This is my 100th post! I’m closing in on 2 full years doing this blog and it’s been kinda insane how much it’s grown. I have over 170 subscribers and have gotten more attention than I ever expected to get. Truth be told I expected nothing, this was originally just a place for me to write down my thoughts instead of me just talking to my partner about them despite them not understanding said thoughts since they hadn’t played the game. But now it’s much larger and I am so so grateful to everyone who has been here to watch it grow.
Anyway, with my 100th post I thought I’d do something special, I’m gonna go over my favorite games ever. Specifically my 10 favorite games ever, in no particular order. This was a tough list to come up with and I had to eliminate some games that just weren’t up to snuff for the top 10. I’m an easy girl to please so I genuinely wish I could make this my top 20 or top 50 but I’m not up for starting a series of this or for making a long as fuck article so anyway. It’s just 10 games and many games were narrowed out of this list because they just didn’t stack up when I went back and played them again recently or years ago so while I’d love to include games that I have fond memories of alone, if it doesn’t stack up in replay then it got left behind. Now, let’s celebrate 100 posts together as you find out more about my taste in games!
Yes, I understand this is a cop out since this is 3 games. I don’t care, nowadays if I play them I play all 3 so they may as well be 1 game. I’ve talked about Mass Effect many many times, I even have a tattoo of a Mass Relay. I adore the series. From the opening of Mass Effect 1 to the closing of Mass Effect 3, the trilogy is a journey unlike any other in gaming. I’ve written about it before as one of my comfort games in my Finding Comfort in Non-Cozy Games series and all I said there still holds true. Truth be told though I haven’t played it in a while because doing this blog has taken up a lot of my gaming. I don’t really replay games much anymore. But the Mass Effect Trilogy still holds a space in my head that draws me back to it, makes me want to play it again. I’ve recently been working on some world design for a TTRPG that my partner and I have been developing and Mass Effect is a massive inspiration for it. As such I can’t not have it as one of my favorites.
Okay, I know what you’re thinking, Persona 5? Not Persona 5 Royal? But you wrote about that one in your Finding Comfort in Non-Cozy Games series! And you’re right I did. So then why Persona 5 and not Royal? Put simply, Royal added a lot of bits into the game that, while complimentary to the journey, aren’t quite in line with what made the game special to me. Royal got distracted with its new character, it made tons of Quality of Life improvements but that doesn’t change that the game also peeled away from what made the game great. Case in point, it changed parts of the ending. It made the impact of your final decision on Christmas much less impactful. By the time the third semester was over you only had a 2 week jump where the rest of the Phantom Thieves did their work to help you out. It just made that part feel rushed. While in the original ending it felt just...better. More so, the ending where you leave on a Train instead of driving off with your friends is also less bittersweet. Kinda depressing honestly. The original ending can still be achieved in Royal, mind you, but you have to ignore parts to do it. The original Persona 5 holds such a fond place in my heart and while I adore Royal, I would say the original beats it out for the spot on this list. It just feels better. More cohesive.
The original Life is Strange was a monumental moment in gaming for me. It was the only episodic game that I truly adored, that I was sitting on the edge of my seat to see what was gonna happen. It was an experience that gave me more than just a simple story and gameplay, it gave me emotions that took me years to truly progress through. It helped me see myself in a game far more than I had before. I’ve always been mildly similar to Chloe, I saw myself in her. Her punkishness, how she gets so attached and falls apart when something bad happens, her thickheadedness, her willingness to put herself in danger because she trusts those around her so much to be there for her. She was a character that inspired me. Of course, with time has come more understanding of the character she was and the more complex aspects of the bad parts of her personality. Then, with the recent Life Is Strange: Reunion (review here) I finally saw the character as an adult with a more formed and mature personality. The original Life is Strange is where Chloe started and, in many ways for myself, it’s where I started to accept myself. It means a ton to me and I adore it.
