2018 has been a good year for video games. From blockbuster epics to smaller indie experiences to inventive takes on VR, the breadth and variety of games that came out over the last 12 months is astounding. To celebrate, Verge staff members are writing essays on their own personal favorite games, and what made them stand out above the crowd.

Return of the Obra Dinn begins at the end. The end of a story, the end of a life, the end of a barrel of a gun.

It begins with a body, a desiccated pile of bones moldering on the deck of a ship that set out from London in 1802 to round the Cape of Good Hope and washed up five years later without a living soul aboard. You arrive as the most quotidian and morbid of figures, an insurance adjuster assigned to calculate the financial liability of the East India Company. Your objective is to determine the fate — and often, the precise manner of death — of each person on board, their culpability in the tragedy, and the larger series of events that left the ship abandoned and adrift.

You’re given an unusual tool to aid in your investigation: a pocket watch described as a “Memento Mortem” — Latin for “remember death.” Wave it over the pile of bones, or any human remains, and it shivers violently until you open it and are transported back in time to the moment of their demise, a frozen snapshot of pain and fury.

Some spoilers for Return of the Obra Dinn follow.

Visually, Return of the Obra Dinn is a marvel; it is the best sort of anachronism, a 1-bit story rendered in the monochrome of a different time, a dithered love letter to the black-and-white Mac games of the 1980s. Like the best black-and-white movies made today, it is not merely an exercise in nostalgia but a striking aesthetic choice that is both form and function, an invocation of digital antiquity that defines it and is defined by it.

On the title screen, a pixelated moon hangs white and singular behind the rigging of the ship, its light shimmering on the water of an impossibly dark sea. From the vantage point of the present, it’s the digital equivalent of finding an old photograph in a trunk, wondering who these people were, how they lived and loved and died — and then walking inside of it.

Read next: The 15 best video games of 2018

Open your pocket watch, and enter. You are given a ledger, a book where you are tasked with cataloging the story of the Obra Dinn, and how it went from a 60-person crew to a derelict, how each soul aboard met their end. It is your mandate to record the hows, the whys, the dark and terrible secrets and decisions that emptied its decks. You will learn many things about the people who inhabited it through the course of your inquiry. Primarily, you’ll discover that these were consummately loyal officers, driven to murder their superiors by a series of events as impossible as they were inevitable.

Then there are the monsters. They arrive, at first, in a penultimate chapter called “The Doom,” where a kraken rises from the deep, and wraps its terrible arms slowly and inevitably around a ship and all the people who have survived to face it. It moves backward, death by death, into the awe and dread of demons with eight legs rising from the bottom of the ocean to take their vengeance, a punishment as deserved as it is unfair.

Return of the Obra Dinn is the product of a polymath named Lucas Pope, the creator of the ruthlessly incisive and award-winning immigration simulator Papers, Please. He wrote, programmed, illustrated, and scored the game entirely on his own, which is as impressive as it is infuriating. It is a horror story in reverse, a narrative pinball bouncing from one set of eyes to another across a gradually unfolding and macabre catastrophe, via the final, desperate moment of each human being when their light goes out. We begin with the knowledge that always comes with history: that it is already written.

The play Romeo and Juliet begins, famously, with a prologue that is epilogue — two people have died, and are already buried. All that remains is to discover the reasons, the rationalizations, the engraved moments of fury and terror and passion that brought us from there to here. This is the story of the Obra Dinn: the corpses have already been thrown into the ocean, torn limb from limb by nameless horrors of the deep. They line the ocean floor without gravestones or obituaries, except for the ones you decide to write.

The ends of stories are funny things, because they are both defining and arbitrary. They are both lies and truth. Because no story truly ends until every person inside of it is dead, until every light has gone out, until it is left, finally, to the people who were not there and cannot remember it to remember.

