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The 100 Best Video Games of the 2010s

Wherever the medium goes from here, these are the games that point the way forward.

The 100 Best Video Games of the 2010s
Photo: Cardboard Computer

Comedian Kumail Nanjiani claimed some years back that video games are the only art form that got better solely because of technology. While that’s arguably been true for much of the medium’s history, it ceased to be the case in the 2010s. The decade in gaming didn’t lack for astounding technical achievements, but its arc was defined less by powerful technology than powerful ideas.

This was the decade that saw tiny studios, lone creators, and crazy concepts reign supreme. This was the decade that saw every platform become a viable place for ideas to sprout and bloom. The limits of the medium are seemingly bound only by the human imagination, and at every level, regardless of the horsepower needed, it now feels like anything is possible.

The decade’s best games took full advantage of that new freedom by pushing the envelope in every direction. Wherever the medium goes from here, these are the games that point the way forward. Justin Clark


BioShock Infinite

100. BioShock Infinite

BioShock Infinite is a visceral experience about an irredeemable psychopath murdering a city of despicable fundamentalists. Booker Dewitt is tasked with saving a reality-tearing woman from a floating white-supremacist paradise, leading to the interactive slaughter of its inhabitants; so much was made of the game’s violence that many overlooked that the repugnant brutality was exactly the point. While most shooters shy away from grue or any consequences to the player’s actions, BioShock Infinite vividly depicts these rippling across universes, where a single choice can carry disastrous results. This is an astonishing game that philosophizes on the human condition—consider that the opponents of Columbia’s segregation aren’t interested in equality, only in suppressing their suppressors—while critiquing its entire genre, concluding that the protagonist of a first-person shooter shouldn’t be allowed to live in any universe. Ryan Aston


The Norwood Suite

99. The Norwood Suite

The public is more aware than ever of the infallibilities of well-known artists, and Cosmo D’s The Norwood Suite evokes the discomfort that many of us often feel when the dirty secrets of an icon are put on display. The setting here is a hotel that houses the legacy of a bandleader named Peter Norwood, whose exploitative relationships with other musicians come to the player’s attention via surreal trips down hidden passageways. Yet this building also bears numerous odd pleasures to behold, not least of which is a soundtrack that seamlessly morphs as you move from room to room. The characters are literally riffs in Cosmo D’s stupendous orchestration; different instruments and notes accompany different lines of dialogue as they appear on screen. The more you explore this strange location, the more you see the threat of commercialization in the form of corporate employees aiming to turn the hotel into a greater moneymaking scheme. Cosmo D gives no easy answers on how capitalistic culture can reconcile the sins of artistic giants, and that ambiguity makes The Norwood Suite a complicated and essential illustration of contemporary concerns. Jed Pressgrove

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Overcooked

98. Overcooked

To make it absolutely clear that Overcooked isn’t your traditional cooking game, developer Ghost Town Games opens mid-apocalypse. A giant, ravenous beast—imagine the Stay Puft Marshmallow Man made of spaghetti and meatballs—threatens to consume your rooftop kitchen. The Onion King, cheering from the sidelines, implores you to fend him off by hastily preparing a soothing selection of salads; after you’ve failed, he transports you back through time, so that you can be a more seasoned chef next time. The subsequent missions, then, are less about tapping out increasingly complex orders, as with Cooking Dash and its ilk, or the exquisite, Zen-like Cook, Serve, Delicious. Instead, Overcooked keeps the recipes simple and the kitchens about as unconventionally chaotic as they come. At times, the difficulty can make this party game feel like a lot of work, although in fairness, the same can be said for Lovers in a Dangerous Spacetime, another demandingly chaotic, but ultimately enjoyable, couch co-op title. The meat of the title—cooperative, chaotic cooking—is almost perfectly handled, as are the garnishes, from the catchy musical score to the delightful crew of unlockable animal chefs. By keeping the kitchens varied and the action constant, Ghost Town Games avoids the flavorless death known as repetition, and doesn’t overcook its premise. Aaron Riccio


Downwell

97. Downwell

Downwell is a quarter-eater without the quarters, an arcade game from out of time. As your character tumbles down an enclosed space, collecting gems and shooting bullets from his feet, the game feels like something you play as much as you give yourself over to. Each run demands split-second decisions. Do you go back for more gems, as a cabal of monsters closes in behind you? Do you risk a stomp attack that demands more precision but will reward you with a badly needed reload? Do you break the block for gems at risk of losing space to maneuver? Each run showers you in game-changing upgrades that introduce still-more variables to consider at a moment’s notice, while you continue blasting your way into the abyss. Like the very best action games, Downwell becomes its own trance state. Steven Scaife


XCOM: Enemy Unknown

96. XCOM: Enemy Unknown

Prepare to die a lot. The modern gaming landscape is one littered with checkpoints, save states, and wonky AI. 2K Games’s reimagining of the XCOM strategy series harkens back to the cult classic’s unsettling gameplay and punishing difficulty. The rewarding sensation one receives after successfully commanding a squad out of a heated skirmish with strange intergalactic warriors is unparalleled in modern games. These tense battles eventually lead the player to actually form an emotional bond with your team members, which makes their inevitable demise that much more crushing. These interactive elements lend XCOM’s tense action an atmosphere that’s engrossing and wholly addictive. It’s easy to treasure an old-school counter-offensive game that understands the motivating power of fear. Kyle Lemmon


Deus Ex: Human Revolution

95. Deus Ex: Human Revolution

In the not-so-distant future, large corporations and multinational firms have developed their operations beyond the control of national governments, and human biomechanical augmentation is simultaneously rising in popularity across the world and being demonized for its role in changing humanity. Like the very best sci-fi, Deus Ex: Human Revolution is about ethics and consequences; this is a game that asks what it is to be human. The game presents both the rise of biotechnology as a means to advance human ability and the human experience, and the subsequent consequences on the world. Its layered narrative matches its deep multifaceted gameplay, set in a rich and atmospheric universe that feels not too far away from our own. Despite a slow start and occasional missteps (the much maligned boss fights were “fixed” for DLC), Eidos Montreal has created an engaging, compelling experience that does justice to the critically acclaimed Deus Ex series. Aston

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Death Stranding

94. Death Stranding

Hideo Kojima’s first game away from Konami, Death Stranding, finds him tearing down the familiar structure of the open-world game and building it back up again as something weirder, more deliberate, and more honest about what it is. It transforms basic traversal into the entire conceit rather than more or less a time sink between story missions and side activities. It peels away the artifice of open-world structure, revealing the dressed-up delivery missions underneath while declaring that they’re a worthwhile pursuit in their own right. And once you’ve totally internalized that idea, the tools the game provides become enthralling revelations: You eventually build sprawling highways and ziplines that propel you across arduous terrain. You’ve worked for them. You’ve earned them. Death Stranding is an admirable experiment for big-budget game design, playing like one long, bizarre, and startlingly persuasive argument that the journey is fulfilling in its own right. Scaife


Iconoclasts

93. Iconoclasts

While Iconoclasts’s bright and imaginative 2D pixelated graphics would look right at home on a 16-bit console of yore, its themes and ideas are very much that of the modern day. The game’s silent protagonist, Robin, is trapped in a fascistic society ruled by fundamentalist dogma, where her skills as a mechanic are outlawed, positioning her as a criminal and counterforce in a setting that opposes scientific advancement and free-thinking. Robin’s journey to escape execution and expose the truth of her society’s dominating political organization aligns her with other well-crafted characters who oppose the tyrannical theocracy both in ideology and ability, and it’s through its characters’ unique facilities that Iconoclasts demonstrates a kind of Ludonarrative harmony, as the gameplay and themes are in lockstep, crafting an experience that tackles important issues of faith, religion, and totalitarianism. Throughout, Iconoclasts’s varied gameplay mechanics directly serve the narrative. Consider Robin’s special tool, an illegal wrench, and how it not only symbolizes suppression of science and personal freedoms, but is used as a weapon against enemies and a means of controlling technology and traversing obstacles, often directly modifying and rearranging objects in the world. It also pushes Robin toward her ultimate goal of fixing the broken world for good. Aston


Yakuza 0

92. Yakuza 0

This prequel faced the unenviable task of taking a decades-old abstruse Japanese series and making it accessible for the masses. Kazuma Kiryu and Goro Majima, important underworld figures later in the series, are introduced to us as a low-level recruit and disgraced outcast, respectively, from different organized crime syndicates. They’re pulled into a conspiracy after Kazuma is framed for murder and Goro rejects an assassination job after finding out that the target is a defenseless blind girl. Their captivating narratives come together in a larger plot brimming with sociopolitical intrigue about property development and clan territory. Think of Yakuza 0 as noir through the lens of ’80s Japan. Its gameplay simplifies the series’s complicated mechanics without limiting the player or compromising the variety in the details. One can take part in any manner of activities throughout the Tokyo and Osaka settings while progressing through the campaign, allowing the game to prove itself both as a compelling prequel to an ongoing series and as its own self-contained story. Aston


Dishonored

91. Dishonored

Arkane Studios’s 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 familiar, the game is enticing for the autonomy it offers players. Dishonored 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. Jeremy Winslow

