In typical fashion for this blog, I waited until the very last day of the decade to write up a top-games-of-the-decade list. It should go without saying that I'm only one person with limited time and budget. Try as I might, I certainly haven't played every single critically acclaimed game of the last 10 years—not even close. That might be why you’re not going to see something like a Breath of the Wild or The Last of Us make an appearance. It might just be that I haven’t had the pleasure of playing one of your most cherished top-10 games. Or maybe I think your favorite game sucks. At any rate, here’s what I picked as the top 10 games from 2010 to 2019. I hope you enjoy!
10. Fallout 4 (2015)
This might be the most contentious game on my list, and I can understand why Fallout 4 falls short for a lot of people. The main story is a little sub-par. Some of the choices you have to make toward the end of the game feel forced (Just because I’m siding with this faction means I have to wipe out all the members of this other faction? Really?). It’s also built on a proprietary Bethesda game engine that seems to be showing its age and limitations. I could go on, but none of that really matters, because I would continue playing this game until the end of time, for all I care. What really makes all the difference for me is that I play the game exclusively in survival mode, which wasn’t even an option upon the game’s release—it was patched in a few months later. What may have launched as a so-so RPG can now be experienced as a one-of-a-kind immersive sim, one filled with thousands of moment-to-moment choices that give you the feeling of an actual struggle for existence amidst a hostile, devastated environment. What will I eat and drink to stave off hunger and thirst? How can I best avoid exposure to disease and radiation that comes from eating and drinking? Where is the nearest bed, so I can save my progress? Survival mode is absolutely punishing for the first several hours. You are a weak and fragile human, and the odds are severely stacked against you. You simply cannot take any wasteland encounter for granted, and you’ll probably need to stealth crouch everywhere you go. But by the time you level up and really start to have some stopping power against the horrors that surround you, you’ll really feel like you’ve earned it, because you have.
9. Monster Hunter World (2018)
Nice game, you might say, but is it really a top-10 game of the decade? Absolutely! I’m not sure why Capcom relegated this franchise to handheld systems for the better part of a decade, but the fact that they did so made Monster Hunter World all the more jaw-dropping upon its eventual release in 2018 for Xbox One, PlayStation 4, and PC. To explore the game’s lush natural environments, to watch its imaginative wyvern creatures twist and fly and writhe about in full HD glory—it was a visual treat well worth waiting for. So yeah, it’s a good-looking game. That hardly secures it a spot in the best-games-of-the-decade list. What puts it over the top is how it feels to play. Monster Hunter games have always been notoriously difficult for new players to grasp, and while that probably remains true for Monster Hunter World, it certainly inches much closer into friendlier territory thanks to its many quality-of-life improvements. At some point, every player must select from one of 14 weapon types to try and master as they hunt down and topple an increasingly difficult roster of monsters, from flying bird-like wyverns with poisonous talons to lava-dwelling monsters to behemoth elder dragons that can one-shot destroy an entire party with a blast of energy. I personally started out down the path of a bow user, and it still remains my go-to weapon in most cases. It’s one that rewards an aggressive but slightly keep-your-distance play style—forcing me to constantly monitor my stamina, range, and aim. But I’ve had just about as much enjoyment dabbling in some of the other weapons, including the slow-but-devastating great sword, the K.O.-inducing hammer, and its quirky cousin, the hunting horn—which you can use as a musical instrument to grant temporary buffs to you and the members of your online hunting party. Like anything with a steep learning curve, it may take a while before everything clicks, so to speak. Once it does, however, you might find yourself addicted to the rush of intensity that comes from putting your best foot forward and plunging into the fray of battle against the toughest creatures Capcom throws your way.
8. The Witness (2016)
I’m surprised I ended up liking The Witness as much as I did, given the rather dull-sounding premise: Walk around a virtual 3D island littered with 2D line puzzles; solve the puzzles to unlock more areas on the island. It was a slow game to get into, but once I crossed some invisible threshold, it became like a book that I couldn’t put down. Jonathan Blow, the game's creator, deserves a ton of credit for the time and care he put into designing not only the individual puzzles but also the way in which those individual puzzles fit together to form a much larger, intricate whole. The world itself is a giant puzzle box that tantalizes and pushes the player further and further into its hidden areas. Never before has the solving of puzzles felt so intrinsically rewarding. Never before have I felt such a strangely tangible yet invisible bond of trust between the player (me) and designer (Blow). If it all sounds like a bunch of highfalutin nonsense, I don’t blame you. But playing through The Witness immediately goes down as one of the most gratifying video game experiences in recent memory.