It is easy to see these moments from the vantage point of the present, in the unforgiving fluorescent light of hindsight, rather than the hot pulse of adrenaline that demanded a gun be fired, a punch thrown, a scream torn from a throat. We do this with our lives, too; we look back at the complicated tangle of decisions that brought us from here to there and we simplify. We look back from the safe distance of the present, and we imagine there could have been a different ending, a fiction that is as safe as it is fallacious.

In the great and terrible wilderness of history, countless millions have died badly, died foolishly, died without funerals or eulogies or gravestones. They died nonetheless. History is the story that we make of them as the camera pulls back and we ask, what did it all mean, if anything? How did we come from setting out toward the horizon, the wind in our hair and at our backs, to ugly, inexorable ends?

The story the game tells is not a pretty one; the past is not a line, leading from where we started into the moment where we stand. It is a knot of moments and decisions tangled over and unto themselves, through the lens of a thousand petty passions and prejudices and personal grudges. Hindsight is a ruthless judge, one that demands that we live with our choices, with the decisions that define us, most of all when we are dead. Return of the Obra Dinn is about writing the story of the past, about doing it justice, about the humanity we can find in our mistakes as well as our moments of heroism.

Return of the Obra Dinn is about the horror of history, the horror of a tragedy in reverse, the horror of inevitability. It is about what it means to set out again toward the unknown in the face of it, toward a horizon that recedes into the distance the closer we walk with the knowledge that our story does not belong to us, not entirely. That we do not know how our stories will end when we begin them, how our adventures or relationships or jobs will end, or how the future will regard us from the comfortable vantage point of its remove.

It is about the realization that we cannot change the past, but that we can do it justice — for as long as someone remembers it, or us, long after we are gone.

After seven years of sharing essays, art, advice, and writing for (and often by) teenagers, the online magazine Rookie Mag is shutting down. Launched by fashion blogger Tavi Gevinson in 2011 — when she was only 15 years old — Rookie attracted a million views in six days and went on to become an intimate, authentic, and feminist lens for its primarily young female audience to look at and speak to the world.

In a six-page editor’s letter that will be the last post on the site, Gevinson explains that “Rookie in its current form is no longer financially sustainable.” Although she considered alternatives — including selling the site to a larger media company, bringing on investors, or charging readers for subscriptions — she ultimately decided against them and the responsibilities and potential compromises they would entail. “It would not be possible for me to make Rookie work, and do other work I care about,” writes Gevinson.

As Gevinson notes repeatedly in her letter, it’s a difficult time for media at large — including other teen magazines like Teen Vogue and Seventeen, which ended their print runs over the last year in favor of digital-only versions. But shifting to digital and developing a devoted online fanbase doesn’t necessarily offer financial stability or sustainability, especially amid declining web advertising revenue. Over the last several years, beloved independent publications like The Awl, The Hairpin, and The Toast have all shuttered.

“We’ve always been somewhat intentionally small, and scale has become increasingly important for securing large ad deals,” said Awl publisher Michael Macher at the time of its closure. “It’s a structural shift with the way media buyers and agencies relate to publishers — and for better or worse less of those dollars are falling to indie publishers.”

Like Gevinson, The Toast founders Daniel Ortberg and Nicole Cliffe considered alternative funding methods, but ultimately decided against it because of how it would inevitably change “our relatively unique community” and because they found themselves increasingly subsumed with administrative and financial duties, rather than the more creative work they enjoyed.

“It will take a long time for me to process the rareness of this connection, and the feeling that it’s over,” writes Gevinson in closing. “But it’s not over. The changes people create in one another do not go away. The people you grow up with stay with you forever. You made Rookie with us, and its spirit will live on in whatever comes next for us all.”

Stan Lee, the former editor-in-chief, publisher, and chairman of Marvel Comics, died this morning in Los Angeles at age 95. Lee was best known for co-creating much of Marvel’s pantheon of beloved superheroes: Spider-Man, The X-Men, The Fantastic Four, the Hulk, Iron Man, Thor, Daredevil, Black Panther, and Doctor Strange, among others.

