#28
Hollow Knight
(Change YoY: NEW!)
In recent years the popularity of Dark Souls has brought us a slew of games trying to emulate its style and gameplay, but the vast majority of them are just poorly designed and cheap copies that completely miss the entire appeal of Dark Souls. However, there have been some genuinely great games that have come out of this as well, and perhaps the best so far is Hollow Knight. It features the kind of interconnected world, difficult gameplay and lore hidden in the small details of the world that Dark Souls does so well, while changing and adding enough of its own things to stand out on its own as well. After seeing so many games miss the point of Dark Souls by just being punishingly difficult without any thought put into it, Hollow Knight was a revelation.
This was, and is, the second best game of 2017 in my opinion, and the best "soulslike" game not developed by FromSoftware I've played so far. Dark Souls is one of my favourite game series ever, and to see other developers taking inspiration from it and finding new and interesting ways to approach the formula is just awesome.
Also, no guesses for this one yet, so here are some additional hints for it.
#27:
This game starts a new subseries within this franchise.
Takes place after the events of another trilogy in the series, and during two other games which have so far not been released in the west.
The main characters are members of a special class in a military academy.
Takes place in the Erebonian Empire.
First of four games in this particular subseries. The last two have not been released in the west yet.