The more I look at this list, the more it's apparent what type of guy they thought would be relevant for this. Among the names are Dan Houser, Josef Fares, Cliffy B and Ninja. That would easily make a top 100 where only a single strategy game exists, 3 different shades of Dark Souls are top contenders and the best game of all time is one who desperately catches up to a trend that's a decade old at that point.
If I were to write about this, I would get waaaay in the weeds about what that means. So, instead, here are 10 games that should make any Top 100 list, which were absent here. It's not a top 10, but games that deserve whatever place they get 👇 (under Read More)
Moreso, consider this your chance to reply with 30 games you like.
Fuck it, let's do this.
Rules
- Games are ranked in order of how important they should be. Some are objectively, unambiguously important. Others are less well known and it's a goddamned travesty. "Greatest" is a trap, because you're never not going to get people who conflate it with popularity.
- Games are disqualified by appearing on the GQ list, even if they're praiseworthy. Those games don't need more hype; hell, you've probably either already played them or know for a fact that you never will.
The List
(30) Wilmot's Warehouse (2019): On its face, this game presents what is, to many players, a living nightmare: a conveyer belt of stockroom trash on one side, angry customers on the other. The beauty of the game, and the reason why it should be discussed more, is the elegance with which it handles that gameplay loop.
(29) Saturday Edition (2022): The most surprising game in Playdate's Season 1. Playing it feels like finding someone's unsigned diary slipped into the shelves of a bookstore. I'm still thinking about it, which is more than I can say of any other object adventure game I've played in years.
(28) Wizard of Legend (2018): One of those games that simply never got the fan traction needed to become a juggernaut, which is a shame. It's broadly excellent at what it does, particularly in its use of action that feels strict and hard but meticulously fair.
(27) Wing Commander II: Vengeance of the Kilrathi (1991): The idea that games could "feel like TV" is utterly quaint at this point, but it took a long time for that potential to be realized. WC2 is, by my lights, one of the first games to make that seem like a possibility.
(26) Amnesia: The Dark Descent (2010): We absolutely would not have modern horror games, at least in their current form, without this game. It's easy to forget now how completely players were taken in by its simple systems, but this is a landmark title that broke major ground in making the medium of horror legitimately interactive.
(25) 80 Days (2014): My gut tells me that 80 Days was a crucial bridge between the interactive fiction of old and modern text-heavy indie games. Maybe that's all in my head (Twine predates the game by 5 years), but the game paints a clear picture of how much text can do in a game, and in the 2010s, it felt like we needed to be reminded of that.
(24) Vampire Survivors (2022): It warms my heart that a game this openly and self-indulgently stupid can also be this compelling and popular. A lesson to us all: Make your dumb idea with all its goofy in-jokes and the world will be better for it.
(23) Riven (1997): The grounded uncle to Myst's goofy cousin, this game stands up after over 25 years in a way that almost every game on the GQ list will not.
(22) Master of Orion II: Battle At Antares (1996): As I've noted elsewhere on cohost, MOO2 sits at a sweet spot for strategy titles, a bag of candy that is so very easy to reach into for another bite.
(21) Mini Motorways (2019): I prefer this game to its predecessor, Mini Metro (2015), but both are deserving of praise for their mind-cleansing design. The perfect way to take a break.
(20) Starflight II: Trade Routes of the Cloud Nebula (1989): An early showcase of how enormous procedural generation could make a game feel. Probably not going to set the world alight today, but it remains shocking even today how much game this game fit onto a single floppy disk.
(19) A House Of Many Doors (2017): No sensible person would set out to make a "Sunless-Seas-Like," and AHoMD does not feel sensible. It instead feels like having the chance to live in the designer's head for a while, which I will always prefer to the feeling of a game that is written by committee.
(18) Thief II: The Metal Age (2000): It's hard to go back to the era before modern shaders, but what a treat this game was. Annoying trends in games so often arise because of some forebearer that did it well, and we really do have the brilliance of Thief II, even more than Thief, to thank for all those stealth sequences.
(17) Super Smash Bros. Melee (2001): Shut up, this is obviously an important game. Yes, Ultimate is the rightful heir to the throne, but the evolution of the Smash Bros. franchise has been a microcosm of how rock-solid game design can be vehicle for brand commodification. Each of the games in this series, even the weaker titles, is way better and more generous than it has any right to be.