Lee’s comics career began in 1939, when the 17-year-old took an assistant job at Timely Comics, the predecessor to Marvel. Born Stanley Martin Lieber, he adopted Stan Lee as a pen name when he started writing comic book stories, and later made it his legal name.

His style of scripting — giving the artist a brief synopsis, then returning to nail down the details after the story was drawn — would later be dubbed “The Marvel Method,” and offered collaborators and co-creators like Jack Kirby and Steve Ditko enormous creative input into the work. Later, there would be sometimes bitter conflicts about precisely who created — or co-created — which characters, though the work-for-hire nature of their contracts meant that none of them retained the rights.

During the 1960s (and beyond), Lee spoke often about the importance of inclusion and the evils of racism. In 1971, Lee challenged the Comics Code Authority — a sometimes draconian set of industry-imposed rules created to avoid government regulation after a Congressional witch hunt of the comic book medium — with an anti-drug storyline in an issue of The Amazing Spider-Man. His boundary pushing led to a review and revamp of the Code, which ultimately declined into irrelevance.

A year later, Lee stepped back from writing comics to become the publisher of Marvel, and quickly became its most recognizable public face, from then until now. As the world of Marvel superheroes expanded into the vast and lucrative Marvel Cinematic Universe, Lee became known for his cameo appearances in the films — perhaps the most popular in-joke in movies already peppered with references for comic book fans.

Recent years have been tumultuous for Lee, including a bout with pneumonia, accusations of sexual misconduct, a $1 billion suit against his former company POW! Entertainment, claims that his advisors have been preying on him financially, Siri erroneously informing the world he was dead earlier this year, a bizarre report that his blood had been stolen to sign collectible comics, and the death of his wife, Joan Lee, who passed away last year after a stroke.

But Lee’s legacy and impact on the world of both comic books and entertainment remains vast, enduring and undeniable. News of his death prompted eulogies across Twitter, by everyone from Chris Evans to Elon Musk.

Even the /thanosdidnothingwrong subreddit — which banned half of its community at their own request in July in a nod to Avengers: Infinity War — decided to hold a moment of silence to honor Lee by restricting submissions until the day after his death.

In an October interview with The Daily Beast, when asked what was still on his wish list after so many years and so many accomplishments, Lee’s answer was simple: “That I leave everyone happy when I leave.”

Nearly a year after launching its subscriber-based crowdfunding platform, Kickstarter announced today that Drip is on the way out. Fortunately, for the creators currently working with Drip as well as anyone looking for an alternative to Patreon, Kickstarter isn’t abandoning the platform. Instead, the company is providing seed funding to XOXO festival creators Andy Baio and Andy McMillan to create an entirely new one with an explicit focus on providing financial stability and transparency to independent artists.

The new initiative came about through conversations between Kickstarter founder Perry Chen and Baio, a former Kickstarter CTO. “You start thinking, what’s next, what are the possibilities?” says Chen. “As we talked more and more, I ended up thinking that this could be a good way for this to progress, for [Baio] and [McMillan] to build on what we’ve done with Drip over the last year.”

Baio and McMillan have a reputation for working with and supporting independent artists, primarily through their work at the annual XOXO arts and tech festival that they created in 2012. “So much of the festival is about helping independent artists and celebrating their work and helping them connect with one another,” says Baio. “But there’s the financial component, too. And helping them getting ongoing funding for their work is something we’ve been thinking about for the better part of a decade.”

There is no specific launch date for the as-yet-unnamed platform, but Kickstarter will continue to run Drip for the next year until existing Drip creators can be migrated there or to another service of their choosing. Baio and McMillan have incorporated as a public benefit corporation (PBC) for the project, much like Kickstarter, which reincorporated in 2015 as a PBC. The new platform they want to build is “much more community driven, much more social,” says Baio. “The thing we keep coming back to is building something that works for every project, regardless of whether or not they’re currently seeking funding.”

The duo emphasizes again and again that they understand the responsibility that comes with this sort of subscription-based funding, which many creators rely on to pay their bills month to month. “It’s different from project-based funding like Kickstarter,” says Baio. “You need to be around for a long time. We are specifically structuring it as we go to make something that is as sustainable as possible.”

