.
100. Ico (2001)
Single-player video games are lonely. Ico
made loneliness feel magical by giving you a companion, even as it
constantly reminded you how alien her mind must be. Just like Princess
Yorda’s gnomic utterances imply a story that she just can’t share with
you, so does the game’s environment imply a vast narrative of which this
story is only a part, creating a potent illusion of context through the
very act of withholding backstory. While the gameplay itself is basic
puzzle-solving and crude combat, it’s the mood that makes it special,
the constant sense that there’s something vast just outside the frame. Daniel McKleinfeld
99. The Talos Principle (2014)
The Talos Principle
articulates the conflict between skepticism and the order of God. This
juxtaposition comes in the context of a series of puzzles, implying that
human and deity have a natural interest in making sense out of chaos.
Without moralizing about sin or catering to secularist values, the game
implies that inquisitiveness mechanically binds humanity to a common
fate. This conflicted but life-affirming perspective trumps the
adolescent nihilism that oversimplifies player choice as an illusion.
Even if the philosophical angle in The Talos Principle
didn’t exist, the game would still be outstanding. The world design
allows you to bounce between puzzles while also requiring a certain
degree of completion to try higher challenges. Developer Croteam’s
gradual integration of several puzzle types is as accessible as it is
shrewdly brain-twisting. Jed Pressgrove
98. Spec Ops: The Line (2012)
The ever-shifting sands of Dubai make for a good setting in Spec Ops: The Line:
It’s an unreliable environment that matches what turns out to be the
game’s unreliable narrator. The military, squad-based action also fits
with the theme of responsibility, frequently forcing players to choose
between two equally unsavory options. The game’s “Damned If You Do” and
“Damned If You Don’t” achievements, earned from killing either a soldier
or a civilian, make it clear just how blurry that titular “line” is. Spec Ops: The Line
never permits players to rest easily in the distance or abstraction of a
long-range war or the novelty of a video game. Players can only focus
on the beauty of a blood-orange sandstorm for so long before it
dissipates, revealing the gruesome consequences of your violence within
it, just as the bird’s-eye view from a dispassionate drone eventually
gives way to the revelatory moment in which your squad must wade through
the charred bodies of the innocent civilians they just mistakenly
dropped white phosphorus upon. The horror, the horror indeed. Aaron Riccio
97. Hitman 2 (2018)
In the exclusive VIP room of the Isle of Sgàil castle, the five
members of the Ark Society council gather to discuss their plans to hold
power over the world. During this Illuminati-esque gathering, the
members of this privileged elite wear masks to conceal their
identities—to discuss how they will profit from fixing the climate
change disaster they created. But unbeknownst to them, one member isn’t
who he seems. The elusive Agent 47, having earlier tossed member
Jebediah Block over a balcony, has infiltrated their ranks, and he sets
out to murder them all, dishing out his unique brand of darkly comedic
justice. Hitman 2,
a fusion of escapist wish-fulfillment and satire, has the player deploy
its familiar and new stealth mechanics across inventive scenarios.
Whether in an exotic jungle or a Vermont suburb, 47 exploits the
hyper-detailed nature of his surroundings to complete his executions,
and frequently in hilarious disguise. The game gives players the tools
to make their own amusing stories within various open worlds, from
choking an F1 driver while disguised in a flamingo outfit, to blowing up
a Columbian drug lord using an explosive rubber duck, to reprogramming
an android so it can gun down an MI5 agent turned freelance assassin
played by Sean Bean. Ryan Aston
96. Conker’s Bad Fur Day (2001)
Considering the reason so many of us play video games, it’s odd how
often most titles follow a very specific set of unspoken rules. Not so
with Conker’s Bad Fur Day, a recklessly unfiltered romp through a parody of inanely inoffensive titles like Banjo-Kazooie.
Conker cursed and solved puzzles by getting drunk enough to extinguish
flame demons with his piss, blithely sent up pop culture as diverse as A Clockwork Orange, Saving Private Ryan, Alien, and The Matrix,
and still had time to lob rolls of toilet paper down the gullet of a
giant operatic poo monster. For sheer balls, lunatic ingenuity, and
crass charm, there’s never been anything like it. Riccio
95. Star Fox 64 (1997)
The N64 was an awkward era in Nintendo’s history, as the company was
getting its sea legs as it was transitioning into 3D gaming. And because
of that weird third leg protruding obnoxiously from the center of the
system’s controller, it wasn’t exactly easy to play the second title in
the Star Fox series. But the controls were responsive, meaning it was at least easy for players to endure Star Fox 64’s steep learning curve. Reminiscent of games like 1985’s Space Harrier and 1995’s Panzer Dragoon,
this compelling on-rails space shooter gave us anthropomorphic animals
piloting what were ostensibly X-Wing starfighters in a galactic battle
against Andross. The game featured local co-op, which made it even more
enjoyable because of the multitude of additional explosions on screen.
And though it came out toward the end of the 20th century, Star Fox 64
was very clearly inspired by cubist art, making it a perturbing and
exciting departure from the vibrant and richly detailed worlds players
were exploring in other Nintendo titles. Unsurprisingly, we’re still
doing barrel rolls to this day, so we can thank Peppy Hare for the tip
all those years ago. Jeremy Winslow
94. Hellblade: Senua’s Sacrifice (2017)
Ninja Theory’s Hellblade: Senua’s Sacrifice
is unusually sensitive for a horror game, rejecting as it does the
trend of using mental illness for cheap scares. As disturbing as the
contradictory voices in the titular protagonist’s head might be, her
fractured psychological state doesn’t exist to leave players feeling
frightened, but to serve up a philosophical inquiry with universal
resonance. Between fights with scores of mythic beings (the
one-versus-all war in the Sea of Corpses is among the most ominous
action spectacles in gaming history), the player learns that Senua
loathes the voices within her as much as she does anything else—and that
self-hatred must be recognized and managed in order for her to attain
some form of peace. This dark but life-affirming parable amplifies its
emotional power through mesmerizing audiovisuals, where hallucinatory
whispers argue over whether you’re ever going the right way and
motion-capture graphics ironically seem like reality when juxtaposed
against full-motion video. Pressgrove
93. Cart Life (2010)
Video games usually de-personalize business management. They shift
the perspective upward, letting us look down on workers and customers as
they go about the mechanical tasks we designate from on high. Designer
Richard Hofmeier’s Cart Life keeps things street level,
building a life sim around its business management. Its monochrome
characters barely scrape by, stretching cash as far as they’re able
while making time to feed cats or pick daughters up from school. Though
the game can easily wear you down, it also gives weight to the small
victories, like selling enough to keep going. Video games have
considerable power to communicate experiences to the player, and it’s
used most often for saving worlds and amassing collectibles and jacking
cars. Cart Life is a reminder of the humanity the medium is capable of. Scaife
92. Ikaruga (2001)
The standard shooter tasks players with dodging enemy fire and
collecting power-ups while unleashing a steady torrent of bullets at
one’s foes. Ikaruga masterfully bucks that trend by introducing
a polarity system, wherein your ship can only be damaged by bullets of
the opposite color of your ship. The game stands apart from other titles
in the subgenre of shoot ‘em up known as bullet hell by, well, leaning
into the hell of gunfire. This bold choice, which turns like-colored
bullets into tools, stylishly revitalizes the genre, forcing players to
unlearn old habits and adapt to new ones that see them boldly flying
into a stream of white lasers, swapping polarity, and then releasing a
barrage of fully charged black homing missiles on one’s foes. Everything
in these often claustrophobic corridors becomes an elegant puzzle, one
where players must, judo-like, turn the enemy’s barrage against it.
High-score runs and harder difficulties require even more elegance and
precision, as these modes now also expect players to pinpoint foes so as
to kill identically colored targets in combo-creating sets of three, or
to recharge ammunition by bathing in enemy bullets. Every single bullet
is an opportunity in Ikaruga, assuming the player is bold enough to make them count. Riccio
91. Xenoblade Chronicles (2010)
Xenoblade Chronicles, like fellow 2012 JRPG revivalist (and Chrono Trigger-indebted) Final Fantasy XIII-2,
cleverly uses the thematic components of shifting destinies and
humankind versus higher powers as ways in which to depict the
oscillating mental states of its central characters. You won’t be likely
to find a more fleshed-out batch of heroes than 18-year-old
sword-swinger Shulk and his ragtag group of Mechon-battlers. Creator
Tetsuya Takahashi clearly understands that a great RPG starts and ends
with its cast, and how well players can identify with their specific,
often extrinsic, ambitions and dreams. Monolith Soft’s ambitious epic is
beautiful, challenging, emotionally gripping, and, above all,
effortlessly transporting. Mike LeChevallier
90. Superhot (2016)
It’s a simple five-word concept that opens the door to brilliance on
par with the best action films and games of recent years: Time moves
when you do. It’s bullet time in its loosest, freewheeling form. Every
stage is the kind of bullet carnival that would make John Wick applaud.
Because time grinds to a snail’s pace until you make your move, the
tension of every split-second decision stretches out forever. Every hit,
then, is given time to simmer, and every new target opens up a world of
possibilities that aren’t reliant on your twitch reflexes, but on your
creativity and deviousness. All the while, the game’s framework takes a
paranoid, cyberpunk, eXistenZ-style tack that somehow fits in with the minimalist aesthetic of the core game perfectly. Superhot takes the blissfully familiar and completely twists the whole first-person shooter genre to fit its own ends. Justin Clark
89. Myst (1993)
In the days before high-speed internet connections, most computer
games left you sitting alone in a dark room, your face lit by a single
glowing rectangle. The mastermind of Robyn and Rand Miller, Myst
exhibited a unique understanding of the simultaneous feelings of
solitude and connection that come from sitting alone, reading words that
someone left for you. The game’s slideshow pace invited the player to
linger, absorbing the details of its proto-steampunk environments like
the reader of a dense novel. Just when computer games were becoming a
world-shaking medium, Myst looked back to literature with a
contemplative affection that was uniquely inviting for those
uninterested in gaming’s usual reflex tests. McKleinfeld
88. Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas (2004)
Rockstar Games’s Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas captures the
essence of gang life and the hood with effectively grotesque accuracy.