This one was a game I never expected to love as much as I did. I kinda expected to just find it mid, I mean, a lot of other people did. But instead when I played it after it launched I found a game filled with depth, amazingly realized and written characters all of which felt rooted in their world, a wonderful story filled with twists and turns, and a game that didn’t have enough time to fully realize all of it’s grand ideas (which it did years later). What I find strange is that many still look at it as one of those “Why couldn’t it have been this other thing that literally isn’t the same game?” Claiming that it just isn’t that good, that it feels contrived or just badly written, but I find that incredibly far from the truth and that usually that’s out of a want for what they wanted it to be in their head as opposed to what it is. The game feels amazing to play and you can easily get attached to the characters, you can even play a trans person which I, as a trans person, found amazing. Cyberpunk also is one of the principle inspirations for that TTRPG I talked about in the Mass Effect Trilogy section and it holds a place in my heart for that as well. Cyberpunk 2077 isn’t the game many thought it was gonna be, instead it was a game that was an amazing experience with characters that had personality and were fucking weird and filled with different political ideas behind what they believe. It was exactly what a Cyberpunk game should have been, it was a game with the personality and punk of the TTRPG and with the characters to match (and that I wrote about in that Finding Comfort in Non-Cozy Games series I’ve mentioned twice already). It was and still is amazing.
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Back in 2008 I bought an Xbox 360. Within a week it had red ringed, so I returned it and got a PS3. Now, I could have just gotten a new 360 because I wanted to play games like Halo and Gears of War, but that wouldn’t let me play a game I had recently discovered. That wouldn’t let me play InFamous. A game all about being Cole MacGrath, an electric Super Hero in Empire City. When it eventually came out, I adored it, even though the jankiness of the cutscenes and character models, and even the shooting, stuck out as outdated. I still loved it and its story and its characters and its villian, but I knew a sequel would turn it up to 11. Well damn was I right. Infamous 2 came out and I immediately adored the fuck out of it. Sure, I missed the vibe of Empire City but I still loved New Marais. Sucker Punch updated their engine and ability to make cutscenes that didn’t look Janky and from the PS2 era, and they made the gameplay much, much smoother. Plus they introduced new powers and continued to develop the characters and gameplay. It was a great game not just because of what it was, but what it built on top. I think my biggest issue with it is that I just wanted to see Cole again in the next game but nope, we didn’t meet him again, sadly. Still love it though.
Strangely, I’ve found many people actually hate Watch Dogs 2. They view the original Watch Dogs as a great serious game with hacking that the sequel took and ruined with humor and fun. I actually view it the opposite, I think that the original Watch Dogs was boring with its seriousness that it was trying desperately to make you feel something and be cool and it just all fell flat for me. Aiden Pearce was a boring character personality wise and the gameplay was very much kneecapped by the seriousness of the whole thing. But then, with Watch Dogs 2 they took it in a direction that I fell in love with. Not only were there fun characters who didn’t take themselves too seriously you also felt like you were actually doing something. You had far more opportunities gameplay wise, they got rid of the BS unlocking of the map, they jumped right into the game without some boring slow introduction to hacking for Marcus, our main character. The hacking was far more fleshed out as well. The whole story and characters were great, I loved them all. The ending fell flat but I think that’s because it just needed a bigger climax instead of the middling one it got. Then the series took a story with awesome and fun characters and a wonderful main character and said “What if we had no real personality for our main character because anyone can be the main character?” which just absolutely ruined the game to me. Legion was boring, it took the lessons of Watch Dogs 2 and threw it all out the game window. Watch Dogs 2 is the definitive Watch Dogs experience for me and I will always love it for that, hacking in it has never not been fun and I wish we had another game that came even close to the magic it had with the blend of hacking and non-serious characters.
As I covered above, I grabbed a PS3 in 2008, but I needed a game with it right? You can’t just buy a console without a game! So I bought Ratchet and Clank: Tools of Destruction of course! I hadn’t played the stories of the prior games in the series, but I had played the multiplayer so I knew some of the characters. Tools of Destruction introduced me to the world, the amazing characters, the dumb weapons, the fantastic platforming, and just to a wonderful experience that kept on giving and giving. The game wasn’t perfect, but no game is. I think back on Tools of Destruction incredibly fondly as both my first PS3 game and my first real Ratchet and Clank game, it is what got me truly into the series. Without playing it I wouldn’t have wanted to play A Crack in Time, or Rift Apart! It holds a place in my heart because of what it gave me at the time and for the future.