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Gorogoa

90. Gorogoa

Gorogoa combines the abstract with the exact, sometimes requiring you to toy with painterly techniques (such as optical illusions) to progress. At first, it might seem frustrating that the solutions ot its puzzles are entirely within the box; you can move the game’s panels in a myriad of ways, but only a few arrangements will actually yield results. But what makes Gorogoa feel like far more than a paint-by-numbers affair is the elegance of those connections, the creative way in which the various elements combine to make something far greater than each individual part. In the game’s climax, the camera pans up a tower that shifts from a colorful structure to a grayish war-torn ruin to a scaffolded restoration until finally being whole again, signifying the process of rebirth without a single word. At the top of that tower, the boy you begin the game as dreams of the old man he becomes, or perhaps the wizened man remembers the child he once was. Which is to say that, as with so many of its puzzles, Gorogoa is content to be a matter of perspective. Riccio


Persona 5

89. Persona 5

The Persona series finally grew up in 2017, transcending its roots as a maudlin supernatural-themed high school simulator to become an absorbing allegory about young men and women becoming painfully aware of their place in society. Over the course of 100 hours, the game’s motley crew of high schoolers discover how powerless and just how powerful they truly are in the face of the world’s various harsh indignities. Throughout, their rebellion is all-encompassing and awe-inspiring; the game’s eye-popping red-and-black Pop-art typography and soulful acid-jazz soundtrack act as an artful middle finger to everyone daring to stand against the Phantom Thieves and what they believe in. Their newfound power in the Metaverse directly translates to genuine courage when the Thieves are faced with hard choices in the real world. For a series that has always been M-rated, Persona 5 represents the first work of maturity Atlus has ever created within it. Clark


Beeswing

88. Beeswing

Developer Jack King-Spooner’s games have always shared a provocative, hand-crafted quality that counters the polygon- and pixel-obsessed default of pop video games. But even his best work (Will You Ever Return? 2, Sluggish Morss: A Delicate Time in History) keeps the player at a distance for the purposes of philosophical and satirical contemplation. Beeswing bravely goes for the heart. King-Spooner reveals his rural Scottish origin through a journey in which memory and art express the real and the artificial as complementary forces, much like Federico Fellini’s Amarcord. The game concerns other people more than its creator, with King-Spooner’s mom establishing the moral core of being a sensitive neighbor who listens. The original soundtrack has an unusual willingness to acknowledge vulnerability from both a technical (you can hear deadened guitar notes that lack intentionality) and storytelling standpoint (pay attention to the scarily personal music that accompanies a surreal trip into the lonely mind of an elderly woman in a nursing home). If the gaming world doesn’t acknowledge and remember Beeswing, culture loses. Pressgrove


VVVVVV

87. VVVVVV

Terry Cavanagh’s mind-bending puzzle-platformer does so much with so very little. The protagonist, a smiley-faced blue sprite called Captain Viridian, can’t jump. What he can do is reverse the flow of gravity, shifting from ceiling to floor on a journey to rescue his crewmembers scattered throughout Dimension VVVVVV. Set to an astonishing chiptune soundtrack that could pass for lost Mega Man music, the game introduces new, often excruciatingly difficult spins on its simple concept as you bounce between strings, survive an onslaught of debris, and exit one side of the screen only to emerge on the opposite side. The challenges expand in scope and complexity, at first seeming to operate on a per-screen basis until they ask you to consider the obstacles that come immediately afterward. Your understanding of its mechanics constantly shifts and expands, as the deceptively lo-fi aesthetic masks so much depth and invention. Scaife

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Cibele

86. Cibele

Over the course of Cibele’s short, autobiographical narrative, creator Nina Freeman (who also plays a semi-fictionalized version of herself) captures the acute loneliness and pining of long-distance relationships with startling accuracy. Taking place entirely through a computer desktop and a simulated MMORPG, you sift through and inhabit the game but never quite become anything in the way a lot of games want you to role-play as the protagonist. You don’t choose Nina’s dialogue or who she loves. Instead, you watch, looking through chat logs and blog posts and selfies. At first, it’s so personal that your presence seems invasive, but it all quickly coalesces into a gateway to her feelings, plans, and desires. Cibele speaks to the way we can idealize our snapshots of who somebody is, how we communicate differently through a screen and the way we love things that are curated and presented to us. As the demands of the game mechanics melt away, all that’s left are those impulses to impress, to be seen, to be wanted. As snapshots of several brief moments in a life, few games are as evocative as this. Scaife


Rock Band 3

85. Rock Band 3

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 series hit its apex with Rock Band 3, the natural evolution of the series that introduced the keyboard to accompany the drums and guitars, and 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


Jazzpunk

84. Jazzpunk

It’s something of a disservice to disclose any part of the ludicrous Jazzpunk at all, since it’s so bursting with weird jokes and mechanics that are an absolute treat to discover. As a teasing expression of Cold War paranoia, it takes those anxieties to the absolute furthest, most absurd extreme. Calling this spy caper a cartoon doesn’t begin to convey its deep silliness, as you explore locales with cut-out hands, toss popcorn at moviegoers, photocopy your ass, access the pizza computer, and dial Satan on a rotary phone. You enter missions by inexplicably downing prescription medication. Though following in the footsteps of such indie classics as Thirty Flights of Loving, Jazzpunk dives so far into the weeds that it establishes a madcap language and rhythm all its own. Scaife


Everything is going to be OK

83. Everything is going to be OK

Everything is going to be OK is about picking up the pieces. And there are a lot of pieces. Nathalie Lawhead’s interactive zine first appears scattered to the winds, the pages totally disorganized while a discordant keyboard tune plays when you mouse over each one. Each one opens some interactive vignette populated by a squeaky rabbit, covering topics from navigating the expectations of others, to feeling alienated, to wanting to give up. It interrogates crushing despair, general disillusionment, and systemic abuse with dark, biting humor, employing Lawhead’s favored aesthetic of striking internet collage. It’s stuffed with strange, often hilarious little tangents: a friendship generator, a running “let’s play” commentary, a man trapped inside an application window, and a survey you must complete to access the vermin-eaten remains of the games folder. The antiquated applications are relics of yesteryear, the things we’ve tossed aside. In Lawhead’s hands, however, they become an act of defiance, a declaration that despite all we’ve been through, all we’ve been put through, we’re still here. Scaife

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Thumper

82. Thumper

While both Activision and Harmonix became grandfathers to a genre that has gone in wildly eclectic places over the last decade, it was only a matter of time before someone explored the outer, scarier reaches of what was possible with the genre. That someone—or someones—turned out to be Mark Flury and Brian Gibson. What they came back with was a rhythm game from hell. Thumper isn’t a game about putting popular tunes in the palm of your hand, or even making you dance. The music is abstract, mere snippets of a breakbeat, the hint of a hook. The soundscape as a whole is an ominous, atonal nightmare, the eldritch fanfare at the mouth of madness. And you’re a tiny, quicksilvery scarab, racing along a track at lightspeed, jumping or dodging obstacles to a deliberate rhythm that creates, somehow, the music that breaks the doors of perdition. It’s captivating and distressing, and beautiful in its malevolence, in a way no other game has managed to achieve that didn’t involve also grabbing a shotgun to kill whatever comes out of the gates. Clark


Alien Isolation

81. Alien Isolation

The surest sign that Alien: Isolation is something special is in the mere fact that Sigourney Weaver—staunchly hesitant to allow her likeness to be used in an Alien video game—signed on to both voice and star in it, along with the near entirety of the original film’s cast. But more than this, Creative Assembly’s work here captures the exact thing that has been missing from every attempt at an Alien game prior: the fear. There are no weapons, no flashing weakspots, no place of safety from the abominable threat that is Isolation’s Xenomorph. Once the alien appears, it’s a constant, gnawing, panic-inducing concern, while you, as Ellen Ripley’s rough-and-tumble daughter, must escape a claustrophobic and diabolically crafted labyrinth of pipes and sterile halls and airless vents. There are no shortcuts or respites to dealing with it; even saving your game makes just enough noise for the thing to take notice. There’s only the fear. Clark


Sunless Sea

80. Sunless Sea

There are, arguably, two categories of games. On one side are games of competence, whose pleasures derive from mastering their required skills and achieving success, measured by completing a stage, knocking out an opponent, or earning a place on the high score table. On the other side are games concerned with exploration, of a fictional world, a story, a concept. It’s a sliding scale, but Sunless Sea, firmly anchored in its farthest end, makes a binary opposition out of it. To properly play Failbetter’s masterpiece one needs to dismiss any thoughts of efficiency; permadeath should be mandatory and gaps between playthroughs measured in weeks, not hours. The break may hurt your grasp on the intricacies of naval combat tactics and the workings of Fallen London’s obscure economies, but is necessary for dull reality to filter out thoughts of cetacean husk forests, conspiracies in simian royal courts, and glowing colossi fleetingly glimpsed beneath the surface, lest their strangeness be diminished by overfamiliarity. Its literary prowess is well documented, but less often remarked upon is how stunningly visualized the submerged archipelago is. But Sunless Sea’s greatest achievement lies in the way words, images, and sounds, even in the rare occasions when they do echo something of prior experience, coalesce to create a universe as unique and otherworldly as it is consistent and persuasive. To a hopeful explorer, there’s no greater gift than the darkness beckoning outside of Fallen London. Alexander Chatziioannou


