The Reader’s Choice Game of the Year event is back and better than ever! This time we’re journeying to the past faster than light to mark the unknown: which game from 2012 deserves our retrospective award of being crowned #TWRMGOTY2012? It’s a far cry from listing every great game from that excellent year, but, diablo take us, we’re walking toward the horizon like super heroes ready to rewrite the chronicles of history: treat this like a game awards time machine and you’re right on the line.

Now witness the power of this fully armed and operational reader’s choice voting post!

Below is a list our nominees, followed by the arguments put forth by our writers as to why you should vote for their nominees, followed by the poll. You will have the opportunity to vote for a single game, and the polls will remain open all week and the winner will be announced on Friday (7/26/19), so if you want more votes for your pick to win, get out there and find some voters!

MAY THE BEST GAME WIN…

The Walking Dead – The ABXY Mage
LEGO Batman 2: DC Super Heroes – The Purple Prose Mage
Forza Horizon – The Slipstream Mage
Journey – The Well-Red Mage
Faster Than Light – The One-Winged Mage
Dragon’s Dogma – The Wandering Mage
Xenoblade Chronicles – The New Age Retro Mage
Spec Ops: The Line – The Thunder Mage
Far Cry 3 – The Sometimes Vaguely Philosophical Mage
Dishonored – The Bizzaro Mage
Diablo 3 – The Indecisive Night Mage
Dust: An Elysian Tale – The Arcade Mage
XCOM: Enemy Unknown – The Regional Exclusive Mage
POLL at the end of this article

Building on the success of the show, The Walking Dead is a zombie game that focuses on the characters and their relationships with a zombie apocalypse as its catalyst and backdrop. Players quickly connect with the main character, Lee, and his new ward, Clementine. The Walking Dead follows the duo as they meet with danger and a cast of other characters, almost all of which can survive until the end, depending on your decisions. Yes, this is more a point-and-click adventure than anything else. So, decisions in both conversation and dangerous situations can determine the health and well-being of the party. It’s the comic come to life. The Walking Dead gives you the chance to see how your decisions and leadership could help save or leave dead your fellow survivors, and maybe even who you really are as a person. It can actually be a fairly emotional experience at times.

Pros:
+ story is engrossing and meets a satisfying end
+ large and varied cast of characters who are interesting and fleshed out
+ can be played at any speed, depending on mood and setting
+ multiple outcomes and endings based on decision-making systems
Cons:
– more than a walking sim, less than an adventure game
– probably 80% of the game is more of an interactive graphic novel than a game

-The ABXY Mage 

LEGO Batman 2: DC Super Heroes is a superhero game that effectively combines the LEGO-based puzzles and platforming with its characters’ power sets in order to make the characters interesting without just being boring combat. The inclusion of over 60 iconic DC heroes and villains makes for endless experimental combinations. The voice acting – a first for the LEGO games – brings the characters to life in their own right, beyond simply being animated minifigures.

Pros:
+ the voice acting
+ 60+ playable characters
+ makes its characters interesting without just using combat

Cons:
– helping secondary characters advance can be tedious
– characters easily become stuck in tight places
– no difficulty settings for a game with wide age appeal

-The Purple Prose Mage

The long-running Forza Motorsport series was one that had basically catered to the niche, die-hard sim-light racing fan. With the release of the offshoot Forza Horizon in October 2012, that all changed. Horizon turned out to be one of those releases that was so good and unique that it created fans out of gamers who didn’t normally touch racing games. If you’re not familiar, the overall Forza Horizon concept was to center all your car-related activities around a huge festival (the Horizon Festival) where motoring, music, and mayhem are on exhibition. It’s basically a Lollapalooza of car culture that throws a huge open-world at you with the festival as the central hub, and lets you explore and race to your heart’s content. You progress by increasing your festival popularity (achieved by simply doing just about anything you enjoy in the game), with the goal of being crowned the most popular driver/personality of the fest. Stunts, drifting, off-roading, street racing, car tuning, and customizing your rides’ looks all win you fans and bring in more cash to help you expand your garage. It’s a fun and inclusive, if not idealized look at car culture and gearheads. But what pulls it all together is that it looks, sounds, and plays brilliantly.

