Outer Wilds is what instantly came to mind for me as well.
Talk about one I wish I could forget and play fresh
Best game of the last 10 years. Probably even longer.
For me, this mostly applies to very unique and story heavy titles that I could enjoy from beginning to end - especially because of their shorter length.
These games surprised me with their approach to story telling and hooked me immediately.
Return of the Obra Dinn
Say NO more
Florence
South of the Circle
My brother lives in a canyon
Lol Say No More was an excellent game. Silly and fun.
Second this.
Quick overview for someone who hasn’t played?
Subnautica. It was just a near perfect execution, with an super immersive environment, tons of things to discover, and a brilliant story. One of the only games I wish I could experience again for the first time. A true work of art.
It would have made so much more sense for the first act of the game being you and Jackie building your reputations. It also would have been the perfect time to have all those filler side quests, so then the time crunch the game says you’re under really would have felt like one.
And can you imagine the gut punch it would have been if Jackie died AFTER you’d spent hours really getting to know him and his mom and girlfriend?
I have a weird answer: Mario 64. It was summer 1999. I saved up birthday and Christmas money to buy an N64, and did dumb little odd jobs too. I finally bought it, and my mom pitched in and bought me Mario 64 with it so I'd have something to play after succeeding at my own sorta self-imposed marshmallow test as a 10-year-old. We had recently moved across the US, so I didn't have any real friends nearby yet, but I had a very fulfilling single player game. For younger people today, it's probably hard to imagine playing a game and having to figure everything about it out for yourself. I had no internet resource. It was summer, so there were no classmates to talk about it with. It was a new state, so I had no friends to learn from. I would play for hours, figuring out the secret to each star, solving puzzles based on nothing but the level provided and the cryptic title of each star challenge. I sat on my bedroom's ugly 70's shag carpet in front of the old TV that didn't work quite right anymore, and worked the pack-in gray controller to death trying to figure out where I was supposed to go, marveling at the 3D graphics and crisp platforming in it.
I knew nothing of politics or current events. There was no drama in my life. Everything was simple, and this game was peak joy in a joyous time. It is the lightning rod of much of my childhood nostalgia. I have replayed it several times, and I feel a sliver of that mirth each time. It's like when you think of a sour candy hard enough and you feel that tingly tightness in the backs of your cheeks while you lightly pucker, but it's just a fraction of the real reaction to the real stimulus.
I even spent a little bit of time learning some basic speedrun strategies and techniques. I figured if I'm gonna play this for my whole life, I might as well challenge myself. I haven't played in a few years now, but I got a run that was only about 30 minutes, which isn't close to any records, but I'm proud of it as an amateur fan of the game.
Does Mario 64 hold up today? I don't know. I don't think I'm impartial enough to be capable of answering that objectively. I never will be. It will never not be that important to me. It's not timeless and it was probably never deserving of a perfect 10, but it's maybe the last time I had a purely innocent and happy memory. I even mentioned at my mom's memorial service the memory of her teaching me the value of saving for and sticking to a long-term goal back in 2013. You're math is right, she passed when I was 24. She fought cancer for years before she lost, but long before that, in 1999, she was in the living room, smoking cigarettes, drinking glass after glass of rum and diet coke. She slept on the couch almost every night. She would get up in the middle of the night to puke from her alcoholism. If she had slept in the same bed as my dad, she would've woken him, and he wouldn't be good at his job. So she slept on the couch between binges. But I was playing Mario 64, door shut, oblivious to the reality of pain, not only yet to come, but pain just down the hall, coexisting with my ignorant bliss. Charles Martinet, yipping as I triple jumped, drowned out the sick on the other side of my wall.
I enjoyed Mario 64 so much, I didn't notice that my mom was slowly killing herself. No game should ever be enjoyed that much.
First game I ever played enough to legitimately speedrun.
Outer Wilds - I hope there will be a way to erase specific memories, to experience this game for the first time again. Just beautiful.
Dark Souls - I think I know the map better than the roads in my home town. Such a nice world.
Gothic - So many memorable NPCs, I think I still remember most of their names
Outer Wilds is mesmerizing the first time you lift off and start flying around in space like a drunken sailor
Outer Wilds DLC is superb too, if you want to revisit that world for a new experience.