Oxenfree

79. Oxenfree

The teens of Oxenfree all have histories, and so does the spooky island where they’re trapped. And whatever that history is, it’s ripping holes in the fabric of reality, causing events to repeat and people to act unlike themselves. Through its rich characterization and poignant exploration of loss, Oxenfree already elevates what sounds like an all-too-familiar premise, but the innovative dialogue system is what truly sets it apart. While walking around, protagonist Alex chooses her dialogue responses (or lack thereof), even interrupting people outright for some of the most natural, free-flowing conversations the medium has yet seen. Through this system, Oxenfree foregrounds its focus on character interaction in ways that many other games leave to an afterthought, drawing you further into their relationships as well as their desperation. Scaife

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Just Cause 2

78. Just Cause 2

There’s something almost quaint about an open world simply being fun to inhabit and traverse. With the continued saturation of such games, the world itself has become incidental, a means to an end. But Just Cause 2 revels in the pure mayhem of traversal. Despite all the cars, helicopters, boats, and bikes lying around, the game’s single most exhilarating elements are the things that cartoonish protagonist Rico Rodriguez has on him at all times: a grappling hook and an inexplicably unlimited supply of parachutes. There are few greater pleasures than slingshotting into the air while deploying yet another parachute to make your escape, to carelessly and confidently skydiving off the side of a mountain, to tethering a bad guy to a rocketing propane tank. Rico’s fall can somehow be broken by grappling toward the ground even faster. Nothing in Just Cause 2 makes a lick of sense, and it’s impossible to imagine it any other way. Scaife


Butterfly Soup

77. Butterfly Soup

Brianna Lei’s visual novel practically overflows with warmth as it celebrates close friends and the giddy discovery of love. The romantic comedy follows four queer Asian-American girls in Oakland, California as they join a high school baseball club while dealing with things in the background like overbearing parents, perceived gender norms, homophobia, and racism. But Butterfly Soup mostly focuses on how the friend group offers a kind of shelter from an outside storm. It expresses this through a vibrant, lovable cast of distinct characters: Sporty, socially anxious Diya and knife-toting Min-seo develop their long-budding romance, both of them supported by quirky Akarsha and snarky Noelle. You feel their joy, through in-jokes and pet names and, in one wondrous moment, the playfully incorrect translations of the language snippets they teach to each other. Butterfly Soup is about the necessity of finding a supportive place to be messy and uncertain, and it celebrates how relationships can buoy us when we need it most. Scaife


FTL: Faster Than Light

76. FTL: Faster Than Light

FTL: Faster Than Light wasn’t the first game to graft roguelike elements onto another genre, but its procedurally generated space adventure is still one of the most thrilling executions of its core principles. Through its different exploration nodes, the game lends itself to skin-of-the-teeth storytelling like no other. While you play from an omniscient perspective, each run provides different weapons, gadgets, crewmembers, and resources in order to fight or flee through the unforgiving cosmos. As you divert power based on ship needs, lock doors to keep problems from spreading, frantically repair damage, and open airlocks to put out fires (or suffocate invaders), FTL reveals itself as not just a fantastic roguelike, but one of the most outright satisfying simulations of space combat. Scaife


Overwatch

75. Overwatch

Overwatch is a game that succeeds in spite of itself. There’s nothing inherently special about Yet Another Multiplayer Shooter, especially one so profoundly threadbare in terms of modes of play compared to its peers. Yet, like Team Fortress 2 before it, the game is an incredible triumph due to the world built around it. It’s a place of bountiful color, dizzying heights, and wide-eyed, uncynical heroes, defined by the smallest interactions between its wildly diverse cast of characters at any given moment during gameplay. To switch characters in Overwatch is to play an entirely different game every single time, with an entirely new story and gameplay. The only truly common thread in each match is the ever-present need for teamwork, where killing the most players might help, but still represents a path to failure without a group of compatriots willing to sacrifice glory for the greater goal. This is the first-person multiplayer shooter at its inclusionary best. Clark

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Hyper Light Drifter

74. Hyper Light Drifter

It’s tempting to call Hyper Light Drifter a clone, as its world design—a town surrounded by four monster- and puzzle-saturated areas—heavily recalls that of The Legend of Zelda: Majora’s Mask. But rather than tell a concrete legend, creator Alex Preston imbues his adventure with impressions about the impermanence and unfairness of life. The anthropomorphic characters speak in images, with many of them depicting violent ethnic discrimination in a nod to Art Spiegelman’s Maus. These pictures stick in the back of your mind as you traverse brightly colored environments full of nonlinear and hidden paths, the pixelations of the graphics encouraging a conflicted perception of beauty and fragility. As in any good action game, learning how to utilize techniques to survive the advances of antagonists comes with pleasure, but this satisfaction is counterbalanced by the blood your protagonist coughs up and drips as you take damage. Even if you conquer everything and discover all of its secrets, Hyper Light Drifter is ultimately a tough reminder of the fleeting and surreal nature of existence. Pressgrove


Metro 2033

73. Metro 2033

Many first-person shooters toy with the idea of atmospheric horror, but few commit to it as heavily as Metro 2033, which turns Russian railway stations into the last bastion for humans driven underground by polluted air and monstrous creatures. Ammo, which in military form doubles as currency, is often scarce, and weapons are either slow to reload or need to be manually, pneumatically charged. And then there’s your gas mask, which not only restricts your vision with fogging breath, but also comes with a strict time limit that’s based on the number of air filters you’ve recovered. Protagonist Artyom is always vulnerable but never more so than when so encumbered; your mask can and will break, after which death is only just around the corner. Survive all of that, of course, and you may discover that the worst horrors of all aren’t those skittering around the dark tunnels, but the poor folk struggling to survive in the unforgiving light of those overcrowded Metro stations. Riccio


SpaceChem

72. SpaceChem

The beauty of visual engineering games, of which SpaceChem remains the best, is in their open-ended elegance. There’s no set solution to any given level; players are simply instructed to reach an end-state, by any means necessary. For some, that means creating horribly inefficient contraptions that slowly wend their way to completion; for others, that creates the leeway for staggeringly intricate machines that rotate or bond the individual atoms in a contraption multiple times in ways that seem unnecessary but achieve optimal results. Fittingly, then, SpaceChem goes above and beyond simple logic gates, each new puzzle expanding the array of options and tasks: Where you might at first be given inputs, later levels might require multiple steps in which you use the outputs of one reactor to fuel another, or send a product looping back through a pipeline in order to fuse it, creating something entirely new. Each level is a lesson in the beauty of science, and those who manage to reach a solution may find themselves quoting Jesse Pinkman as they shout in triumph: “Yeah, science bitches!” Riccio


Assault Android Cactus

71. Assault Android Cactus

Developer Witch Beam’s Assault Android Cactus is one of the most emotional shooters of all time. The game supercharges the drama of destroying the hundreds of foes that pour into any given level by requiring you, amid all the constant repositioning, to look out for power-ups that recharge your dying battery. Other design choices further suggest a rebellious vision of the genre. A couple of the nine selectable characters don’t fire bullets, demanding one to rethink how to carve out paths in claustrophobic situations. For most playable heroes, a dodge move is automatically initiated before and after you fire a secondary weapon that must charge back up for another shot, forcing unusual foresight for evasion. These innovations come packaged with brilliant work by musician Jeff van Dyck, who, when your battery runs out, punctuates your failure with a five-minute song that makes ample use of AutoTune, campily and convincingly expressing the pathos of a defeated robotic hero: “I’m not half the droid I used to be. I’m not half the droid I want to be.” Pressgrove

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Child of Eden

70. Child of Eden

Developer Tetsuya Mizuguchi has always pursued an aesthetic of the digital spiritual, finding transcendent beauty in vector math. In Child of Eden, he leaps past his previous games with an unprecedented visual fusion of the technological and the organic. This game will rightly be compared to synaesthetic masterpieces like Rez or Space Invaders Extreme, but it equally merits comparison to games like Zeno Clash or Final Fantasy XII, in which the appeal is a guided tour through a world you’ve never imagined, where it’s hard to say if you’re on water, land, or air, and where glowing whales sprout bioluminescent cacti among many other gorgeous and strange sights. In recent years, there’s been a resurgence of interest in the rail-shooter genre, as developers explore its capacity for immersive cinematic experiences—not to mention its easy adaptation to motion control. But Child of Eden does those action-movie simulators one better by taking you someplace you’ve never been and then delivering the best acid trip you’ll ever book. Daniel McKleinfeld