7. Super Meat Boy (2010)
The smoothest, tightest movement mechanics of any 2D platformer ever made—that’s what you get when you play Super Meat Boy. That and a chance to feel like a “golden god” should you manage to thread the needle through its 300-plus levels of fiendish navigational challenges. With their 2010 indie masterpiece, Team Meat demonstrated to the world that by keeping the scope small and refining your core mechanics to a state of near perfection, even small games could be stretched to great heights. Super Meat Boy doesn’t distract you with bombastic visuals or superfluous controls. It doesn’t overwhelm you with new sets of verbs or button prompts to learn and master with each new set of levels. You don’t need to worry about collecting coins or power ups. All you ever need to do is run, jump, and change direction—and it never ceases to be fun. For one of the toughest games around, it’s also surprisingly free of frustration—and that’s saying something! The levels are all bite-sized challenges, meaning even if you die for the hundredth time on a given stage, it’s not like you’ve lost hours or even minutes of progress on any given attempt. Without so much as a shrug, Super Meat Boy jettisons decades of vestigial baggage from video gaming’s arcade roots. For starters, you have unlimited lives to play with, and the waiting time between death and restart is instantaneous. These sound like simple changes to the old-school formula, but they contribute leaps and bounds toward making the game the timeless classic that it is. Other platformers such as 2018’s Celeste have taken their cue from this 2010 trendsetter, sometimes to great effect, but nothing I’ve played has yet to surpass it.
6. Alan Wake (2010)
My wife and I both share a real fondness for Alan Wake, a game modeled after the tone and episodic structure of a binge-worthy television show. As much as it’s generally held up as a critical success, I still think it’s an underrated classic that transcends the boundaries of what might otherwise be a generic third-person shooter—thanks largely to its clever premise and intriguing, supernatural storyline. The titular protagonist is a best-selling author who, upon vacationing to a secluded lake cabin near the fictional town of Bright Falls, Washington, finds himself pulled into a strange nightmare reality in which his wife has disappeared and the pages of his latest manuscript—which he doesn’t remember writing––are coming to life. The fact that the game is set in a beautiful Pacific Northwest environment probably elevates my opinion of it, seeing as that’s the corner of the world in which I grew up. But seriously, I love the places this game takes you to—woodland parks and campgrounds, logging mills, an old fire lookout tower. Against these gorgeous backdrops, you'll be fighting off hordes of dark-enshrouded entities with a combination of light and firearms. While I’m sad that we’ve not yet received a proper full-blown sequel to Alan Wake, I’m happy to see the recent acclaim developer Remedy is receiving for its 2019 release, Control. I haven’t played it yet, but it certainly looks fantastic and just as inventive in concept as Alan Wake. Here’s to hoping we’ll get something more out of the franchise in the next decade, whether an actual TV show or another game. Maybe both? (Check out my initial Alan Wake review.)
5. Minecraft (2011)
I feel like I’ve only scratched the surface of this game’s infinite depths, and I say that as someone who once jumped through all the bizarre hoops, traipsing back and forth into the deadly nether world in order to defeat the mysterious Ender Dragon. Depending on your personality and play style, it can be overwhelming to be dropped into a newly fabricated sandbox world—its unexplored blocky terrain expanding out in all directions—with no objective and little guidance given. But that’s the beautiful thing about freedom. There’s virtually nothing to stop you from making your mark however you see fit. You could decide to venture out and map out that surface terrain, like a virtual cartographer. You could start building a simple farm and homestead, an enormous castle, or a sprawling underground bunker. You could play solo. You could play it online with friends. If I’m being frank, Minecraft isn’t really a top-10 personal favorite of mine. I’ve probably started over from scratch too many times and gotten a bit worn out by the tedium that comes with slowly going through my unwritten checklist of mining for iron, gold, diamonds, and other hard-to-find resources. But that’s likely because I approach the game as a self-limiting adult, circling back to my own self-imposed routines. At its heart, Minecraft is a game for children—whether in body or only in spirit. I can’t think of another game that has made as large or as positive an impact this decade.