In my Legacy of the Dark Knight Review I talked about how Batman is my favorite super hero. Well, obviously, that means an Arkham game had to be on this list. Arkham City felt like the natural selection purely because it was the game that I felt had more of an interesting amount of Freedom and character interactions to it than Asylum. Sure, I loved Asylum, the puzzles were fun, the characters were fun and fleshed out, everything was awesome. But I still loved City more. It felt bigger, more interesting, more varied, and just more different. I loved being able to go around the whole of the sectioned off city as Batman, gliding around far more than you could in Asylum, and doing far more detective like stuff than in Asylum with it being so much more varied. It felt like a far more realized Batman game than Asylum did. It also felt far more cohesive and true to the idea of the adaptation as opposed to Knight which, while having some amazing moments and such, was just never going to live up to the fact that the Knight was actually just Red Hood while Rocksteady insisted he wasn’t. But he was, even using a red tinged mask at the end of the game. They tried too hard to make it seem like they were making a new character when in reality they were trying to do a twist and a very poorly hidden one. Because of that City takes the cake for best Batman game for me.
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This one is the most recent addition to this list. Last year, I played Nine Sols and absolutely fell in love with it. Not only did it provide me with a cool as fuck sci-fi story with characters that felt like they had depth and all in a really well written and, occasionally, well drawn Comic format way. But it also brought along with it two accessibility settings that really set the bar for what I wanted out of hard games difficulty wise (check out the review for more). Going around the map, finding different secrets, getting as close as I, someone with difficulty doing fine motor control movements enough to be amazing at hard games, could to mastering the parry mechanic, and seeing Yi get revenge on those that left him to die. It was an amazing experience that made me want to get more into Metroidvania games, that made me want to try to find games with difficulty or accessibility settings that are supposed to be hard. It made me feel more capable of a writer because it allowed me to see what I wrote about that I wanted out of something like Silksong but actually in practice. It got me to play Lies of P, another game I adored. It is one of my favorite games ever because of all of this and I still think about it months and months later.
The original Uncharted was good, it had issues but the characters were solid and the foundation was great. So with Uncharted 2 it was a big moment for the “treasure hunting” genre of games. It took the series from being about fun treasure hunting to also being about characters. Uncharted 2, to me, gave me the same memories of watching Indiana Jones films, it gave me feelings of running around through multiple environments and fighting bad guys only to come across a more paranormal (or at least weird) treasure that ends up corrupting the bad guy that has been searching for it the entire time. Uncharted 2 had moments that felt like movies with big action set pieces like a moving train and moments that felt like the characters were actually having a tender moment. The game set the standard for me for what I believed cinematic experiences could be in gaming. The next game in the series was good of course but this same feeling wasn’t replicated again until Uncharted 4. The Last of Us took part of what made Uncharted great, the characters, and developed it further but it still is not as good as the Uncharted series to me. Of course early on in my time writing on here I wrote about this and I still stand by it. Uncharted 2 has an amazing and wonderfully fun story that you can replay without being stressed or getting emotional. It’s wonderful.
Well, that’s the 10. There’s a lot I wish I could have included. Making the short list were games like Metaphor: ReFantazio, Dragon Age: The Veilguard, Deus Ex: Human Revolution, Portal 2, Assassin’s Creed: Odyssey, Witcher 3, Dishonored, Danganronpa 2, Wolfenstein: The New Order, Ikenfell, even Hi-Fi Rush. I’ve played so many games during my over 30 years of time on this earth and I love that I now write about them. This being my 100th post I figured I should end it with something special, but really all I have to say is that I appreciate everyone reading this, everyone who has provided advice, everyone who has given their thoughts in my comments, and all the lurkers who like my stuff but never interact. I’m here not just because I like writing but because it feels good to know other people like my writing too.
So Anyway, what are some of your favorite games ever? Do you agree with some of my picks? Do some of my picks really bother you? Do you think some of my picks make sense, but for completely different reasons? And do you have a game to recommend me that you think, if I played, would be added to this list? If you’ve thought “yes” to any of these let me know in the comments, I love reading them!
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Cat
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