Controlling Carl “CJ” Johnson, you traipse through Los Santos committing
acts of delinquency, crime, and murder, all in the name of the Grove
Street Families. An internal battle starts to brew between members of
the street gang just as other gangs begin to make their move, and you
watch CJ go from gangbanger to murderer to businessman—just about the
most brilliant display of character development from the PlayStation 2
era. The game’s Los Santos was neither as large nor as detailed as its
recreation in Grand Theft Auto V,
but the setting, a fictional depiction of Los Angeles, was distinct and
realistic enough to feel like a livable city. It’s no wonder Rockstar
returned to the well. Winslow
87. Missile Command (1980)
Missile Command is the definitive thinking person’s shooter.
With limited counter-missiles at your disposal and multiple cities to
protect, you must quickly observe the trajectory of every incoming enemy
missile, and your shot placement must account for the radius of every
ensuing explosion so as to destroy as many projectiles at once. This
anticipatory approach makes the experience unquestionably distinct from
other shooters of the time, such as Space Invaders, Combat, Centipede, and Asteroids, all of which featured unlimited ammo and only asked players to aim for one target with each shot. But just as important, Missile Command
is culturally significant in how it reflects the anxiety of the Cold
War era. The game envisions a scenario where civilization must be
protected from an unpredictable foreign enemy—one that doesn’t come from
outer space. The gravity of this theme is amplified by the unique
control layout of the game’s arcade cabinet, which gives the illusion
that you’re manning a war station rather than merely playing another
machine in the arcade. Few games have captured widespread geopolitical
paranoia like Missile Command. Pressgrove
86. Elite Beat Agents (2006)
Ouendan, the Japanese rhythm title Elite Beat Agents
is based on, boasted unique, tactile gameplay that felt just as much
like drawing elaborate art as it was tapping to a beat. The cherry on
top were the visuals, a series of vignettes about Japanese citizens
having trouble in their daily lives, and the Ouendan showing up to
cheerlead the courage they need. Elite Beat Agents managed to
somehow translate all of that to the West but with an extra injection of
full-on cartoon-madcap antics, set to some of the most well-known hits
ever written. And so, we have a game where a dance troupe dressed like
the Men in Black gives an adventurous pug the courage he needs to save a
baby who wanders onto a construction site, set to the Jackson 5. We tap
along to a lone truck driver’s harrowing night killing zombies with
canned nuts to Destiny’s Child. A meteorologist gets her entire city to
fight the bad weather off with electric fans so she and her son can have
a picnic, while you tap along to Earth, Wind & Fire’s “September.”
None of these elements combined should work, and yet, here they all are
in Elite Beat Agents, one of the most delightful concoctions ever to grace a portable system. Clark
85. Paper Mario: The Thousand-Year Door (2004)
For as memorable as the classic Super Mario worlds have been, they
feel every inch the platforming gauntlets they’re designed to be. You
never really picture them as places where people live. The great triumph
of the Mario RPGs is how effortlessly they build that world outward and
fills in its blanks, and no game reveals Mario’s world to be such a
wonderful, bizarre place as well as Paper Mario: The Thousand-Year Door.
It’s the sort of game where our hero infiltrates a secret society’s
equally secret moon base. He enlists the local Pianta mafia to get him
to a big arena in the sky, wherein he fights alongside a punk infant
Yoshi as a sort of amateur wrestler called “The Great Gonzales.” The
timing-based battle system is relocated to a stage in front of an
audience that grows as Mario levels up, letting you play to the crowd
for power-ups. More than just a Mushroom Kingdom coat of paint over a
well-worn template, this is one of the most inspired RPGs ever made and
the reason people still clamor for Paper Mario to return to its roots so
many years later. Scaife
84. God of War (2018)
The eighth entry in the God of War series is full of
classic, epic combat, as you’ll slay your share of elemental trolls,
winged dark elves, and giant thunder dragons throughout the game’s
campaign. But whereas its precursors placed mindless violence front and
center, this game brings a new weight to protagonist Kratos’s every
move. It’s in the heavier Leviathan Axe that he wields this time around,
as well as in the lessons his actions convey to his son. The new Nordic
setting also refuels the franchise’s creative roots. The game overflows
with ideas and fresh locations throughout Kratos’s journey across the
Nine Realms, with some side quests so expansive that they don’t just
introduce an extra area, but an entirely different dimension with its
own set of rules. There’s a double meaning to everything, especially the
more visceral combat, which forces players to think about how to best
engage foes, but about what they’re teaching their in-game son. This
collection of mythic stories is made more relatable, not more mundane,
through the lens of parenthood. Riccio
83. Phantasy Star IV: The End of the Millennium (1993)
Phantasy Star has its fans, a great many of whom jumped on
when the series went MMO, but it’s never been a franchise uttered in the
same breath as Square Enix’s best, and Phantasy Star IV: The End of the Millennium releasing hot on the heels of Final Fantasy VI didn’t help. The irony is that Sega’s magnum RPG opus does pretty much everything Final Fantasy
would offer in the years that followed way ahead of the curve: combo
spells, manga-inspired cutscenes, space travel, multiple vehicles to
play around in, and the best, delightfully earnest storytelling the
genre has to offer. This is the system’s quietly ignored masterpiece. Clark
82. Hotline Miami (2012)
Amid the arms race of next-gen graphical evolution and the seemingly
endless deluge of triple-A blockbuster shooters arrived a veritable
thunderbolt of weird, Hotline Miami, and the landscape of modern gaming would never again be the same. A hallucinatory top-down action game that plays like River City Ransom as imagined by David Lynch, Hotline Miami
is a fever dream of violence and retro gaming, pulling together the
tropes of the medium’s innocent infancy and turning them into something
altogether darker. Jonatan Soderstrom and Dennis Wedin didn’t simply
make a classic game. Rather, they burrowed their way into the deepest
recesses of gaming’s unconscious, and the result feels like a nightmare
you just had but only half-remember. Calum Marsh
81. Streets of Rage 2 (1992)
Streets of Rage 2 is a beat ‘em up, not a rhythm game, but
you can still get lost in its groove. The electronica- and funk-driven
soundtrack by Yuzo Koshiro is catchy, startling, and enrapturing. The
way the four characters feel as you fight—as you punch, kick, slide,
grab, throw, perform backbreakers, counter fools standing directly
behind you, and more—mirrors the soul of the music: Everything is
tightly constructed but flows like an improvisational avalanche. This
game doesn’t hold back on the challenge front either. At times, the
screen fills with so many moving bodies that the timing and
decision-making required to dispatch the crowd of foes might seem
impossible to perform. But when you do manage to come out of a brawl
without losing a life, Streets of Rage feels like one of the hippest dances you can nail. Pressgrove
80. Viewtiful Joe (2003)
A dazzling homage to movie magic, superheroes, and the 2D
side-scroller that was warmly praised when released on the
then-floundering GameCube, Viewtiful Joe employed a battlefield
blueprint inspired by cinematic visual effects. Its VFX powers (Slow,
Mach Speed, and Zoom In) put players in the director’s chair (or,
perhaps, that of the editor), giving them the opportunity to control and
cut their own stylish fight sequences while dispatching foes and
solving puzzles. And with its charming art design (a nod to both
Japanese tokusatsu and American B movies) and cel-shaded graphics done
oh-so-right, it remains a reminder of what enchantment might result from
the marriage of film and video games. LeChevallier
79. Ninja Gaiden (1988)
Though tough and not infrequently cheap with its hits and enemy respawning, Ninja Gaiden
rewarded your perseverance. It’s a game of foreboding, arcane temples
and ancient demons with creepy little details. Using comparatively
little horsepower—especially compared to the flashier but slower Shinobi
titles—the game lets players feel like a ninja, a fast, powerful
warrior with both speed and power, able to manipulate physics and do
impossible things. The most vital and important part of its spectacle,
however, were its cutscenes, the first time such a thing had been
implemented in a console game, and still some of the best implemented
until the PlayStation era. And those cutscenes managed to replicate the
language of cinema, telling a simple, fantastical story, and yet an
effective one, full of twists, unexpected plot turns, tension, and
stakes. Ninja Gaiden marked the moment where your primary
motivation to complete a stage wasn’t a high score, but to see what
happened next, and what happened next was actually interesting enough to
be worth the effort. Clark
78. SimCity (1991)
Will Wright’s SimCity was a philosophical challenge to the
notion that video games must be more like fantasies to be engaging to a
general audience. Real-world complexities, such as tax rates and zoning,
drive the mechanics of this revolutionary title where the player
assumes the role of an omniscient mayor of a city. Rather than present a
series of rigid, designed tests of skill to players, SimCity
asks us to imagine the kind of world we want to see and then to build it
accordingly. Sometimes mistakes will be made or disasters will strike,
dooming our dreams of a highly functioning metropolis, but failed
agendas and catastrophes give us insight into how to plan for
contingencies next time. Games as different as the political simulation Democracy or the sandbox hit Minecraft all owe something to the open, meticulous gameplay of SimCity. Pressgrove
77. Halo 3 (2007)
The alien vessel you’re trapped in is less a ship than a living thing.
The rooms are bordered with bloated, swollen pustules stretched from
wall to wall, while sacs of throbbing “organs” hang from the ceiling,
from which disgusting monsters emerge to attack—a stark contrast to the
large endless fields that comprised most of Halo: Combat Evolved.
Beginning on Earth with a bloody firefight in the jungles of Africa,
then teleporting to an ancient structure beyond the edges of the Milky
Way where multiple alien races feud, leading to the rescue mission in
the disgusting living alien ship, before concluding with a recreation of the original Halo, Halo 3 remains notable for its diversity of setting and how it complements its variety of action. Aston
76. Three Fourths Home (2015)
Through a family’s yearning for solidarity and economic security, Three Fourths Home
finds a spiritual connection between seemingly disparate generations.