4. Inside (2016)
After the incredible success of their first game, Limbo, the developers at Danish studio Playdead could have done anything they wanted. That they chose to create a follow-up that bears so many striking similarities to their first outing was a surprise, but that’s not the half of it. That it managed to completely eclipse its already great predecessor was simply remarkable. Just as with Limbo, Inside is a linear 2D puzzle platformer in which you must guide a little boy through a surreal and dangerous world. The game has a very “cinematic” quality that at moments feels very resonant of something like a Stephen Spielberg thriller, where your sense of wonder is slowly subsumed into a pervasive feeling of terror, time and again. To borrow from something I posted last March on the Cane and Rinse website forum: “It nails the element of suspense, not only because of the timing of the action—think of the panic that ensues from the sound of barking dogs before you even see the pack arrive on the screen, or how the relief of a narrow getaway is almost immediately supplanted by the realization that you’re not out of harm’s way just yet. The dread you feel in so many parts of the game is almost always heightened due to the simple fact that you have no idea who or what you’re even up against.” Even scarier, you can't be sure if you're escaping the danger or running ever headlong toward it.
3. Spelunky (2012)
For all of its hair-pulling moments of inevitable failure and despair, this game is simply too much fun, and I would play it more often than I do if it wasn’t for the fact that I know once I start I’ll get pulled into its never-ending cycle of death and reload. It’s still one of my life goals to one day beat this game “the hard way,” which involves triggering a series of events that extends the game beyond its standard 16 levels of mines, jungle, ice caves, and temple to include a secret black market level, a City of Gold level, and four brutally difficult levels of Hell that can only be accessed by getting through those other challenges and then defeating the main game's (not-so-final) boss in a specific manner. I think if I manage to pull off that optional challenge, I might finally be able to hang up my gamer hat and retire a happy man. At any rate, you can see what I wrote about this game back in 2012. It was great then. It’s still great now. Game designer Derek Yu was among the earliest to discover the brilliant formula for endless replayability when he mashed together the genres of roguelike and 2D action platformer to create the original version of Spelunky in 2008. The 2012 remake is the version that cemented its legacy as an all-time video game classic, and I can’t wait to see what Yu has in store for us next year with Spelunky 2.
2. The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt (2015)
I don’t think you’ll find a better example of well-written dialogue, character acting, and general storytelling in all of video games. The Witcher 3 is a high-fantasy epic that never goes off the rails. Every story beat is grounded in the drama of complex characters that feel real and human (even when they’re not, technically, human), starting with the game’s protagonist, Geralt of Rivia. This is largely thanks to the rich source material of Polish novelist Andrzej Sapkowski, but even that would have been all for nought if it wasn’t for the care and talent of the entire creative development team at CD Projekt Red, who used that material to create an entire trilogy of original storytelling. All three games are an achievement in their own right, and in some ways I actually appreciate the smaller, more linear nature of The Witcher 2: Assassins of Kings. But with The Witcher 3, CD Projekt Red essentially threw down the gauntlet to the entire AAA game industry with this groundbreaking testament to what an open-world game can be. I’ve played a lot of content-heavy open-world games since 2010 onward. None of them have felt as rich as this one. Even the side quests are almost always terrific, as Geralt finds himself constantly entangled in all manner of feuds and conflicts—from the politics of warring nations to heartbreaking episodes of love and betrayal that befall the lives of everyday people tucked away amidst the most isolated villages. While Geralt always manages to slay the monster—it is his trade, after all—the game rarely offers happy endings, let alone clear delineations of right and wrong behavior. If one of the great values of literature is the ability to conjure empathy in the reader for the struggles of other people, be they real or fictional, then The Witcher 3 represents one of the best current examples of this phenomenon carried over into video game form.