Saints Row IV

69. Saints Row IV

The natural evolution of the hyperactive, subversive Saints Row series is superpowers: With Saints Row IV, the “auto” part of what was once a mere Grand Theft Auto clone is no longer relevant because the player can run faster than all of the cars. Going even further off the grid than the previous series entries, the game makes the protagonist the president of the United States, then blow up the Earth and relocate the Third Street Saints to a dystopian cyberscape run by aliens. Saints Row IV retains the inventive RPG elements and enjoyable mission/side-mission structure of the series while giving players the ability to shoot fire from their hands. The result is addictively anarchic entertainment, in which the chaotic freedom of the open world gameplay is matched with smart, funny writing and occasional pot shots at other popular video games. I have no idea where Saints Row can go from here, but I can’t wait to find out. Aston


Wolfenstein: The New Order

68. Wolfenstein: The New Order

For an over-the-top action-packed alternative-history game in which you face off against Nazis and their robotic schnauzers in their lunar base, the meat and potatoes of Wolfenstein: The New Order’s narrative isn’t only down to earth, it’s downright emotionally affecting. One level’s antics are interrupted by the rigor of abruptly taking an ethnic purity test at gunpoint; another has you infiltrating a concentration camp, with the game slowing things down long enough so as to ensure that the squalid circumstances and abject humiliations you’re made to experience aren’t exploitative. The nail-biting stealth mechanics and satisfying gunplay are just fine, and the diverse settings (within a U-boat, in a museum dedicated to Nazi victories, traveling along the seabed) keep things fresh, but the horrors of this thankfully avoided timeline are what stay with you. Riccio


Cart Life

67. Cart Life

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. 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

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Hypnospace Outlaw

66. Hypnospace Outlaw

Hypnospace Outlaw conjures up an entire internet, circa 1999, populated by overly busy GeoCities-like pages, Tamagotchi-like virtual pets that poop all over your screen, and a mix of chiptunes and a fictitious electronic subgenre called Haze. As an enforcer, your job is to crack down on copyright infringement and illegal downloads, but the gameplay’s cross between Papers Please and Pony Island constantly throws narrative out the window by taking you down delightfully written rabbit holes, like a site dedicated to horror film descriptions, the fantasy-themed Sanderverse, and the weird history of anti-communist artist W. E. Briggs. The content of these sites is fictional, but the need to connect shared by their creators—angsty teens, lonely veterans, and scam artists—hits close to home. The awkwardly immersive—and immersively awkward—design of everything, right down to the tab-unfriendly HypnOS browser, is gaming’s equivalent of the slow food movement, requiring a deliberateness and investment from players that’s rarely as rewarding as it is here. Riccio


Super Smash Bros. Ultimate

65. Super Smash Bros. Ultimate

Conventional logic says that a game as enormous as Super Smash Bros. Ultimate should be collapsing under its own weight like a dying star. It feels like the Mr. Creosote of video games, a title almost disgustingly distended with content. The series roster has grown enormous beyond belief, and already another announced DLC character—Joker from Persona 5—threatens to be the wafer-thin mint that makes the whole thing explode. And yet, it’s undeniable that the title lives up to its name beyond anyone’s wildest imagination. Not just an all-inclusive compilation of nearly every piece of content from its predecessors, Super Smash Bros. Ultimate uses standard Smash Bros. fight mechanics as the foundation for a full-blown RPG. It also beefs up the series’s familiar Classic single player romp from being a bunch of random fights with LittleBigPlanet-style recreations of entire games and their most iconic moments. Even after cramming in everything you’ve ever seen in a Smash Bros. game, Nintendo still has a plethora of surprises to spring on the player—tiny delights waiting to be unlocked hundreds of hours down the road for any player of any skill level. Clark


Little Inferno

64. Little Inferno

Little Inferno transcends its cyclical mobile-game-like trappings by subversively putting a deeper purpose back into the insignificant act of ordering objects from a catalogue, waiting for them to arrive, and then immediately burning them. Superficially, you’re earning money and collecting achievements by combining specific items in your pyre, but really, the act of coming up with tenuous connections between these otherwise meaningless objects serves to spark the imagination. With no way to interact with the world save by depositing each new delivery into your fireplace, the smallest bits of humanity—letters from a friendly neighbor—serve to warm the solitary protagonist and stave off loneliness. As you’ll discover in the game’s heartbreaking, Twilight Zone-like coda (which takes on an entirely different genre), Little Inferno is asking you to burn it all down but respects that the decision to do so cannot be an easy one. Riccio


Severed

63. Severed

It wasn’t terribly long ago that tech/gaming bloggers preached of the end of the console gaming world as we know it, and that the sword of Damocles would have the App Store logo engraved on it. Severed, in a strange sort of way, feels like the ultimate in thumbed noses to that doomsaying, taking a very mobile-game concept—an RPG where you slay enemies by slashing their limbs off using the touchscreen—and not just adding a console game’s depth and artistry, but using the framework to tell a deeply affecting tale about loss and grief. It’s a delicate balance to strike, but DrinkBox Studios, fresh off the firmly tongue-in-cheek Guacamelee!, makes it seem effortless, like this is the kind of RPG we get all the time, instead of a beautifully innovative gem, one that might very well be the last of its kind. Clark

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Xenoblade Chronicles

62. Xenoblade Chronicles

Yes, the Nintendo Wii only gave us a handful of bona-fide masterstrokes, but each and every one of them is a game that doubtlessly invites multiple replays. How suitable is it that the Wii’s tenable swan song also single-handedly revitalized the vintage JRPG subgenre? Xenoblade Chronicles, like fellow 2012 JRPG revivalist Final Fantasy XIII-2, cleverly uses the thematic components of shifting destinies and humankind versus higher powers as a way to depict the oscillating mental states of its central characters. Across the last decade, few heroes were as fleshed out as 18-year-old sword-swinger Shulk and his ragtag group of Mechon-battlers. Writer-director Tetsuya Takahashi (Xenogears, Xenosaga) has been in this market for quite a while, and 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 boundlessly beautiful, challenging, emotionally gripping, and most distinguishably of all, effortlessly transporting. Mike LeChevallier


SOMA

61. SOMA

Perhaps no other game on this list is as flawed as SOMA: A redundant first act, a collection of laughably inept enemies, and an array of technical issues congeal into a rather unfavorable first impression. Still, as everyman Simon Jarrett descends into the depths of a seemingly empty underwater research base, forced unease is gradually replaced by silent awe at the haunting beauty of this new environment and the journey expands inwardly to reflect his own growing self-awareness. The whole process stands as a metaphor for something that becomes clear soon enough. But just like our oblivious protagonist, we’re too busy disregarding the piling evidence, even while too fascinated to abandon a quest that will inevitably lead us to the truth that already resonates in the scale, the emptiness, the sheer unfathomable fortitude of an alien world utterly indifferent to our existence. There’s no god waiting at the end of Simon’s dark night of the soul, only a simple, unbearable realization on the nature of being. That, and the darkest, most shocking twist in recent memory on any medium. Be patient with its faults and grateful for its cruelty: SOMA will cleanse you. Chatziioannou


Driver: San Francisco

60. Driver: San Francisco

Driver never had the cultural street cred as the other big crime-game-on-wheels franchise that hit around the same time, Grand Theft Auto, and once Grand Theft Auto III sent Rockstar into the stratosphere, all Driver could seemingly offer was a fraction of the same experience, and with a duller script. That is, until Driver: San Francisco saw the series taking a hard left turn into absolute chaos. The game not only injects a desperately needed dose of levity and self-awareness into a needlessly dour series, it spikes it with a dose of the supernatural. Here, Tanner gets into an accident during a chase that sends him into a coma, from which he can possess any of San Francisco’s citizens when they’re behind the wheel of a vehicle, and drive it like he stole it. With all attempts at modern street cred completely demolished, the game sees Driver finally getting out of its own way to thoroughly mine all the fun inherent in its premise, with all the fatal consequences of driving around at ridiculous speeds taken out of the equation. It was a risk, and the kind of risk that a developer should think about when making a game that’s really about little more than smashing cars together. Clark


Anatomy

59. Anatomy

As you walk around a dark house listening to tapes, Kitty Horrorshow’s Anatomy taps into an instinctual, almost childlike terror. It locates that long-ago feeling where you wake up in the middle of the night and stumble to the bathroom as quick as you possibly can, eyes forward, trying not to think about the darkness around you. The game hisses into your ear that nowhere is safe, escalating its glitchy imagery until the smallest abstractions give way to something truly frightening, a gut-level unease that rattles your soul. On-screen messages ominously alert you to where tapes are located until the words grow distorted, until the house itself seems to warp unnaturally around recorded messages that deteriorate as they play. Everything about Anatomy burrows into your head: the devices that won’t shut off, the sweating meat thing, the windows that aren’t there, the gnarled textures and the grotesque portraits. This house has teeth. Scaife

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DmC: Devil May Cry

58. DmC: Devil May Cry

Of all the things that required rebooting in the Devil May Cry franchise, one could argue that its original protagonist would be relatively low on that tabulation. Yet developer Ninja Theory went ahead and did so anyway, morphing the dapper, white-haired, silver-tongued Dante into a brooding brunette slacker who simply doesn’t give a fuck unless it’s absolutely necessary. Shockingly, their plan, initially met with much face-palming when details of the game were made public, worked. The backbone of DmC: Devil May Cry’s magnificence is its amplification of the demon-hunter extraordinaire’s character flaws, and in a strange and mystifying sort of way, the game taps into what it’s like to be the black sheep in a profoundly dysfunctional family. The Dante of this game is inherently an asshole, to be sure, but his motivations are gradually made clear in a spotlight that isn’t forceful or trite. He’s haunted by his past, but instead of dwelling on his demons he ruthlessly slaughters the ones that stand in the way of personal salvation. An admirable cause, for a no-good half-hellspawn punk. LeChevallier