For me it is The Elder Scrolls IV - Oblivion. That game changed my life. I was somewhat around 12 to 15 years old when I first found it and haven’t heard from it before. The Cover just looked interesting, so I bought it (as physical copy in a Hertie). One the way home in the car I was already studying the booklet and instantly got hyped. Invited a friend over as I got out of the car and we played for like 10 hours that day. Since then it became my favorite game and I played it for over 2k hours. Still waiting/hoping for an Android port, so I can enjoy it again in the few free time I have now as father. Definitely going to play this game one day with my daughters.
That moment when you get out the sewers and you're like: "Fuck. What do I do? I'm free!"
Exactly :D That was a life changing experience! First thing I did actually was marching right into kvatch and freeing it. I had no idea what was going on. At first there were only trees and beautiful landscape and the next moment the world ended. I thought oh wow I completed the game now, that was kinda quick. Boy was I wrong… But it was really nice being called hero from kvatch throughout the whole game!
Edit: speaking about it let’s me feel nostalgic right know. Just tried installing it from my old physical copy, didn’t work. Then I saw it’s on sale in the Steam store, so I just bought the GOTY Deluxe Edition (5.99€) and it’s downloading right now. Can’t wait to play it once again!
Xenogears. Hands down my favorite. The story, especially to teenager me, was enthralling and original. The gameplay was fun, and the music and environments captivated me. I played that game through several times. And when I go on long vacations now I try to bring a way to emulate it and have another play through.
Return of the Obra Dinn. Hoping to forget as much as I can about this and replay it in ten years.
Donkey Kong country
Elder scrolls oblivion
A few for me.
GoldenEye on the N64. The times I had with by friends playing multiplayer will stay with me forever. We got so competitive. And then Perfect Dark multiplayer after it. Weeks of my life have gone in to multiplayer on both those games, just hanging out with friends having a good time.
Doom, but on the SNES (yeah, I'm old). Holy shit this was an epic mission to complete it. No saves. It took about three of us tag teaming it to play through the entire thing in one sitting to get to the ending.
Titanfall 1/2. Still the best movement of any game I've ever played. Criminally underrated. Apex is a shell of what Titanfall was.
Portal 2, Firewatch, Titan Station, Replika and Pony Island. All intriguing stories that get stuck in your head.
Masquerada: Songs and Shadows, the unique story & lore, the characters, the language, the pausable combat, the haunting music.
Citizen Sleeper: The evolving well written narrative and dice based decisions affecting your run and outcomes. The music and art design.
Transistor: Aesthetic, story and characters along with the music and cyberpunk noir setting and combat.
Greedfall: The pseudo-historical setting, the fully fleshed out world, the language, story and investment in the plot.
Elex: The fantasy/sci-fi hybrid, verticality and exploration of an apocalyptic world wracked by factional war.
Duskers: The remote tactical exploration of infested space hulks with command-line operated drones.
Cosmic Star Heroine: indie retro sci-fi cyberpunk espionage RPG with delightful turn based combat system, enjoyable characters, excellent soundtrack.
MGS2 - I went into this game with no prior knowledge and it was unlike anything I'd ever played. Nothing made sense and I loved it. The ending AI speech is insane and incredibly ahead of its time. I could play any game in the series multiple times, but MGS2 has stuck with me the most
Celeste - The whole package of this game is just amazing. The music and level design is top notch, and completing a hard level is so satisfying.
Shovel Knight - Similar feeling to Celeste, but I really loved how the DLCs completely changed the gameplay to make each playthrough fresh.
Mario Odyssey - This game was just an absolute joy to play throughout! So inventive and perhaps the most fluid and varied movement options of any platformer I've seen.
BOTW - It came out at a time when open worlds were pretty common, but it still felt so different. No other open world game has given me the sense of freedom and exploration that this game did (maybe Skyrim would be a close second - playing that for the first time was magical). I'm currently playing TOTK so maybe that'll usurp this, though I love both.
Disco Elysium for me too. There is just nothing else like it.
SOMA really made me question and think about notions of identity, sentience and morality.
Another one would be somewhat of a deep cut, a visual novel Full Metal Daemon: Muramusa. Dark, philosophical, uncomfortable and captivating.
Is Stray two years old already? Damn.
For me:
Others that have had a huge affect are:
Spiritfarer. I needed a good distraction after my dad passed away, but I put it off for a year because I was afraid my grief would still be too raw at the time.
Then the grief grabbed me by the throat when playing the game where you need to help a frog pass over after death because he couldn't let go of his wife and daughter for whom he DIY's a lot. It was as if my very own father was imported in the game. I've never sobbed this much in my life over a videogame and it truly helped me process things so much better. So many valuable lessons to be learned from that game.