1. Dark Souls (2011)
I wrote about my fascination with this game back in 2014, and I still struggle to find the words to explain it. Every now and then, someone will try to write off the notion that this game is only popular or highly regarded for its brutal difficulty, and ... sure—there’s certainly more to it than just that. But it is an essential ingredient. Take away the challenge and what would be the point? And yet, there have been difficult video games since the very beginning of video games. Why does this one happen to resonate with so many people? I can only assume it’s because it taps into some primordial aspect of our human nature, a part of us that yearns for validation and the chance to prove our mettle against the forces of darkness that would otherwise cripple us if we lacked the strength or courage to face them head-on. If the modern-day comforts and conveniences of the developed world have all but eliminated the most sinister forms of hardship and adversity faced by our ancestors, then why not invent a few imaginary epic struggles to act as a no-stakes substitute? Nine years after From Software gave us the original Dark Souls, it’s still a game unmatched—saved maybe by its successors—in terms of its absolute starkness of visual aesthetics and overall presentation. It just feels more like an authentic journey into the heart of darkness and less like your run-of-the-mill video game, at least in comparison to so many of its contemporaries that constantly invade your field of view with distracting text prompts and tutorials and signposting—all of which tends to pull you away rather than draw you in.
Michael Thomsen famously wrote about Dark Souls back in 2012, asking whether the 100-hour game was ever worth such an investment of time. In the case of Dark Souls, his answer was no. It was a well-written piece, and this was one of his ultimate conclusions: “There is real beauty in Dark Souls. It reveals that life is more suffering than pleasure, more failure than success, and that even the momentary relief of achievement is wiped away by new levels of difficulty. It is also a testament to our persistence in the face of that suffering, and it offers the comfort of a community of other players all stuck in the same hellish quagmire. Those are good qualities. That is art. And you can get all of that from the first five hours of Dark Souls. The remaining 90 or so offer nothing but an increasingly nonsensical variation on that experience.” It’s that last part that probably strikes the nerve for most Dark Souls apologists. Can you really get the essence of the Dark Souls experience in the first five hours, to the point that you’re only playing further toward your own personal detriment? I certainly hope not. I can never really blame someone for choosing to spend their valuable free time in pursuit of other experiences, but all I know is that Dark Souls is still the only game of its kind (the 100-hour kind) in which I conquered through to the very end and immediately rolled a new character to start it all over again. I’ve never read War and Peace, but I have read a few hefty novels from cover to cover: Moby-Dick, Jane Eyre (twice), Bleak House, just to rattle off a few. Personally, I value the time I spent with those works just as much as the time I’ve spent playing Dark Souls, or any of the games on this list for that matter. Some games out there are certainly not worth your time, but speaking only from my own experience, for anyone who loves video games and wants to experience the very best of the medium, Dark Souls might be the one video game most worth your investment.
10. Fallout 4 (2015)
This might be the most contentious game on my list, and I can understand why Fallout 4 falls short for a lot of people. The main story is a little sub-par. Some of the choices you have to make toward the end of the game feel forced (Just because I’m siding with this faction means I have to wipe out all the members of this other faction? Really?). It’s also built on a proprietary Bethesda game engine that seems to be showing its age and limitations. I could go on, but none of that really matters, because I would continue playing this game until the end of time, for all I care. What really makes all the difference for me is that I play the game exclusively in survival mode, which wasn’t even an option upon the game’s release—it was patched in a few months later. What may have launched as a so-so RPG can now be experienced as a one-of-a-kind immersive sim, one filled with thousands of moment-to-moment choices that give you the feeling of an actual struggle for existence amidst a hostile, devastated environment. What will I eat and drink to stave off hunger and thirst? How can I best avoid exposure to disease and radiation that comes from eating and drinking? Where is the nearest bed, so I can save my progress? Survival mode is absolutely punishing for the first several hours. You are a weak and fragile human, and the odds are severely stacked against you. You simply cannot take any wasteland encounter for granted, and you’ll probably need to stealth crouch everywhere you go. But by the time you level up and really start to have some stopping power against the horrors that surround you, you’ll really feel like you’ve earned it, because you have.
