RANK 20 (11 votes)

Cereberal, paralyzing, familiar and tantamount to everything we understand is horror gaming. Silent Hill 2 works as a disturbed study of the human condition that is ultimately more empathetic than it is terrifying. A spiraling, macabre dive into how trauma shapes us - and the mind of those who create said trauma. A perpetually enigmatically beautiful and profound piece of work that urges you play it, one that horror games have been trying to catch up to for years since.
(Archagent)

RANK 22 (10 votes)

A true collaborative effort that drew on a vast well of ideas pooled from one of the most star-studded teams in the history of the medium, Final Fantasy VII is a genuine watershed moment that blazed trails we continue to follow to this day.

Taking full advantage of the liquid nature of the medium in this crucial moment of generational transition to make stunning revolutionary leaps in style and form, Final Fantasy VII blends countless disparate influences, from film noir to cyberpunk anime to new age mysticism, to tell the timelessly resonant story of a troubled cynic fighting against imminent ecological collapse whilst confronting the unanswerable question: Who Am I?

At the dawn of the 3D age, video gaming desperately searched for an answer to the same question. And just like it did with Cloud, Final Fantasy VII offered no easy answers, no cohesive solutions. Instead, it offered something better: a vision of video games that was not devoted to emulating film or manga, to realism or abstraction, but to all of it at once, a thousand ideas sprinting down a thousand roads, leaving seeds of the future scattered wherever they went.
(Woodaba)

RANK 7 (19 votes)

In Super Mario 64 your move-set is so expressive that moving around feels downright joyful and so varied that you’ll find yourself with multiple different ways to understand and approach individual platforming challenges. Meanwhile, the levels themselves take advantage of this move-set with so many criss-crossing routes that new players and seasoned veterans alike will find themselves traversing via sizably different yet equally valid, intended and rewarding approaches.

If contrasted with any other 3D platformer of its generation Super Mario 64 starts to look at least a decade ahead of its time in all those ways. Is it any wonder then that for people of a certain age loading up this game for the first time felt almost like they were peeking into the future, seeing the potential of video games and the wonder of being allowed to truly frolic in 3D digital spaces that are so deeply built for that?
(AutumnLily)

RANK 35 (7 votes)

Fallout New Vegas is a game about choices, their consequences, and learning to accept them and move forward rather than remaining trapped in the past. The game echoes this theme through the lenses of its many characters and storylines, be it a war veteran dealing with PTSD and the loss of his wife or a Super-Mutant suffering dementia but desperately trying to hold on to the memories of her grandchildren. Your actions throughout the game have genuine impact on the world around you, allowing you to choose whether the desert of the Mojave Wasteland will move into a new future or stay rooted within beliefs of the past. It is New Vegas’ writing that makes it so impactful to me personally. The progressive theme of moving on from your past and facing tomorrow is just such a positive message that speaks both emotionally to our progress as human beings but also of gaming in general. War may never change, but we always can.
(Cab)

RANK 25 (9 votes)

It is rare to find titles in the medium that provide complete freedom to explore unbound by conventional means of progression. Rarer still are those that leave the player feeling that the world they inhabit outside of the game is a warmer, kinder place than the one they parted with at the door. These feelings have only grown stronger the more time has passed since my inaugural flight from Timber Hearth, where you inherit a rocket ship and the dreams of a space program birthed not as a military show of force, but out of a desire to understand the past and present.

The Outer Wilds is no mere puzzle game, its “solutions” betray the simplicity of the answers we expect to see when we march to GameFAQs in frustration. Nothing in the game just "is". You don't understand how to interact with something? The knowledge required simply lies somewhere else. Knowledge in this game is what items are in typical puzzle-adventure games, and the core of the gameplay is conducting science in tandem; experimenting, understanding and forming conclusions -even just tentative ones- to understand and experiment even more. There are few experiences as fulfilling in gaming to me, or in any medium for that matter.
(Nowhere)

RANK 81 (3 votes)

RANK 25 (9 votes)

I wake up in a claustrophobic transparent box. I see nothing but a toilet, a bed and a radio inside - is that a camera watching me through the walls, what sort of prison is this? Wait, what is that door with a timer going down and what about that smaller room above floor level with a window and chairs, who's supposed to be watching me? As the timer is ending, I hear a feminine robotic voice - let's call her Kim - and I go through an orange portal to come out of a blue portal and continue to the only door in the room.

Kim explains to me that I'm going to begin a test. I proceed to solve what seems to be chamber #1 out of 19 and quickly understand what is expected from me, there was a similar room above ground floor in this chamber but still no signs of life in them. As I progress through the chambers Kim explains to me that, after I finish the test, I'm going to be rewarded with a cake so I got a little hungry but I'm going to pass this test with flying colors to enjoy that cake! As I progress through the rooms the lack of people is still evident.