Edit: I ended up breaking the game by putting off the final quests of the frog character which is ironic because I needed to let him go, but couldn't.
Kingdom hearts 2
Such a great game with a good story and amazing gameplay mechanics
Celeste, it's the first story-based ideo game that my longtime girlfriend and I played together after we started dating. I was mostly oblivious about mental health struggles and depression whereas she had gone through most of her childhood and young adulthood living with anxiety.
The soundtrack... the story... the relationships... the challenge...
Truly a Hidden Gem ™️
Mass Effect trilogy & Ghost of Tsushima for me.
CrossCode stuck with me for a long time. Such charming characters, finishing it really felt like leaving friends behind.
The first Resident Evil on PSX absolutely blew my mind. I rented it from Blockbuster so many times that it would have been cheaper to buy it. In my grown-up years, I think I've purchased it for 5 or 6 different platforms and replay it every year or two on my PC.
Runners up are SOMA, Talos Principle, Deus Ex Human Revolution, Pilotwings 64 and Tomb Raider Revelations.
The original GTA for PS1, Super Mario world and Yoshi's Island. Mainly because these were my first video games that I can remember and I have fond memories of them.
silent hill and kingdom hearts specifically just burrowed their way into my head from the moment i started playing them, same with disco elysium. there's tons of weird, obscure PS2 games that also just never leave me. and whatever happens with the development, the demo of 'agony of a dying mmo' made me feel things that i've never been able to let go
Probably gonna go with Maple Story, Gunbound, Drift City, Star Wars Battlefront 2 on PS2.
Old games from my childhood. Such good memories and I know that if I went back and played them now it just wouldn’t be the same.
Oni. The Bungle game before Halo. In fact originally, Halo was pitched as a sequel, but then the gameplay moved away from melee into more gun focused, followed by a deal with Microsoft, it became it's own thing.
Only Sleeping Dogs has ever matched this game on mixing melee with gun combat in a way that feels good.
I remember reading a white paper on the culling algorithm that let them build levels that were much larger than the standard at the time
Oh my, Oni was so perfect and I really can't understand that it never got a successor or a later remake. Loved that game and I came here to write excactly that. I'm happy I wasn't the only one.
Subnautica. Fantastic game:
Probablymy favorite game of all time.
Have you given No Man's Sky a spin since it ironed out all the launch creases?
I purchased it after completing Subnautica. I did not like it. It's very repetitive - same planets, same galaxies, same NPCs. Also it has incredibly stupid AI.
Subnautica, on the other hand, has lore and thallasophobia simulator included. Lot's of places to explore, lot's of stuff to do in order to achieve goal.
I am not sure why people compare NMS to Subnautica lol. 😅
Inside. 3 hours I'll never forget.
Halo CE was the first Xbox game and first FPS I ever tried after having only really played platformers and Pokémon. I remember being really blown away by how open the map for the second level felt. The controls were simple enough for me to pick up relatively easily. (It only took me a few hours to stop accidentally hitting left trigger and blowing myself up...)
Spec ops the line was one of the first games that I played that really made me think about what I was doing as I played it.
Gotta be Death Stranding I played this in Aug 2020, and at that point in the pandemic I hadn't seen anybody but my mom for literal months and the story/message fully broke me, and the gameplay experience is one of the most unique I've ever played. Also the first game I think I beat with zero kills (where killing is an option, at least)
I think it's probably the most successful 'pacifist' game I've ever played due to how killing enemies actually tangibly affects your gameplay, and isn't just a 'game over' screen
I was thinking about stray yesterday and really sad about the robot that sacrificed herself and the little Droid last of humanity did to save the cat. Omg.
Oot was always one that stuck with me. The sonic games on mega drive were my first console games but oddly enough one game I'll never forget is tuk goes to town on csx64 lol.
Undertale, most recently. The story and aesthetic left a mark, and it's one of only a few games where I was truly surprised by some things.
Tales of Symphonia is another one that stuck. The gameplay felt satisfying in a way that not many other RPGs can compete with.
FF 7, 8, and 9
Suikoden 1, 2, and 5
Speedball II (Master System II)
Olympic Gold (MS2)
California Games (MS2)
Timesplitters 2 & Future Perfect
Premier Manager 99
Broken Sword II
Tekken II
WWF Attitude
Alundra
Breath of Fire III/IV
Command & Conquer: Red Alert
Tiger Woods PGA Tour 2005 (great for couch parties)
I could go on, but that's a nice list of older games I can remember sinking a lot of time into in my younger days. I have a lot of fond memories there.
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