Here are the rules, in case you’re in need of a reminder. As always, these lists aren’t intended to be a definitive ‘best’ list of the year in question. Rather, they’re all games we’d recommend people still play today,andhave something that makes them worth saving. That might be they’re the best example of their genre, or they contain a valuable lesson that future game designers would do well to take heed of. It’s also this specific version we think people should play, too, so remasters and remakes may mean that certain games are missing from their original year of release. We’re also going by PC release dates here, not when they first came out more generally.
The Sims 4
Rebecca:As if I was going to rescue anything else from the flames.The Sims 4has a strong claim to being the most important game in my life: demonstrating an excruciatingly detailed knowledge of it nabbed me my first job in the industry. It’s also by far and away the game I’ve put most hours into overall, at least since gaming systems began recording that sort of thing for my neurotic and shame-filled perusal. I’m currently about 750 hours deep. That’s only a steady 100 hours a year since the game launched, though. I’m sure I don’t have a problem.
The wonderful thing aboutThe Simsis that it can be approached from so many different angles. Is it an architect simulator? A character modelling studio? A soap opera storytelling machine? A time- and resource-management challenge? I sometimes think no two Sims players are actually playing the same game. For me, The Sims primarily acts as the ultimate geeky playground: somewhere I can re-create favourite characters from games and other media when I find our time together is over too soon — and the powers of Create-A-Sim even extend to resurrecting the beloved dead. It’s a game that can contain every other story that I love too much to let go of straight away; a DIY patchwork of unthinkable fanfiction crossovers, precision-curated to my highly specific yet ever-shifting tastes. The metaverse could never.
Secondly, Alien: Isolation is agreat horror gamebecause it is, just, a masterpiece in set design. Playing as Ripley’s daughter, you are constantly jumping at half-glimpsed bits of furniture and piping because so much of the ship looks like the alien. The developers keep you scared all the time without even having to try! Excellent ratio of terror:action. Good work, those people.
The game is a mix of interactive scenes, blown-out video footage, and poetic title cards. Fry an egg. Wander around city streets. Watch the city go by. Leap through a meadow, trailing stars. Rocket through the stars, burning. Stare at cherry blossoms. Dig a grave. Stare out your window at that grave. Be buried alive in that grave. Watch the sun set over the ocean. Climb an endless ladder into the sky. Open the fridge. Sometimes it’s unclear if you’re awake or dreaming, lines blurred by settings and actions borrowing from each other. The scene where you fry an egg seems real, the scene in that same style about catching glowing balls in a mug probably isn’t, but the one where chopping vegetables draws the knife distressingly close to claiming a finger? Who knows. I wince every time that knife raises for the final time. 2:22am picks different scenes on repeat playthroughs too, or sometimes offer a surreal version of a mundane scene. I adore this.
“Play alone,” the instructions say. “Play at night.”
James:If only this time capsule thing were real.Titanfallhas already perished in a sense, having been permanently taken off sale after months of petulant DDOS attacks on the game’s backend. What an ignoble end for a triumph of competitive multiplayer design: an utterly seamless hybrid of breakneck first-person shootery and stompy mech fights, each match ebbing and flowing between the two. Calling in your own Titan always felt like a hard-earned, harder-hitting reward, but if you were left on foot, you always had enough tricks up your sleeve that games were never simply won by whichever side got their robots first. Tricks like the intoxicatingly fast, fluid wallrunning, which could probably carry a completely different parkour game by itself.
It takes a master of their craft to balance such disparate FPS styles; Respawn nailed it on the first go. Though on that note, without Titanfall, we wouldn’t haveTitanfall 2: a sequel with all the same competitive thrills that just happens to include one of the decade’s finest FPS singleplayer adventures as well. And inApex Legends, we have a battle royale that cuts both the Titans and the wallrunning, yet still gets enough mileage out of the underlying gunplay and movement skills to be one of the best BRs in an industry full of them. The best, for my money. These two successors might secure Titanfall’s legacy in part, but it’s also impossible to talk about what’s good about them without paying respect to the original. And if we can’t bring it back, we should at least preserve it as it was.
For me,The Roomremains the pinnacle of the growing Room series. In it, you’re tasked with opening a single, cast-iron safe. It looks simple enough, but this intriguing machine is like a ticking, cog-powered onion. There are so many layers to peel back in this ingenious puzzler, and each pull of a lever, twist of a key and push of a button feels like you’re playing with an intricate, ancient, magical toy. Its sequels built on this by expanding its puzzling across multiple rooms and even into the realms of virtual reality, but in doing so they also started to stretch its core concept a little thin. By sticking to its single, titular play space, The Room maintains its thick air of mystery much more effectively, and its surprises are that much more potent. It’s a master of the grand reveal, and its eye for flair and showmanship have yet to be bested.
