The Best Video Games of 2016

In the ninth episode of "Westworld," the HBO television series that imagines an escapist theme park populated by human players and fantasy-fulfulling androids, a character named Dolores questions the appeal of the world outside. If humans are so eager to flee into her reality, she asks, as sentience flickers into her circuitry, why would she ever want to visit theirs? In 2016, the year that facts, political decency, and a handful of our most cherished celebrities joined the choir invisible, who could argue with her? Now more than ever, fiction seems a place of retreat, and the interactive fictions of video games have an especially keen appeal. In times that feel out of control, the controller is a refuge. No matter how dark the world we enter, we are, like Westworld's clientele, made to feel invincible.