You make dialogue choices as twentysomething Kelly, whose disappointment
about her lack of self-sufficiency could have made for a pandering tale
of millennial angst. Developer Zach Sanford avoids this mistake by also
emphasizing the vicissitudes of her family’s life, whether it’s her
father being out of work due to injury, her younger autistic brother’s
trouble at school, or her sometimes-overbearing mother trying to hold
the whole unit together. This approach gives Three Fourths Home
a mature social consciousness, allowing the characters to illustrate
common American anxieties that transcend the party politics of our time.
Pressgrove
75. The Binding of Isaac (2011)
Two titles are more responsible than any other for turning these last
few years of gaming into the era of roguelikes. If Derek Yu’s Spelunky is the indisputable prodigy, the preppy Ivy League candidate parents love to show off to neighbors, then Edmund McMillen’s The Binding of Isaac
is the problem child, the surly metalhead most likely to snub the
guests and stay in the garage smoking pot and listening to Slayer. It’s a
game sprinkled with visual references to terminal illness, substance
abuse, abortion, religious fanaticism, and matricide—one where digging
into sunflower-colored turds can net you some cool treasure and passing
gas is a viable mode of offense. Yet the core mechanics operating behind
this repulsive and fascinating façade are no less impeccably engineered
than Spelunky’s. Alexander Chatziioannou
74. Mega Man 2 (1988)
What Street Fighter II did for both the Street Fighter series and the fighting-game genre, Mega Man 2 did for both Mega Man and the entire platforming genre. Not content to simply perfect all the things its predecessor had done wrong, Mega Man 2
represents a lightspeed jump in ambition. Every enemy not immediately
ported over from the first title hides a surprise. Every platforming
challenge is tougher but fairer. The powers that Mega Man grabs from the
bosses are wildly varied from just “gun that shoots [blank].” It’s in
the Dr. Wily stages that the game achieves perfection, however, with a
series of challenges that are still jaw dropping in their execution on
an 8-bit system to this day, from the shocker of a dragon chase leading
into a precarious mid-air boss fight, to the final stage, a slightly
incongruous but effectively creepy grace note that takes Mega Man
through a silent catacomb, punctuated by dripping acid. Better graphics
and more gimmicks haven’t gifted the series with nearly the creative
bravery as its very first sequel. Clark
73. Goldeneye 007 (1997)
Not only was Goldeneye 007 one of the rare film-to-game
adaptations that worked, featuring complex level designs (and bonus
objectives scaling to difficulty) that required equal measures of
stealth and shooting, but it also defined an entire generation of FPS
gamers with its heated four-player split-screen multiplayer. The film
lasted only a few brief hours, but the experience of sitting beside
three dear friends, sneakily watching their screens to get a
better read on their position, and then watching as they accidentally
walked into the corridor you’d just riddled with proximity mines was the
sort of halcyon summer haze that memoirists dream of. Riccio
72. Banjo-Kazooie (1998)
Here’s the odd game that boasts a split-personality protagonist: an
amiable bear representing the superego and an obnoxious bird
representing the id. While Nintendo created the 3D-platformer template
with Super Mario 64, Rare refined it with their tongue-in-cheek Banjo-Kazooie.
The humor and game mechanics simultaneously develop all the way through
to the hysterical game-show finale and subsequent boss battle that
effectively take advantage of all the skills you’ve acquired across the
game. Subbing the blank-faced plumber with a chilled bear and his sassy
backpack-bound avian sidekick, the game stands out for its
self-awareness: An unusually meta experience, it constantly pokes fun at
its contrived storyline, limited characterization, and other gaming
tropes. Few games are so accomplished in both personality and gameplay. Aston
71. Half-Life 2 (2004)
The original Half-Life, released in 1998, redefined the way
players experienced first-person shooters with heavily scripted
sequences and a well-written narrative. Half-Life 2 took this
to the next level, as silent protagonist Gordon Freeman is removed from
cryostasis and plunged into a future dystopia—a formerly human-populated
city now turned zombie nightmare—reminiscent of Nazi Germany where the
last remaining humans reside, enslaved by an unstoppable alien threat.
Without ever relying on cutscenes, the game makes you a first-person
participant in its storyline, one that turns the tide from oppression to
rebellion fighting for the future of humanity. It’s a classic whose
thrills best those of most action movies and demonstrate the remarkable
innovation the medium is capable of. Aston
70. Dishonored (2012)
Dishonored combines elements of other immersive sims, like BioShock and Thief,
to create a mechanically enjoyable first-person stealth game that
challenges your awareness and resourcefulness. While its narrative about
betrayal and revenge is rote, the game is enticing for the autonomy it
offers players. This is very much a gamer’s game: It hands you a
target—kill High Overseer Campbell, for example—before then turning you
lose, giving you the freedom of the world and Corvo’s powers to deal
with your target however you see fit. Though the end of every mission
may resort to a binary lethal/non-lethal choice, the ways you can
approach any mission are bountiful, making each run different enough to
warrant multiple playthroughs. Winslow
69. Katamari Damacy (2004)
It’s impossible to summarize Katamari Damacy with the
language of literature or film: plot, character, iconic images,
expressive subjectivity. Instead it makes art from gaming’s preferred
values: accumulation, variation, interaction, progress. The story is
absurd, and its visuals and controls are willfully crude. Yet it’s a
well-honed machine that generates pure joy. Because lurking behind the
serious silliness is a glimpse of theme: The game is an elegant metaphor
for growing up, in which the world becomes fuller and more detailed the
bigger you get, beautifully conveying the thrill of an expanding
horizon. If that’s not art, what is? McKleinfeld
68. Titanfall 2 (2016)
Given its predecessor’s sole emphasis on multiplayer matches, it’s almost shocking that Titanfall 2
sets such a high bar for single-player missions. The game’s focus on
the creative integration of wall-running, double-jumping, sliding,
shooting, and melee attacks makes even the tutorial section a blast.
More importantly, this highly customizable action encourages the player
to take risks that would be suicidal or impossible in everyday
first-person shooters. But that’s only half the fun. Titanfall 2
ingeniously alternates between this fluid soldier-based play and
weighty, deliberate mech face-offs—a juxtaposition of styles cleverly
hammered home by the dialogue between the go-getter pilot and Spock-like
AI of the walking machine. Everything in the campaign is designed to
give you a rush, from laughably over-the-top villains to the remarkably
fast burrowing through tight places to platforming sections that will
make you think you’re seeing sideways. The greatness of the game’s
campaign raises a controversial question in our globalized world: Who
needs an internet connection or other players when the proceedings are
this electrifying alone? Pressgrove
67. Street Fighter II Turbo: Hyper Fighting (1992)
In combat sports, speed kills. Such is the philosophy behind Street Fighter II’s
third iteration, which can test your reflexes and execution like no
other fighting game, especially when you put in a special code on the
Super Nintendo Entertainment System version and dial the turbo all the
way up. This update also gives several of the champions from Street Fighter II
new ways to cover ground and space on the screen, presenting an even
greater demand on players to develop smart plans of attack and defense.
Otherwise, this is the same ingenious title that popularized an entire
genre, established a slew of video-game icons (the menacing M. Bison,
the powerful Chun-Li, the too-fast-for-his-size E. Honda), and captured
the public’s imagination with its visionary depiction of the
intersection between geography and violence. Pressgrove
66. Galaga (1981)
It’s the little details that define the unique and absorbing personality of Galaga.
Each enemy makes its own sound when you hit it with a blast from your
ship, giving your frenzied attempt to vanquish all the aliens an almost
musical quality. The behavior of your foes—their crisscrossing fire,
their doubling back once you think they’ve left the screen, their
synchronized circular dives toward your ship—is practically an Olympian
display of agility and misdirection. And what of your own style of
shooting? Do you just frantically tap the fire button, hoping to
eliminate everything in sight based on luck and aggression? Or do you
methodically determine the vertical channels where you will launch
bullets, catching your adversaries in the middle of their deceptive
shenanigans? Popularity isn’t a valid or reliable measure of quality,
but there’s a reason you’re still likely to see a Galaga
machine in random spots across the country. This isn’t just another
series of explosions in space, but a timeless work of art and a
rip-roaring sport that almost anyone can grasp. Pressgrove
65. Super Mario World: Yoshi’s Island (1995)
A 2D pearl with enough creative energy and nuanced artistry to fill two games, this sequel to Super Mario World
gave the Yoshi clan their rightful time in the limelight, and in the
process developed a set of ingenious platforming mechanics that have yet
to be even shoddily imitated. Yoshi’s flutter jump, in combination with
his egg aim-and-throw technique, made for a unique variation on the
typical side-scrolling Super Mario Bros. escapade. Certain
areas also allowed Yoshi to transform into a multitude of vehicles that
could navigate previously unreachable areas. Yoshi’s Island is a game that’s absolutely brimming with pioneering ideas, representing Nintendo at its most fearlessly experimental. LeChevallier
64. Rock Band 3 (2010)
From singing vocals in harmony to hammering away at a four-piece drum kit, Rock Band
makes you feel like you’re part of the music. The natural evolution of
the series that introduced the keyboard to accompany the drums and
guitars, Rock Band 3 upgraded the plastic guitar with a real one. While Activision’s competing Guitar Hero franchise fell apart with unwelcome, irrational, and incompatible yearly iterations, Harmonix treated Rock Band
as a platform, allowing players to buy whatever songs they wanted and
adding valuable features with each release, like the ability to play
music online, expanding the party internationally. How else can I sing
Journey with my friend in Canada from my house in the land down under? Aston
63. Braid (2008)
Braid was the first art game to combine highbrow ambition
with rock-solid gameplay. Like most pioneering works, it’s largely about
its own medium, appropriating the inexorable left-to-right movement and
damsel-in-distress story of a certain famous gaming icon and using it
as a metaphor for…life? Guilt? L’amour fou? Braid doesn’t
answer all the questions it raises, and that’s a good thing. Better
still is how elegantly the story and the game mechanics work together,
with time-reversing levels exploring remorse and single-key puzzles as
metaphors for loss. Like the games it parodies, Braid makes
walking and jumping feel great, but it uses that visceral satisfaction
to draw you into something profoundly disquieting. McKleinfeld
62. Grim Fandango (1998)
Grim Fandango opens with something much scarier than being
chased by necromorphs or overrun by zergs: the simple acknowledgement
that you’re dead. Plenty of people have nervously speculated about the
afterlife, and this game reassuringly suggests that it will at least
look awesome, by mixing Aztec aesthetics with noir tropes and presenting
it with Tim Schaefer’s trademark wisenheimer goofiness. The widescreen
tableaux of the graphic adventure worked like Beckett landscapes, adding
a bracing chill to comic business. Amid the uncomfortable chuckles of Grim Fandango’s
premise, the absurd logic of adventure games is a welcome pal, and
every hard-boiled cutscene is a reward worth working toward. McKleinfeld
61. WarioWare, Inc.: Mega Microgames! (2003)
While, obviously, Nintendo at their best makes accessible, creative
masterpieces for kids and kids at heart the world over, the Nintendo we
don’t praise nearly often enough is the wacky esoteric lunatic Nintendo
that runs with the most bonkers concepts right into the end zone.
