Game of the Year 2017: Rebekah’s picks

Rebekah’s Game of the Year #4 – RiME

It’s almost impossible to explain what’s so incredible about RiME without giving away its ending. Certainly, it’s an aesthetically enjoyable game with lovely music and passably challenging puzzles throughout, but if you didn’t push through the ten-or-so hour adventure to the end, you’re unaware of RiME’s true brilliance. Those who showed up looking for The Witness-level of challenge from the game’s relatively simple environmental puzzles will have put the game down before they could even discover what really makes RiME tick.

The entirety of the game is an allegory for a specific tragedy, one you don’t see coming at all until the game’s waning moments. With that knowledge, everything you did leading up to that point is cast in a new light. The statues you passed, the structure of the puzzles you solved, the collectibles, and the overall tone of each area all have their part to play in telling the story you didn’t know the game was telling. For this reason, RiME isn’t just worth one playthrough, it’s worth multiple. Especially once Stage Select opens and tells you which collectibles you missed! I’ve never felt so motivated to 100% a video game before, but when emotional weight is attached to reasonably (yet still challenging) achievements, you can bet I’m there for it.