9. Monster Hunter World (2018)
Nice game, you might say, but is it really a top-10 game of the decade? Absolutely! I’m not sure why Capcom relegated this franchise to handheld systems for the better part of a decade, but the fact that they did so made Monster Hunter World all the more jaw-dropping upon its eventual release in 2018 for Xbox One, PlayStation 4, and PC. To explore the game’s lush natural environments, to watch its imaginative wyvern creatures twist and fly and writhe about in full HD glory—it was a visual treat well worth waiting for. So yeah, it’s a good-looking game. That hardly secures it a spot in the best-games-of-the-decade list. What puts it over the top is how it feels to play. Monster Hunter games have always been notoriously difficult for new players to grasp, and while that probably remains true for Monster Hunter World, it certainly inches much closer into friendlier territory thanks to its many quality-of-life improvements. At some point, every player must select from one of 14 weapon types to try and master as they hunt down and topple an increasingly difficult roster of monsters, from flying bird-like wyverns with poisonous talons to lava-dwelling monsters to behemoth elder dragons that can one-shot destroy an entire party with a blast of energy. I personally started out down the path of a bow user, and it still remains my go-to weapon in most cases. It’s one that rewards an aggressive but slightly keep-your-distance play style—forcing me to constantly monitor my stamina, range, and aim. But I’ve had just about as much enjoyment dabbling in some of the other weapons, including the slow-but-devastating great sword, the K.O.-inducing hammer, and its quirky cousin, the hunting horn—which you can use as a musical instrument to grant temporary buffs to you and the members of your online hunting party. Like anything with a steep learning curve, it may take a while before everything clicks, so to speak. Once it does, however, you might find yourself addicted to the rush of intensity that comes from putting your best foot forward and plunging into the fray of battle against the toughest creatures Capcom throws your way.
8. The Witness (2016)
I’m surprised I ended up liking The Witness as much as I did, given the rather dull-sounding premise: Walk around a virtual 3D island littered with 2D line puzzles; solve the puzzles to unlock more areas on the island. It was a slow game to get into, but once I crossed some invisible threshold, it became like a book that I couldn’t put down. Jonathan Blow, the game's creator, deserves a ton of credit for the time and care he put into designing not only the individual puzzles but also the way in which those individual puzzles fit together to form a much larger, intricate whole. The world itself is a giant puzzle box that tantalizes and pushes the player further and further into its hidden areas. Never before has the solving of puzzles felt so intrinsically rewarding. Never before have I felt such a strangely tangible yet invisible bond of trust between the player (me) and designer (Blow). If it all sounds like a bunch of highfalutin nonsense, I don’t blame you. But playing through The Witness immediately goes down as one of the most gratifying video game experiences in recent memory.
7. Super Meat Boy (2010)
The smoothest, tightest movement mechanics of any 2D platformer ever made—that’s what you get when you play Super Meat Boy. That and a chance to feel like a “golden god” should you manage to thread the needle through its 300-plus levels of fiendish navigational challenges. With their 2010 indie masterpiece, Team Meat demonstrated to the world that by keeping the scope small and refining your core mechanics to a state of near perfection, even small games could be stretched to great heights. Super Meat Boy doesn’t distract you with bombastic visuals or superfluous controls. It doesn’t overwhelm you with new sets of verbs or button prompts to learn and master with each new set of levels. You don’t need to worry about collecting coins or power ups. All you ever need to do is run, jump, and change direction—and it never ceases to be fun. For one of the toughest games around, it’s also surprisingly free of frustration—and that’s saying something! The levels are all bite-sized challenges, meaning even if you die for the hundredth time on a given stage, it’s not like you’ve lost hours or even minutes of progress on any given attempt. Without so much as a shrug, Super Meat Boy jettisons decades of vestigial baggage from video gaming’s arcade roots. For starters, you have unlimited lives to play with, and the waiting time between death and restart is instantaneous. These sound like simple changes to the old-school formula, but they contribute leaps and bounds toward making the game the timeless classic that it is. Other platformers such as 2018’s Celeste have taken their cue from this 2010 trendsetter, sometimes to great effect, but nothing I’ve played has yet to surpass it.
