Confirmed " memes took a knock during January 2016 , which opened with the announcement that Marc Laidlaw , the series ' writer , was set to leave Valve for pastures new .

As though it wasn ' t already obvious , it seems ever more likely that we will never see concluded the adventure Gordon Freeman embarked upon in 1998 .

It was a quiet time for releases , with only Rise of the Tomb Raider really counting as toptier , though Mario and Luigi : Paper Jam and The Westport Independent offered some interesting new ideas .

Day of the Tentacle ' s return was far more welcome , since the original game hit our PCs over 20 years ago . Tim Schafer seems to be on a journey to re-release all his old games as quickly as possible - so we can expect the newly shiny Full Throttle soon . After the disappointment of Hitman : Absolution , the new game , titled simply Hitman , raised a skeptical eyebrow among fans when it launched in episodic

The Westport Independent appealed to us as a vehicle for questions of journalistic ethics ( the real kind , not the sort that make eggs shout at you on Twitter ) as you fought to maintain your independence in the face of an increasingly draconian government .

Using a graphical

form in March .

But these doubts were swiftly dispatched with fibre wire when the new episodes featured sprawling levels , enduringly replayable with a massive variety of possible approaches .

The time-limited Elusive Target missions and the dribbling out of new levels throughout the year helped ensure Agent 47 ' s adventures stayed relevant , and created if not the best installment in the series , certainly one of the very strongest .

style pioneered by Papers , Please but by a different team , it used unconventional gameplay and fresh ideas to really make us think .

There were other games released in January too - but few of note , and the less we say about Five Nights at Freddy ' s World , quite frankly , the better .

Celebrating arbitrary lengths of time since a game ' s release might seem blindly corporate , but there ' s little denying the impact Nintendo ' s creature-capturing simulator has had on our industry .

Going from a cutesy handheld RPG to a massive multimedia franchise with hundreds of episodes of an anime , dozens of games across a fistful of systems , and soon to smash records for mobile gaming speaks only praise for the vision of Satoshi Tajiri , and is well worth celebrating .

Amid all sorts of technical issues , Street Fighter V hit the digital streets and went on to meet disappointing sales throughout the year .

But there were less traditional games which did manage to land a few blows .

Far Cry Primal showed us the fun to be had in running around flinging spears as our cave-dwelling ancestors , while The Flame in the Flood saw you living a similar existence after the end of the world .

And after Harvest Moon decided it wanted to be an RPG dating sim rather than a farming game , Stardew Valley stepped in to fill the mud-splattered boots with a faithful and well made new farming game that became hugely popular .

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