GAMES OF THE GENERATION

On the eve of the next generation, we invite you to celebrate the very best of one coming to a close. And we do mean the best: while we dedicated E339’s Games Of The Decade feature to the defining titles of the last ten years, our Games Of The Generation awards go to the crème de la crème – those Edge has judged to represent the pinnacle of game design as we know it today.

A few rules to begin with: we judged only games from November 2013 onwards, taking PS4 and Xbox One’s release month as our starting point. Alongside the two major consoles, we chose our other platforms of note to be PC, mobile, VR and Switch (apologies, Wii U, but your younger sibling rather outshone you this gen). And as we’re putting forward only the magazine’s most revered, suffice it to say the double-digit scoring games of the last seven years get one last lap of honour – although due to the recency of its release, we’ve decided to reserve one [10], Media Molecule’s Dreams, for consideration in our imminent Game Of The Year awards instead.

So, yes – you won’t be surprised to see many of the games on this list (although one of them Edge never even officially reviewed). But the sheer range of artistry on show here is overwhelming, a testament to just how far we’ve come as an industry of creatives in seven short years. A fond farewell, then, to an irreplicable generation of true one-offs that pushed the boundaries of game design to brilliant effect. Here’s to the next.

BLOODBORNE

Developer FromSoftware Publisher SIE Format PS4 Release 2015

The greatest games are the most coherent: the worlds in bottles so fully formed, so enveloping, so thought-through in every detail, that the player forgets about the glass. In Bloodborne the player character heals through injecting blood, the reason they and others have come to the baroque, fog-muffled streets of Yharnam: blood that runs from higher planes down into the corpse-filled sewers, and stains and corrupts everything it passes through.

Bloodborne has been called Lovecraftian, an oversimplification of a game which takes elements from many myth systems to build its own monster. This is science fiction of the 19th-century kind, where humankind’s ambitions are bound by rudimentary technology and tantalisingly incomplete notions of how things like a body might work – and could, perhaps, be improved on.

Human drive pumps relentlessly through . The unique combat system is built around ‘trick’ weapons, capable of switching between two forms mid-combo, and aggression. You are a hunter, and hunters must hunt. A shield item is found fairly early on and treated as an in-game joke: who would fight beasts with a weapon like that? You are first taught and then forced to abandon