Recently, this is the Nintendo that gave us Splatoon. That Nintendo also gave us WarioWare,
a game whose lifeblood is an almost Dadaist cocktail of absurdity. A
collection of minigames, all of which can be completed within seconds,
is a great and logical little gimmick, especially for a title made for a
portable system. But having those games hosted by disco clowns in blue
afros and monkeys in VR helmets trying to evade the cops, and having the
games themselves range from “collect four coins in 3 seconds” to “make
this sad princess sniffle up the giant line of snot hanging out her nose
in 3 seconds,” is the stuff of inspired lunacy. Though the sequels
raise the stakes, and add more gimmicks, none are a perfectly curated a
package of unfiltered crazy as the original GBA title. Clark
60. Batman: Arkham Asylum (2009)
What should be a night unlike any other, with Batman returning a
deranged Joker to Gotham’s correctional facility for deviants and
delinquents, is turned on its head as the criminals that have plagued
the city are suddenly released from their cells and quickly take over
the joint. Batman: Arkham Asylum is exceptional for how it allows players to feel
as if they’re the Dark Knight, whether he’s carefully sneaking up on
and inspiring fear in his rogues’ gallery, applying detective skills to
solve crimes, or utilizing the technology at his disposal to navigate
the game’s expanding setting. A fight with the muscular Bane is
action-oriented, taking full advantage of the game’s superb beat-’em-up
controls, while encounters with the twisted Scarecrow has Bruce falling
victim to hallucinatory nightmares that make Arkham Asylum feel
as if it’s in the dominion of a horror game. It all builds to a climax
where Batman’s core ideology is put to the test. The worst night of the
Dark Knight’s life makes for one of the best superhero games of all
time. Aston
59. Beyond Good & Evil (2003)
We’ve finally reached a point in gaming history where gamers are finally starting to ask more of The Legend of Zelda as a series, not realizing that what they’re asking for has been staring them in the face since 2004. Beyond Good & Evil definitely owes much of itself as a collection of gameplay mechanics to 1998’s The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time, but it takes that crucial creative next step for the whole idea of what a Legend of Zelda
game could and should be. It manages to stay playful, colorful, and
light in the midst of a heady sci-fi tale of human trafficking and alien
civilizations, coupled with the same diverse world building and
character design that Michel Ancel would bring to Rayman over the years. Clark
58. Super Mario Kart (1992)
Nintendo’s Super Mario Kart defined the kart-racing genre
with the innovative way in which it doubled down on the wackiest of
mechanics. The game’s adorable characters jump and slide, as well as
fire weaponized banana peels at one another, while simultaneously
navigating, for example, Thwomp obstacles in Bowser’s Castle and
adapting to the chocolaty mud of Choco Island or the icy traction of
Vanilla Lake. The result is an amped-up arcade racer—a drift-hopping
romp through a variety of obstacle courses, with each of the eight
drivers handling in a completely different fashion. That variety (and
the increasing speeds of each new engine class) keeps the game fresh to
this day, especially in Battle Mode, which allows players to directly
square off against one another, creating their own gauntlets out of
endlessly ricocheting green turtle shells. Riccio
57. Inside (2016)
While the cult of the indie puzzle-platformer has waned in recent years, Playdead’s follow-up to the critically beloved Limbo
lit a pale, shimmering fire right in the heart of the genre. Deft
configurations of the familiar crates, levers, and ladders that make up
the expected trappings of Inside’s
puzzles produce some of the most memorable conundrums of the past few
years in gaming. Rather than trying to ignore the long shadow cast by
its predecessor, the game maintains an active, fruitful conversation
with Limbo but never to the point of sheer repetition. Immaculately authored and coiffured by six long years of development, Inside
has some of the most memorable moments that the genre has yet seen. The
game may only have a few tricks in its repertoire, but its success at
those is difficult to overstate. Steven Wright
56. Super Mario Galaxy 2 (2010)
Super Mario Galaxy 2
is an ever-moving avalanche of expert game design, built from the
ground up to be an experience of play, of whimsical engagement, and not
just agency, a turnkey required to fulfill some clichéd predetermined
narrative. In all the years that Super Mario Bros. titles have
been synonymous with “good” video games, perhaps that’s the crucial
element that gives them their lasting appeal and keeps drawing people
in, whether they are first-time players or have been with Mario from the
beginning. Games can simply be fun, and light-hearted, and
wondrous. The infatuation with “adult” and “artistic” pretenses in
gaming remain popular among its advocates, but in the context of what
video games used to mean and why millions grew up loving them, Super Mario Galaxy 2 may be its best example yet. Kurt Shulenberger
55. Mega Man 3 (1990)
Although the previous Mega Man games had already combined platforming and shooting to entertaining effect, Mega Man 3
innovated that formula in a way that remains unsurpassed. This sequel
exemplifies how seemingly minor tweaks to the mechanics and audiovisuals
of a signature style can supercharge a game’s kinetic potential. With
the addition of a slide maneuver for the blue protagonist—the most
significant alteration to the series up to that point—this entry didn’t
rely on trial-and-error positioning as its predecessors did and invited
audiences to escape harm or death within split seconds. And while such
changes made Mega Man 3 a more dynamic action romp, the
energetic but bittersweet melodies composed by Yasuaki Fajita gave the
game a more complicated emotional core, hinting at some existential
reluctance at play when a robot must fight other robots, including Mega
Man’s own brother, Proto Man. The series was never this evocative again.
Pressgrove
54. Bayonetta (2009)
One of the most hysterically ridiculous games ever made, Bayonetta
is the story of a super-powered 10-foot-tall dominatrix-librarian-witch
with glasses and a skintight outfit made of her own hair who battles
rival witches, heaven’s angels, and finally God himself. An empowered
female protagonist over-fetishized to the point of parody, she’s a
corrective to gaming’s view of women primarily as eye candy or damsels
in distress. Bayonetta’s universe is one in which men are
completely disempowered, impotent against a race of Amazonian women who
rule the world. The clever subversion of the typically male-dominated
action genre is complemented by deep, addictive, and rewarding action
mechanics, many utilizing Bayonetta’s own hair as a weapon. Aston
53. Return of the Obra Dinn (2018)
The Obra Dinn is silent, with the ship’s crew either dead or
disappeared. Gifted with a kind of supernatural pocket watch, you
observe freeze frames of each person’s last living moments, looking for
clues to their name, occupation, and cause of death to jot down in your
little book. For insurance purposes, of course. Lucas Pope’s follow-up
to Papers Please places soulless, dehumanizing record-keeping
on a collision course with unimaginable horror, morphing the story of
the crew’s last days into a logic puzzle as an indictment of capitalism.
Many games have flirted with crime scene investigation in a guided
capacity, but Pope actually turns you loose to sift through myriad,
missable details on your own. Tattoos, accents, crew assignments, blood
trails, and more must all factor into your calculations in one of the
most satisfying, complex detective games ever created. One scene finds
you jammed into a narrow space that restricts your movement, forcing you
to only peek through a hole in the wall at the frozen terror beyond.
It’s one astounding composition among many, proof that Return of the Obra Dinn is as meticulously wound as the pocket watch that sets it in motion. Scaife
52. The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker (2002)
Link’s quite Odyssean Gamecube adventure from 2002 is one of
discovery, of sailing across vast oceans and encountering islands where
different species inhabit. Unlike other 3D games whose graphics quickly
become ugly due to technological obsoletism, The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker’s
cel-shaded aesthetic suggests a timeless Hayao Miyazaki film made
effortlessly playable, of childhood dreams come to life. Its richness
also derives from the depth and maturity to its narrative, so redolent
of Greek mythology, of children suffering for the sins of their
ancestors and given the lofty task of saving the world from ancient
evils long thought buried, undergoing experiences that will forever
change them. Aston
51. Super Mario RPG: Legend of the Seven Stars (1996)
There was once a time when Square and Nintendo held hands and skipped merrily through fields of sunflowers, and gems like Super Mario RPG: Legend of the Seven Stars
remind us of how awesome it was when these two industry titans partied
together. The game turned the Mushroom Kingdom on its head by thrusting
the titular plumber into a quest that was anything but a run-of-the-mill
Mario venture. Bowser wasn’t the Big Bad, but instead a comrade,
fighting alongside his adversary in addition to Princess Toadstool and
newcomers Mallow, a cloud boy, and Geno, a possessed doll. Super Mario RPG’s razor-sharp wit and intuitive battle system made it a success and paved the way for the Paper Mario and Mario & Luigi series. LeChevallier
50. Jet Set Radio (2000)
By the time Jet Set Radio came out, the skateboarding game
was already in its decadent phase, with players forced to memorize lists
of buttons like bored yeshiva students reciting the Torah. Jet Set Radio
stripped the controls down to one stick and one button, replacing
combo-memorization with a zen focus on the environment. Then that
environment was filled with awesomeness. The cel-shaded graphics, witty
cutscenes, and hip-hop-meets-J-pop soundtrack—still the best original
music in gaming history—are a fervent Japanese fan letter to American
graffiti street art, imagining kids of all cultures united against
corporate blandness. The game uses style the way a great pop star does:
as the mortar to build a dreamed-for world. McKleinfeld
49. BioShock (2007)
BioShock had greater narrative and thematic ambition than
any previous big-time first-person shooter. But the real magic came—as
it always does in great art—in how it was told. The FPS is well-suited
to immersive exploration, and every corner of BioShock had some
detail that expanded the story. Even the enemy AI, which gave all NPCs
background tasks, convinced the player that Rapture was a world going
about its business before being interrupted by your murderous intrusion.
