I feel like my “all-time favorite” changes depending on my mood, but if I had to pick just one, I’d probably go with The Witcher 3. That game just hit all the right notes—amazing story, incredible world-building, and so much stuff to do without feeling like pointless filler. Plus, the expansions were just as good, if not better than the base game.
What about you? Are you more into RPGs, shooters, or something else entirely?
It’s easily The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past.
It has everything I could ask for in a game: Sword fighting. Magic. Secrets. Dungeon crawling. An alternate dimension. Side quests. Different tools and items. There’s enough content that it feels fulfilling to complete it. Peak art. Peak music. NPCs don’t talk too much, and there are just enough of them to make the world feel alive. Bosses.
RISK OF RAIN 2
StarCraft 2 was the perfect competitive RTS, with the best pro scene. I lived and breathed that game for years. Sucks that Blizzard decided to stop supporting it.
Shadow of the Colossus was barely even a game, it was art. I don’t think I even played it for more than 20 hours total but just a simple masterpiece.
Morrowind. One of the few games you can fail the main quest by going on a rampage or by selling the wrong item.
The spells in Morrowind are so creative & fun too! Levitate & recall were my favorites.
Come on, now…
- Grind to gather resources.
- Make a potion to fortify intelligence
- Make a potion to fortify alchemy
- Drink potions
- While potions are active, make another set of fortify intelligence and alchemy potions, which - as a result of your potion-enhanced intelligence and alchemy skill - now fortified even stronger and longer.
- Repeat steps 3 and 4 a few times to become the smartest god-like being around for an infinite amount of time.
Game-breaking, but I would absolutely do it in real life if I had the option. I want the brains!
Night eye is amazing. Don’t even know what time of day it is when that spell is active.
I feel like my “all-time favorite” changes depending on my mood, but if I had to pick just one, I’d probably go with The Witcher 3. That game just hit all the right notes—amazing story, incredible world-building, and so much stuff to do without feeling like pointless filler. Plus, the expansions were just as good, if not better than the base game.
I replayed the entire game after completing Cyberpunk 2077 and finished it this weekend. Sadly for me the game doesn’t hold up that well in various aspects and it was one of my favourites. The story is great, the ending is really well done, but the combat is too simple, the leveling of the game is all over the place, the RPG aspect of the game is really underwhelming and the game is just too damn long. I actually ended up enjoying Cyberpunk 2077 more at the end, but TW3 is a better game in general.
As for my “all-time favorite”, that depends.
Nier: Automata changed me, the game had a real impact on me.
Zelda BOTW is the game that made me feel happier while playing it.
Sekiro is the game that just clicked perfectly.
DAO was my all time favourite RPG but Divinity 2/BG3 both took that spot.
Chrono Trigger is the game that I’ll always remember, the singleplayer game that I’ve replayed the most.
Terraria is my favourite indie game.
I have a real soft spot for Bloodstained, I loved Casltevania Symphony of the Night and I waited so long for Bloodstained and the guys delivered what I expected. The first game that I wanted to do 100%.
Dark Souls.
It fundamentally changed me as a person. All of the other fromsoft games are great but none of them really encapsulates the experience that is the first Dark Souls game.
You can’t say something like that without elaborating! How did it change you?
So I first played Dark Souls when I was 17. As a kid that was going into my senior year of high school, completely obsessed with games like Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3 and Uncharted 2 - Dark Souls was such a drastic change in how you interacted with a game. No constant ADHD flick shots in a cod game, no mindless story based progression with a complete lack of difficulty.
Dark Souls taught me three things: Slow down, think critically, and never give up.
Looking back on it, it’s some real basic knowledge to impart on someone. But I feel like they apply to everything in life and nobody around me seems to think the same.
It kinda blows my mind when you look at YouTube and see the absurd amount of videos there are of people describing how dark souls made them a better person mentally. The game is clearly special in a way no other game is to a lot of people and not to mention it popularized a whole new genre.
If anyone reading this hasn’t tried Dark Souls or has tried it once and bounced off of it quickly. I really recommended giving it a(nother) shot.
Best single game is probably Portal. The pacing, storytelling, innovation, sound, all are top notch even 20+ years later. Graphics aren’t phenomenal, but don’t need to be. The challenges and easter eggs made it a blast to 100%.
I’d say that Portal 2 even improved the first one in every aspect.
I’m on the fence about which is better. Portal 2 is an improvement, but also has its flaws.
Part of the reason I would argue Portal 1 was better is because it was so unexpected. I went in expecting “interesting puzzle game” which it is, but I did not expect to also get “excellent humor with strange horror vibes and incredibly good personality.”
If someone didn’t know what a Glados was I think the first one is better. I also recognize that many people who have never played Portal are well aware of Glados.
Portal felt like a very long, pretty well-done tech demo, but Portal 2 is where it’s at.
I felt that Portal 2’s difficulty curve was a little off but was perfect other than that. It was too easy for most of the game and then ramped up to what I consider to be a good difficulty level later on.
The two player portion was fantastic though.
Not just my mood, but I have different flavors of favorite.
