1. The Talos Principle

I played The Talos Principle at exactly the right time in my life. I was at university, living alone for the first time, just starting to feel the weight of mortality, then this silly puzzle game comes along and tells me that:

• I am definitely going to die
• Everyone I know is going to die
• Regardless, life is still worth living

The Talos Principle made me cry more times than any other single game on this list. The gameplay involves redirecting lasers and stacking boxes.

I hope you can find something in all those files - a song, a book, a movie, - maybe a game - just something that you'll love, that makes you realize how much poorer the universe would have been without it.

2. Kid Icarus: Uprising

Kid Icarus Uprising is great because it makes you think it's a short and sweet game of nine levels, then slowly draws back the curtain to reveal that you're a mere third of the way through.

The character work is immaculate. The Uprising version of Hades is my favourite iteration in fiction; he's here, he's queer, and he's having the time of his fucking life.

Much ado has been made of the controls, but when you master them, there's so much depth to get your teeth into. Every weapon has ten different firing modes, and with nine categories of weapons to pick from, the domain of player expression is massive!

My favourite weapons are the Crusader Blade and the Aurum Palm because of their very strong continuous fire modes.

Pit: I didn't know you had a Super-Sensor!
Palutena: Hee hee, I don't. You know how I like to make stuff up.

3. Nier: Automata

There are games with better action than Nier Automata. There are games with shinier graphics. The rail shooter segments really don't have much depth to them. Enemy difficulty is frequently in the "bullshit" category instead of the "challenging" one.

It's also one of the most heartfelt, devastating experiences that I've had the pleasure of experiencing.

Nier Automata is my ideal of an unpolished gem. If you smoothed out some of its edges, you would lose a fundamental aspect of its personality that makes it a work of art. Because it is deeply imperfect, it has transcended perfection.

That makes the game more human than any other AAA I've ever played.

Do you think games are silly little things? [No/Yes]

4. Xenoblade 3

Xenoblade 3 is a game about child soldiers caught in a never-ended cycle of exploitation for the benefit of a myopic group of old bastards. It's a world that is frequently hopeless, and always unfair. It is hurtling towards oblivion and the people in power have no desire to save it.

Can you tell what it's a metaphor for?

Considering it's a game from a large studio and funded by Nintendo, Xenoblade 3 has a surprisingly anarchist soul. Rather than trying to work within the system, Xenoblade 3 tells the player to tear down the ruling class by forging lines of collaboration between the common soldiers. Take note, other writers: our protagonist getting to be in a position of power is explicitly the "bad ending".

The game would be ranked even higher if it weren't so beholden to series fanservice. Please let Melia retire, Monolithsoft.

It's been fun, Noah.

5. FFXIV: Shadowbringers

Despite being a MMO, Final Fantasy 14 is also a really solid story-based RPG, whith the Shadowbringers arc being my personal favourite.

The world of the "First" is so well-realised that I completely fell head-over-heels in love with it; I just want to exist in that tragic, doomed land, where the scant survivors have banded together to eke out an existence at the end of time.

I love how Shadowbringers expanded the cosmology of FFXIV and recontextualised the previously-undercooked Ascians as a tragic group of apocalypse survivors who have turned to fascism in response to the world moving on from them.

I just wish that more people could recognise that even though big-bad Emet Selch is charismatic as hell, he is still a fascist. Even though he speaks with authority, he is shown by all the evidence around you to have come to the wrong conclusions.

But how can I hold it against the game that its fictional villains are so well written that people fall for the same tricks that they do with real life villains?

It ends this day. One way or another, it ends.

6. WipEout Pure

I love WipEout. This should not come as a surprise. The WipEout games are a near-perfect combination of style and gameplay and I've played and replayed each one multiple times.

WipEout Pure is my favourite of the bunch, mostly because of its physics engine. Compared to the other games, the ships slide around a lot more, resulting in a lot of inertia to manage as you navigate the turns.

