THE EDGE AWARDS

A decade comes to a close, and with it, the end of a generation – and the latter is quite evident in the pages that follow. This was, once again, a far from stellar year for big-budget games, with platform holders and old-guard publishers largely keeping their powder dry ahead of next year’s launch of Scarlett and PS5. Ten years ago, that would have made for a rather fallow Edge awards, but the landscape has changed vastly over the course of the 2010s. Back then, we had a separate award for indie games. Now they dominate the top ten.

As a result, our rundown of this year’s finest interactive entertainment yields a list of no little breadth. At the top end of the budgetary scale, there has been growing consternation at how the ever-increasing cost of game development has fostered an aversion to risk. Yet the smaller studios, student teams and back-bedroom programmers that operate at the other end of the funding spectrum are hardly immune to it either. In a generation where the big players’ fear of failure has led to too many big releases smelling the same, however, indies have learned that being different is the pathway to success.

Hence a top ten comprised, variously, of games that cast you as an FMV voyeur, a heartbroken synthpop motorcycle warrior, a late-stage alcoholic detective and an 8bit sheep, to name just a few. Over the pages that follow we present the best, the worst and the weirdest – and there really is a lot of weird – of another fascinating year in games.