As triple-As disappointed, indies saved PC gaming in 2018

2018 has been an excellent year for videogames, just not on PC. It hasn’t been a bad year, but the triple-A gaming goodness hasn’t been shared around equally. Much of the year has been spent gazing jealously at our console cousins as they got stuck into exclusives that push the medium forward, such as God of War, Spider-Man, and Red Dead Redemption 2. That isn’t to say we didn’t get transformative titles this past 12 months: while we felt let down by iterative refinements to established franchises this 2018, myriad plucky indie games stepped into the breach. Celeste is one of many indie games that set 2018 apart, picking up PCGamesN’s game of the year gong, and with good reason. Developer Matt Makes Games plundered the retro aesthetic of pixel art and imbued its ravishing 8-bits with something new. The core tenets of the platformer became a natural means of expressing the game’s themes of anxiety as protagonist Madeline scaled the best figurative mountain in videogames. Into the Breach is one of the strongest strategy games we’ve ever played, too. This turn-based gem from Subset Games sees you martialing the last bastion of humanity’s forces against a near-insurmountable alien threat. Battles rage across small chess-like squares as you puzzle out how to best move your mechs to maximise enemy damage and avoid civilian casualties. It’s on this unassuming, Advance Wars-esque grid that you learn how to be a hero.

from PCGamesN http://bit.ly/2QVHTPh