(16) Homeworld (1999): At time of release, the question "Can an RTS have a story?" had been answered in the affirmative, but mostly by games with the narrative sensibilities of playing with action figures. Experiencing the sober, restrained storytelling of Homeworld must be what it felt like to grow up listening to radio dramas about spacemen and then seeing The Ten Commandments (1956) when it released in theaters.
(15) Fez (2012): A beautiful, thoughtful, and deceptively layered game that was unfortunately overshadowed by its combative, intense developer, Fez has much less to do with other pixel platformers than one might think at a glance. In practice, it's the closest the industry has come to a reimagined version of Myst for the 21st century.
(14) Knytt Underground (2012): A curious paradox of a game. It feels small and intimate, and yet sprawls enormous. Its disarmingly DIY aesthetic masks absolutely rock-solid platforming controls. Its cutesy character designs mask some unnervingly heavy emotional moments. A lovely thing.
(13) Opus Magnum (2017): The Zachtronics pantheon of games runs a gamut from "for people who know how to code" to "for almost no one, except me." In that spectrum, Opus Magnus sits at a sweet spot. Genuinely challenging without presenting any insurmountable jumps in difficulty, luxuriously replayable, and blessed with an undeniable aesthetic.
(12) X-COM: UFO Defense (1994): While the tactical model presented by X-COM would soon be swept away by the RTS juggernaut, its influence still echoes in many modern single-player titles. More broadly, it was a game that leveled genuine surprises at the player, such as the horrible realization that the layout of the rooms in your bases might have tactical significance.
(11) Slay The Spire (2017): It's sort of amazing to me how quickly truly great games can get memory-holed these days. There is much to learn from the elegance with which StS merges roguelike mechanics with deck-building and encounter design. No game I can think of teaches more elegantly how simple decisions compound over time.
(10) Planescape: Torment (1999): It's significant that this game held the record for "longest in-game script in a major title" for years. What makes the game great is the extent to which it's interactive fiction in disguise. As much as Bioware RPGs are the natural successor to this game, it's a shame that their dedication to voice acting and rigged character animation prevents them from ever having the potential to shock you the way Torment did when it gave you the option to rip out your own eye.
(9) Papers, Please (2014): It must have been a relief to certain listicle authors when Return of the Obra Dinn came out and was excellent, because it exonerates them for pretending Papers, Please does not exist. Shame on them. This uncomfortably political, emotionally taxing game confronted a generation of players and designers with the question of whether games could be something other than fun, in a way that they were unable to dismiss out of hand.
(8) System Shock 2 (1999): In a lot of ways, SS2 is the Event Horizon of video games. Imperfect but ambitious, it points a no-longer-human finger toward a sea of science fiction horror possibilities while still punching above its weight, even among the modern competition.
(7) Fallen London (2009): The rare game in which lore is not the sauce ladled over some mechanical loop, but is the meal itself. Anyone thinking about writing in games should think hard about how different Fallen London's approach is and why it works. This is not to say that every game should follows its example, but rather that the contrast it provides to other games is deeply illuminating.
(6) Bushido Blade (1997): The only game I've ever seen take over a party. While it's not surprising that a game this punishingly strict didn't become a genre of its own, it remains a landmark, the greatest dueling game ever made.
(5) Celeste (2018): Look, this is a perfect game. It is unambiguously a better game than almost every platformer from which it draws inspiration. It deserves every morsel of hype it has received.
(4) Star Control II: The Ur-Quan Masters (1992): I suppose it's inevitable that any game over 30 is going to begin to sink beneath the waves, but I'm convinced that legions of older game developers have forgotten how much playing this game impacted them in their youths. Absolutely an all-timer.
(3) Grim Fandango (1998): As much as it leans on noir tropes, Grim Fandango managed to make its world feel populated by characters with their own lives and routines. Its most subtle and most important feature is its in media res approach to worldbuilding, as it lets us discover and rediscover not just the world and its characters, but the protagonist's relationship to them and how those change over the game's various time-skips.
(2) Gorogoa (2017): Also a perfect game, a polished jewel, a melancholy treasure of a thing. Admittedly, its genre has a smaller audience, but I won't hear ill spoken of it.
(1) Dwarf Fortress (2006): Not to much an Everest as it is a space elevator, no developer or team of developers is ever going to match the heights of this bananas accomplishment in game design. There aren't enough hours in the day. Despite this, you can see its influence everywhere. A colossus among games, in whose shadow the industry now toils.
