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| Strife (an underrated classic!) |
When I was a child, I spake as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child: but when I became a man, I put away childish things.
As a kid, I would play almost any computer game, including literally any shooter. All the id and Raven games, obviously, and all the 3D Realms games, and all the LucasArts ones. All of Rare's shooters on the N64 (yes, even Jet Force Gemini). All the Turoks. But more esoteric stuff, too: Operation Body Count. Rise of the Triad. Redneck Rampage. Rebel Moon. Chasm: The Rift. Blood (and Blood 2, which, God help me, I absolutely loved). Strife (an underrated classic!). Every single iteration of Chex Quest.
As I got older, I had less time for games, and more of my gaming time was occupied by one miserable Skinner box at a time: World of Warcraft, Destiny 2, Hearthstone, Marvel Snap. I did find time for the occasional other game, and I did eventually kick the slot machine habit, but my tastes had changed. I've become less patient, or perhaps more discerning, or maybe both. Whatever it is, I bounce off of most PC games (and videogames in general) in a way I never did when I was young. I'd generally rather be playing board games, or playing TTRPGs, or reading.
But a few PC games released in my latter days have made lasting impressions on me. Let's just say, arbitrarily, that I became an adult in 2010. Here are ten games I've loved in the past fourteen or fifteen years, plus notes about a few related titles:
10. Brigador
A perfect little retro shooter. Wonderful integration of music, art, writing, and gameplay. Satisfying to play, but stompy shooty mech combat alone wouldn't have held my attention for 30 hours; happily, the world and atmosphere are totally absorbing. It's a fabulously inventive vision of the future, a refreshing change of pace from the omnipresent Space America, Space Rome, and Off-Brand Dune.
9. Teleglitch
Highly original, compellingly challenging, endlessly replayable. Puts lo-fi graphics to better use than 99% of retro (or retro-ish, retro-inspired, whatever) games out there. Moody and atmospheric despite being top-down pixel art. In a funny way, it's probably the closest anybody's come to recreating what made (and makes) Quake so magical. (Stay tuned for my inevitable “Actually, Quake is the greatest game of the past 15 years, and of all time” follow-up post.)
8. Subnautica
Absolutely captivating, and briefly tricked me into thinking I liked survival games and base-building. Tried The Long Dark, No Man's Sky, etc. Nope! I just like Subnautica. Showed a way forward for first-person action games that involve danger, excitement, and freedom of movement without being a nonstop bloodbath—a path regrettably few have followed yet.
7. SOMA
There are a lot of on-rails story-driven first-person games out there these days, and most of them aren't great. You've got stuff like Spec Ops: The Line, which does interesting things with the medium but just isn't very fun or interesting. You've got stuff like Firewatch, which tells a good story charmingly but leaves you thinking, But why was that a game? SOMA is the rare example of a powerful, effectively told story that really depends on the digital (and first-person) medium. It's not perfect—the gameplay can be frustrating in places—but it's haunting.
6. Crusader Kings II
I was a Civilization obsessive for most of my life, logging hundreds if not thousands of hours on every iteration starting with the first (Civ V, with about 950 hours played on Steam, probably represents a distant third place after II and IV). I do play Civ VI occasionally—I've got friends who love it and keep trying to rope me into multiplayer games—but I will never again be obsessed the way I once was.
Yeah, part of it is that they've just glommed too much stuff onto the old Civ chassis, and part of it is that I'm older and tastes change, but mostly it's that CK2 opened some third eye in my forehead and I can never look at grand strategy or alternate-history simulation the same way again. I haven't even tried CK3 and perhaps I never will (can't say I love the Paradox business model) but I had some incredibly memorable times with CK2—and learned a shocking amount about medieval history and geography. It probably says something that, of all these games, CK2 is the one I had a thousand screenshots of and felt compelled to show as I played it, not just a representative image yanked from the internet.
5. Shadowrun: Hong Kong
Among the many old-school RPGs launched in that curious flurry of Kickstarter activity a decade ago, Shadowrun Returns was something of an also-ran, raising less than half as much funding as Torment or Project Eternity, and considerably less than even Wasteland 2. It was a great little game, though. (Whereas I found Torment enjoyable but disappointing, Pillars a tedious slog, and Wasteland 2 not even worth finishing. Gotta give a shout to Tyranny, though—the underrated and overlooked little sibling of Torment and Pillars is by far the best game of the three, and would probably be my eleventh pick for this top-ten list.)
