Each day this week we will be highlighting our editors top five favorite games of 2016. You can view our coverage hub for game of the year here.

Stardew Valley (PC, PS4, XB1)

“We live in a world where people are comoditized in a system where the only people who have any measure of control are wealthy elites that have automated the system to generate and hoard more wealth to themselves while having an incentive to pay those workers as little as possible as there is one to take their place should they “break”

In Stardew valley you try to escape that life as you automate more and more of your farm, making it into a machine to generate wealth for you to hoard, as you recklessly exploit the natural resources of the valley with no legal right to do so. At the same time you get to see the desperate lives of your country neighbors as they struggle with poverty, lack of work, broken infrastructure, and encroaching corporations. Do you think you can save them? Maybe you can, but only one of them, through a marriage. That is fresh and exciting and new at first but as the years toil on your love turns to boredom, then boredom turns to resentment, resentment leads to divorce and you using magic to turn your children into doves. You could maybe save the Valley with elbow grease and gumption, but don’t as instead you rely on magical (unpaid) beings to do all that work. And that is the GOOD path. Easily the best game I’ve played all year.

Watch Dogs 2 (PC, PS4, XB1)

The proletariat seeks to control our lives through television, movies, the internet, our cellphones, our religion, even our homes. Seeking to bend us, to control us, to reach into our wallets and take what is ours hard earned. As put forth in the words from the Alex Freeland song, “We Want your Soul.” With this much corporate invasion spurring us on to act on artificial consumerist instinct, there’s no hope, is there?

That’s where DedSec comes in. Sowing dissent and getting people woke where ever and however they can. Taking down organized religion and combating the prison industrial complex Using RC Cars, drones, and lots and lots of guns they’ll pull out the establishment brick by brick, and if they have time, rip apart a few violent crime organizations as well, all with a stated goal of replacing it with their own true anarchist society. Don’t forget to slow down and take in some of the tourist traps of San Francisco however, and if you’re lucky, you’ll get a glimpse of the occasional bare breasts or dongle. With cooler cars to rip off and better music to spur you on as you burn society to the ground, hacking is a lot more fun, including ways to screw a target over by engineering a gangland hit or police raid with the social engineering tab. This fun exercise in sticking it to the corporations comes to you via those corporate geniuses at Ubisoft, who pieced together this game just for you using a test audience.

Overwatch (PC, PS4, XB1)

Heroes never die. They instead respawn and respawn to push a truck from a diner to a warehouse, or better, a limousine off a backlot to a trailer. Why there are deep political conflicts that require the involvement of multinational black operatives with highly specialized abilities more suited for guerrilla warfare in North African mountainsides all centralized around locking down an objective next to a Chinese takeout is anyone’s guess, but damn does it feel good to fight for what you believe in. And what you believe is getting to objective B.

If you approach Overwatch with the mindset of throwing your soldier’s body into the meat grinder like you would in Call of Duty, you’re going to have a bad time. Instead you have to rely on your allies to have your back. To provide you medical treatment when necessary, to take a bullet for you while you shore up backlines, to keep an eye on incoming threats from a sniper’s nest. Yes maybe you’re in a cool mecha, the apex of South Korean engineering, that can fly with a jetpack, or maybe you select a special operative who by way of horrific evasions of the Geneva convention can now turn into a living shadow and reap righteous death on his targets, and yes you’re going to feel cool doing it, but you have to coordinate with your team and create some hardcore adrenaline flushed alliances that will get you through the heat of battle. Then when it’s all over, you get to all see each other scorecards and call each other noobs and tell them to f off and git gud. Ah teamwork.

Pony Island (PC)

“The devil ain’t got no power over me. The devil come, and me shake hands with the devil. Devil have his part to play. Devil’s a good friend too… Because when you don’t know him, that’s the time he can mosh you down.” – Bob Marley

In the hybrid adventure platforming title Pony Island you’re stuck in an eternal hell as a shackled soul. Hell is an arcade cabinet. Hell is being a pony. Run glorious pony. Run to freedom.

Doom (PC, PS4, XB1)

I don’t understand Overwatch’s story. Events don’t really seem to connect and the characters seem to have no reason to know or like each other. I do understand the stories in Call of Duty and Titanfall’s stories. I understand they want to be cinema in video game form, but a cinema where the only spectacle is how much fire power you can hold. Doom’s approach to story is different. Doom Guy’s approach to story is “Fuck yo story, I’m going home.”

There is story to find, there is lots to explore, but Doom is all about bathing in the viscera and guts and sanguine fluids that pulse through the pus filled pustules of demon hordes as you progress through a facility where only the most brutal of deaths and the most atrocious of horrors await. It feels like shooting and ripping and tearing your way through one otherworldly beast after the other should get old, but it never does, the battle high never wears thin, there’s always another neck to break and another head to blow off. You begin to wonder if maybe John, you are the demons. But it’s fleeting as you don’t give a damn, it’s just so dang fun.

**HONORABLE MENTION**

Rise of the Tomb Raider (PC, PS4)

Square-Enix released Rise of the Tomb Raider in 2015. Then they released the version everyone actually played in 2016. You resume the role of war criminal Lara Croft who returns to slaughter her enemies, destroy historical holy sites and embroil herself as a British national in a guerrilla cause that should easily see her citizenship revoked. Perhaps there is a deeper message here however, Lara is ostracized by the country she’s from and leaves to conduct horrible acts in motherlands not her own, and yet she continues to walk with no societal comeuppance perhaps due to her splendiferous wealth and influence. A woman who was born with golden body armor.

Of course, that’s assuming karma doesn’t pay Lara back in the moment. With every twisted limb and chill that seeps into her bones, her fragile extremities at extra risk as her body heat is constantly pulled to her core by a metabolism she can’t control. Trying to thrive off what thin meats she can find when hunting rabbit and squirrel and in times of desperation rat. Unlawfully imprisoned in a gulag and swimming through waters ready to freeze over and entrap her in an aquamarine coffin sickly preserving her velvet beauty. This isn’t counting the wolves or the bears or the men, all things that want to see her dead or worse. But she has skills. Skills to survive. An arrow through the grey matter of an endangered large cat. Dousing her foes in kerosene or making them inhale lethal neurotoxin. Impaling the greatest of her enemies with a pickaxe or a knife or an arrowhead, only the messiest and most brutal of murders for those who cross her. In this cold forgotten part of Siberia there are no heroes. There is only survival.