It's also got the most 'Y2K' aesthetic of the bunch, with lots of clean shapes and references to street art culture. The earlier work by The Designers Republic certainly contributed to the Y2K movement, but is a little more dirty and industrial, whilst Pulse and onwards lean into a more 2010s flat UI style.

If you want to play it, make sure you grab the free DLC, because it more than doubles the amount of content.

7. Hypnospace Outlaw

Hypnospace Outlaw harkens back to an era of the internet that I am juuuust old enough to remember. The era of custom personal web presences, of exciting cursors, of desktop pets. It was beautiful, but it was already under the thumb of our corportate overlords even back then.

Given that you are reading this on my personal website, it should not surprise you to learn that I am fond of the vibe of Hypnospace Outlaw, but what I want to make clear is that the game is also a masterclass in character writing and naturalistic puzzle design. It's also funny as shit.

Hypnospace is an experience that transcends its nostalgic premise and deserves to be spoken of in the same breath as the lauded Outer Wilds.

8. Ace Combat 7

Honestly, most of the Ace Combat games are really good, but the reason why I like 7 the most is the level design. More so in 7 than any of the others, each level has one or two special gimmicks that makes it feel unique.

Take, for example, Pipeline Destruction: The first half is an air-to-ground mission where you need to pick out fuel tanks that will take out their neighbouring structures to get a high score, then in the second half, you need to seek small moving targets in a dust storm that reduces your visibility to a very small radius. Neither of these ideas get repeated in another level.

I am also willing to be the world's only Skies Unknown story defender. Sure, the plot is a bit all-over-the-place, but thematically, it's surprisingly consistent in both overt and subtle ways.

Can you hear me, pilot with the three strikes?

9. Armored Core 3

Armored Core is the mech game. I have played other games where you pilot a mecha, but none of them have the same level of autistic number crunching as armored core. Every mech is comprised of 13 parts, each of which has a stat list that covers the entire screen. It's not balanced and not all of the stats are even important, but there's nothing else around that lets you minmax like Armored Core.

Mastering combat in Armored Core 3 feels completely natural. Your mech can't really do any special moves, it is up to the player to work out how the movement physics can be exploited to effectively dodge different kinds of attacks and outmaneuver their opponents.

It's also a scathing takedown of capitalism without ever uttering the word.

A group of employees, unhappy about our decision to shutdown the Zidan weapons factory, have taken over control. [...] We're sending you in to end the standoff and get the project back on track. Eliminate all targets in the factory.

10. Outer Wilds

Hey, I mentioned this earlier!

Everyone says that Outer Wilds is a masterpiece, and, like: yeah. Most puzzle games - including my personal favourite game - trade on the players' suspension of disbelief to justify why you have to engage in such abstracted activities. By comparison, Outer Wilds has built its puzzles into the fabric of its world in such a way that you might not even realise you're playing a puzzle game!

And yet, it manages to elicit more moments of "Ah ha!" than anything else that I've ever played. This is a deeply clever game, and we're lucky to have it.

I am ready to die in space.

11. (Open) RCT2

Even though it's 26 years old, Roller Coaster Tycoon remains my favourite management game. A really robust simulation, a theme that allows for lots of creativity, and a low barrier to entry keeps me coming back to it again and again.

It's also an incredibly pretty game thanks to its gorgeous pre-rendered sprites and OS-style window based interface. Is it weird to say that I kinda want to gnaw on some of the scenery objects?

RCT1 is the better game than RCT2 due to the scenarios it offers, but I can't live without the sequel's QOL improvements. Luckily, you no longer have to choose between them because of the modern rebuild called "Open RCT2", which expands on the games without damaging what makes them great.

Trans Rights is really good value!

12. Titanfall 2

Ok, so you've probably heard of the level "Effect and Cause", and yes, that's definitely a cool level, but it's not why I love Titanfall 2 so much. In fact, even though the campaign is a masterclass in rapid-fire FPS level design ideas, there's one simple thing that elevates the game above all of its peers.

You. Can run. On the Walls.