Mortal Kombat

57. Mortal Kombat

Besides the superb HD graphics, spectacular gore, a great “best-of” character roster, and an excellent online component, NetherRealm Studios’s glorious reboot of iconic fighter franchise Mortal Kombat really transcends its competitors with an engaging, fully fledged story mode, retelling the narrative from the first three series entries from multiple perspectives. Beloved characters are dismembered and maimed in a lengthy, clever campaign with actual weight—a first for a fighting game. Borrowing and fine-tuning mechanics from current 2D fighting games, Mortal Kombat is accessible for those new to the genre but also deep enough to engage diehard fans. The extreme nature of the violence pushes buttons, as it should, but the game is both fun to play and fun to watch. Complete with a compelling Challenge Tower and extras alongside a traditional arcade mode, Mortal Kombat is not just an amazing fighting game, but maybe the finest in the series. Aston


That Dragon, Cancer

56. That Dragon, Cancer

Although the 14 vignettes in That Dragon, Cancer are uneven in quality, everything is undeniably personal in Ryan and Amy Green’s game, which details the struggle with their young boy Joel’s fatal fight with cancer. That Dragon, Cancer could have easily been a one-dimensional expression of sadness and grief or a simple call for pity. Instead, among sentiments of frustration, despair, doubt, resignation, and even hatred, the couple holds true to their Christian belief that God’s grace should shape one’s perception of circumstances, not the other way around. The sequence where you can light candles to hear different people asking God to have mercy on Joel is the most moving spiritual moment in games since the worldwide prayer in the final battle of Earthbound. Unlike that classic RPG, That Dragon, Cancer doesn’t seem to end in victory, yet a paradox in the final vignette cements the Greens’ unwavering message and place in video-game history: “And the air is emptier without his laugh, and yet our hearts are still full.” Pressgrove


No Man’s Sky

55. No Man’s Sky

There are three versions of No Man’s Sky: the one Hello Games hyped up, the one gamers expected, and the one we got. Only one of those versions matters, and it’s the one devoid of the expectations of the mob. It’s the one Sean Murray and his team built for years, a world-birthing engine of infinite exploration and possibility. It’s a game that feels vast, infinite, and somehow so small and limiting. And yet, the Herculean achievement of creating a nigh-seamless universe teeming with not just life but ways to live cannot be denied. An international team of hundreds could’ve made No Man’s Sky palatable and easy, or made gunplay a priority. Instead, it’s a beautifully massive game that serves no other master than presenting the means and resources to explore an unending universe. There’s no other video game that so intrinsically trusts and nurtures the great human need to be in the stars than this. Clark

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Night in the Woods

54. Night in the Woods

There’s a single image late into Night in the Woods that seems like the perfect metaphorical encapsulation of America in 2017: a group of ignorant, stubborn, and proud coal miners on one side of the screen; a group of resentful, struggling, but unerringly hopeful millennials on the other. In between, a chasm leading to an abyss from which not even light can escape. The chasm is everything in Night in the Woods. It’s the bewilderment of why an intelligent liberal would stay in a conservative backwater town. It’s the argument over breakfast over why parents make the choices they do for their children. It’s the realization of how little your upbringing prepares you for the larger world. It’s even in recognizing the divide between every person on Earth and the lurking eldritch gods beyond our understanding. Somehow, all of this is contained in a game that looks and acts less like J.D. Salinger writing a Lovecraft novel than it does a Richard Scarry adaptation of Scott Pilgrim vs. the World. Clark


Rayman Legends

53. Rayman Legends

Rayman Legends is like that really weird and wonderful dream you had last night, the one you can only half-remember. To help keep things straight, Michel Ancel has given Rayman an exceedingly solid platform to stand on—literally, the game’s a platformer—and thrown every other rule out the window. Perhaps Rayman becomes a duck in this level. Maybe his aide, Murphy, can be used to throw up temporary guacamole platforms or to eat a path through a giant, reconstituting birthday cake. How about a sequence that’s perfectly choreographed to a remix of “Eye of the Tiger”? The game’s relentlessly wacky and inventive: the medieval world has an entirely different feel from the undersea one (which throws in spy mechanics); tapping Greek mythology is merely interesting, whereas a Dia de los Muertos theme is eclectic. With the constant addition of new content in daily/weekly challenges, appearance of timed (and super-challenging) invasion levels, and inclusion of levels from Rayman Origins, Legends easily lives up to its name. Riccio


Zero Escape: Virtue’s Reward

52. Zero Escape: Virtue’s Last Reward

As out-of-the-blue magnificent as 999: Nine Hours, Nine Persons, Nine Doors was, Chunsoft’s spiritual successor, Zero Escape: Virtue’s Last Reward, outdoes their previous claustrophobic gem in a variety of ways. For one, it implements a deviously magnetic show-not-tell method of creeping-evil storytelling, giving the player as few narrative details and enigma-solving hints as possible, applying its around-the-corner surprises as strenuously earned gifts. Secondly, Virtue’s Last Reward uses its closeted setting to its full advantage; its labyrinthine warehouse backdrop exudes grimly atmospheric flourishes at every opportunity, making the replica steamship from 999 seem like a bum vacation by comparison. While the game’s prime mover, Sigma, might not be a more appealing main character than 999’s mutable Junpei, each participant in the treacherous Nonary Game is well-rounded and believable in their plights, causing their successes and downfalls to resonate as profoundly as that of an IRL companion’s. LeChevallier


Tales from the Borderlands

51. Tales from the Borderlands

The stark contrast between the Borderlands FPS titles and Telltale Games’s adventure-game magnum opus is encapsulated by the music in its opening credits. Where Borderlands uses down-and-dirty soul to remind you that you’re the bad guy and to go out and get as much swag as you can, Tales from the Borderlands’s opening needle drops evolve over its five episodes from money-making R&B to spacey, soulful laments to the loss of friends, and the need for us to become better people so as to get them back. It’s almost miraculous what Telltale does with Gearbox’s aggressively cynical cash cow. The greed and homicidal mirth at the series’s core shifts into unerring positivity and lightness across 10 hours, delivering just the right amount of biting sarcasm, madcap physical comedy, and high-speed treasure-hunting adventure along the way. It’s helped, more than anything, by Telltale doing what they do best: crafting characters worth caring about, and who actually grow even more endearing or compelling with time. The worst scumbag in Tales from the Borderlands gets an affecting moment of vulnerability. The sweetest, most unerringly wonderful character in the game finds themselves in the deepest peril of all. Having such total control over both situations is an absolute joy. It’s just about as perfect as a game narrative can get. Clark

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Subnautica

50. Subnautica

Subnautica’s open world, an expansive ocean on an alien planet, is frightening and mesmerizing in equal measure. As a survivor of a water landing, you must manage your oxygen wisely as you delve deeper into a sea full of never-before-seen life. As you uncover resources from caverns, long coral tubes, ship wreckage, and more, you will create more sophisticated forms of technology that can help you advance the game’s unobtrusive story or grant you access to the darkest corners of the underwater setting. No stretch of water in video game history has offered such an enlivening and humbling experience, from when you first lay eyes on the majestic alien equivalent of a whale to when you struggle to swim to the surface on zero oxygen. Drowning in Subnautica leads to an existentially provocative moment, as the protagonist’s slowly fading sight is so convincing that you might find yourself believing that you’re crossing over, in an unexpectedly peaceful fashion, to an undiscovered dimension. Pressgrove


Marvel’s Spider-Man

49. Marvel’s Spider-Man

With Marvel’s Spider-Man, Insomniac Games taught us the crucial difference between inhabiting a superhero and actually being one. Heroes rarely get to relate to the people they save on a personal level. In gaming, it’s even rarer to see a hero who saves a specific person’s day for no reward, and in ways that don’t involve breaking bones. Video games excel at letting players wield great power, while ignoring the great responsibility that comes with that. Marvel’s Spider-Man, miraculously, excels at both. As breathtaking and awesomely kinetic as it feels for Spider-Man to swing through Manhattan before taking out bad guys in a wild death-defying mid-air dance, the game’s most daring feat is when the acrobatics take a sidestep to poignancy and humanity. The inherent coolness of being Spider-Man never overwhelms the portrayal of every character as human beings trying desperately to accept or transcend their problems, their sworn duty, even their mortality, and Peter Parker showing nearly infinite empathy in coping with his and their mistakes. Spider-Man, the webslinger, is cool. Spider-Man, friend of an entire city, is phenomenal. Clark