In terms of nostalgia and all-time enjoyment, hard to beat Ocarina of Time.
In terms of pure “this game is so good”, may have to go with Red Dead Redemption 2. Truly a masterpiece.
In terms of most hours played, Civilization 6 at over 2000 hours.
I like this way of doing it. For me:
Nostalgia and all-time enjoyment, probably Pokémon Gen 2 / Remakes (Silver / Gold / Crystal / SoulSilver / HeartGold). I consider them all one game of different “flavours”. If I had to choose one I’d probably go with SoulSilver. The remakes added some much needed modern conveniences, and having your Pokémon follow you around in the overworld was awesome.
Pure “this game is so good”, probably Elden Ring. Before the DLC I’d probably go with Dark Souls III because of Gael and Friede, but Shadow of the Erdtree blew me away.
Most hours played, Skyrim at over 5,000. HITMAN is in second place at a bit over 1,300.
My “nostalgia favorites” will always be Legend of Zelda Ocarina of Time and Sonic 2 (Genesis version). Sonic 2 is just so fun to go back and play any time I want a quick retro sides rolling platformer fix, and I’ve played through it more times than I can count. OoT was the first game I played that showed me what games could be through a combination of story/cutscenes and gameplay, as someone who was never able to get my hands on an SNES to play the epic JRPGs of the console growing up (I loved my Genesis, but let’s be real, those kinds of games on Sega consoles didn’t really come until later).
Nowadays Breath of the Wild and Tears of the Kingdom have eclipsed OoT for me, and for other more modern games another standout fave is Fire Emblem Three Houses, due in large part to its story and setting having everything I look for in a game, and its characters actually being more fleshed out and developed than the one-note units handed to you in many other games in the franchise. Engage has more… Engaging gameplay (sorry not sorry for the pun) but the story and characters hold it back quite a bit for me. Gameplay-wise, my favorite strategy RPG actually has to be Triangle Strategy, in that it has quite creative maps and every unit is designed with the potential to be useful depending on how you approach your own strategy, but I like the story/characters of Three Houses at least a bit more, and I tend to value story more in general in games. I’m also a big fan of the Ace Attorney franchise for the overarching story, characters and writing that it’s built up through its history. Phoenix, Maya, Edgeworth, Apollo and friends are all among some of my favorite characters in gaming, and I’m glad I decided long ago to give that quirky-seeming series a try. AA7 when, Capcom?
StarCraft: Brood War
It’s a difficult question to answer. I personally barely consider Disco Elysium to be a game, more like an interactive story that uses certain game mechanics as grammar elements and punctuation in its storytelling. It’s a novel masquerading as a game. It’s three novels in a trenchcoat. But if we do count it then it is my pick, by a landslide.
Otherwise it’s probably Baldur’s Gate 2. It’s the story game I’ve replayed the most over the years and it was absolutely fundamental in my journey as a gamer, the definition of a formative experience. Even though parts of it are dated now (some clunk is to be expected from a 25-year-old game) I still prefer it to BG3. It’s got a great story, great companions and an all-time great villain. David Warner put in an incredible performance and even all these years later there aren’t many video game villains who have surpassed Irenicus in sheer aura.
For me Disco Elysium is definitely my favorite of all time if we count it.
If we don’t for some reason, then Hi-Fi Rush is an absolute joy of a game and I’ve loved every second of it. Very obviously a labor of love and far more gamified than Disco Elysium.
I personally consider Disco Elysium very much a game (a way better role-playing gamer than most), because an “interactive story” is a game. Combat shouldn’t be a necessary condition. Planescape: Torment should have had the guts to scrap its lackluster combat and focus on its strengths.
Disco elysium is the best book I’ve ever played.
I played BG1 and 2 for the first time shortly before the release of BG3, and I just wanted to hear Irenicus talk more.
Disco Elysium, on the other hand, just did not hit for me. The only things I hear about it are praise, but my friends list is filled with people who played it for a few hours, like I did, and stopped, so maybe the dissenters just aren’t so vocal.
Like I said, the game itself on its store page claims to be a “detective game RPG” while in reality I would argue it’s barely any of those things. So a lot of people probably come into it with the wrong expectations. It’s more like a novel about love and loss, about addiction, depression and the past looming over the present like a grey ghost. It’s a story about finding hope in the midst of overwhelming nihilism. As someone who has struggled with all those things it hit incredibly close to home, and was the most meaningful experience I’ve ever had playing a video game.
I don’t think I came to it with many expectations other than that people praised it for the writing, but I found the characters to nearly universally be abrasive and the story delivered via info dumps.
That’s not an inaccurate description. Though context is important - most of the characters know yours through behavior and actions that neither you or the character remember. A lot of the game is playing with how you handle that.
True, but I hated the player character too, and I’d have appreciated a more elegant introduction to the world.
I can sympathize that. The whole game is intentionally bleak and rough, which can be pretty off putting (though it does make the few nice parts exceptionally nice). The devs made a pretty heavy handed choice to focus more on being confrontational art rather than being particularly accommodating to the player.
