Nier: Automata

Yoko Taro writing, PlatinumGames combat, and a structure that spends its running time undermining what you assume you are playing. You begin as 2B, an android soldier sent to clear a ruined Earth of machines on behalf of a human race that has retreated to the moon. The action is Platinum at close to its best — fast, weighty, switching between hack-and-slash, twin-stick shooting and side-scrolling without warning — but the reason people talk about it is what happens after the credits. Finishing the game once is explicitly not finishing it; subsequent playthroughs are not replays but continuations from other perspectives, and the actual ending is several routes deep. Keiichi Okabe's score is among the best written for the medium and does a lot of the emotional work. It is a game about whether manufactured things can mean anything, delivered by a director who keeps finding structural rather than narrative ways to ask, and it converted a cult curiosity of a series into a commercial success on its third attempt.