The pair remains uncertain about the policies they will adopt around NSFW content. McMillan says that while they wanted to support as many creators as they can, “there are complex technical problems in supporting [NSFW content], like payment gateways. We need to look into how technologically possible it is to support those creators but I would say that we have a history of prioritizing and including those people in the community and that’s a priority for us moving forward.”

When asked whether LGBT content would be flagged as adult content, even if it is not explicit — a controversy that has recently erupted around Patreon — Baio’s response was succinct: “LGBT content is not inherently explicit or NSFW in any way.”

Baio and McMillan also emphasized that they planned to be communicative with their creators about any significant changes to the service, particularly anything that would affect the income of the people on the platform. “Essentially what you’re offering here is financial stability for independent artists,” says McMillan. “The thing that we are producing for these people is going to look like a piece of software, but really it’s financial stability. And we have to be incredibly respectful of bringing people into this ecosystem, in everything that we do. One aspect of that is inevitably is going to be radical transparency whenever we decide that we’re going to change something.”

Although early phases of the new platform may be invite-only, their goal is to make it open to everyone. And despite the seed money, Chen makes it clear that Kickstarter will have no oversight or control over the project. “We’re just here to support,” he says. “It’s their ship to steer. And that’s exactly the way it should be.”

Writer Stephen Elliott, one of the men named in the controversial, crowdsourced “Shitty Media Men” list, has filed a lawsuit for libel and emotional distress against its creator, Moira Donegan, asking for $1.5 million in damages.

The Google spreadsheet, which was created by Donegan in October 2017, was widely circulated in media circles, particularly among women. It encouraged anonymous users to share allegations of sexual misconduct by predatory men in media.

Faced with routine institutional dismissal and fear of professional repercussions for reporting, women in a wide variety of industries have often relied on so-called “whisper networks” to quietly share information about assault and harassment with other women. The “Shitty Media Men” list was a tangible, publicly accessible manifestation of this sort of network that quickly transcended “whispers,” went viral, and made its anonymous accusations visible to the public at large.

As Donegan noted in her subsequent essay at The Cut, “I was incredibly naïve when I made the spreadsheet. I was naïve because I did not understand the forces that would make the document go viral.”

While this may have unearthed numerous infractions that women had previously felt unable to report, the anonymous nature of the list earned it many critics as well. As Sarah Jeong noted on The Verge earlier this year:

The scope of the list was not well-defined, eventually collecting stories that ranged from incredibly violent sexual assaults to unwanted workplace overtures, a mixture of allegations that all fit the bill of “shitty” but felt, to some, a little odd to be mixed together. The worst allegations that had been reported by multiple people were highlighted in red, but many of the details were opaque: it was unclear how many women had made the same allegation, there were no time stamps, no encryption, no sealed records to return to if an investigation was ever launched … But most obviously: once this open document went viral, it became less and less reliable.

In September 2018, Elliott published an essay titled “How an Anonymous Accusation Derailed my Life,” in which he detailed the impact of being accused of rape on the list. He says after he was named on the list, several publications canceled planned coverage of his book collection of essays, he was disinvited from several events, and his television agent stopped returning his calls. “Was this just business as usual, or had she found out about the list? I didn’t know,” he writes. In response to the essay, at least one woman spoke out publicly about alleged misconduct by Elliott.

The lawsuit indicates that Elliott plans to sue other anonymous users who contributed to the Google Doc, and subpoena Google for metadata that could identify them. “Plaintiff believes that information obtained in discovery will reveal the Jane Doe Defendants’ true names, addresses and other identifying information and allow Plaintiff to amend this Complaint to state the same,” the lawsuit says.

According to a piece published at The Cut, several of the men named by the list oppose the lawsuit. Supporters of Donegan have launched a GoFundMe campaign to help pay for her legal fees. In a tweet posted after the announcement of the lawsuit, Donegan made it clear that she still supports the list.