I think that’s another thing as well, a lot of people go in with the idea that you can to some extent “play as yourself” like you do in many RPGs. And they get frustrated when they’re only given stupid or horrible dialogue options like “why would I ever say any of these things?!”. Because the game is actually rather restrictive in terms of roleplay: yes you can choose your flavour and variety of crazy but at the end of the day you’re always Harry, you’re always insane and damaged and you can’t change that.
For me personally, I’m also an utter failure and I hate myself deeply, so maybe that’s why I easily resonated with the protagonist. And in the end, much of the actual story is about dealing with failure, about finding hope amidst despair and about overcoming and letting go of the past.
I’m totally fine with playing a character who is always a shitty person, but when the world was littered with those characters, it was undesirable to spend any more time in it, especially considering my issues with the story’s delivery as well.
Sekiro.
Only hard until you start to understand the dance moves. Then it becomes pure nirvana.
After NG+7 I had to stop playing it and give some other games a chance.
Even when I suck at a boss fight it feels like I learn something new every time, such a good gameplay loop
I got stuck on it and then stopped playing for so long that I feel that I need to start again. I do intend to start it again if I ever get the time to put into it.
I’m still surprised how well received it was, not because I disagree, but just because of the numbers. It’s currently sitting at 95% positive ratings on Steam, and that’s with 229k reviews, for a game that plays so different from what gamers expected out of FromSoft.
Super Mario World - just a fun game. Lots of little secrets and fun to speed run.
Titanfall - I played an absurd amount of this one and really wished there was a 3rd one. 1-2 remind me of the pattern seen in trilogys where 1 sets the stage, 2 deviaties pretty far and polarizes fans and then 3 uses the best of both while trying to feel more like 1. (Mario 1-3, Halo 1-3). My favorites in this pattern tend to be 3 so I’m disappointed I never got Titanfall 3.
Pubg - when it was new. Lost me years ago now but that first 6 months to a year was awesome. So many crazy games and absurd fun.
PUBG died the instant they introduced bots. I uninstalled immediately.
But got damn, while everyone else complained about physics and clothing on the floor, my partner and I had the BEST TIME EVER playing. One of the best games I’ve ever played for sure when it was newer.
I remember one time I was driving them on the motorbike thing with the sidecar with eight others remaining, and we hit an invisible pebble and were ROCKETED into the sky. We did a ton of flips and were laughing together about how we’re absolutely dead. We fell for ages and finally landed… no bounce. Just perfectly on our wheels. The bike was on fire. We were fine. We got out and ran away, only to die when three people were left. But we laughed sooooo hard when we landed totally fine. Insanity.
I miss it so much.
Quick edit: the first time I won in a 1v99, my heart rate hit 185 by the time my watch could calculate, so probably higher. I was vibrating. I had to lie down in bed. It was the most unique feeling a game has ever made me feel.
I loved Titanfall 1 so much. Titanfall 2’s campaign was absolutely fantastic but I didn’t get on with the multiplayer so much.
I actually think that was a “me problem” rather than a problem with the game. I think that I had just had enough of multiplayer shooters as I’ve not played one since.
Any of those three
- Disco Elysium
- Death Stranding
- Outer Wilds
Great list. But I love reading trough the reasoning behind the picks. What are yours?
Personally I think outer wilds is a one of a kind game which represents am artistic message about existence that cannot be conveyed the same way in any other medium.
I think the common denominator is a strong / immersive story and universe that appeals to me (big fan of sf), interesting mechanics and gameplay in a way that makes the game unique in its own way, and the artistic approach behind the game, so for each of those :
- Outer Wilds was a fantastic experience that you can only live once, the freedom of exploration is crazy, the feelings you can go through in the span of a single minute make it so memorable, I connected with this game like no other
- Death Stranding I played during one of the lockdowns, and after hiking in Iceland, it was a continuity of these two experiences that felt very personal. It was also my introduction to Kojima games. I found it to be such a premium experience and statement about video games, I loved the insanity of the plot, and once you dug deeper, you find all the artistic inspiration and process that went behind the game, it’s an insane work of interactive art
- Disco Elysium I was already fully on board just learning about the game, I sympathise with the authors, the fact that it started as an rpg campaign, with immense lore behind it, love the art style, the narration, the story and its themes, I haven’t lived in post USSR Europe but the game make me nostalgic/melancholic for a time, aesthetic, struggles I didn’t know
They’re my absolute favourite but some games come close, Inscryption, Pyre, Spiritfarer…
I wish more people would play The Hex. I got more playtime out of Inscryption and loved it, but I played The Hex later on and I did not expect to like it more, but it’s fucking genius. I think it’s a legitimately better game.
I am so psyched for Pony Island 2.
Prey, I forgot Prey, but I haven’t finished it yet, also Dishonored
Great points. One think I love about disco is how much expression it gives to the mundane. It’s not about firebreathing dragons but about trashcans. My most intense interaction I’ve had in this game was with a malfunctioning speaker on a office building.
Based list. Outer Wilds in particular chef’s kiss.