And no game has ever been so smart about cutscenes, the bane of most
narrative FPS titles. BioShock elegantly led you through its
levels with subtle environmental cues, and when it took away control, it
did so for a very good reason. McKleinfeld
48. Ms. Pac-Man (1981)
Even after about 40 years, the immediately recognizable goal of Ms. Pac-Man—to
consume every pellet in a maze without running into a ghost—continues
to attract novices, experts, and everyone in between on the skill chart.
There’s nothing quite like that touch of panic as you guide the
spherical titular heroine through narrow passages with enemies
practically breathing on her as she gobbles up the last few stray dots
to clear a stage. Advancing to the next board comes down to whether you
keep making the right lightning-fast decisions to elude imminent death,
all the while taking advantage of the limited power pellets that briefly
transform the protagonist into an annihilative force. Whether you
perish within the first few levels or are able to reach a kill screen,
the hurried, obsessive-compulsive nature of Ms. Pac-Man leaves
one breathless in a way that can never be forgotten and that has rarely
been surpassed, even by far more complex titles. Pressgrove
47. Killer7 (2005)
If the hallmark of auteur theory is that, without any knowledge of
its production or even seeing its credits, you can tell who wrote and
directed a film, then Suda51, né Goichi Suda, is undeniably one of the
few legitimate auteurs in gaming, and Killer7 remains his magnum opus. Something akin to a psilocybin experience, Killer7
starts off as a linear rail shooter about a hitman with dissociative
identity disorder, even then managing to be one of the most
fundamentally creepy, psychologically horrific takes on such a thing. It
then proceeds to mutate the entire genre to fit his needs, slowly
blossoming into a profane, fever-dream manifesto on sex, politics,
murder, Eastern religion, and, somehow, pro wrestling. It’s very safe to
say that that isn’t a sentence that has been or will be written about
any other video game. Clark
46. Animal Crossing (2001)
It feels somehow naïve for Animal Crossing to exist. The
game’s focus on customizing your own space, accumulating items, and
playing at a measured, even limited pace is the sort of thing we
associate with crass monetization. Games like this are usually built to
chase whales, but Animal Crossing knows the simple pleasure of
cracking dad jokes as you catch sea bass, red snapper, and pond smelt.
It finds wonder in the mundane, through quirky doodads you buy at the
store or find in the dump, as well as through conversations with your
neighbors that sparkle with personality. Seasons change, celebrations
happen, visitors sell their wares, and your animal friends disappear
into the wild world, leaving only their memories behind. Plenty of games
are about managing life, but Animal Crossing is one of the few
about living it, about brushing up against a vast unknown and taking
things as they come. It’s almost relentlessly pleasant, built on a love
for your relationships and a space to call your own. Animal Crossing isn’t naïve, then. It’s aspirational. Scaife
45. Left 4 Dead 2 (2009)
What sets Left 4 Dead 2 apart from similar first-person
shooters is its core ethos of co-operative gameplay: If you don’t work
with your three partners, you’re toast. You and three other survivors of
an apocalypse must fight against the hordes of the undead that now
reside where America’s middle class once thrived. The manic baddies
(shades of 28 Days Later)
will quickly overwhelm your team, though you’ll frequently encounter
creatively grotesque “special” zombies that present unique threats like
trapping and dragging individual players away from the group, or
blinding players unlucky enough to be vomited on. Left 4 Dead 2
immerses you intently into its world by way of thrilling gameplay,
character dialogue, and environmental storytelling, punctuated with rich
detail and world building (will the plight of Chicago Ted ever be
resolved?). Custom campaigns and add-ons made the game endlessly
replayable, enforcing its status as a modern classic. Aston
44. Grand Theft Auto V (2013)
Grand Theft Auto V’s
plot takes the greatest of joy in throwing maximum shade at its
audience for enjoying what the series has always done. It’s something of
a brilliant bait and switch, where the stunning veneer houses the most
reprehensible digital society ever created. It’s all a dark, scathing
satire on all of America’s flaws—the American dream as interpreted
through by a vast prism of gluttony, lechery, and sociopathy. As much as
Rockstar could and should be aiming to get a female perspective into
one of their games, and sooner rather than later, their response a
couple years back on the matter made sense: Grand Theft Auto V
isn’t just a story starring men, but about manhood, about what’s
expected of them in the real world, about their agency in the
hyper-violent digital world, and what it’s all supposed to mean. Clark
43. The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild (2017)
Another timely franchise reinvention, The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild discards the linear formula of previous 3D Legend of Zelda
titles, offering up what may be considered gaming’s first truly open
world. When the game begins, the war is already over, the battle lost a
century ago. The world is in ruins. Link awakens and is immediately
drafted back into a conflict where little can ever be restored to how it
once was. And after a brief introduction, Hyrule is entirely yours to
traverse in any way that you want. Throughout, your curiosity is
aroused: Unbelievably vibrant sights abound across this seemingly
endless dominion, and if one such sight in the distance catches your
eye, you’re encouraged to run to it and discover the secrets it may or
may not contain. You need not enter the many shrines littered across
this land, but if you do, a plethora of often-tricky puzzles will stoke
your imagination every bit as evocatively as the many legends that
elaborate on Ganon’s takeover of Hyrule. And that no one path toward
victory will ever be the same as that of another player attests to the
game’s thrilling and imaginative sense of design. Aston
42. The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt (2015)
Whereas some games put their emphasis on discovering new and ever-more-powerful loot, The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt
is too focused to be distracted by shiny objects. Its best content is
in the narrative, and there’s arguably a greater variety of
monster-hunting quests than weapons to collect. Simply put, there’s a
richness to the folklore- or fairy-tale-inspired monster hunts—a house
undone by tragedy and betrayal, a vengeful wrath summoned up by
injustice—that compels players to scout out every inch of the game’s
territory (as if the poetry of a moonlit copse or the sunset from a
mountainside vistas wasn’t already enough). The beauty of the game is
tempered by the ugliness of the monsters (this sometimes refers to the
acts of deplorable humans), just as the fantasy setting is given a solid
foundation thanks to political machinations that would make Game of Thrones proud. Wild Hunt,
then, feels far more real and important than its individual parts.
Whereas other titles may captivate or spellbind an audience for a few
hours, this game’s mature narrative manages the singular feat of keeping
players invested for nearly 100 hours. Riccio
41. Metal Gear Solid 3: Snake Eater (2004)
Leave it to Hideo Kojima to follow the critical and commercial success of the second Metal Gear Solid with a sequel that abandons its most recognizable qualities. Metal Gear Solid 3: Snake Eater
dropped players into an unfamiliar jungle bristling with hostiles human
and animal alike, where they were left to fend for themselves without
the expected comforts—no radar, no high-powered weapons, and no easily
navigable map. And yet, despite the newfound emphasis on realism (a
respite from the meta-game artifice of its predecessor), this was still Metal Gear through and through: realism laced with the absurd. What else could it be? Marsh
40. Journey (2012)
A mute, red-cloaked idea of a character trudges through a seemingly
infinite desert, scarf flapping in the gentle wind. The light from a
far-off mountain beckons, but not urgently, because you might want to
smell the digital flowers. You will feel a sense of pride from seeing
something new, rather than from eluding enemies, or from making
conventional progress. This isn’t a game about the ruins left behind in
the sand—the past, the what-might-have-been—but rather about the
narrative ahead that still lies open for players to experience. Even
when the game matches you with a second player, you can communicate only
through cryptic chirps, leaving it to you to interpret intent. In this,
Journey is the Everygame. Riccio
39. Gone Home (2013)
Set in 1995 Oregon, Gone Home
sees Kaitlin returning from a year-long pre-college trip through Europe
to find her family’s house in a state of disarray, with only a
foreboding message left from her little sister that she will never see
her again. What appears to be the setup for a horror game is instead
misdirection for a powerful coming-of-age story. Kaitlin’s house is
indeed haunted, but only by the sadness and longing of its inhabitants.
Exploring each room reveals more about each member of her family and
builds the unique narrative, ending in a wonderful inclusionary climax
that speaks to the maturation of the medium of video games. Aston
38. Portal (2007)
One great thing about video games is that every aspect of them, from
how trees look to whether gravity works, is a decision. Valve’s prior
games expertly simulated physics, while Portal asked what would
happen if, like God, you could make physics different. And it presented
that slapstick joke with sophisticated narrative panache. Melding
wunderkind student designers with veteran comic writer Old Man Murray, Portal
grounded its spatial wackiness in recognizable (in)human resentments.
The story of GLaDOS and Chel is one of the great, Bechdel-test-passing
double acts in gaming history, made all the funnier by Chel’s
classic-FPS taciturnity. McKleinfeld
37. Outer Wilds (2019)
There are six unique planets in Outer Wilds
to explore, and your curiosity will lead you to die in dozens of ways
on each of them, before a time loop returns you to the start (shakes of The Legend of Zelda: Majora’s Mask).