Liam:At about the halfway point ofWolfenstein: The New Order, protagonist B.J. Blazkowicz is awoken in the middle of the night by Tekla, a statistics-obsessed member of the resistance. Tekla is distressed. She’s been watching you sleep and is concerned about what happens when someone drifts off. When you lose consciousness, do you lose yourself? Every night, when we fall asleep, do we die? Blazkowicz listens patiently, before nodding and delivering a simple yet poignant response:“What about the soul?”
I never expected existential philosophy to crop up during my time with The New Order, but its earnest heart is the reason I adore it. Don’t get me wrong, this is a profoundly silly game, one that sees you shooting robot dogs and fighting Nazis on the moon. You spend far more time dual-wielding machine guns and battling baddies in mechs than you do pondering what makes humans, you know, human, but that’s what makes these quieter moments so memorable. Nestled within this absurdist piece of alternate reality fiction are fully-realised characters, with Blazkowicz acting as the grounded core that helps keep proceedings from tipping over into pure nonsense.
Transistor is the story of Red, a singer in a virtual-reality-esque city who has found herself on the wrong side of a powerful and influential group known as the Camerata. Her companion is a futuristic talking sword - the Transistor - which has the power to “integrate” individuals of influence in order to unlock new powers within itself. Locked inside it is someone close to Red - a quiet, contemplative, and loving person whose only goal is to protect Red. Which is proving difficult, because around them both, their once-beautiful city is being stripped bare by a mysterious army of hostile programs known only as the Process.
I don’t want to say any more than that. Please, please, discover this game for yourself. The combat is wonderfully creative. The world is alive like no other game-world I’ve ever seen. The characters and story are wonderful, and heartbreaking, and ingenious. The music is just… There are no words. This game is a concentrated explosion of creativity, emotion, and beauty. Play it.
Ed:How controversial of me! To pickDark Souls…The Second One?! Yeah, you’re damn right. It might lack the magic glaze ofDark Souls: Prepare To Die Edition’s graphics and its intertwining world, but Dark Souls II makes up for all these things by taking a massive shotgun to the whole thing. The game is a vast scattershot of poison swamps, castles, haunted woods, and shrines. Wander through the FromSoftware offices and I’m sure you’d find discarded shells littering the floor to this day.
Quantity doesn’t often usurp quality, but the game’s disjointed approach makes it feel more like a traditional adventure than the originalDark Souls. You aren’t ascending or descending but pinging between bonfires in distant or bizarre lands. And sometimes you can’t help but stand in awe in between all the zigzagging: ancient samurai Sir Alonne rises from his meditation like Qui Gon Jinn as you step into his marble office; a humungous frog peels back its mouth to reveal the skeleton beneath; thunder crackles overhead as a twisted knight wields a mirror that summons evil shades.
And then you’ve got Aldia, Scholar Of The First Sin: a disfigured, flaming tree who sounds like David Attenborough melting into a puddle of wax. He broke the curse, managing to exist outside of light and dark! What the heck are you on about Ed? Let’s just say he shed light (heh) on the nature of the titular soul and put many lore points in perspective. Essentially, he’s a figure of – what I’d consider, anyway – importance with cracking dialogue. His narration of Dark Souls II’salternate endingstill gives me goosebumps. It’s a flawed journey of fantastic scope, and you can’t knock its ambition. You could even go so far as to say it bears great resemblance toElden Ringin its structure. But more than that, if you forget Dark Souls II, you’re forgetting Aldia and his rightful place in the Souls universe. Nowthat’sa sin.
Nidhogg’s greatest strength, though, is that the controls are just as easy to understand. I’d dabbled in Mortal Kombats and Street Fighters, but the long lists of moves and combos were too much. My brain was filled with French vocabulary and algebra at that age, so I needed something a little simpler from my fighting games. Nidhogg hits the nail on the head, with three different sword positions and a handful of ways to stab your enemy.
Since you have the same set of simple moves, reaching the finish line is a test of mastery over Nidhogg’s combat system and, more importantly, your opponent’s behaviour in battle. It emphasises predicting the placement of your opponent’s next lunge over endless button combos, and it’s those simple thrills that I want to preserve forever. Nidhogg lets you settle arguments with ripostes instead of rib punches, and it’s the perfect way to quickly decide who gets the last chocolate digestive.