Pros:
+ stunning visuals and car models; day/night cycle has impressive lighting effects for the time
+ huge and gorgeous open world set in the foothills of the Rockies in Colorado
+ high degree of freedom – the player can do what they want, focus on what they like best, and continue game progression
+ perfect blend of arcade and sim controls, with the option to fine-tune these for any gamer driver, rookie to elite veteran

Cons:
– building up your garage takes time, and a lot of in-game cash if you have your heart set on certain vehicles
– open-world can sometimes feel a bit too open (not enough NPCs at times)
– forgiving controls and races may not appeal to diehard sim-racer fans

-The Slipstream Mage

If you asked me “What’s a video game that’s unlike video games?”, I might say Journey. This brief but unforgettable experience harrows the player’s emotions, bridging connections across barriers of languages, creeds, cultures, ethnic groups, and countries to create new kinds of musically-intoned friendships. Without preaching, without the bludgeon of dialogue, it teaches the player to feel, to experience real majesty, ascension, curiosity, awe, ambition, loss, guilt, and isolation, in the long but rare tradition of telling its story without words. This is a game that anyone can play, which truly anyone could experience, which can resonate with any player, should they undertake that journey themselves from desert to mountain alongside the mysterious traveler. In many ways, Journey is unlike the other games on this list; it is unlike many games, excepting those of course which followed hastily in its footsteps, attempting to recapture, recrystallize its sense of grandeur and impact, some stumbling, some keeping pace in their race to emulate a monument. Journey, as I said years ago in my critique, is a game that transcends the medium in which it is played. It is an experience. To cite it as simply an example of “games as art” is to obliterate or ignore its unique accomplishment in the games industry: it is more than a game that is cinematic, more than a game which is beautiful, more than a game resembling something in a museum. It is something more, more than merely pretty, more than merely sad. Much more than mere action. It is “art” as only games can be. It is a triumph of human creativity. I’ve talked very broadly about Journey here, without getting into the details of its mechanics or plot, but that’s only because Journey is so much more than the sum of its parts.

Pros:
+ moving soundtrack by Austin Wintory
+ unparalleled manipulator of emotions
+ expertly told without words
+ breathtakingly sublime but more than beautiful: its visuals serve its themes
+ many secrets for its size
+ encourages players to learn on their own
+ companionship unlike anything else you’ve experienced in a video game

Cons:
– unforgivably short
– occasionally abstruse
– larger areas with more to explore would have been welcome
– losing a companion without being able to find them again is heartbreaking
– slow-paced

-The Well-Red Mage

Don’t you just hate it when you make an FTL jump to barely escape your spaceship crew nearly burning to death from solar flares only to arrive at a new sector and be immediately invaded by pirates while simultaneously trying to put out fires and keep your crew from suffocating? Welcome to the world of Faster Than Light where hundreds of things could go wrong and the choices you make could either help or make things even worse in this procedurally generated rogue-like. It is one of the most replayable games I have ever encountered and so much fun to repeatedly die on. Steam reviewer Val the Wyvern says it best: “500 hours and still haven’t won yet smh.”

Pros:
+ near eternal replayability
+ simple but effective pixel art
+ great music and sound effects

Cons:
– punishingly difficult even on normal difficulty
– random elements may become frustrating

-The One-Winged Mage

It was a grand time of open-world fantasy games. Dragon Age 2 and Elder Scrolls: Skyrim had come out the previous year. They were the hot stuff, the kings of gaming. The games people played over and over, untiring. You would think that a similar game released a year later in a completely new intellectual property, untested and unproven, would be risky. It would have to stand out among giants from the start, as well as bring in new mechanics and ideas to draw attention to itself. It would have to be a truly excellent game, one of a kind in an oversaturated genre. That game was Capcom’s Dragon’s Dogma, and it was the giant it needed to be. Boasting a new kind of online multiplayer system with the Pawn AI system, a large open world, and dynamic battle against monsters of all sizes, Dragon’s Dogma burst open the doors and planted itself as a staple required for any fan of dragon-slaying open-world RPGs.

