Through some weird combination of factors I ended up barely playing any of 2016's games, so there's not much I can give points to this time around. I'm positive that if I had played them, Kirby: Planet Robobot (my new favorite game soundtrack ever), Pokémon Sun/Moon, and Zero Time Dilemma would all be on this list.
40 Points - Oxenfree
So Oxenfree is my game of the year largely by default, because it's the best game in the tiny pool of games I played. But it's also a great point-and-clicker and a very impressive debut work by a studio, and I feel like it'd definitely hold its own in a year where I actually played 10, 20, 30 commercial releases too.
1). Beat for beat it's a teen horror flick, except it uses that to tell a ghost story that's really a senior year of school story. All the layers are done well, and I'm always 100% down for video games taking on narrative styles from other media that they don't do often and they don't do well often. (One of the reasons I loved Gone Home.)
2). It looks like that pic Q posted and it sounds like this:
https://scntfc.bandcamp.com/track/beacon-beach
3). Conversations happen in realtime, and when you choose something to say you can interrupt the person who's talking and steer the conversation in a different direction. Or, you can remain silent and let whatever was last said hang awkwardly in the air. Combine this with a good script and you have the most naturalistic dialogue system there's ever been in a video game. (
The secret behind the whole thing is that the script is 1,200 pages long.)
Play this game.
40 Points - Swapdoodle
20 Points - Day of the Tentacle Remastered
You can play the game with the same music, graphics, and controls as Day of the Tentacle, so as a baseline it's exactly as good as the original. But there's more streamlined interactions with objects, and MIDI muzak if you like that sort of thing, and Flash-y graphix if you like that sort of thing, and remastered voice clips from the original tape records which is neat. And DotT is just a solid as fuck game, holds up extremely well for an early '90s adventure game.
Jam it back in, in the dark.