In Nier: Automata’s opening monologue, our android protagonist 2B expresses her desire to meet God and kill Him. It’s a deliberate thesis statement in a genre obsessed with solving all the world’s problems through deicide and, despite its early bombast, Nier is far more interested in the vacuum left by god’s absence.

While its escalating proxy-war between androids and robots soars to ever more ludicrous heights of anime melodrama, the core plot is merely a matrix holding together a series of bittersweet, personal character arcs, vignettes and philosophical explorations of the search for meaning and purpose in a ruined and indifferent world. A stark contrast to 2017’s trend of major publishers being terrified of their games having something to say, Yoko Taro and his team at Platinum have crafted a provocative, thematically-consistent meditation on what it means to be human.

Nier doesn’t claim to have all the answers, but instead offers guidance to find your own meaning in the spaces between bullet-hell chaos, robotic cults and beating a sentient oilrig to death with its own chainsaw arm.