God, there's nothing quite like crossing a whole level without ever touching the ground, gunning down npcs, getting into firefights with other pilots...

The only downside is that the game has such a high skill ceiling that I quickly found myself hopelessly outclassed in multiplayer. If I could still get into matches with other people around my own ability level, I'd still be booting it up every week.

Guy I killed with the smart pistol: "Go fuck yourself cheating fuck"

13. Minecraft

Minecraft is great because it's so close to the platonic ideal of a sandbox game. Even though it has an "ending", nobody actually cares about it; rather, Minecraft is a game where you decide your own goals.

Do you want to build something cool? Then go on a continent-spanning adventure to find enough snow to realise your designs.

Prefer to test your twitch skills against other players? Join one of the thousands of different multiplayer servers that exist out there.

Are you a factorio autist? Well, there's at least double-digits modpacks that you could install to turn the game into an automation simulator.

14. Apotris

There's not much in life that can get me to enter a flow state like Tetris can. I'm not even that great at it - I don't know how to T-spin and my combo game is seriously lacking - but give me 200 lines at 20 gravity and I won't worry about anything else for the next ten minutes.

Apotris is, in my opinion, the best way to get your Tetris fix. It's highly customisable, and because it's a GBA game, very lightweight to run.

Look, I don't have to justify this one. Tetris is Tetris. It's arcade gaming perfection.

15. Vanquish

Vanquish holds the dubious honour of ruining third person shooters for me, because there's nothing else out there that feels as dynamic, as fluid as Platinum's one and only attempt at the genre. It is entirely possible that the main reason why I never became a Mass Effect fan is because I tried to play it immediately after Vanquish.

It's got it's problems: the story is ass, only a couple weapons are actually viable, too much of the campaign relies on autoscrollers and turret sections. But when it lets you loose, boy do its mechanics sing.

In a lesser game, you fight tanks by finding a rocket launcher and then firing it from behind heavy cover. In Vanquish, you boost up to the tank's weak point, sliding through a hail of bullets so that you can unload your shotgun at point blank - one, two, three - are you out already? No time to reload. Reactivate your boosters, kick the weakpoint with rocket assistance. As you rebound, time slows, you notice that you are flying backwards over the head of an enemy that had been coming in for a melee. Switch to the machine gun and blast away that robot's head. The tank and the robot detonate in a shower of sparks before you even hit the ground.

Favourite series: WipEout

Yes, all of them - including Fusion!

Best soundtrack: Xenoblade 3

Somehow this is an uncommon opinion, one that I cannot comprehend when the game features masterpieces such as:

• Off-seer
• Moebius Battle
• A life sent on
• Carrying the Weight of Life
• Noah and N

Favourite protagonist: Nia (Xenoblade 2)

Her story of self-actualisation is extremely trans coded and I adore her.

Favourite antagonist: GLaDOS (Portal)

I want my robot boss to insult me in increasingly deadpan ways.

Underrated: Spore

Is the gameplay bad? Yes. Counterpoint: I spent hundreds of hours making and sharing silly little guys on the UK Spore forums, and I regret none of it.

Best art style: Rayman Origins

This game is a moving painting.

Best first level: Caves (Tomb Raider)

I can't think of any other level that better eases you into the mechanics that are going to be riffed on for the rest of the game. I think I know the layout of Caves better than I do my local town.

Best ending: Nier Automata

The [E]nd of YoRHa is the peak of the video game medium.

Favourite boss fight: Crimson 1 (Project Wingman)

I listened to the soundtrack "Zero" before I played Ace Combat Zero, and the Crimson 1 fight above a burning city is exactly how I imagined the fight against Pixy would look.

Most stressful game: XCOM

So, what's your backup plan if this 70% shot misses?

Oh, this is your backup plan?

Damn, that's rough buddy.

Guilty pleasure: Digimon Story Cybersleuth

I am begging this game to stop lewding every female character in it, but it's also the only game where I get to have an Imperialdramon, so it's not like I can just not play it.