectures from outsiders on how they are to be blamed for all of their problems. “Content producers” beg platform holders for better protection from harassment, but receive little to none. Victims of exploitative loans watch as big business is bailed out, and they’re left to tread water. Soldiers, many recruited from low-income families, return home only to find medical support lacking. The last decade has taught us this again and again. If there is an anxiety being reflected by Darkest Dungeon, it’s this: We live in a world that is willing to ruin people for a little net gain. best horror stories do more than just scare us with gore or violence, they make manifest a deeper anxiety.
Taking us everywhere from the dusty dry cliffs of the Wyoming wilderness to the cold strategic emptiness of space and beyond, here are the ten games on PC that really rocked us in 2016. Taking a look at the best of what the platform had to offer this year, not only is it alive and well, it’s also facilitating and pushing the very edge of the medium’s artistic limits, visually or otherwise. It’s hard to imagine now but once upon a time, people used to ask if the PC gaming scene was dying.