6. Alan Wake (2010)
My wife and I both share a real fondness for Alan Wake, a game modeled after the tone and episodic structure of a binge-worthy television show. As much as it’s generally held up as a critical success, I still think it’s an underrated classic that transcends the boundaries of what might otherwise be a generic third-person shooter—thanks largely to its clever premise and intriguing, supernatural storyline. The titular protagonist is a best-selling author who, upon vacationing to a secluded lake cabin near the fictional town of Bright Falls, Washington, finds himself pulled into a strange nightmare reality in which his wife has disappeared and the pages of his latest manuscript—which he doesn’t remember writing––are coming to life. The fact that the game is set in a beautiful Pacific Northwest environment probably elevates my opinion of it, seeing as that’s the corner of the world in which I grew up. But seriously, I love the places this game takes you to—woodland parks and campgrounds, logging mills, an old fire lookout tower. Against these gorgeous backdrops, you'll be fighting off hordes of dark-enshrouded entities with a combination of light and firearms. While I’m sad that we’ve not yet received a proper full-blown sequel to Alan Wake, I’m happy to see the recent acclaim developer Remedy is receiving for its 2019 release, Control. I haven’t played it yet, but it certainly looks fantastic and just as inventive in concept as Alan Wake. Here’s to hoping we’ll get something more out of the franchise in the next decade, whether an actual TV show or another game. Maybe both? (Check out my initial Alan Wake review.)
5. Minecraft (2011)
I feel like I’ve only scratched the surface of this game’s infinite depths, and I say that as someone who once jumped through all the bizarre hoops, traipsing back and forth into the deadly nether world in order to defeat the mysterious Ender Dragon. Depending on your personality and play style, it can be overwhelming to be dropped into a newly fabricated sandbox world—its unexplored blocky terrain expanding out in all directions—with no objective and little guidance given. But that’s the beautiful thing about freedom. There’s virtually nothing to stop you from making your mark however you see fit. You could decide to venture out and map out that surface terrain, like a virtual cartographer. You could start building a simple farm and homestead, an enormous castle, or a sprawling underground bunker. You could play solo. You could play it online with friends. If I’m being frank, Minecraft isn’t really a top-10 personal favorite of mine. I’ve probably started over from scratch too many times and gotten a bit worn out by the tedium that comes with slowly going through my unwritten checklist of mining for iron, gold, diamonds, and other hard-to-find resources. But that’s likely because I approach the game as a self-limiting adult, circling back to my own self-imposed routines. At its heart, Minecraft is a game for children—whether in body or only in spirit. I can’t think of another game that has made as large or as positive an impact this decade.
4. Inside (2016)
After the incredible success of their first game, Limbo, the developers at Danish studio Playdead could have done anything they wanted. That they chose to create a follow-up that bears so many striking similarities to their first outing was a surprise, but that’s not the half of it. That it managed to completely eclipse its already great predecessor was simply remarkable. Just as with Limbo, Inside is a linear 2D puzzle platformer in which you must guide a little boy through a surreal and dangerous world. The game has a very “cinematic” quality that at moments feels very resonant of something like a Stephen Spielberg thriller, where your sense of wonder is slowly subsumed into a pervasive feeling of terror, time and again. To borrow from something I posted last March on the Cane and Rinse website forum: “It nails the element of suspense, not only because of the timing of the action—think of the panic that ensues from the sound of barking dogs before you even see the pack arrive on the screen, or how the relief of a narrow getaway is almost immediately supplanted by the realization that you’re not out of harm’s way just yet. The dread you feel in so many parts of the game is almost always heightened due to the simple fact that you have no idea who or what you’re even up against.” Even scarier, you can't be sure if you're escaping the danger or running ever headlong toward it.
3. Spelunky (2012)
For all of its hair-pulling moments of inevitable failure and despair, this game is simply too much fun, and I would play it more often than I do if it wasn’t for the fact that I know once I start I’ll get pulled into its never-ending cycle of death and reload. It’s still one of my life goals to one day beat this game “the hard way,” which involves triggering a series of events that extends the game beyond its standard 16 levels of mines, jungle, ice caves, and temple to include a secret black market level, a City of Gold level, and four brutally difficult levels of Hell that can only be accessed by getting through those other challenges and then defeating the main game's (not-so-final) boss in a specific manner. I think if I manage to pull off that optional challenge, I might finally be able to hang up my gamer hat and retire a happy man. At any rate, you can see what I wrote about this game back in 2012. It was great then. It’s still great now. Game designer Derek Yu was among the earliest to discover the brilliant formula for endless replayability when he mashed together the genres of roguelike and 2D action platformer to create the original version of Spelunky in 2008. The 2012 remake is the version that cemented its legacy as an all-time video game classic, and I can’t wait to see what Yu has in store for us next year with Spelunky 2.
