Let's do best of the year ... Things. Game of the Year: Pillars of Eternity. Superb revival of Infinity Engine RPGs with fantastic lore, intriguing storyline and great combat system. It took everything I disliked about IE games, fixed it, and then added some. Game's not perfect, certainly - but I'm already looking forward to doing a second playtrough once second part of the expansion is out and I'm the kind of guy who usually only plays everything once. It's also my surprise of the year by a large margin. Best Writing would have to be Sunless Sea, no contest there. The game's writing is absolutely stellar, and I don't think I have ever played anything quite like it. With lighthearted tone and minimalist use of text, the game presents us bizarre, depressing and utterly alien setting. In a very Lovecraftian fashion it only hints, never fully spells anything out. It gives player snippets of lore, characters and conversations and then leaves it up to player to piece everything together, to complete this engrossing puzzle of Sunless Sea. Everybody needs to play this. Witcher 3 for not getting how the **** do RPGs work, but being a stellar storytelling experience nonetheless. The combat system in the game is fantastic, the game is absolutely gorgeous, and the writing is superb. Bloody Baron questline is up there when it comes to best videogam writing, voice acting and generally direction I've ever seen and while the rest of the game isn't quite up there, it's damn close. A relatively unexperienced Polish studio has shown us how do you do open world storytelling well and surpassed all expectations. Best Homeworld Homeworld Remastered is the best homeworld game of 2015. ... Really, I was just looking for where to squeeze Homeworld as the two games have been a stellar experience and everybody should play them. Very untraditional approach to real-time strategy games, very slow, very elaborate with engrossing story and amazing soundtrack. And finally a reasonable drawing distance which is what stopped me from playing the originals. And yes, I know remasters are cheating. The best old game played this year would have to be Shadowrun: Dragonfall. It's cyberpunk which is an automatic +, but it's generally got a fun storyline, great companions and companion quests. It's also a game which really made me care about my "base of operations" - I got massively invested into my part of Berlin and cared a lot about fates of its inhabitants. Fantastic mission variety and quite a few ways of reaching an objective help too. Feel free to make up your own categories :-P