Stand in one of rustic Timber Hearth’s geysers, and you’ll learn that
being propelled through the trees isn’t what kills you, so much as your
subsequent landing. Spend too much time marveling at the labyrinthine
corridors and fossilized remains hidden within Ember Twin and you may
learn firsthand that the sand is going to keep rising, gravitationally
pulled off nearby Ash Twin like an orbital hourglass, until it either
crushes or suffocates you. Falling through a black hole surprisingly
enough doesn’t kill you, but running out of thruster fuel
before reaching the science satellite at the other end of that wormhole
certainly will. Death is at the center of Outer Wilds—literally
so, in that its solar system’s sun is going supernova in 22 minutes—but
what makes the game such a unique and enriching experience is how much
it has to say about life. It’s not about winning so much as it is about
what you accomplish and learn along the way. Riccio
36. Spelunky (2008)
Playing Spelunky often seems like a quest to find out how
many different ways your underground explorer can die. This
uncompromising and darkly comedic 2D platformer has some of the most
dynamic consequences you can fall prey to, or take advantage of once you
learn the ropes, in a video game. Arrows can bounce off walls and
enemies and still hit you for damage, rats can be picked up and thrown
to set off traps, a bomb intended for a large foe can destroy part of a
shop and cause the storeowner to hunt you down wherever you go—the
possibilities are innumerable in developer Derek Yu’s randomized yet
themed levels. Die once in Spelunky and you have to start all
the way over, but the serendipitous and unusual discoveries you’ll make
along the way are more valuable than any treasure you might hold onto
for a couple of minutes before perishing. Pressgrove
35. The Last of Us (2013)
Come for the zombies, stay for the giraffes. Dead Space fans will smile as they navigate claustrophobic sewage tunnels, Metal Gear Solid veterans will have a blast outmaneuvering a psychotic cannibal, Resident Evil junkies will enjoy trying to sneak past noise-sensitive Clickers, Fallout experts will find every scrap of material to scavenge, Dead Rising pros will put Joel’s limited ammunition and makeshift shivs to good use, and Walking Dead
fans will be instantly charmed by the evolving relationship between
grizzled Joel and the tough young girl, Ellie, he’s protecting. But
Naughty Dog’s The Last of Us
stands decaying heads and rotting shoulders above its peers because
it’s not just about the relentless struggle to survive, but the beauty
that remains: the sun sparkling off a distant hydroelectric dam; the
banks of pure, unsullied snow; even the wispy elegance of otherwise
toxic spores. Oh, and giraffes, carelessly walking through vegetative
cities, the long-necked light at the end of the tunnel that’s worth
surviving for. Riccio
34. Psychonauts (2005)
In a time when retro throwbacks are ubiquitous, and the platforming
genre has been riding a creative high for some years now, it’s almost
hard to remember the environment Psychonauts was released into,
where the glut of platformers had been reduced to scavenger-hunt
simulators, bred for ease of use and waste of time rather than genuine
inspiration. As immensely boisterous and entertaining as Psychonauts
still is today, it’s miraculous once you think about the logic guiding
its creative peers at the time, and Tim Schafer choosing to fly in
direct opposition to most of it. The game’s concept alone would make for
some fine storytelling in just about any medium with any tone—trade
summer camp for corporate espionage and, well, you’ve got Christopher
Nolan’s Inception—but
combined with Double Fine’s abstract, exaggerated visuals, a
willingness to push the absurdity envelope for humor’s sake, and truly
unique, meticulous mechanics, Psychonauts remains a work of creative and comic genius that works wonders out of that concept. Clark
33. Super Mario Odyssey (2017)
The joy of Super Mario Odyssey
is in your self-made journey. This is a game that invites you to dwell
within and interact with both the old and the new. Wander around a
recreation of Peach’s Castle (from Super Mario 64) to your
heart’s content, maybe enter the retro 2D levels ingeniously embedded
into certain flat surfaces throughout the game’s kingdoms. You can also
adopt a completely new identity throughout by possessing foes, allies,
and sometimes random objects: You can rocket around as a fragile Bullet
Bill, spring into action as a stilt-walking sprout, or swim up a volcano
as an adorable lava bubble. However you play this game on your way to
saving Peach from a forced marriage, it’s start-to-finish fun, and the
travel-guide presentation of the in-game map suggests that Super Mario Odyssey
aims to serve as a kind of vacation. The game’s collectible Power Moons
reinforce this leisurely emphasis, as you’re as likely to get a reward
from performing agile acrobatics as from paying close attention to that
dog wandering along a sandy beach. This freedom elevates Super Mario Odyssey, making it not just a game, but a colorful, creative playground. Riccio
32. Disco Elysium (2019)
Disco Elysium
suggests a playable William S. Burroughs novel, and even he would’ve
needed a lot more drugs to connect the dots in all the labyrinthine and
utterly bewildering ways that player choices here wreak utter havoc on
the world and your sloppy, drunken burnout of a detective. It’s not
enough that solving the game’s central mystery—a murder tied to a worker
revolution in the city of Revachol—takes so many cruel and bizarre
twists and turns along the way, but the protagonist’s stats actively
work both for and against you the whole time. Your mental and
emotional health is a torrent that can carry you away at any moment
whether you feel prepared for it or not, which might be the most real
part of such a deeply surreal experience. Your detective’s failures can
weigh on him, making him emotionally unqualified to make certain
decisions down the road, arrogance can lead him to take actions based on
his rage, and his embarrassment can give away his secrets when his
self-confidence drops. His every emotion has a voice, sharply written
and impossible to deny, and they will have their say, during one
conversation or another, and if the dialogue goes awry, never has a game
of this sort made it so abundantly clear that you have no one to blame
but yourself. Clark
31. Fallout 2 (1998)
As stated in that ridiculous fake country song in Trey Parker’s Team America: World Police, freedom isn’t free. Expanding greatly on its predecessor’s maniacal open world, Fallout 2
will pretty much let you attempt to do whatever you want—whether that’s
playing all sides in a gangster war, freeing slaves, having an affair
with either the daughter or son of an overprotective father, or just
being a horrible violent psychopath—but don’t expect the nonplayable
characters in this game to just stand by. They’ll always remember your
sinful or moral deeds, and thus, so will you. There isn’t a popular
open-world game today, including the neutered Bethesda-produced Fallout sequels, that matches Fallout 2’s
sarcastic commitment to freedom of choice. This classic is wilder than
the Wild West, depicts a society that makes the real world look
relatively sane, and reminds us that escapism comes with consequences. Pressgrove
30. Doom (1993)
An ominous metal riff immediately trumpets a distinctive brand of intensity in the first level of id Software’s Doom.
From there, the game more than lives up to the implications of its
title, as the player wades through cold corridors, battles
demon-corrupted human bodies, and sprints across deadly ooze. With loads
of secret rooms containing precious items, Doom also welcomes
you to comb an environment that seems alive, especially when you, after
being lulled into complacency by the allure of an empty area, become the
victim of abrupt and devilish traps, like an entire wall that slides
down to unleash a menagerie of aggressive demons behind you. Because you
can only aim straight ahead with a gun or chainsaw, the game forces you
to take advantage of the protagonist’s running and strafing abilities,
but the speed of your movement can be as discombobulating as it is
enlivening. All of these aspects, more so than the game’s graphic
violence, cement Doom as a horror masterpiece that transcends the first-person shooter label. Pressgrove
29. Final Fantasy Tactics (1997)
Not for nothing is one of the 20 main classes in Final Fantasy Tactics
labeled a Calculator. This is a game for math geniuses, with no end to
the mix-and-match job customization offered. Or it’s a game for future
military commanders, with over 60 chess-like scenarios to survive, often
at great odds. Or, with real-world inspirations like the War of the
Roses at heart, perhaps it’s a tale for historians. There’s magic, too,
and yards of in-game lore to read, so it’s for English majors as well.
Other games presented lessons, but Final Fantasy Tactics was
the complete package, a school unto itself. Many strategy RPGs preceded
and followed it, some even hewing closely to the same fundamental
systems, but none have managed to capture this blend of fact and
fantasy. Riccio
28. Castlevania: Symphony of the Night (1997)
Dozens of games have referred back to the things Symphony of the Night did back in 1997 to veer the traditionally linear Castlevania
series off into completely unknown open-world territory, and few have
done it as spectacularly. The game’s main castle and its spectacular
upside-down counterpart are staggering achievements in art design, and
the score contains two or three of the best classical compositions of
the last two decades in gaming. But more than this, the experience of
exploring every haunted nook and cranny of this place, so drowning in
secrets, unique weapons, and non-repeating enemies, remains astounding
to this day, whether the player is on his or her first or 40th
playthrough. Clark
27. Max Payne (2001)
On a winter’s night some months after the death of his wife and
child, renegade D.E.A. agent and ex-cop Max Payne takes to the streets
of New York on a bloody Punisher-esque quest to avenge his
family, cleaning up the corrupt city and uncovering the conspiracy that
cost him everything. Combining graphic-novel noir storytelling with
addictive Matrix-inspired “bullet time” gunplay, Max Payne
still stuns for its rush of varied visual poetry. At the push of a
button, Max moves and aims in slow motion, giving him the edge against
his trigger-happy enemies, and these endlessly replayable sequences
evoke the fantasy-fulfillment of playing Neo in The Matrix’s infamous lobby scene, or as one of John Woo’s renegade heroes. Aston
26. StarCraft (1998)
It has long been said that any encounter with extraterrestrial life
would carry with it drastic changes to our world, such as forcing us to
adapt to new technologies overnight. Though the aliens in StarCraft
are fictional, their arrival upends pretty much everything that’s
expected from real-time strategy games. The old, traditional Terran
forces serve to showcase the asymmetric balance of the new alien races,
with old fog-of-war conventions and the rock-paper-scissors combat of Command & Conquer
and stolid swarm tactics giving way to forced innovation. The Zerg
slowly web their “creep” across the map, blocking and burrowing their
menacing, swift-tendriled troops, while the Protoss rely on regenerating
energy shields to make the most of a more limited number of troops. The
campaign further emphasizes the compelling clashes between species, a
dynamic that allowed StarCraft’s multiplayer to thrive long after the game’s release. Riccio
25. Dark Souls (2011)
The labyrinthine world of Dark Souls is a source of almost
constant suspense: With no map at your disposable or straightforward
path for you to follow, you must learn to move deliberately through
doorways, dim passages, wooded areas, and winding ridges, as a wide
variety of deadly monsters wait to rid the environment of your meddling
presence. Because you must fight and then, after getting a much-needed
break at a bonfire (a symbol of false salvation), refight these unholy
creatures, only to stumble upon one ominously titled location after
another, the game channels a purgatorial vibe unlike any other. Dark Souls
invites you to question the meaning of its repetitious combat as you
observe more signs of ruin, madness, and demonic life run amok. If
played online, with other players either guiding or hindering you,
you’ll likely feel as if you’re part of a demented community of outcasts
and riffraff. But play it alone and that’s when the deepest
emotions—loneliness, morbid curiosity, hopelessness, relief—are liable
to take full possession of you, and in the blink of an eye. Pressgrove
24. The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past (1991)
In 1991, a console game of such depth and sophistication as boasted by The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past
was simply beyond conception. In fact, it was almost beyond
possibility: Nintendo had to expand the capacity of their console’s
cartridges to make room for the breadth of what they’d hoped to do here.
