The best PC games of 2018: Sea of Thieves

The best moments in Sea of Thieves usually come at the very end of a session. Me and my crew have turned in our treasures, gotten drunk at a nearby inn, and spent the night vomiting our guts out all over town. That leaves us to watch the sunrise and play a little ditty with wooden instruments in hand as we prepare to part - arguing over whether to play a mournful dirge or a jaunty melody - before we get distracted by our cannons and start firing our own bodies to the top of a local mountain. When Sea of Thieves made the rounds at E3, the question everyone kept asking was, ‘What do you do?’. Honestly, after all my time with the game since release, I’m still not quite sure I can answer that. Sure, you collect treasure, use gold to buy fancier equipment, and occasionally do battle with rival players or sea monsters, but those are just tangents. Every few weeks, we get the crew back together - me, my wife, and a couple of friends from opposite ends of the country - and just go. In the midst of one of our first voyages, we were suddenly enveloped by a mass of tentacles and found ourselves in a battle against the kraken. That sent us all scrambling to different parts of the ship, shouting out orders to each other over the din of crunching wood and monstrous roars.