Most years, I find whittling a best-of list down to just 10 entries a tortuous process. Not so in 2017, because in December 2016 I became a mother, and that brought with it a complete change in my video gaming habits. This year, I rediscovered how people play games when it's not part of their job. And actually, I only played nine that made the cut.

Video game fashion goes through trends just like fashion in the real world. In 2017, games let us pretend we were at a fashion week, express our true selves, and do somersaults in six inch heels and a miniskirt.

It is the future. A young man, arms strong from competing with 100 other shoppers every day to be the only person to buy groceries at Target, eyes his grandmother expectantly. Her features betray exhaustion from years of delivering raw, unfiltered internet to those the three mega-providers deem unworthy, but there is fight in her still. "When did it all begin?" the young man asks. "2017," she finally replies.

Every game on this list served as a balm for the depression cave that I lived inside throughout 2017. I'm pretty sure these games happen to be good even if you're not depressed, since most of them popped up on my coworkers' own best-of lists, but I had such a dire need for escapism this year that I found myself evaluating every experience through that grim lens.

Games love to pummel you with lists of things to collect, places to get to, and enemies to beat. Sometimes you just need to take a moment to pause, catch your breath, and look up at the beauty above.

One Steam review is a person shouting into the void. Two is an argument. A whole mess of them, though? That's a deep, dark look into the collective psyche of Steam users. In 2017, we rounded up the best reviews of the year's top Steam games and maybe, just maybe, learned a little something about ourselves in the process.

This year, I published a book, fell in love with a brand new hardware system, and played a ton of video games. Here are the best ten.

From Tales to Dragon Quest to a brand flippin' new Persona, this has been a stellar year for Japanese role-playing games. We've come a long way from the dark days of, like, 2012.