Rez Infinite

48. Rez Infinite

The original Rez, like most of what came out for the ill-fated Dreamcast, was a game so drastically ahead of its time that it might as well have time-traveled back from 2016, when Rez Infinite hit. The game isn’t only a space shooter taking place in a timelessly cool technological utopia, but one with a rhythm element, where letting the treble and bass move you is literally the only way to succeed. Rez Infinite isn’t just the most polished and visually audacious version of that experience, where modern consoles had finally caught up to Tetsuya Mizoguchi’s ambitions, but also the evolutionary apex of that experience, taking the entire thing into virtual reality. Rez in VR by itself would be among the most breathtaking experiences to be had in a headset, but the new level, Area X, is a masterpiece. It’s a wide-open cataclysm of light and sound and stars that suggests nothing short of giving the Beyond the Infinite sequence from 2001: A Space Odyssey the EDM treatment. If Rez felt like a glimpse of the future, Rez Infinite made us feel as if we actually lived there. Clark


GRIS

47. GRIS

At the heart of GRIS is the idea of recovering from anguish through coping strategies and empathy. As the game commences, a girl has undergone some kind of devastating trauma. Then, the player avatar, Gris, falls through the world and into a derelict and hopeless place devoid of color. A first, Gris can barely walk, her movements seemingly encumbered by her psychological tolls, but she perseveres through barren wastes to find a monument where she restores the first ounce of color to the world and gains the ability to jump. From here, each wordless and strikingly artful section of GRIS symbolizes a different aspect of dealing with a psychological trauma, which is represented here by predatory animals that manifest from black ink. Crushing depression is exemplified by gray colors and empty landscapes, which Gris brings color and form back to as she helps others, as well as reforms the girl’s fractured psyche. That the narrative is intentionally ambiguous is important, as the game would not have the universal appeal that it does if it only dealt with a specific traumatic event. GRIS is a triumph of deeply affecting interactive poetry. Aston

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Remember Me

46. Remember Me

Usually, the trajectory of a developer is to start out making something small that proves they have the ideas to move on to the AAA big leagues. Dontnod Entertainment went the opposite direction. It took a massive financial flop on Capcom’s dime to show them they didn’t need AAA. That flop, however, is still a unique and utterly enthralling game in its own right. Where your average beat ‘em up lets the player simply smash buttons till enemies fall over and die, Remember Me demands that you consider whether the side effect of each button press was what you needed. Where most games of its time used climbing and platforming simply to transition from one killzone to the next, Remember Me tells a story of urban stratification and corporate-sponsored eugenics in every environment. And where the story in such games is disposable at best, Remember Me’s big hook involves the physical manipulation and alteration of memories, a gimmick that would show up elsewhere, but never as artfully done as here. Clark


Pathologic 2

45. Pathologic 2

Pathologic 2 is a hand around your throat. Few games have so vividly bottled despair and desperation, asking you to cast aside any and all preconceptions about what to value in a video game as you examine what you’re willing to hoard and what to peddle to save your skin. And fewer still do it with such overpowering, nightmarish style, at once theatrical and dreamlike. To be sure, the game, from the Russian-based Ice-Pick Lodge, requires some getting used to, but with the difficulty modifiers added since its initial release, the only real obstacle toward learning the nuances of its world have fallen away; the modifiers make it much easier to get into the game, without compromising the sense of place or misery. Pathologic 2 is a game built to cut you open and show you your soul, brimming with so many thrilling turns away from traditional game design that if it doesn’t become an instructive text, the medium will only be poorer for it. Scaife


The Witness

44. The Witness

Jonathan Blow’s long-awaited sequel to his 2008 indie megahit Braid is a puzzle game powered by ideology, a series of conundrums designed to inspire real-life note-taking and challenge your geometric savvy. The Witness can be as difficult as any game released this decade, all-consuming in its mystery, eating up hours and hours of your time with its demanding and exacting logic. And while this love letter to the power of knowledge and science might come off a tad smug in its hyper-rationalist worldview, the cumulative effect of its swaths of mind-melting riddles ultimately serves as a complete portrait of its creator himself: beguiling and enigmatic but thoroughly appealing nonetheless. Steven Wright


Life Is Strange

43. Life Is Strange

Equal parts My So-Called Life and Donnie Darko, mixed with a very special brand of nostalgia familiar to anyone who played DONTNOD’s prior Remember Me. That’s Life Is Strange in a nutshell, and it would be special just for being that. Where Life Is Strange transcends the sum of its parts is in its ability to tap into such a universal teenage need to be able to step back and take every decision, every word unsaid, every stupid argument with a loved one, every reckless act with a friend who’s a bad influence, everything about being a teenager that one regrets later, and rewind to take the unexamined path. Max Caulfield’s specific experience as a kid attending a fairly exclusive boarding school may not be universal, but the experience of being a teenager who still hasn’t figured out what kind of person she wants to be in the world yet is nigh-ubiquitous. Being able to look at one such teenager’s life and make decisions in her stead with hindsight as a very real gameplay mechanic is powerful, and entirely unique for this medium. Even despite the looming supernatural threat at the plot’s center, Life Is Strange gives its adolescent experience all the import and empathy it deserves. Clark

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Octahedron

42. Octahedron

Octahedron is a rave in video game form. Here, you create your own platforms as you attempt to climb shafts filled with electric neon obstacles and viral creatures that scrabble about on their glowing fibrous legs shooting sound waves at you. Each level adds some new interpretation of the electronic soundtrack’s thumping beat, layering on the complexity until you’re contending with missile-launching turrets spinning in unison, avoiding platform-eating piranha plants, or manipulating blocky speaker-like cannons so that their streams of sound no longer block your path. This synesthetic experience feels like a close cousin to that of rhythm games, though Octahedron affords the player more freedom, since you’re restricted only by the number of platforms you can create before needing to land on a fixed surface. Hypnotically satisfying, the game is the song you can’t—and don’t—want to get out of your head. Riccio


P.T.

41. P.T.

Both Guillermo del Toro and Hideo Kojima were quick to mention when P.T.’s big secret was out that it was little more than a warning shot, a living statement of intent for the next Silent Hill, and that the game we’ll get in a few years won’t be directly tied to this in any way. If P.T. is little more than a high-water mark Kojima and del Toro set for themselves, then wish them luck if they want to top what is the most aggressively fierce assertion of pure horror in an interactive medium. Each run around P.T.’s unsettling Moebius strip of a house brings something new, something unknowable, something unpredictable, and something unforgettably malevolent. This isn’t horror you kill with a shotgun. This isn’t a place you negotiate with. This is inescapable horror that entraps, crushes, and oppresses. In less than 60 minutes, P.T. accomplishes what nearly every horror game prior spend hours never achieving. Clark


Spelunky

40. Spelunky

Playing Spelunky HD often seems like a quest to find out how many different ways you can die as an explorer of underground tunnels. 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 HD 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


Fallout: New Vegas

39. Fallout: New Vegas

The follow-up to Bethesda’s Fallout revival is a study in contrasts, a game with the same first-person scavenger template but the confidence of Obsidian Entertainment, a studio founded by people who worked on the original series. Rather than waking up in another post-apocalyptic Vault shelter facing familiar foes, you’re an ill-fated courier in a wasteland of weirdos. It’s a much richer, more complex game that, in the wake of Fallout 4, feels like a sort of alternate timeline from the all-in-one playthroughs that Bethesda’s style began to emphasize. It’s a game that rewards specialization, that pushes for ambiguity and difficult choices in its moral morass of squabbling factions in the ruins of the old world. Though maligned for technical issues on release, as mods have plugged a lot of the game’s holes in the intervening years, New Vegas has gone on to be deservedly recognized as a genre classic, and perhaps the apex of this role-playing style since The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind. Scaife

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Hotline Miami

38. Hotline Miami

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; 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


Alan Wake

37. Alan Wake

Alan Wake had its work cut out from the beginning, calling its shot as the unholy hybrid of the darker elements of Twin Peaks and the steadily building human dread of the best Stephen King novels. And Remedy proved itself more than up to the task. The actual horror elements of this horror game are enormously effective—particularly as the endgame ramps up, and the threat shifts from the creepy things that go bump in the night to the unknowable things that live between worlds—but the build-up would mean absolutely nothing if the game hadn’t given such weight to the character work first, a collection of eclectic personalities and small-town oddballs that all have to reckon with the unknown at one point or another. All of that is the glue holding together an elegant take on the Silent Hill formula. But the weapons and tools that would keep you alive and walking in Silent Hill are nearly useless in Alan Wake. Here, the only friend you have is light, and putting the simple fear of the dark back into jaded modern audiences is an artful stroke. Clark


Inside

36. Inside

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. Wright


Shovel Knight

35. Shovel Knight

You could say that Shovel Knight came out of nowhere to become one of its year’s most memorable independent titles, but that would be doing it a bit of an injustice. Sure, this was relatively unknown company Yacht Club Games’ first project, but they needed a successful Kickstarter campaign in order to get it off the ground. After a brief preview, donors from all walks of life believed in the end goal enough to make ample contributions, reaching almost quintuple the initial $75,000 target. With the funds they required and then some, the creative team was able to put together an immaculate homage to NES groundbreakers like Mario Bros., Castlevania, DuckTales, and Mega Man. The core DNA of Shovel Knight is composed of vintage charisma, but the game still manages to feel stunningly contemporary. A sort of 8-bit Dark Souls, its numerous challenges will have your stress level skyrocketing, but it’s a beguiling tension you can’t help but return to time and time again. LeChevallier