The results were well worth the expense and effort. You didn’t just
play this game, but plunged headlong into its adventure, entering a
story and a world whose fate you felt lay in your hands. Today, however,
A Link to the Past ought to be regarded as more than a milestone for a franchise still evolving. It is, in its own right, a legend. Marsh
23. Kentucky Route Zero (2020)
Kentucky Route Zero
is a game often content to remain as mysterious as its namesake, an
underground highway seemingly unbound by physical laws. Any fights,
between unions and predatory companies, have already happened or
doubtless will happen again. Instead, it explores the aftermath of
cultural devastation, of how people survive in the ruins of the American
experiment and how they build atop (or beneath) that wreckage, with the
strange reality meant to represent what capitalism has done to the
world. The magic is there, only contained and warped by the society that
has grown around it. The characters’ paths narrow as the game
continues, as the fist of an unfeeling system closes and people are
overwhelmed by weaknesses; you drift from the role of driver to the
person being driven to a simple observer of what’s to come. The people
you encounter are refugees of greed and exploitation and obsolescence,
and there’s a sliver of hope as they defiantly continue, finding
pleasure in creation and companionship. They write, they compose, they
perform, and they record, inspired by past struggles and a world content
to forget its own history beyond facile preservation attempts in
arbitrary little museums. Scaife
22. Super Mario World (1990)
Super Mario World feels like Nintendo’s own technology
finally catching up with every lofty, unattainable gameplay idea they
couldn’t implement between 1985 and 1990. This is from an era where the
first game a developer released on a new system had something to prove,
and the chip on Nintendo’s shoulder shows here. The game still feels
massive, teeming with secret stages, alternate exits, Rube Goldbergian
stage design, and verticality the likes of which could never have been
done prior, and hasn’t really been done as expertly since. Add the fact
that this is a Super Mario Bros. game that actually gives Super Mario a cape, and features Yoshi’s first appearance in the series, makes it one for the ages. Clark
21. Ōkami (2006)
The sun goddess Amaterasu, taking the form of an angelic white wolf,
sets out to vanquish the eight-headed demon Orochi from Nippon. So
begins a tale worthy enough to follow any of the most revered Japanese
folk legends in a century-spanning anthology. With aesthetics that pay
tribute to the ancient art of calligraphy and the soulful connection
between painter and brush, Ōkami bleeds beauty from every pore.
Combat, too, is akin to the elegant strokes of bristles on parchment,
smoothly interweaving Amaterasu’s lightning-quick attacks with swipes of
the Celestial Brush, a tool that allows for on-screen drawings to come
to life, aiding in both battle and puzzle-solving. A charming sequel, Ōkamiden,
was later released for the Nintendo DS, but its lack of lasting impact
proved the peerless original wasn’t in need of a second act. LeChevallier
20. Mass Effect 2 (2010)
The Mass Effect universe was too big to stay confined to one platform, and with Mass Effect 2,
Bioware finally let PlayStation 3 owners explore the galaxy on their
system of choice. Gamers will probably be divided forever about whether
this sequel streamlined or dumbed down the combat, but the appeal of the
Mass Effect series isn’t the fighting, it’s the world. Lots of design docs have concept art that seems straight out of OMNI magazine, but only Mass Effect 2
managed to implement that in-game, creating thousands of beautiful
planets with obsessively detailed backstories for everything on them.
Even more than the ambitious Elder Scrolls games, Mass Effect 2
realizes the potential of video games for executing the kind of rich
world-building that fantasy and sci-fi fans love, and very much unlike Elder Scrolls, they tell the story with acting, writing, and direction that you don’t have to apologize for. McKleinfeld
19. Planescape: Torment (1999)
The leads of most video games tend to come in two varieties:
pre-defined and blank slate. With its immortal protagonist The Nameless
One, Planescape: Torment goes for both. He awakens in a morgue
with no memory, and he soon learns this is par for the course; his many
past selves have left scars on the incredible, unorthodox world and on
the imaginative characters that have crossed his path. The game is about
learning who he’s been, as well as defining who he’ll be. It asks hard
questions about the nature of the self, and about whether it’s truly
possible to become a better person after so many transgressions. Though
nearly 20 years old, Planescape: Torment is still one of the
benchmarks by which we measure the quality of video-game writing, with a
level of choice and complexity that’s rarely equaled in any other RPG. Scaife
18. Final Fantasy VII (1997)
The death of Aeris Gainsborough heralded a new truth about the medium: Video games can make you cry. The sweep and thrust of Final Fantasy VII
engrossed as few adventures do, of course, but to be moved by the
emotional dimension of this story—to be invested in the lives and deaths
of Cloud Strife and his crew of AVALANCHE eco-terrorists, to feel
compelled to save this world as if it were your own—suggested the
beginnings of a new kind of video-game experience. Love and pain and
beauty are coursing through this thing. Action and adventure are at its
core. But emotion is its lifeblood. Marsh
17. Super Mario 64 (1996)
We didn’t have a template for 3D games until Nintendo conceived of one for us. Super Mario 64
was an architectural marvel designed and built without a blueprint: the
rolling open-world hills and sprawling primary-color vistas that seem
as familiar to gamers today as the world outside were dreamed up out of
nothing more than programmed paint and canvas. Shigeru Miyamoto was
given the unenviable task of contemporizing his studio’s longest-running
and most prominent franchise while remaining true to its 2D legacy. And
it’s a testament to the designer’s accomplishment here that, more than
20 years later, the result feels no less iconic than the original Super Mario Bros. Marsh
16. EarthBound (1994)
There has never been a game as irreverently comic and deceptively touching as EarthBound.
It takes place in a darkly skewed version of Earth, with 13-year-old
Ness’s “rockin’” telekinetic powers and trusty baseball bat going toe to
toe with local gangs and bullies, Happy Happy cultists, and drugged-out
hippies. Despite liberally borrowing from RPG conventions (including an
emphasis on grind-heavy gameplay), the game oozes originality in just
about every other aspect, offering more than just escapism, but, in its
battle against loneliness and negative emotions, a reason to ultimately
set the controller down. Riccio
15. Portal 2 (2011)
In its co-option of a perspective (and its attendant controls)
typically associated with homicidal adventures for a fundamentally
cerebral, bloodless affair, Portal 2
turned out to be a beautifully rendered and addictively engaging piece
of form/content subversiveness. As a single-player quest, the game is so
consistently inventive that it can be downright exhausting, though
alleviating the strain of its toughest segments is the laugh-out-loud
humor, which comes in the form of tutorial graphics and PSA displays
that playfully mock dystopian sci-fi conceits, as well as its cast of
characters. Moreover, as superb as the game’s solo mode is, even more
impediments await via a unique cooperative campaign whose two-player
traps are just as devilishly complex, and also further rework
tried-and-true FPS aesthetic and interface formulas into something
thrillingly unique. As innovative, challenging, amusing, and downright
entertaining as they come, Portal 2 refutes the dim-witted contemporary adage by proving that the most fun comes from turning one’s brain on. Nick Schager
14. Super Smash Bros. Melee (2001)
The best games of all time invoke an almost instant sense of nostalgia. But Super Smash Bros. Melee’s
charms aren’t simply generated from the goodwill of such classic heroes
as Link and Mario. They also result from its chaotic twist on combat,
as much a matter of playing evasion ballet as of mastering the various
power-ups and environmental hazards. That said, taking such a deep bench
of characters out of their elements and into a brawler wasn’t without a
special sort of charm, as watching F-Zero’s neglected Captain
Falcon take revenge on an overstuffed Kirby or having Jigglypuff
knock-out Luigi will simply never get old. Riccio
13. Super Metroid (1994)
Perfection in game design is like pornography: You know it when you see it. And in Super Metroid,
it’s plain as day. It isn’t exaggeration to say that every element of
the game has been conceived and calibrated to something like a platonic
ideal: its level design feels complex but comprehensible; its difficulty
is precisely balanced; its controls are as smooth as buttercream; and,
perhaps most crucially, its sense of atmosphere is richly palpable. The
greatness of Super Metroid is apparent from the moment Samus
Aran floats up from within her Gunship to stand poised and ready in the
rain. It’s achingly beautiful. This is game craft at the height of
elegance. Marsh
12. Silent Hill 2 (2001)
Silent Hill 2 is a game about grief. The story is simple: A
widower is drawn toward the eponymous town after he receives a letter
from his dead wife, who asks that he meet her in their “special place,” a
hotel off the shore. In Silent Hill he finds terrible things: monsters,
demons, all glimpsed hazily through a shroud of impenetrable fog. But
worst of all he finds the truth. This isn’t a game about battling
creatures or solving puzzles; those elements hang in the background like
the ornamentation of a bad dream. In Silent Hill 2, you find yourself asleep, and the game is about needing to wake up. Marsh
11. The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time (1998)
During the lengthy development of The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time,
Shigeru Miyamoto envisioned a worst-case scenario in which Link would
be restricted to Ganon’s castle throughout the game’s entirety, jumping
through portals to enter mission-based worlds. Let us be eternally
grateful, then, that Miyamoto and his colleagues got a handle on their
newly broken-in hardware before submitting their final product. There
aren’t enough superlatives, in any language, to describe how important Ocarina of Time
is, not only to the medium of video games, but to the act of telling
and being enveloped by stories. You start the game as a child and finish
it as an adult. Along the way, you will have traveled countless miles,
met all sorts of creatures, and been tested both in battle and by a slew
of imaginative puzzles. The Great Deku Tree. Dodongo’s Cavern. Jabu
Jabu’s Belly. The Water Temple. Oh God, the Water Temple. Your initial
foray into any of these environments isn’t easily forgotten, and the
dungeons comprise only a fraction of the fantastical pleasures found in Ocarina of Time, a game that’s not just a game, but the birth of a memory that you’ll hold dear forever. LeChevallier
10. Red Dead Redemption (2010)
Red Dead Redemption is the game Grand Theft Auto always wanted to be. This pseudo-sequel to 2004’s Red Dead Revolver—a
functional if underwhelming third-person western saga—thrusts you into a
roam-all-you-want Old West sandbox environment, allowing you the
freedom to concentrate on the storyline’s primary missions or simply
gallop about the vast plains, dusty deserts, and Mexican mountains,
collecting rare herbs, hunting wild animals, and rescuing whatever
damsel in distress you might happen upon along the way. Far less
limiting than GTA’s urban metropolises, which always felt constructed out of paper houses, Red Dead Redemption’s
settings are fully, thrillingly alive, their functioning ecosystems,
sudden dramatic occurrences, and operative economy all helping to create
a sense of participating in a universe that operates independent of
(rather than revolves around) you. To spend time in this adventure’s
locales is to feel a part of a wider world. And, consequently, to catch a
glimpse at gaming’s immersive potential. Schager
9. NieR: Automata (2017)
If NieR Automata
were just a straightforward open-world action title, one that could be
completed in some 10 hours, stretching from the first line of dialogue
until Ending A, it would still stand tall for being a fundamentally odd
game about machines pondering their humanity, ending on a quaintly
sentimental but earned grace note. Ending A, though, is the tip of the
iceberg, partially obscuring what eventually reveals itself to be one of
the most unique ludological and existentialist exercises in any medium.
