Oh baby, this was a good decade! I have
many thoughts, and I wanna see your guys' as well! At least five pages, single-spaced!
To start with some that don't really fit in...
Honorable Mention A: Super Smash Bros. Ultimate, Splatoon 2, Mario Kart 8 Deluxe, Mario Maker 2 - To me, these are just timeless fun, usually in a multiplayer setting. I love them, and I mentally set them aside from all other games as being something that I want to go back to over and over and over again.
Honorable Mention B: P.T. - I never actually played this; I've only watched playthroughs of it. But I love what it stands for, I love the mystery behind it, I love the story behind it's development and removal, and I love that it's now this elusive thing that's super hard to get your hands on. This was without a doubt one of the craziest gaming experiences of the past decade whether your directly played it or not.
Wait, crap, that reminds me, I haven't beaten
Death Stranding yet! That's bound to land on here somewhere! Alright, we'll call it
Honorable Mention C.
On to the main list!
21. Super Mario Odyssey - Like I always say: this is a Marvel movie in an industry that hasn't figured out how to make Marvel movies. It's a darn good game, but there are no other darn good games, so it stands out! (The freedom it gives the player is great.)
20. Baba is You - This was shaping up to be one of my favorite puzzle games ever--and it still is!--but there's one end-game puzzle that I've been stuck on for nine months now. Not having a nice conclusion to my experience did sour it a bit, but it was still a great game.
19. Save the Date - This game
really blew my mind when I first played it. Its whole storytelling gimmick has been done a million times since--by games on this list, even!--but I've gotta give it a shout-out for being the first.
18. Nintendo Labo Variety Kit - I love the Gameboy Camera. I love the N64 DD. I love the e-reader. This is just the next in that series of weird experiments, and it was
awesome. The music stuff in this game--cutting waveforms out of paper and scanning them in as sounds with the IR camera, using the Joy-Con's rumble as an instrument--was just brilliant. I don't know that I needed four Labo kits, but this first one was fascinating.
17. Metal Gear Solid V - This game is a
blast, it's opening level is an amazing horror movie, and it succeeded in telling a story so subversive that almost no one understood it. The "V" isn't a Roman numeral, it's an English letter; MGS4 was the series' climax, whereas this is a much more personal story masquerading as a Metal Gear game, and it's brilliant.
16. Zero Escape Trilogy - I'll lump all these games in one, since that's how I think of them. 999 was mindblowing, Virtue's Last Reward both refined and expanded on all of its concepts, and Zero Time Dilemma... was weird and had a hilarious Mr. Poopy Butthole level twist, and I appreciate it! Metaphysics, game theory, and fourth wall breaking are all my jam.
15. Starseed Pilgrim - It's like a new kind of Tetris, but interspliced with poetry about heartbreak! The perfect game!
14. BIT.TRIP - This was really the first game series that showed me that a story could be told through gameplay allegory... and it's still kind of the only one to try anything like it? Even if you ignore all that though, these are some really great, unique rhythm games. BEAT and RUNNER were especially mindblowing at the time, let's not forget that RUNNER kind of pioneered a whole genre. Speedrun levels are the most popular category in Mario Maker 2 by far!
13. Little Inferno - This game hit me at just the right time as I was entering adulthood. I love Kyle Gabler's music, sense of humor, and overall style, and this weird experimental Wii U launch game was such a beautiful little story about pursuing your dreams to play curled up under a blanket with the gamepad. One of the best title screens of any game ever, too.
12. Hotline Miami - Yet another game that hit me at just the right time--when I was an angsty teenager! Loved the fun, violent gameplay and bumping soundtrack.
11. Frog Fractions - Mindblower.
10. Stephen's Sausage Roll - The antithesis of Frog Fractions. Around the time this game came out, I'd been trained to expect that every heavily-praised indie game was some kind of subversive sneaky thing... but nope, turns out this is just a damn good puzzle game! It might be the most elegantly-designed puzzle game ever, in fact. Every. Single. Level. Of its 200 levels. Puts a totally new twist on this really simple set of mechanics, and it explores
everything to it's fullest potential. I'd love if this came to Switch, you guys need to try it.
9. Rhythm Heaven Fever - I am such a sucker for this series.
Remix 9 of this game is my favorite level of any game ever (with Remix 8 being a close second). As someone who's always loved mashups, I have not experienced joy in any other game like Rhythm Heaven brings me.
8. Fez - Maybe the closest that any game has come to the beautiful, empty mystery of the original Zelda game? With crazy math puzzles? I want to replay this one, but all of it's amazing puzzle solutions are still so fresh in my mind nearly a decade later. What a work of art.
7. Pokemon Go - The first three weeks that this game was out may have literally been the most fun three weeks our world has ever experienced. It was
insane being able to go outside on a gorgeous summer day and see
everyone outdoors catching Pokemon and being friendly with each other. You could run into groups of people at 3am. "Smart critics" whine about how this game wasn't everything it could have been, but whatever, those three weeks were magical and you have Pokemon Go to thank for them.
6. Minecraft - Minecraft is so good, dude. It's so good that we've forgotten how good it was. Every time I go back to it, I get sucked in for days. What a wonderful source of creativity for kids; this was the most popular game in the world for the longest time, and it deserved it. I still love seeing what people program with Redstone.
5. Portal 2 - Damn good game.
4. Undertale - After my first playthrough, I thought, "Okay, this was pretty good, I can see why people like it so much. Fun little indie game." After my second playthrough, I thought, "ALRIGHT, yeah, I can see why people put this up there with the great SNES JRPGs. It's a classic." After my third playthrough, I thought, "Wow, I can't believe what I'm seeing, this is a subversive masterpiece and an awesome piece of commentary on video games."
3. The Witness - Masterpiece. I don't understand how it's possible for this game's world to have been put together... every single object is doing like three different things, and tweaking any one little detail would have rippling effects throughout the whole surrounding area. I loved the puzzles, I loved the philosophy. This sucked me in.
2. Spelunky - It's kind of hard to talk about what makes Spelunky so great eight years later, since it's been ripped off so many times and everything it introduced is so ingrained in our brains that it all feels normal now. (Like Minecraft!) And despite all that, Spelunky is still the king.
This article blew my mind back in the day, and it's crazy that people are
still finding new ways to break this game and beat it faster. It's also the first instance I can think of of people doing "challenge runs" in games, which has now blossomed into one aspect of
my favorite genre of internet video.
1. Breath of the Wild - A design revolution. Nintendo crafted the biggest, most beautiful game world in the history of the medium, filled it to the brim with hilarious puzzles and mysteries, gave the player ridiculously fun powers to control with such
satisfying controls--and then backed off and said, "Yeah, you can skip it all if you want. You do you." It respects its player's intelligence. It's good for hundreds of hours of entertainment. It's got a
five disk soundtrack despite having "no music" (and 120 dungeons despite having "no dungeons!"). It's the best game I've ever played.