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Baba Is You

34. Baba Is You

A puzzler in which the player manipulates the rules of each level by forming short phrases with movable words, Baba Is You turns programming syntax into inventive and peculiar fun. Crabs can be refashioned into keys, the player can move a wall by literally becoming it, and the winning condition for a stage can, and often must, be reimagined. Finnish developer Arvi Teikari gives his game a nervous audiovisual aesthetic; every object pulsates to a quirky synth-laden soundtrack, hinting at the transformations that are about to occur. Some of the player’s attempted solutions can be adventures unto themselves, leading to reconfigurations that exude a wacky charm despite not translating to success. On other levels, the creative possibilities are limited because of sentences that cannot be split apart, requiring more heavy thought from the player about what can be done to advance. Baba Is You’s alternation between experimentation and brain-stumping logic makes it as compelling and challenging as any puzzle-based game this year. Pressgrove


Super Meat Boy

33. Super Meat Boy

Edmund McMillen and Tommy Refenes’s platforming classic exploded onto the indie scene in 2010, all but mastering the form through precise controls, devious level design, a staggering level count, and a brilliant Danny Baranowsky soundtrack. Meat Boy is perpetually dwarfed by buzzsaws, lasers, and cannons in his quest to rescue Bandage Girl from Dr. Fetus, the challenges always near-insurmountable. And despite its quick restarts, the secret of Super Meat Boy is how much it leans into the difficulty, splattering the world with the squishy red paste marking all the places where Meat Boy has traveled and, inevitably, died. Upon finally reaching the end, the attempts all replay at once, each Meat Boy faltering until one reaches the finish, triumphant. It’s hard as hell to complete these levels, and no matter how punishing things may seem in the moment, the game’s ultimate celebration of that effort is what makes it so fulfilling. Scaife


Batman: Arkham City

32. Batman: Arkham City

Batman is an icon that finally received a just video-game treatment with Rocksteady’s classic Batman: Arkham Asylum. That Metroid-esque action-adventure title utilized its gothic environment to full effect. It’s even-better sequel, Batman: Arkham City, could have turned out to be just an open-world expansion of its predecessor’s formula. Thankfully, it’s anything but that. Exploring Gotham City’s quarantined ghetto is the game. The Dark Knight runs across snowy rooftops, dive-bombs off a gargoyle, only to grapple onto a shady-looking factory up ahead. Sure, there’s the formula of hitting a waypoint, entering a building, fighting through a horde of goons, and rumbling with a boss. The sinew between those familiar muscles is where Arkham City succeeds. Chase after every Riddler trophy or uncover Azrael’s furtive subplot. Or, just explore for exploration’s sake. The options are furtive and ingenious. The brooding, gothic quality that oozed out of Arkham Asylum’s pores is expanded and shot through with a new revelation: Batman’s ominous metropolis is the true star of Rocksteady’s excellent franchise. Lemmon


Undertale

31. Undertale

At a time when RPGs have never been bigger, more popular, or more epic in scale, Toby Fox reinvented the entire genre by completely rejecting it. Undertale is, essentially, the first Gen Z video game. It speaks in an arcane language of non sequiturs, memes, and abject weirdness for its own esoteric sake, and so fluently, that it’s hard to imagine its existence prior to the exact moment the Kickstarter happened. What’s easily decipherable, however, is its almost cavalier deconstruction of the turn-based RPG, one where every enemy is an entity that matters, with wants, needs, a bizarre logic of their own that must be heard, understood, parsed, and responded to. It’s a game where the most boring and disappointing way to greet each entity is to kill it for experience points. To truly connect with any given enemy requires more work, and it always starts with taking the time to say hello to them. That work is among the most gratifying, even poignant, experiences one can have with an RPG. All that from a game visually outclassed by even the most rudimentary NES title. Clark

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Uncharted 4: A Thief’s End

30. Uncharted 4: A Thief’s End

There’s an old moral lesson in which, after discovering that the perilously recovered treasure chest was empty, the hero realizes that the true reward was the quest itself. There’s no such moral lesson in Uncharted 4: A Thief’s End, which is both a rewarding adventure in and of itself and an overflowing bounty of innovation, a last-hurrah that throws everything at its fans without ever once feeling derivative. There are daring escapes from Panamanian jails, shootouts at an Italian manor’s gala, car chases through the streets of modern King’s Bay—and that’s hardly scratching the surface. The graphics come uncannily close to the game’s cinematic aspirations, a new grappling hook mechanic enhances the already epic gunfights, and sequences in the Madagascan outback add a much-needed dose of semi-open-world exploration to the series. Despite needing to encompass all of these features, the ambitious story never feels stretched or shoehorned, and delivers an emotional closure to the series as protagonist Nathan Drake must choose between his gilded obsessions and the life of his rogue brother, Sam. Given all that, Uncharted 4 avoids another moral: You can’t have too much of a good thing. Riccio


Spec Ops: The Line

29. Spec Ops: The Line

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. Riccio


Conrol

28. Control

Home to the Federal Bureau of Control, the government’s paranormal secure-and-contain agency, The Oldest House is a sterile, brutalist setting at odds with the calamity escalating within. The player takes control of Jesse Faden, the agency’s new director, as she battles against an extradimensional invasion alongside other FBC agents, all fighting for the same thing: control of our reality. This is a game that makes the mundane terrifying. A room of possessed, demonic government agents pales in comparison to a malevolent telekinetic sailboat anchor, or a common household refrigerator that demands to be watched at all times lest everyone around it succumb to its violent wrath. Beyond this, Control compels with the backstory of Jesse and her brother, whose hometown of Ordinary was torn apart by a reality-altering slide projector later taken by the FBC, revealed in partially redacted government files and audio recordings. Such diary mechanics aren’t uncommon in video games, though Control’s cleverness comes in its layering of its deep lore with a discomfiting ambiguity. The game might be confined to one office building, but the endless chain of paranormal conflicts that take place within The Oldest House reach out to worlds far beyond our own. Aston


Gone Home

27. Gone Home

Two thousand thirteen has seen a necessary and hasty maturing of video games as a medium, led in part by Anita Sarkeesian and her terrific web series on sexist video-game tropes, without whom we might never have seen a game like Gone Home. Set in 1995 Oregon, Kaitlin returns from a year-long pre-college trip through Europe to find her family’s house derelict and 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 by the sadness and longing of its inhabitants instead of the supernatural. 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 as a whole. Aston

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Hellblade Senua’s Sacrifice

26. Hellblade Senua’s Sacrifice

Ninja Theory’s Hellblade Senua’s Sacrifice is unusually sensitive as a horror game, rejecting 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 perhaps the most ominous action spectacle of the decade in gaming), 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


Dark Souls

25. Dark Souls

Director Hidetaka Miyazaki’s labyrinthine world provides 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, the game functions like a demented community of outcasts and riffraff. But if you play it alone, that’s when the deepest emotions—loneliness, morbid curiosity, hopelessness, relief—can take full possession of you, sometimes within mere moments of each other. Pressgrove


The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild

24. The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild

Another timely franchise reinvention, The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild discards the linear formula of previous 3D 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


Antichamber

23. Antichamber

Alexander Bruce’s superb Antichamber is a riddle wrapped up in an enigma, an elaborate first-person puzzle-platformer like Portal or QUBE that challenges the player to forget their preexisting knowledge about the world and discover entirely new rules about how the universe ticks. Little is as it seems in the game, as its deceptive, lucid cel-shaded appearance masks a series of conundrums that compound in intricacy and complexity the deeper one travels. The setting is littered with signs that give abstract philosophy as to how to traverse the non-Euclidean levels of the titular chamber, which simultaneously guide the player and complement the vibrant Zen-like atmosphere. Antichamber juggles so many interesting ideas at once and successfully marries them with its gameplay that while the finale lacks impact, the prior journey continues to resonate long after completion. Rarely is having one’s mind bent so satisfying. Aston

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Journey

22. Journey

You’ll start out in the desert, descend into a midnight-blue labyrinth, and soar through the clouds into the bitter, icy mountains, but the game’s beautifully rendered settings aren’t the journey. It’s the emotional experience that elevates Journey above others, what distinguishes your poor, red-cloaked character from the billions of specks of sand he traverses. The areas you explore are often massive, but at the height of despair, and if you’re playing online, a second player may appear. Perhaps they’ll feel as you do, wandering around with the wide-eyed wonder that comes with starting out on this journey for the first time—or perhaps they’re a spiritual veteran of the game, serving as a reassuring guide. You’ll never know, as you can only communicate via chirps, but for three hours, they’ll be your best (and only) friend—and should you lose them, you’ll feel a loss that all the 1-Up mushrooms in the world could never salve. Riccio