Returns was followed by an even better sequel, Dragonfall, and then another, still better sequel, Hong Kong. It's a wonderful setting, has wonderful characters, and tells a fascinating story whose stakes (unlike those of most RPGs, including nearly all of the above) are minor enough to feel real but major enough to feel meaningful. The devs lavished a fabulous level of detail on every little corner of the game. One of the best text-driven games of recent memory.
4. Hardspace: Shipbreaker
Did somebody say “first-person action games that involve danger and excitement without being a nonstop bloodbath”? I would love this game just for its ambition, trying to imagine the blue-collar labor of the spacefaring future and turn that into a game. I love the aesthetic, of course. (Shout-out to Blackbird for Homeworld: Deserts of Kharak, too; it's nothing new in terms of RTS gameplay, but the setting, the visual design, the art, the sound—absolute perfection. Those animatics!) I love the slightly hokey but sweet story of solidarity and industrial action. It might have sneaked into this list on those strengths even without good gameplay. The gameplay, happily, is outstanding: cerebral and visceral at the same time, exciting, immersive. A rare and triumphant example of genuine innovation in PC games.
3. Control
Kind of the AAA counterpart to Brigador. Incredibly high-quality production in every respect, with everything working together toward a united purpose. So stylish that you find yourself thinking, Wait, why aren't all games like this? I would play games all the time if they were all like this. Outstanding gameplay, fascinating setting, engrossing story, just a delight from top to bottom.
2. Cyberpunk 2077
We've all been dreaming of a boundless open-world sandbox ever since we tried Daggerfall or whatever as kids. I've soured on Bethesda's games, step by step, to the point that I never finished Skyrim and never even picked up Fallout 4. And I have never been a fan of Arkane's so-called immersive sims. I played Dishonored, I played Prey. They were good, but I couldn't love them. They're not immersive. They're toyboxes full of checklists; they don't feel like living worlds. Same goes for the recent Deus Ex games.
Cyberpunk 2077 is not a toybox. It's the first game of its type I've played that smothers that checkbox-ticking instinct, and it does so with sheer Borgesian vastness. In most of these games, you read every note, open every door, rifle through every shelf—because it's a game, and the developers put this stuff in there for you to look at, and you wouldn't want to miss any secrets. In Cyberpunk 2077, you do not. Why would you go into people's houses and paw through their stuff? Why would you crawl down into every culvert looking for hidden stashes? Why would you read every single news article and grocery list and chapter of erotica you encounter? You don't do that shit in the real world; it would be insane. It would be insane in Cyberpunk 2077, too, which is more like a real world than any game I've ever experienced.
Oh, and the characters are unforgettable, the absolute mountain of music positively slaps, the gameplay (especially after the recent 2.0 overhaul) is solid, and the aesthetic is matchless. Retro-futuristic aesthetics have a tendency to look inauthentic, even if they're cool. Everything's too consistent, too similar; there's no sense of history, of groundedness. That's the case, jarringly, in the recent Fallout titles, in Prey, in the Bioshock series, etc. The artists working on Cyberpunk 2077 anticipated that problem and, preposterously, created an entire century of fictional visual arts, architecture, and product design. A century of evolving trends in clothing, automotive design, industrial architecture, and so forth. It's magnificent.
1. Disco Elysium
Boy, it sure sounds like I loved Cyberpunk 2077, huh? What could top that? How about…the second-greatest game of all time?
Disco Elysium could only have been made by a bunch of starving artists who started out with no idea how to make a game. It breaks every rule and is always better for it. This is a heartbreaking work of staggering genius, but for real. Probably the only game that ever made me cry. Definitely the only game that ever made me consider getting a tattoo—and when you find out how obsessed with Quake I am, that's going to become really impressive.
As with several of the above, this one scratches my itch for a magnificent integration of setting, writing, music, art, and everything else, and here it's really all cranked to 11. The best writing in a game, ever. Some of the best music. Some of the best voice acting (and my God, the quantity of it!). One of the most indelible settings. The only knock I can make against it is that it's such a fucking computer game. It's impenetrable to people who didn't grow up on CRPGs, and that's a shame because I know a lot of non-gamers who would adore it if they could just crack its hard shell.
Honorable mentions: Frozen Synapse, Titanfall 2, Portal 2, Heaven's Vault
One especially dishonorable mention that might get its own special blog post someday: Bioshock 2
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