Update March 22nd: The most recent update adds The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild and Typeshift.

I’m a sucker for end-of-year lists. They’re positive, celebratory, and useful. But too often, lists are backloaded with fall releases. A book published in January? A video game released in March? They’ll need luck and a good publicist to score best-of list slots come December.

I empathize with annual curators. Given the constant deluge of new titles, each arriving with their own noisy hype, it can be a struggle to remember a TV show or a film from 11 months ago. So this year, I’ve decided to keep a journal of my favorite video games, a public way to collect the year’s finest.

The format is inspired by Thrillist’s ongoing list of the year’s best movies. Critic Matt Patches only catalogs the stuff he can recommend 100 percent. “No mixed-bags,” he writes, “[or] interesting train-wrecks.” My list won’t be quite as definitive. I love train-wrecks; I live for mixed bags.

I’ll be updating my list as often as I can — hopefully I’ll have plenty of games to add. I’d love it if you joined me in this experiment. I’m opening the comments so you, dear reader, can share your favorite games as the year goes on.

Dates refer to when I began each game, and may not align with release dates. This is not a definitive list for The Verge. I am only adding games as I play them. If you feel something is missing, please recommend it in the comments.

The latest additions

March 2nd - The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild

One of my favorite conversations to have with friends about Breath of the Wild is to hear what they don’t like about the game. I know, it’s a cynical place to start, but the conversation naturally ramps to the same positive conclusion: “I hate this specific thing, but I can’t imagine the game without it.” The weapons degrade, but I love the danger of each battle. Thunderstorms turn Link into a lightning rod, but I love to use the weather against my enemies. The world is too big, but I love to get lost.

The love / hate tension speaks to Breath of the Wild’s audacity of design. assumptions that have been calcified over a decade of corporate risk management.

It seems silly to says a Zelda game is risky, but wow, this Zelda took risks that could have been, at almost every step, catastrophes easily mitigated with safer, proven design. When someone tells me they don’t like something in Zelda, often they mean I haven’t liked the execution of this idea in other games. But here, under the right guidance, and stripped to their essentials, rough ideas become polished, and big, risky, sometimes infuriating design is inseparable from an all but perfect adventure.

Available on Nintendo Switch and Wii U.

Typeshift

March 20th - Typeshift

I met Zach Gage in 2009, when he made Really Bad Chess, and Spelltower. You have almost certainly heard of one of them, if not played all of them.

What makes Gage’s life as a mobile game designer so fascinating is that it isn’t actually separate from his life as an artist. Gage takes the most familiar and played-out genres (a remake of Space Invaders, a Milton Bradley board game, word puzzles) and contorts them into commentaries of themselves. As such, a Zach Gage game is like a book and a book club, and Gage is like a creator and a critic.

Gage wears plenty of other hats, too. For his latest game, Typeshift, a collaboration with Merriam-Webster Dictionary, Gage has created a contraption that would make a shrewd CMO envious. A puzzle game, Typeshift teaches players by asking them to find words. Words are aligned by shifting letter tiles up and down, each push accompanied by the perfect ASMR click. It’s addictive and edifying, like popping a special kind of bubble wrap that expands your vocabulary. But here’s the business hook: once a board’s completed, a menu provides links to the definition of each discovered word on Merriam-Webster’s site. Merriam-Webster gets a web visit every time a player experiences the slightest hint of curiosity. In two days, I’ve probably visited the site for 50+ definitions. The dictionary gets traffic. The player gets smarter. And Gage, he expands the reach of his art.

Available on iOS.

The full list

January 9th - Gravity Rush 2

I’ve whined for years about action games that star the same bald dude fighting the same one-dimensional villains, using the same rocket launcher and machine guns. Indie games have been a counterpoint for more than a decade, but big-budget games have been slower to stray from the pack. Gravity Rush 2 is one of a few recent AAA games to break the cycle. All its most powerful characters are women. Its antagonists are embodiments of income disparity and personal grief. And the main character never fires a gun. It has some tacky fan service, and missions can be repetitive, but these are small flaws in a weird video game that’s truly unlike anything else on the market.

Our review digs into the game’s creative use of an open-world environment:

Walls, rooftops, and the underbellies of the constructions are speckled with a pink gem currency that upgrades Kat’s powers and provides the minimum excuse to investigate the nooks and crannies of every building. This would be tedious if not for the game’s ecstatic sense of momentum. Besides falling, Kat has the power to slide across surfaces in any direction — it feels sort of like grinding in Tony Hawk Pro Skater or Jet Set Radio. Slipping up a 50-story clock tower, then free falling over the other side never loses its thrill.

Available on PS4.

January 15th - Yakuza 0

I don’t know how I missed the Yakuza series. I raised myself as a diehard Sega fanboy, only shedding my allegiance during the fall of the Sega Dreamcast. As a spiritual follow-up to that console’s ambitious, unfinished Shenmu series, Yakuza floated at the top of my to-do list. But then there was high school, college, my first job, my second job, marriage, and all the other games that I, for one reason or another, prioritized above the adventures of a man with nice suits and impressive back tattoos. Yakuza 0 has been a treat, a throwback to what I remember of Sega games in the late 1990s and early 2000s. It’s a melodramatic soap opera with violence that has the sensory pleasure of popping bubble wrap or cracking open a can of beer.