The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt

21. The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt

The biggest issue with open-world games is that they so often end up feeling empty, or populated with repetitive filler quests in order to give a sense of depth. Part of the magic in The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt is that it doesn’t waste an inch of its territory. That keep in the distance that’s fallen into disrepair? Chances are it’s housing a terrible secret, or, at worst, a hidden cache of treasure. That’s no mistake either. Whereas some games put the emphasis on discovering new and ever-more-powerful loot, 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


The Last of Us

20. The Last of Us

Come for the zombies, stay for the giraffes. Dead Space fans will smile as they navigate claustrophobic sewage tunnels, Metal Gear Solid vets 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 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


Bayonetta

19. Bayonetta

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 stunningly deep, addictive, and rewarding action mechanics, many utilizing Bayonetta’s own hair as a weapon. Aston

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Horizon: Zero Dawn

18. Horizon: Zero Dawn

Horizon: Zero Dawn features one of the most vibrantly envisioned open worlds in a video game to date. It’s a world where woodland creatures scrounge for their next meal alongside humans living in seemingly primitive tribes, and the only clues that we’re immersed in a futuristic setting are some nifty gadgets that the protagonist utilizes throughout and the enormous metal predators stalking the forests and deserts. What separates this open world from the settings of games with similar ambitions is how it functions in service of the characters and their lives. Young redheaded orphan Aloy and her kin are just as beautifully realized as the world around them, their believable and sympathetic characterization driving the narrative as Aloy discovers the dark reasons for the state of this world and attempts to find her place within it. As the narrative builds to an unusually affecting and optimistic conclusion, Horizon: Zero Dawn’s brand of post-apocalyptic sci-fi comes to feel like a necessary corrective to the troubles of our present day. Aston


Hitman 2

17. Hitman 2

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. The game, 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. Hitman 2 gives players the tools to make their own amusing stories within the game’s 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. Aston


What Remains of Edith Finch

16. What Remains of Edith Finch

What Remains of Edith Finch is more than a collection of stories about ennui; it’s a postmodern collage of stories about stories, or rather, how we deal with our lives and the things that are later remembered about us. It’s a perfect marriage between the telling of a story and one’s first-hand engagement with it, especially since some of the more abstract tales—a 10-year-old’s transformation-filled nightmare—must be experienced to be understood. Every remembrance is informed by an aspect of a person’s life (an artistic child’s last days are revealed via the pages of a hand-drawn flipbook), and while these scenarios are tragic, they’re also somewhat hopeful. Each new vignette, as in the surreal fantasia conjured up by an infant who cannot comprehend that he’s drowning, offers a fresh perspective on how we cope both with life and death. The game’s most powerful moment even demonstrates the way in which video games themselves offer a dangerous or therapeutic form of escapism (depending on the user). And long after What Remains of Edith Finch has ended, these powerful, indelible memories remain. Riccio


Bloodborne

15. Bloodborne

Though always a shining example of artistry, level design, and tiny, beautiful, emergent moments of story waiting to be found out in the world, FromSoftware’s Souls series remains better known to most for its unforgiving difficulty than its accomplishments in world building. Bloodborne is an earnest, powerful attempt to change that. The essence of the series remains, with its deliberate (albeit slightly faster) approach to combat, brilliantly labyrinthine stages, and crowd-sourced help or hindrance composing the core of the experience. This time, however, the ruined, diseased world of Yharnam, the increasing psychotic delirium of its people, and the incredible fever-dream terrors around its every corner cannot be ignored. This is Lovecraft by way of old-school Cronenbergian body horror, a place that will consistently, effectively distress and disturb with just as equal measure as it will consistently and effectively kill you. Yharnam is a place where you can witness every friend and enemy desperately praying to God, and the game takes a vicious glee in pointing out that this deity is on the wrong side. The term “survival horror” will never be more accurate for another game than it is for Bloodborne. Clark

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The Binding of Isaac

14. The Binding of Isaac

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. Chatziioannou


Kentucky Route Zero

13. Kentucky Route Zero

Kentucky Route Zero has released only four of its five acts at the time of this list’s publication. But even with the story unfinished, the game still feels like a cohesive whole. This is the strength of its vision, a soulful rendering of the countryside at night perfectly communicated by its lyrical text, minimalist graphics, and incredible sound design. It’s a game meant to wash over you, evocative in a way that’s broadly true and surreal yet also grounded, lived-in. You feel exactly the beauty it means you to feel, as well as the sadness, the desperation, and the desolation of a Rust Belt ravaged by false promises. Though you and the main character, Conway, are ostensibly passing through, the game never makes the mistake of putting players above it all—outsiders simply shaking their heads as they move along and forget. It recognizes struggle, but it’s careful to emphasize above all else the quiet dignity of the lives that are working through it. Scaife


Titanfall 2

12. Titanfall 2

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


Return of the Obra Dinn

11. Return of the Obra Dinn

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

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Doom

10. Doom

The original Doom and its sequel are perhaps unmatchable in their vigor: high-octane destruction of labyrinthine locales, darting through fireballs and slimy orbs, brazenly stolen heavy-metal riffs punctuated with the ever-present cocking of a super shotgun. The Doom reboot represents perhaps the closest we’ll ever come to that high-water mark, transforming the classic two-plane gunplay with vertically vast spaces that require not just a quick trigger finger, but also a pair of deft dancing feet. The pedants among us might note that the glut of insta-hit enemies and the addition of jumping render this Doom more akin to 1996’s Quake than was perhaps intended, but such complaints miss the point entirely. The incipient dominance of the militarized mega shooter made it seem like we were never going to get another classic single-player arena blaster, so, please, just enjoy the carnage. Wright


Superhot

9. Superhot

While 2016 was a great year for the big-budget first-person genre, Superhot proves that the restraint of the indie scene is still a creative force to be reckoned with. 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 no longer reliant on the player’s twitch reflexes, but rather 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. Clark


Red Dead Redemption

8. Red Dead Redemption

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—because so much of those cities’ interior spaces were inaccessible—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. Nick Schager


Outer Wilds

7. Outer Wilds

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 Majora’s Mask-like time loop returns you to the start. 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

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God of War

6. God of War

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, like fiery Muspelheim or poison-fogged Niflheim. The regions that remain on the main path are central to Kratos’s literal and figurative journey: a witch’s autumnal sanctuary speaks to peaceful isolation; a giant’s frozen corpse, perilously climbed, illustrates the bitter results of war; and Helheim, the green-hued land of the dead, gives a firsthand demonstration of the implacable calling of the dead. Even God of War’s central hub is something more than it immediately appears: The water level recedes multiple times over the course of the game, each time exposing new islets and interconnecting pathways to existing ones, much as Kratos’s taciturn surface is gradually stripped away to reveal his deeper nature. 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


Portal 2

5. Portal 2

Portal 2 is a masterpiece. Valve is the rare developer that completely understands the language of video games, using the medium to craft a compelling and enriching narrative experience that expands upon everything that made their 2007 hit exceptional. Once again, Chell finds herself at the mercy of psychotic AI GLaDOS, forced to take on ever more elaborate “testing” that comprises complex and satisfying physics-based puzzles while exploring the darkly hilarious history of Aperture Science. This world builds around the player, first as GLaDOS reconstructs her gorgeously detailed test facility following decades of neglect (the graphics are second to none, with every image beauteous and meaningful), secondly as the origin of the deeply unethical research corporation is revealed, headed by the increasingly insane Cave Johnson (voiced by a phenomenal J.K. Simmons). He’s just one of many memorable characters introduced across the involving narrative; Stephen Merchant in particular delights as insipid “Personality Core” Wheatley, the perfect antagonist and intellectual nemesis for GLaDOS. Beyond the wonderful single player campaign, a unique cooperative campaign offers an entirely new challenge working through intricate puzzles with a partner, continuing the narrative under the watchful, vengeful eye of GLaDOS. Portal 2 is a worthy sequel and the best game of 2011. Aston


Mass Effect 2

4. Mass Effect 2

The Mass Effect universe was too big to stay confined to one platform, and with Mass Effect 2, Bioware finally let PS3 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


Super Mario Odyssey

3. Super Mario Odyssey

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 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

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Disco Elysium

2. Disco Elysium

It’s a common and well-documented complaint that role-playing games don’t always do the greatest job at truly letting players play a role. You’re typically just along for the ride, and calling the shots when it comes to crucial dialogue or combat. Disco Elysium, then, is the closest the world will ever get to having 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, or that the game’s art style feels like someone trying to capture the experience of watching Battleship Potemkin on acid, but that 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


NieR Automata

1. NieR Automata

If NieR Automata were just a straight-forward open-world action title, one that could be completed in approximately 10 hours, stretching from the first line of dialogue until Ending A, it would still stand tall this decade for being a fundamentally odd game about machines pondering their own humanity, ending on a quaintly sentimental but earned grace note. Ending A, however, 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 the history of 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 own burgeoning sentience from the scraps we leave behind. The actions of the game’s androids and robots frighten, sadden, and disturb us more than the actions of any other enemy one can face in any other game because, fundamentally, these beings are us, fumbling violently around existence with only the most vague concept of what life, love, sex, murder, religion, and death mean in the grand scheme of things. 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. There has never been a game quite like NieR Automata, and until the day there’s more than one Yoko Taro, there’s not likely to be another. Clark

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