Pros:
+ incredible range of character customization, with nine player classes, hundreds of kinds of armors, clothes, and weapons, and a large and diverse general look customization
+ spectacular giant-killing mechanics. Climb a cyclops and stab it in the face. Ride a griffon as it takes off into the sky. Play cat-and-mouse with a drake for an hour.
+ great replayability, both in-game (with new game+) and on system (releases on PS3, XB60, PS4, XB1, PC, and Switch)
+ excellent AI on the NPC support characters. They learn and teach each other as you borrow them from other players
+ you can literally romance almost ANY PERSON IN THE ENTIRE GAME. Almost no limits. There are pre-expected romance options but if you want to win the heart of a rando, you can get that rando

Cons:
– the standard Capcom difficulty climb. You can easily die in the early game by taking a wrong turn, which is easy enough to do given its open world, but once you hit a high enough level, you become nigh unstoppable. Just gotta get past the first 20
– many of the primary quest/romance characters are either not very likable or somewhat flat

-The Wandering Mage

The centerpiece of the Operation Rainfall movement (along with The Last Story and Pandora’s Tower) Xenoblade Chronicles is one of the games that come late onto a system that was already running on very old console tech to begin with, that you just sit back and wonder how they managed to pull off what they did. Xenoblade Chronicles presented Wii players with huge environments with seemingly very large draw distances and the ability to get to pretty much any area presented in any particular environment. To top it off these environments are also littered with massive enemies some who can mess you up very early on so avoid them until you can actually fight them. A great soundtrack also emphasizes a lot of the epic scenery. The RPG gameplay is also very solid as it uses a real-time style that allows you a certain amount of control of the AI characters to decide how they use special abilities. It works well as well as letting you stay in the environment rather than taking your out of it for battles. Though this has the sometimes downside of letting way too powerful enemies interrupt and mess up your life. With a solid and metaphysical story that puts the world into context, it was a truly memorable RPG that made Monolith Soft a major player for Nintendo and gaming at large.

Pros:
+ massive environments with large draw distance littered with large amounts of enemies and secrets; Monolith Soft used seemingly every bit of power the Wii was capable of to make this game
+ fantastic soundtrack and solid voice acting
+ strong RPG gameplay with lots of strategy involved
+ all this is wrapped up with a solid story with some interesting twists and metaphysical aspects

Cons:
– some of the textures are kind of ugly up close, particularly the facial textures
– voice acting is mostly good but there are some questionable choices
– real-time battles can result in high-level enemies interrupting your fight and killing you
– Riki and his entire annoying race of whatever they are.

-New Age Retro Mage

Games are at their best when they subvert expectations. When Spec Ops: The Line was released, military shooters were male-focused agro-fests that glorified the horrors of war through the visceral thrills of fighting it. By showing the ravages of combat through the lens of a soldier struggling with PTSD and forcing the player to make brutal decisions, Spec Ops: The Line turns the genre on its head in an effective and impactful way. And it’s a finely-tuned shooter from a mechanical standpoint, which makes the critique on who we are as gamers truly hit home. An important outlier in a genre filled with same old, same old.

Pros:
+ a groundbreaking achievement of interactive storytelling
+ presents an important critique on the nature of war games and the central motivations of gaming as a hobby
+ unique setting
+ impactful, story alerting decisions
+ powerful, punchy sound effects
+ a digestible and appropriate run-time

Cons:
– gameplay and gunplay never rise to the level of the genre’s best in class
– graphics from the Unreal 3 engine are a bit outdated
– a tacked-on, throwaway multiplayer mode

-The Thunder Mage

Far Cry 3 is about things going wrong. Really wrong. I mean, really, any situation in which a regular all-American good kid is executing hundreds of foes with ruthless efficiency is one in which something’s gone wrong, but Far Cry 3 was unusually insightful about just how bad things implicitly are in almost any world that involves lots and lots of shooting. It’s become more trendy in its wake for killy murder games to make at least some overtures in the vague direction of ‘but isn’t all this murder bad and doesn’t that mean something artistic?’, but Far Cry 3 was one of the earliest titles to do it really well. Plus it’s just stupidly fun.

Pros:
+ nice shooting mechanics: easy to grasp, and satisfying to pull off
+ plenty of memorable moments both from emergent gameplay around the island and from the main narrative, especially when the antagonists are around
+ there’s a mission about setting fire to acres of marijuana to the sweet, sweet sound of reggae dubstep

Cons:
– protagonist Jason’s journey-into-darkness isn’t always the most well-executed of stories, with pacing and voice acting occasionally distracting from the themes
– no way to change HUD settings, meaning a constant stream of occasionally overwhelming information you might not need or want

-The Sometimes Vaguely Philosophical Mage

2012 was indeed an excellent year for video games, and for me the shining star was Arkane and Bethesda’s loving tribute to/ripoff of Thief, Dishonored. The game follows the story of Corvo, former bodyguard to the queen of a sprawling empire who is framed for her assassination and must set out on a quest to clear his name and bring the real killers to justice. Featuring a brilliantly realised setting in a fantasy/Victorian world, cleverly designed levels and plenty of choices for stealth or combat along the way, this game is not to be missed!