2. The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt (2015)
I don’t think you’ll find a better example of well-written dialogue, character acting, and general storytelling in all of video games. The Witcher 3 is a high-fantasy epic that never goes off the rails. Every story beat is grounded in the drama of complex characters that feel real and human (even when they’re not, technically, human), starting with the game’s protagonist, Geralt of Rivia. This is largely thanks to the rich source material of Polish novelist Andrzej Sapkowski, but even that would have been all for nought if it wasn’t for the care and talent of the entire creative development team at CD Projekt Red, who used that material to create an entire trilogy of original storytelling. All three games are an achievement in their own right, and in some ways I actually appreciate the smaller, more linear nature of The Witcher 2: Assassins of Kings. But with The Witcher 3, CD Projekt Red essentially threw down the gauntlet to the entire AAA game industry with this groundbreaking testament to what an open-world game can be. I’ve played a lot of content-heavy open-world games since 2010 onward. None of them have felt as rich as this one. Even the side quests are almost always terrific, as Geralt finds himself constantly entangled in all manner of feuds and conflicts—from the politics of warring nations to heartbreaking episodes of love and betrayal that befall the lives of everyday people tucked away amidst the most isolated villages. While Geralt always manages to slay the monster—it is his trade, after all—the game rarely offers happy endings, let alone clear delineations of right and wrong behavior. If one of the great values of literature is the ability to conjure empathy in the reader for the struggles of other people, be they real or fictional, then The Witcher 3 represents one of the best current examples of this phenomenon carried over into video game form.
1. Dark Souls (2011)
I wrote about my fascination with this game back in 2014, and I still struggle to find the words to explain it. Every now and then, someone will try to write off the notion that this game is only popular or highly regarded for its brutal difficulty, and ... sure—there’s certainly more to it than just that. But it is an essential ingredient. Take away the challenge and what would be the point? And yet, there have been difficult video games since the very beginning of video games. Why does this one happen to resonate with so many people? I can only assume it’s because it taps into some primordial aspect of our human nature, a part of us that yearns for validation and the chance to prove our mettle against the forces of darkness that would otherwise cripple us if we lacked the strength or courage to face them head-on. If the modern-day comforts and conveniences of the developed world have all but eliminated the most sinister forms of hardship and adversity faced by our ancestors, then why not invent a few imaginary epic struggles to act as a no-stakes substitute? Nine years after From Software gave us the original Dark Souls, it’s still a game unmatched—saved maybe by its successors—in terms of its absolute starkness of visual aesthetics and overall presentation. It just feels more like an authentic journey into the heart of darkness and less like your run-of-the-mill video game, at least in comparison to so many of its contemporaries that constantly invade your field of view with distracting text prompts and tutorials and signposting—all of which tends to pull you away rather than draw you in.
Michael Thomsen famously wrote about Dark Souls back in 2012, asking whether the 100-hour game was ever worth such an investment of time. In the case of Dark Souls, his answer was no. It was a well-written piece, and this was one of his ultimate conclusions: “There is real beauty in Dark Souls. It reveals that life is more suffering than pleasure, more failure than success, and that even the momentary relief of achievement is wiped away by new levels of difficulty. It is also a testament to our persistence in the face of that suffering, and it offers the comfort of a community of other players all stuck in the same hellish quagmire. Those are good qualities. That is art. And you can get all of that from the first five hours of Dark Souls. The remaining 90 or so offer nothing but an increasingly nonsensical variation on that experience.” It’s that last part that probably strikes the nerve for most Dark Souls apologists. Can you really get the essence of the Dark Souls experience in the first five hours, to the point that you’re only playing further toward your own personal detriment? I certainly hope not. I can never really blame someone for choosing to spend their valuable free time in pursuit of other experiences, but all I know is that Dark Souls is still the only game of its kind (the 100-hour kind) in which I conquered through to the very end and immediately rolled a new character to start it all over again. I’ve never read War and Peace, but I have read a few hefty novels from cover to cover: Moby-Dick, Jane Eyre (twice), Bleak House, just to rattle off a few. Personally, I value the time I spent with those works just as much as the time I’ve spent playing Dark Souls, or any of the games on this list for that matter. Some games out there are certainly not worth your time, but speaking only from my own experience, for anyone who loves video games and wants to experience the very best of the medium, Dark Souls might be the one video game most worth your investment.