Our review by Andrew Webster describes the game’s old-school structure:

Yakuza 0 does a lot of things that modern games shy away from. It features cutscenes that can span many minutes, and lots of text-heavy dialogue you’ll need to pore over. There’s plenty of repetition, with occasionally excessive amounts of battles and missions that boil down to boring fetch quests. A lot of the time you’re simply running from one place to the next. It even has long and frequent load times that harken back to another era. It can take some getting used to, but eventually Yakuza 0 settles into a pleasing rhythm. Beat up some bad guys, watch some cutscenes, and then relax with a visit to the batting cages. Instead of making the game feel dated, these aspects give it a distinct sense of charm. It’s not perfect, but it’s unlike anything else being made today.

Available on PS4.

January 20th - Hatsune Miku Project Diva Future Tone

I love the very idea of Hatsune Miku and open-source rock stars. I hope we see more “virtual” musicians, a model that could democratize pop singles without sacrificing a teenager to the music industry in the process.

Hatsune Miku Project Diva Future Tone is the culmination of a solid rhythm-game series that collects music created by Miku producers and fans. If Yakuza 0 is the entry point into the Yakuza series, then I recommend Future Tone for anyone curious about the Miku phenomenon.

Along with Final Fantasy XV and The Last Guardian in December, I should have listened to Kotaku’s Jason Schreier, who’s been tracking the abundance of RPGs and interactive-fiction releases over the past few years.

That said, all four games have an irritating deference for fan service: Cidney’s costume in Final Fantasy XV, the lecherous snapshot mission in Gravity Rush 2, female “pain sponges” in Yakuza 0, and skimpy bikini costumes meant for Future Tone’s cast of underage girls. January’s best games are fantastic in their own ways, but I can’t think of another month in which I was so reluctant to play games while we had guests in the house.

Available on PS4.

January 25th - Resident Evil 7

It’s fitting that January should end with one more game from a Japanese developer, this time Capcom saving the Resident Evil series from a convoluted mythos and years of regressive action-game design. Resident Evil 7 trades the third-person perspective of previous entries for a first-person viewpoint. What could have been an over-the-top zombie shooter is a legitimately frightening horror game. The dark corridors of a Southern plantation borrow heavily from TV shows like True Detective and American Horror Story. But the game is most indebted to indie horror games like Amnesia and Outlast, which kept the horror flame lit while Capcom floundered with Resident Evil 5, Resident Evil 6, and a handful of remakes and spinoffs.

In our review, Andrew Webster praises the nauseating detail of the scenery:

The Baker home, in particular, is a gorgeously grotesque place, where simply wandering around and looking at things — cages whose use is best left to the imagination, or disturbingly bloodstained bathrooms — can foster a powerful sense of dread.

Available on PC, PS4, and Xbox One.

February 21st - Horizon Zero Dawn

For a decade, the developer Guerrilla Games and its hundreds of employees spent tremendous time, money, and energy on Killzone, a franchise damned by a generic title and bland premise. A space army fights space Nazi-stand-ins through a handful of games that served largely as graphical showpieces for Sony’s PlayStation consoles. The games weren’t bad, but they were forgettable, largely running towards the goal posts established by the genre king of the last generation, Call of Duty.

Horizon is the first game from the studio since Killzone. Phil Kollar at Polygon wrote in his review, “Horizon Zero Dawn is a refreshing change of pace for Guerrilla Games. While playing it, I couldn't shake the feeling that this game was made by people excited to be working on it, and that excitement was contagious.” And that’s true. But what surprises me most about Horizon is how much it builds of the technical skill acquired through the Killlzone series.

Guerrilla Games learned to design beautiful scenery, write competent human drama, and design a really tangible and responsive form of combat through Killzone. And then, crucially, they didn’t throw the baby out with the bathwater. Rather, Horizon feels like a studio unburdened from a flagging genre, a meaningless sci-fi setting, and one of video games’ drabbest color palettes. The result is a creative riff on the evermore popular open world roleplaying genre, set in a fascinating “post post apocalyptic world,” drenched in color, and sprinkled with lovable characters. Horizon is absolutely fantastic, and I can’t imagine it happening without the games that came before it.

Available on PS4.

February 19th - Hidden Folks

A game like Hidden Folks justifies this diary experiment. The app doesn’t have hundreds of side-quests, a fully explorable open world, or expensive 3D models. It doesn’t even have color. A black-and-white riff on the hidden objects genre, Hidden Folks is modest and charming. It’s also steeped in a potent nostalgia, albeit in a manner unlike its contemporaries. You won’t find beloved characters or pixel graphics. The nostalgia on offer is akin to that of coloring books, which have had their own resurgence in popularity. Opening the app is transportive, returning you to the time you sifted through a copy of Where’s Waldo, waiting for your Mom at the salon. Or when you combed every page of Highlights at the doctor’s office. Creator Adriaan de Jongh previously designed Bounden, a game that used a smartphone to turn strangers into dance partners. It was a game that asked you to look outward, to connect. Hidden Folks is Bounden’s inverse. A game that has you quietly searching through a tiny collective image from our childhoods. It points you inwards. Yes, it’s cute and silly and simple, but Hidden Folks is something else, too: meditative.

Available on iOS and Steam.

Return for future updates…