Improbably for a virtual space that is so weirdly constructed and illusive, Fez's world lives in my memory just as Hyrule or Azeroth do. New games | Panels | Let's Plays | Industry Insight | Esports tournaments | Livestreams Tabletop gaming | Exclusive merch | More!

"And my reward? 26-29 Eurogamer Expo 2012 held in Earls Court, London.

"I didn't know what I was missing until I found it again. We even saw some convincing, economical storytelling, thanks to games like The Walking Dead, 30 Flights of Loving and Journey.Then there were two new console launches. Suddenly Fez isn't about cheery exploration any more: it's about scribbling down notes, cracking codes, and working out what dark, otherworldly logic ties a selection of disparate parts of the map together. 24-31 Street Fighter franchise completes 25 years. "Fez is my favourite game of 2012, and it's also one of my favourite albums of 2012. But most of all, I love it because it's quiet. Now quick look back for this generation consoles for Game of the Year from 2006 to 2011.

Tetris squares, Triforces, a smile-eyed celebration of the Nintendo childhood, here repackaged, repurposed in a living museum of pixels and ideas. It's a celebration of the medium's formative years, where clues to the game's heritage etch every wall. DJMax Technika Tune = 11 points 3. "A great musical score is an important component of all the greatest game worlds - think Zelda: Ocarina of Time or World of Warcraft - and so it proves with Fez.

No other game's voice could be heard so loudly over the din of the surrounding story. It's a world that's confident enough in its own charms to confound and confuse you.

Most games box you in within minutes, introducing their mechanics and then allowing you to perform variations on a theme for however many hours there are to follow, and that's fine - some of my favourite games of 2012 do exactly that, in fact, and you can still be surprising and daring and original when you make a game that way. All Rights Reserved. So let’s cut the faffing and get to it. "This is what I was missing, I think: I was missing the pleasure of slow-burning discovery. "For whatever reason Myst fell out of vogue. The Wii U and PlayStation Vita haven't exactly exploded out of the blocks, but they are already bringing us a mixture of unique new experiences and the comfort of old friends. Other games made louder statements in 2012, but for me, none were so coherent or memorable as Fez." That feeling of being personally affected by a game is more common with small-scale developments, of course - the connection between individual creators and players can be diluted when there are several hundred people plugging their work into one production - but this game was uncommonly intelligent and coherent.

""Sometimes I am accused of hating video games," she says. "The Eurogamer Game of the Year is voted for by our staff and contributors. The only other one I played this year is Mass Effect 3 but I wouldn't even considered that close to being my game of the year so I'd say Downpour. By the time I had felt out the game's edges and maxed out the completion percentage, for once I was too much in awe to be concerned by them. Usually another evocative, dreamlike vista hiding further cryptic clues. 2012 also saw Kickstarter go from 0-60 (or, in Tim Schafer's case, $0 to $3,336,371), while free-to-play started to shake off its dodgy reputation with help from games like Tribes Ascend. Fez did away with all that and simply let me march to the beat of my own drum as I scrawled down its various glyphs and riddles until I'd inevitably stumble upon that 'Ah-ha!'

"I love Fez. Vreeland underscores artist/designer Phil Fish's surreal locations and playful illogic with notes of mystery, melancholy and awe. "The fact that Fez's Escher-like spatial conceit - a 2D platform game set within a 3D world - isn't the main headline of its appeal says a great deal. I love the way it presents new ideas and bends old rules, without ever doing anything for the sake of it.

This is more importantly a game about the wonder of exploration, both in the physical sense of searching out each of its spatial secrets, and the mental sense of understanding its glyphs and codes. It's a perfect, wordless sci-fi parable - and an elegant comment on the development of video games themselves, expressed in a way only a game could articulate. There were brighter times for the battered racing genre as well, thanks to Need for Speed: Most Wanted, Ridge Racer Unbounded and particularly thanks to Forza Horizon. It trusts that you're smart enough to work things out.

"Fez never shouts at you or screams for attention or tells you that you're doing it all wrong. is the theme of the second half of Fez - the assault on the final selection of collectables after the first lot have all succumbed to a handful of hours of easy platforming. I only need to hear a chord of Vreeland's music to be transported there, and the thought of visiting it again and seeing its blood-orange sunsets fade into starry night makes my spine tingle. When the time of day changes - I can never remember if the sun has to rise or set, but I think it's the latter - markings around the door are slowly picked out in gold.

But the games I really adore are the ones that give you a little advice but otherwise leave you to your own devices. Other games made louder statements in 2012, but for me, none were so coherent or memorable as Fez. It's the secret history of a race of people learning to hunt, to worship, to count and spell, and finally struggling to understand the existence of a third dimension.

And it was the year of skulking expertly through the shadows, thanks to Dishonored and Mark of the Ninja. But I think it's about something else: what games were to us in their charged infancy, what they've expanded into in the 30 years since, and how to fold those things together into a single, beautiful whole. It was also the year of the roguelike, thanks to games like Spelunky, FTL and ZombiU. ""It's often the case, isn't it?"