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Games released in 2017

53 games released in 2017 and reviewed here, best first.

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53 reviews

Cuphead

A hand-drawn, 1930s-cartoon-style boss-rush platformer that's as punishingly hard as it is beautiful — and whose second most-upvoted negative review points at a real, still-unaddressed colourblind accessibility gap that echoes a pattern this library keeps finding.

9 / 10

Reviewed

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NieR:Automata

A genuine landmark action RPG whose Steam version spent four years as a warning label of its own — a beloved, philosophically ambitious game shipped in a technically broken PC port that Square Enix quietly fixed on a different storefront first.

8.5 / 10

Reviewed

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Prey

Arkane Austin's 2017 immersive sim remains Very Positive across more than 54,000 Steam reviews, widely regarded as one of the genre's finest achievements — a reputation this review can confirm survived the closure of the very studio that made it, when Arkane Austin was shut down entirely by Microsoft in 2024, and a real controversy over the game's own title, which this review can confirm Bethesda forced onto an unrelated story over the objections of Arkane's own founder.

8 / 10

Reviewed

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SPACEPLAN

A potato-powered clicker that spends its idle timers on story instead of retention, and then does the one thing almost nothing in the genre does — it actually finishes.

8 / 10

Reviewed

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Total War Warhammer II

A widely loved grand-strategy classic whose negative sample documents a real 2018 spyware scandal, persistent Denuvo/always-online friction, and a heavily criticised DLC structure requiring ownership of a separate game to access its best campaign mode — a complaint Creative Assembly substantially resolved in December 2025 by giving Warhammer III free to owners.

8 / 10

Reviewed

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Albion Online

A classless sandbox MMORPG where every sword, ship and set of plate armour is player-made — and where losing a fight in the wrong zone means losing all of it. Nine years in, and now on Xbox, the question is whether that risk still teaches or just filters.

7.5 / 10

Reviewed

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Almost a Hero

A party of the world's most useless heroes carries a fairly ordinary idle RPG through sheer force of writing, while its rewarded-video-ad economy is honest enough about what it's selling that the comparison to gacha idlers actually favours it.

7.5 / 10

Reviewed

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Middle-earth: Shadow of War

Home to one of the most inventive systems in action RPGs — a system its publisher then patented, blocking every other studio from building anything like it, a decision reviewers are still angry about years after the studio that made it, Monolith Productions, was shut down.

7.5 / 10

Reviewed

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Nioh: Complete Edition

Team Ninja's samurai-era Souls-like pairs one of the deepest stance-based combat systems in the genre with a Diablo-style loot flood that a large, vocal share of its own fans say fights against everything the combat is trying to do -- a disagreement that hasn't moved in nine years of reviews.

7.5 / 10

Reviewed

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Pyre

Supergiant Games followed Bastion and Transistor with a fantasy exile story told through a three-on-three magical sport, and split its own fanbase in half doing it -- one of its own most quoted reviews calls it "Supergiant's worst game, but their best piece of art."

7.5 / 10

Reviewed

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West of Loathing

A stick-figure comedy RPG from the Kingdom of Loathing team that landed among 2017's most acclaimed indies -- Overwhelmingly Positive on Steam nine years later -- while carrying a serious, publicly documented allegation against its director that a real share of its own reviews now raise unprompted.

7.5 / 10

Reviewed

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Battle Chasers: Nightwar

A gorgeous, Kickstarted turn-based RPG built from Joe Madureira's 1990s comic, praised almost universally for its art and combat variety and just as consistently accused of burying both under grinding and pacing that never speeds up -- nine years on, the achievement data backs up exactly where players quit.

7 / 10

Reviewed

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Clickpocalypse II

A nearly decade-old mobile idle RPG that still gets one thing right that most of its modern competitors don't even try — a completely fair, no-IAP, no-gacha monetisation model — and undercuts it with technical rough edges that have apparently never been fully sanded down.

7 / 10

Reviewed

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Colony Survival

A voxel colony-building strategy game crossing Minecraft's block-by-block construction with genuine tower-defense stakes, still in Early Access more than nine years after its 2017 debut — sustained by an unusually transparent weekly developer blog and a loyal Very Positive fanbase, with a persistent, still-current complaint that its mid-to-late game never quite matches the promise of its opening hours.

7 / 10

Reviewed

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ELEX

Piranha Bytes' post-apocalyptic science-fantasy RPG traded Gothic's medieval valleys for a comet-scarred planet of jetpacks and magic swords, and kept every bit of the studio's famous jank along with it -- nine years on, it is a genuinely divisive game whose fans use the word "uncut gem" without irony and whose detractors mean "worst game ever made" almost as literally.

7 / 10

Reviewed

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Hand of Fate 2

A card-and-dice tabletop RPG that most reviewers call a genuine improvement on its predecessor in almost every way except the one that matters most in the moment -- the real-time combat every encounter drops you into -- from a small Australian studio that closed for good less than two years after release.

7 / 10

Reviewed

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Soda Dungeon

A free turn-based idle dungeon crawler that bolts Clicker Heroes-style ascension onto a tavern full of soda-fuelled adventurers, charming enough that thousands of players still recommend it a decade after it started life as a mobile game.

7 / 10

Reviewed

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