The winner is…

It's that time of year again. The time where we all start looking back at the past 12 months to try to figure out what the high points were.

In the video game world, this means an unending deluge of "Game of the Year" lists. Every gaming publication worth its salt is recollecting their top picks of 2021, but the most prominent ceremony will be Geoff Keighley's show simplistically titled "The Game Awards."

Established in 2014, The Game Awards has worked to become the video game industry's equivalent of The Academy Awards or The Grammy Awards. Much like those awards, every year sees a list of high profile titles pit against each other in various categories as fans argue over which ones are most deserving and loudly proclaim how wrong the awards are when their game doesn't win.

As is tradition.

It's a fun time, especially if you like new trailer drops for upcoming games and don't take the awards themselves particularly seriously.

More over though, the awards are a good way to draw attention to deserving titles that may otherwise be missed.

Case in point, one of the landmark titles of last year was a small indie game called "Hades."

The rouge-lite action game saw the player making repeated attempts to fight their way out of the titular underworld in the sisyphean task of escaping the realm of the dead (Sisyphus himself is, appropriately, one of the supporting characters in the story).

Each attempt challenges the player to go a little further than the last. The further you go, the harder things get, but this difficulty curve is balanced over time as the player learns better strategies and gains access to more tools and abilities. Every inch of progress feels like a great victory as you slowly become skilled enough to reliably overcome the game's seemingly never-ending series of challenges.

The gameplay loop on its own is satisfying enough, but that's only half the equation. Each new attempt unlocks another morsel of story, slowly but surely revealing background information on the many mythological characters featured in the game along with the circumstances behind your character's never ending quest for escape.

"Hades" was nominated for a Game of the Year award last year and, in my humble opinion, should have won. Though, having only gotten around to playing it this summer, I didn't know at the time how badly the game had been robbed.

Since then though, I've been retroactively outraged that such a meticulously well designed game didn't walk out of 2020 with the top award. (Though it did get recognized as "Best Indie Game" and "Best Action Game" so it wasn't a complete snub.)

On the other hand, had the game not been nominated at all, it may have slipped past me entirely. I can say it's largely because of its presence at The Game Awards that I thought to prioritize it at all.

Which brings us to this year.

Among the nominees for this year's Game of the Year awards is "Deathloop," a first-person shooter from Arkane Studios with remarkable similarities to "Hades."

In this case, the player is an assassin trapped in a "Groundhog Day" styled time loop that has to learn all the ins-and-outs of his environment to eliminate eight targets before the day resets and he has to start all over again.

Like "Hades," "Deathloop" sees the player gradually become more and more efficient with each repeated attempt, unlocking more of the game's narrative bit-by-bit along the way.

Also like "Hades," "Deathloop" largely went unnoticed by me when it came out this summer. Ironically, it came about at about the same time I started playing "Hades."

I slept on "Hades" for more than a year before giving it a try and regretted it. I don't think I'll be making the same mistake with "Deathloop."

I won't be playing "Deathloop" in time to be properly outraged about its impending Game of the Year snub, but I'll make an effort to be retroactively outraged by this time next year.

Travis Fischer is a news writer for Mid-America Publishing and fully intends to be outraged over "Metroid Dread" not winning as well.