Pros:
+ well designed levels
+ plenty of options to achieve your goals
+ strong story and characters
+ interesting art style

Cons:
– most levels can be easily solved with stealth, combat not as rewarding
– the “Big Twist” is really obvious
– morality system is very unforgiving

-The Bizzaro Mage

In 2012 upon Diablo 3’s initial release, it was in rough shape. The graphics were beautiful, though a bit too bright and cheery to fit perfectly with the rest of the franchise. Mechanically it “Worked” but it felt like something from the previous entries in the series was missing. Though I am indeed nominating this game for GOTY 2012, I will say it didn’t hit its peak performance in that year. Despite this, I stuck with it and beat it with each character type before the first major changes in difficulty (so hard!!!). After certain key members of the design team were replaced, however, the difficulty, skills, itemization, set pieces, and variety of challenges all received a major overhaul changing the game drastically to the much greater form we see today.

Pros:
+ gold auction house (existed upon release, now hone)
+ best graphics in Diablo series
+ easily contains years’ worth of gameplay potential (if you enjoy grinding/farming)
+ a few challenges, modes, difficulties, and an expansion improved the gameplay
far beyond its original potential

Cons:
– real money auction house (existed upon release, now gone)
– despite its crisp graphics, it was too bright and cheery for a Diablo game
– took 2 years of re-development/re-design to become a potential contender
for GOTY (bit late for official consideration)
– though the soundtrack was “Pretty Good”, it was nothing compared to the
soundtrack of the first two games (I still hum those dark old tunes once in a while;
the D3 tracks aren’t “bad” they just don’t jump out as being memorable in comparison)

-The Indecisive Night Mage

Dust: An Elysian Tale is a great game. It takes the classic ‘Metroidvania’ concept (Metroid + Castlevania) of exploring a world and slowly gaining powers and skills throughout the game to access new areas, overcome obstacles, and kill new enemy types. It does this in a lush, beautifully animated world, deep story, and dynamic characters. The controls and combat mechanics are relatively tight, and is a great example of the ‘Metroidvania’ genre. It helped proved the ‘indie’ genre as a fiscally sound investment and exposed a wider audience to the possibilities of video games. It helped show that anyone could make a game.

Pros:
+ beautiful art style & music
+ enriched world to explore

Cons:
– shorter gameplay experience
– occasionally fiddly controls

-The Arcade Mage

Even though it’s become common for a lot of gamers to reference Dark Souls when discussing difficult games, ever since 2012 my point of reference has been XCOM. Sure, other games might be tough but have you ever found your small band of heroes outnumbered and outclassed by super-powered alien creatures? And in that situation would you press on anyway thanks to the slim chance you might actually survive the skirmish? 2012’s XCOM: Enemy Unknown, a reboot of the classic XCOM series, is an absolute beast of a game: as unforgiving as it is rewarding and as brutal as it is satisfying. Tactical turn-based combat has never felt so intense: simply surviving a mission in this game is cause for celebration, especially as you start the campaign very much on the back foot and never feel at ease throughout This is a game about careful planning, thinking three moves ahead, building yourself back up from the depths of defeat and trying again and again and again. Personally, I may not be very good at it, and I may never actually beat it, but I really really love it!

Pros:
+ intuitive combat system with plenty of scope for tactical play
+ plenty of base-building and customisation options
+ challenging and so very rewarding.

Cons:
– an extremely steep learning curve
– can become difficult to the point of becoming frustrating at times

-The Regional Exclusive Mage

POLL

And those are our nominations! You may vote for just one game in the poll below. Choose wisely. Best of luck to all nominees.

Pump up your favorite pick and share this post to earn more votes for the game of your choice. Come back Friday to see the results!

[crowdsignal poll=10368912]

Red formerly ran The Well-Red Mage and now serves The Pixels as founder, writer, editor, and podcaster. He has undertaken a seemingly endless crusade to talk about the games themselves in the midst of a culture obsessed with the latest controversy, scandal, and news cycle about harassment, toxicity, and negativity. Pick out his feathered cap on Twitter @thewellredmage, Mage Cast, or Story Mode.