Feel free to list a few video games from different genres. Best is definitely subjective and I’m sure there are many “Best” games for various categories.
Half Life: Alyx for example is widely considered the “Best” VR game. Many would agree it’s the best Action VR game, but it wouldn’t be the “Best” for puzzles.
To make it easier I’ll list the types of Genres for Video Games from Wikipedia. Please do give suggestions for some of the highest quality games you’ve played from various categories:
- Action: Platform games, shooter, fighting, survival, etc
- Action-Adventure: Survival horror
- Adventure: Interactive, real time, 3d, text adventures, etc
- Puzzle: Exploration, trial and error, breakout, logical games, etc
- Role-playing: Action RPG, MMORPG, tactical, sandbox, etc
- Simulation: Management, life simulation, vehicle simulation, etc
- Strategy: Real time, turn based, wargame, grand strategy, etc
- Sports: Racing, competitive, sports games, etc
- MMO: Massively multiplayer online game
- Openworld: Sandbox, creative, open world, etc
Note: Non-exhaustive category list. There are more such as card games, board games, etc. Please check the wiki link above for more categories to get ideas for the “best” games.
I personally would recommend Subnautica (Open World), Half Life: Alyx (VR Action-Adventure), The Witcher 3 (Role-playing), Black Mesa (Action), Titanfall 2 (Action), Portal 2 (Puzzle), Battlebit (MMO/Action), and Half Life 3 (Fictional Game).
Bioshock is the answer.
System Shock 2.
Chaos is a brilliant multiplayer turn-based strategy game.
Lemmings is the perfect puzzle game (also shameless plug for !lemmings)Hades is perfect. Every single pillar of that game supports each other.
Chrono Trigger
The story is great. The music is timeless. The replay-ability of the game is off the charts. You can change the combat style to be time-based instead of turn-based.
Sekiro (RPG).
It’s not necessarily representative of RPGs as a whole, but man, I have never played a game that felt so polished. The combat is immaculate, the levels are beautiful, and more subtly, the power scaling is really well tuned. Because it’s not open world, they were able to hand tune the enemies’ difficulty more closely to match your own progression, and for me, it resulted in fights that always felt challenging but fair.
Witcher 3
I have to go way back and vote for the Shenmu trilogy. Open world and RPG.
I agree that Half Life for action adventure.
Definitely Portal 2 and the Talos Principal for puzzle.
Rocket League is awesome and so are the Skate games.
Crazy Taxi and Paradise City belong somewhere too
OG Half Life. I should load that up again!
I recently beat Half-Life MMod and really enjoyed it. I was worried it would be too over the top, but I found it just right as something between the original and Black Mesa.
Easy.
Disco Elysium for all categories.
I hear that’s amazing but I don’t want to buy it because I heard the current owners screwed over the devs or something
So, an interesting point of detail, is a game “gooder” when it perfectly executes its formula after countless iterations, like FF6 did, or is it better when it innovates in a new way, bringing together new ideas into a magical, if occasionally rough-around-the-edges, novel new approach that others start copying, as Doom did?
Also, are we looking at them from the perspective of their time, where Pac Man was once the pinnacle of gaming itself, or from a modern, more objective perspective, where Pac Man struggles to provide the same value as BotW does almost half a century later?
Calling Doom a novel approach is a bit of an understatement, don’t you think? Doom is easily one of the most influential milestones in the history of video games, period. Despite the roughness around the edges – most or all of which was necessary to get it to even work on PC hardware of the time, as it was certainly well understood by hyper dimensional time traveling space wizard, John Carmack. Nowadays we all know how the engine cheated, wasn’t truly 3d, and where all the jank and bugs can be found. But from the perspective if someone in 1993 playing on their 486-DX, Doom really felt like a highly polished and complete experience.
Doom’s impact in the scene in 1993 was so vast that you can still see it to this very day if you know where to look. There was so much that it either invented or perfected: Network multiplayer, both deathmatch and co-op; the now standard FPS loadout of melee-pistol-shotgun-rocket-launcher; the entire modern concept of the “violent video game” controversy; the notion of rock star game developers (John Romero…); the capability of generating distinct and recognizable 3D environments with a sense place. That’s really just the start. Doom made the entire video game industry at the time do an about-face. It changed the landscape forever despite how quaint it might look today.