I just entered a room that I don't think I'm supposed to be in. I see erratically written on the wall "the cake is a lie"...
(mutyumu)

RANK 47 (5 votes)

There’s only one shield in Bloodborne: a rusty, wooden shield that says in its description “Shields are nice, but not if they engender passivity.” and this is Bloodborne’s combat approach: don’t be a coward, transfuse your blood with the beasts, ripping their organs off. It’s a very violent game but made in a very elegant way: most of the enemies are battled in cities with gothic architecture or woods that looks like a hand-made scenery from a horror movie, and all of this beautifully interconnected in the same elegancy – and dare I say, even more – as the first Dark Souls. The moon illuminates the floor of those architectures, getting more bloody as the game goes, reflecting the player itself, getting more violent with each fight. Don’t confuse being brave with not being afraid, though. As Eileen, a NPC of the game, says: “Without fear in our hearts, we're little different from the beasts themselves.” We are not supposed to be fearless – this is what makes us humans – but we can’t let it control us. Fight your nightmare and search for the truth, enriching yourself with the frenesi of the battle. Just be careful with all the knowledge you get, the truth may set you free, but if you can't stand it, you will turn into a madman, not so different from the beasts you killed.
(heatten)

RANK 39 (6 votes)

Whilst it might be known for its wonderful aesthetics, gameplay that is challenging and yet wants you to succeed, creative level mechanics, and a sweet-hearted narrative about not giving up in the face of depression and anxiety, what really sets Celeste apart from other platformers is its movement. The controls are elegant in their simplicity - a dash, a jump and directional movement - making the game very approachable, yet the Farewell expansion teaches wavedashing and wall-bouncing as ways of using these basic controls to both further the challenges it can present whilst redefining those earlier levels by showing you the ways to zoom through them that you didn’t realise were there all along; truly the perfect speed-game.

The rabbit-hole goes so deep on how these basic controls emergently interact with each other though to make a list of increasingly silly sounding techniques - five jumps, demodashes, dream hypers, jellyvators, neutral reverse cornerboosts(?!) - which make Celeste rank alongside Super Mario World hacks in terms of being a kaizo designer’s dream; the custom level community surrounding Celeste is so vibrant and talented that you’ll never run out of new levels to play as long as you still have that drive to keep climbing ever-taller mountains.
(AutumnLily)

RANK 16 (12 votes)

Undertale took game culture by storm in 2015, becoming the source of song parodies and fanfiction for the next three years. This should come as no surprise, because the creator Toby Fox was involved in the similarly gargantuan touchstone of Homestuck prior working primarily on the music.

Undertale itself stands tall to the hype and acclaim garnered towards it, showing nary a crack in its pristine presentation. Undertale is a story to game devs everywhere about budgeting out the assets on your title as far as possible. Its short length is made up for by telling a story through the act of restarting, so you can meet the world in a whole different way. There is something similar in the music design with leitmotifs and borderline remixes of tunes for other spaces in the game. Far from being a detriment though, this reuse is seamless in form and presentation. That's not to say there isn't a wide cast of characters, everything from boisterous skeletons to dog knights lay ahead in your journey through the caves and ruins of Undertale. Every character, even the enemies, is excited to tell you their story.

Undertale is also a tour de force in keeping the player involved. For one, it's a RPG game for people don't like RPGs. The most novel mechanical inclusion is various SHMUP styled dodging minigames to avoid taking extra damage meaning that you always feel involved in the stakes of a fight rather than mechanically hitting the same buttons without worry. Of course it need not be said how such minigames add even further to the lush character portraits of the enemies you fight. Also, Undertale is constantly out to switch things up to keep players that much more engaged, using punchy humor and reasonable puzzles to keep the player immersed that much more. Even if you removed the metacommentary and stellar 3rd act finale boss fight from the picture, you would still be left with one of the best computer games of its year, if not of its decade.
(Erato_Heti)

RANK 10 (17 votes)

Everybody knows what this game is, if you haven't played it then your 8 year old cousin has.

Takes influence from simulationist PC games and infuses it with tactility. You can build anything from a humble dirt hut to a massive fortress, but the simple feeling of placing and breaking blocks is not to be overlooked. And even for my fellow arcade fiends, quickly traversing terrain is an interesting and challenging task: do some Nether runs if you don't believe me!

The wide variety of appeals (combat, exploration, building, messing with your friends) make this an ideal multiplayer game. And like Doom/Quake/etc. before it, there is a staggering breadth of user-made content to explore as well. Minigames, art works, PvP, an extensive modding scene (which gave birth to Factorio!), you name it and it's probably there.

In particular, I've always had a soft spot for the CTM genre of maps. Your only goal is to Complete The Monument by gathering all 16 (or less in shorter maps) colors of wool pieces scattered across a hostile world. Other than not crafting wool, there are no rules: you can build and break whatever and wherever the game systems allow. Traverse and survive a connected web of dark dungeons and huge vistas! Seriously, if you like the exploration aspect of Souls, check these out. https://ctmrepository.com/

Minecraft is a massively popular, social, all-ages game that appeals to the better drives of human nature. What more can you ask these days?
(HotPocketHPE)

RANK 64 (4 votes)

RANK 39 (6 votes)

A game that absolutely raised the bar of standards for open world game design, maybe to an unfair degree. BOTW to me isn’t about the destinations you travel to but about how you journey around Hyrule. Thanks to its free-form mechanical structure, physics and chemistry systems, combined with the tools given to the player, there’s a real sense of constant decision making and flexibility for those decisions to allow for player expression across the world like no other. I see it sometimes jokingly called “babies first Immersive Sim”, but it’s telling to me that even years after its release, with notably a lot of the open world game industry trying to copy BOTWs homework, that many fail to capture the small moment-to-moment player experimentation elements that truly made Hyrule a joy to explore and a breath of fresh air.
(DrDelicious)