On one hand, it’s a love letter and celebration of everything games
are, as its mechanics flit joyously between genres; it’s a
hack-and-slash power trip one moment, a shooter the next, sometimes even
a platformer. On the other, it’s pathologically obsessed with tearing
down everything about what those genres have done up to this point in
gaming. NieR Automata
performs a philosophical autopsy on the post-apocalyptic corpse of
humankind through the lens of machines finding themselves bound to make
sense of their burgeoning sentience from the scraps we leave behind.
It’s a game that revels in the destruction of one’s enemies, and also
forces players to recognize their own role in creating them, and the
imperative of understanding them to truly move forward, a pensiveness
framed by one of the most glorious, eclectic scores ever composed. Clark
8. Resident Evil 4 (2005)
In Resident Evil 4,
your mission to save the president’s daughter from kidnappers quickly
goes south, stranding you in a nameless rural village in Spain in the
midst of crazed villagers infected with something very, very bad. The
game offers no guidance as to how to react or escape, leaving you in a
state of anxiety as U.S. government special agent Leon Kennedy attempts
to flee only to be quickly cornered and overcome. The series’s
transition here from the stationary camera of the previous games to a
fully 3D environment was a major step forward for third-person action
games, but the sense of uncertainty that wracks the player throughout
the lengthy narrative, of being made the center of a horrific, frenzied
nightmare, is what made this game one of the most profoundly
discomfiting experiences video games have ever seen. Aston
7. Metroid Prime (2002)
On paper, Metroid Prime should’ve been the game that made us all believe that the Metroid series should’ve stayed dead after the eight-year gap between Super Metroid
and this release. In reality, Retro Studios defied every expectation
that came with dragging a side-scroller kicking and screaming into 3D.
Everything that made Super Metroid brilliant—its sense of
isolation, Samus’s varied arsenal, the sheer size of the game’s
world—remains intact. What Retro added was grand, evil beauty to Samus’s
surroundings, a subtly creepy story of ill-fated alien civilizations
told entirely without breaking the gameplay, and a laundry list of FPS
innovations that felt next-gen, and in more than just the graphics, even
when the game was prettied up for the Wii. Clark
6. Chrono Trigger (1995)
Chrono Trigger is the easiest, conversation-ending answer to
the question: “Why do you like RPGs?” It’s in the wonderfully written,
infinitely endearing characters that are the best examples of each of
their archetypes. The great, smart-alecky humor. The twists and turns in
the plot, few, if any, of which are telegraphed from miles away. The
consequences of your actions across the multiple timelines. The combat.
The lack of random encounters. The score. That Mode 7 clock at the start
that still feels like the beginning of something epic more than 20
years later. This is every JRPG element working in total harmony. Clark
5. Tetris (1984)
The mastermind of Alexey Pajitnov, Tetris is a game of pure
abstraction, its mastery of the simplest possible visual units as ideal
and impersonal as the Helvetica font. It’s no coincidence that it came
to America as an ambassador from a foreign country; like the math
equations on the Voyager shuttle, it speaks a language even
space aliens could comprehend. The fundamental gameplay imperative of
fitting blocks together is almost offensively infantile, but players who
master the game can feel neurons growing as they learn to stop just
seeing the shapes, and start seeing the negative space around them. The
system recalibrates your perceptions as you explore it, and that’s what a
great game is about. McKleinfeld
4. Shadow of the Colossus (2005)
Since 2005, games that examine players’ bloodlust haven’t exactly
become commonplace, though many have effectively wrestled with our
feelings of doubt and guilt. One of Shadow of the Colossus’s
triumphs is its refusal to make murder feel good. None of the colossi,
no matter how alien or invertebrate, are necessarily hostile. They all
suggest frightened animals protecting their territory, and whatever
catharsis you feel in slaying one comes from the selfish, uniquely human
ideal of being something very small and frail standing toe to toe with
something unfathomably enormous and seemingly all-powerful. The game
then treats your victory with all the pomp and circumstance of having
slain the last kitten on Earth. Every triumph in Shadow of the Colossus is a tragedy for which Wander pays a deep physical and spiritual price. Clark
3. Super Mario Bros. 3 (1988)
Some games have one great world. Super Mario Bros. 3 has
eight, and its numerous inventive obstacles—from the sun that drops from
the sky to attack you in Desert Land to the convoluted passages of Pipe
Land—make the game delightfully overwhelming. At Mario’s disposal is an
array of fantastic power-ups, which grant full flight—sometimes
literally—to the player’s imagination, providing you with new ways of
navigating stages and finding tucked-away areas outside the typical
boundaries of platforming levels. The game also remains revolutionary
because of its world map, whose various elements often communicate a
powerful sense of place and mood, as with the unusually encouraging
dancing trees of Desert Land and the dread-inducing blacked-out paths of
Dark Land. And the secrets throughout this epic title are among the
most unusual you’ll encounter in a video game—none stranger than your
being able to enter the background of a level by squatting on a white
block. Such unforgettable discoveries show that Super Mario Bros. 3 isn’t just another well-crafted franchise sequel, but rather the epitome of unrelenting creativity in game design. Pressgrove
2. Final Fantasy VI (1994)
There’s a classic South Park episode that mocks the fact that if there’s a joke you like, chances are The Simpsons already did it. The same can be said for Final Fantasy VI,
which basically broke and reset every rule for the modern RPG. It would
have been impressive enough to feature 14 playable characters, each
with their own unique abilities (like Sabin’s Street Fighter-like
combinations). Or to introduce the steampunk combination of magic and
technology to the genre. Or to offer branching narrative paths. Or to
stuff the game with enough side quests to fill an entire sequel. But Final Fantasy VI
did it all, first and flawlessly. That such a perfectly scored game in
which the world is destroyed halfway through also finds time for humor,
thanks to a certain cephalopod, is just icing on an already impeccably
gluttonous cake. Riccio
1. The Legend of Zelda: Majora’s Mask (2000)
The Legend of Zelda: Majora’s Mask
is antithetical to everything we’re conditioned to feel about popular
game design. We’re meant to appreciate the bombast and big open spaces
that let us assert our dominance over and over again. But Majora’s Mask is about looking inward, about confronting our own powerlessness. It’s the smallest 3D Legend of Zelda
game that Nintendo has ever produced, focused as much on its main quest
as on observing daily lives and routines. You come to know people and
places with an intimacy that few video games can claim, and you
especially come to know your continued failure to save them. The moon
obliterates the town of Termina again and again, and the people gaze
upward to accept their fate as Link looks on, caught in the cycle of his
own defeat. You can intervene and provide brief moments of respite by
beating side quests, but the people never step out of line on their
march to inevitable death. The small victories are just that: small in
the face of what’s to come. You must eventually play the ocarina to
restart the time loop, and you must eventually watch those victories
evaporate as you move incrementally forward, powerless to save them all.
Though you finally come to the solution and break the time loop to save
the world and its people, you accomplish this only after so many
failures, only after seeing death through the eyes of so many. Masks
function in the game as a way to hide, as well as a way to empathize.
The ones you’ll use most often, the ones empowered by ghosts, remind you
that you’ve only arrived in the middle of a larger life cycle that you
have no power over. Majora’s Mask
still lets you play the hero and even manipulate the flow of time, but
it never lets you bend to your will a world that exists only for you,
the player. Though the moon may rise with your help this once, it’s
perfectly capable of going on alone.
