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This is going to sound weird probably but evidence suggests that I’m a pretty good teenage girl. My exuberant performance as Gaige in Borderlands 2 is legendary – ask anybody – and before that I managed a highly effective troupe of Dangerous High School Girls in Trouble.  Put me in a tartan skirt and I’ll change the world, or at least the school’s immediate environs. So it probably comes as little surprise that I enjoyed the first part of Dontnod’s odd, sweet, beautiful Life is Strange, an episodic consequenture from the creators of Remember Me.

It’s that time of year again.  A time for quiet reflection.  A time for looking ahead.  A time for staying up super late and celebrating solar mechanics.  Most importantly, though, it’s a time for reminding ourselves of some awesome games we played in the last 365 days – measured in the gaming world as “the time between the releases of Retro City Rampage and Dr. Luigi.”

Some years there are games that characterize my gaming experience.  That sum up everything that was most memorable about that year in gaming.  Other years, like this one, it’s hard to point at any one title or experience.  This last year was, for me, more of a tidal shift.  I’m a lot more of an indie player than I was twelve months ago (though that’s a highly relative thing).  For probably the first year ever, the pinnacle of my gaming experience didn’t come (at least not definitely so) from a console release from a major publisher.  That’s not to say I’m shelving my PS3 and swearing off the AAAs, but the reality of how much they’re losing their power really struck home for me personally, rather than just academically, in 2013.