Lamplighter’s League is a brilliant game with a heart ten times larger than it has any right to be. Every moment carried me to another place, transported me into a new body. The tactics, the meat and potatoes mechanically, are sound. Progressively challenging, deeply explorative, and full of thump. The character work will consistently surprise you with golden nuggets of development and growth. Also, and this can’t be said enough, the setting fucking rules.

It’s not every year that you come across a game that has the innate ability to command your thoughts for weeks, even after completion. Perhaps it is the high bar that I am using as a filter. What I seek to elucidate here is perhaps obvious, still, there are only a few games that elicit a deep emotional response from me. I can list those games on one hand. I have been playing games for twenty-three years. I have been writing about games for twelve years. It is even rarer when a game vaults itself all the way to the top of said list. This is it. This is my favorite game of all time.

I love stealth games. They are my absolute jam. I’ve been an Assassin’s Creed acolyte from the beginning and Splinter Cell rests firmly atop my list of favorite franchises. The industry isn’t flooded by this genre, but there are a fair number of quality contenders. The Dishonored games are a tour de force, I love the critically mixed Deus Ex prequels deeply, I only play Far Cry with my knife and bow, Ghost Recon is a kind of comfort food, even in Uncharted 4 I avoided combat in favor of being a sneak. Why is there so little stealth multiplayer?

Recently my sister, Kacy (58), and my daughter, Cara (49), have both been bitten by the gaming bug. We meet regularly on Xbox and play online games together. For us it is social, challenging, and fun even though we didn’t grow up playing video games. We’ve come late to gaming, learning to navigate in virtual 2- or 3-D environments using a dual-stick controller, suffering the embarrassment and frustration while loving the challenge.

I remember hearing about Stardew Valley when it was approaching release. I thought it looked cute. I have this long hidden secret that I love organizational and management heavy games. It doesn’t come out very frequently. Deep down I knew that Stardew Valley was something that I could easily sink dozens of hours into, I would just need to find the right moment.