I feel like my “all-time favorite” changes depending on my mood, but if I had to pick just one, I’d probably go with The Witcher 3. That game just hit all the right notes—amazing story, incredible world-building, and so much stuff to do without feeling like pointless filler. Plus, the expansions were just as good, if not better than the base game.
What about you? Are you more into RPGs, shooters, or something else entirely?
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Morrowind. One of the few games you can fail the main quest by going on a rampage or by selling the wrong item.
The spells in Morrowind are so creative & fun too! Levitate & recall were my favorites.
Come on, now…
- Grind to gather resources.
- Make a potion to fortify intelligence
- Make a potion to fortify alchemy
- Drink potions
- While potions are active, make another set of fortify intelligence and alchemy potions, which - as a result of your potion-enhanced intelligence and alchemy skill - now fortified even stronger and longer.
- Repeat steps 3 and 4 a few times to become the smartest god-like being around for an infinite amount of time.
Game-breaking, but I would absolutely do it in real life if I had the option. I want the brains!
Night eye is amazing. Don’t even know what time of day it is when that spell is active.
Best single game is probably Portal. The pacing, storytelling, innovation, sound, all are top notch even 20+ tears later. Graphics aren’t phenomenal, but don’t need to be. The challenges and easter eggs made it a blast to 100%.
I’d say that Portal 2 even improved the first one in every aspect.
Portal felt like a very long, pretty well-done tech demo, but Portal 2 is where it’s at.
I’m on the fence about which is better. Portal 2 is an improvement, but also has its flaws.
Part of the reason I would argue Portal 1 was better is because it was so unexpected. I went in expecting “interesting puzzle game” which it is, but I did not expect to also get “excellent humor with strange horror vibes and incredibly good personality.”
If someone didn’t know what a Glados was I think the first one is better. I also recognize that many people who have never played Portal are well aware of Glados.
It’s a difficult question to answer. I personally barely consider Disco Elysium to be a game, more like an interactive story that uses certain game mechanics as grammar elements and punctuation in its storytelling. It’s a novel masquerading as a game. It’s three novels in a trenchcoat. But if we do count it then it is my pick, by a landslide.
Otherwise it’s probably Baldur’s Gate 2. It’s the story game I’ve replayed the most over the years and it was absolutely fundamental in my journey as a gamer, the definition of a formative experience. Even though parts of it are dated now (some clunk is to be expected from a 25-year-old game) I still prefer it to BG3. It’s got a great story, great companions and an all-time great villain. David Warner put in an incredible performance and even all these years later there aren’t many video game villains who have surpassed Irenicus in sheer aura.
I played BG1 and 2 for the first time shortly before the release of BG3, and I just wanted to hear Irenicus talk more.
Disco Elysium, on the other hand, just did not hit for me. The only things I hear about it are praise, but my friends list is filled with people who played it for a few hours, like I did, and stopped, so maybe the dissenters just aren’t so vocal.
Like I said, the game itself on its store page claims to be a “detective game RPG” while in reality I would argue it’s barely any of those things. So a lot of people probably come into it with the wrong expectations. It’s more like a novel about love and loss, about addiction, depression and the past looming over the present like a grey ghost. It’s a story about finding hope in the midst of overwhelming nihilism. As someone who has struggled with all those things it hit incredibly close to home, and was the most meaningful experience I’ve ever had playing a video game.
I don’t think I came to it with many expectations other than that people praised it for the writing, but I found the characters to nearly universally be abrasive and the story delivered via info dumps.
That’s not an inaccurate description. Though context is important - most of the characters know yours through behavior and actions that neither you or the character remember. A lot of the game is playing with how you handle that.
True, but I hated the player character too, and I’d have appreciated a more elegant introduction to the world.
I think that’s another thing as well, a lot of people go in with the idea that you can to some extent “play as yourself” like you do in many RPGs. And they get frustrated when they’re only given stupid or horrible dialogue options like “why would I ever say any of these things?!”. Because the game is actually rather restrictive in terms of roleplay: yes you can choose your flavour and variety of crazy but at the end of the day you’re always Harry, you’re always insane and damaged and you can’t change that.
For me personally, I’m also an utter failure and I hate myself deeply, so maybe that’s why I easily resonated with the protagonist. And in the end, much of the actual story is about dealing with failure, about finding hope amidst despair and about overcoming and letting go of the past.
I personally consider Disco Elysium very much a game (a way better role-playing gamer than most), because an “interactive story” is a game. Combat shouldn’t be a necessary condition. Planescape: Torment should have had the guts to scrap its lackluster combat and focus on its strengths.
It’s easily The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past.
It has everything I could ask for in a game: Sword fighting. Magic. Secrets. Dungeon crawling. An alternate dimension. Side quests. Different tools and items. There’s enough content that it feels fulfilling to complete it. Peak art. Peak music. NPCs don’t talk too much, and there are just enough of them to make the world feel alive. Bosses.
Have you tried A Link Between Worlds yet?
Unfortunately not. Is it only available on the 3DS?
Yeah, unless you emulate it of course. It’s not a direct sequal, but it’s heavily inspired by A Link to the Past
That’s a tough one to answer. I have to say league of legends, because it’s always our friends fallback game.
But other favorites are:
- Terraria
- Subnautica
- Bravely Default
- Warcraft 3 - mainly the custom maps, we played so much of that
- Slay the spire
I feel like my “all-time favorite” changes depending on my mood, but if I had to pick just one, I’d probably go with The Witcher 3. That game just hit all the right notes—amazing story, incredible world-building, and so much stuff to do without feeling like pointless filler. Plus, the expansions were just as good, if not better than the base game.
I replayed the entire game after completing Cyberpunk 2077 and finished it this weekend. Sadly for me the game doesn’t hold up that well in various aspects and it was one of my favourites. The story is great, the ending is really well done, but the combat is too simple, the leveling of the game is all over the place, the RPG aspect of the game is really underwhelming and the game is just too damn long. I actually ended up enjoying Cyberpunk 2077 more at the end, but TW3 is a better game in general.
As for my “all-time favorite”, that depends.
Nier: Automata changed me, the game had a real impact on me.
Zelda BOTW is the game that made me feel happier while playing it.
Sekiro is the game that just clicked perfectly.
DAO was my all time favourite RPG but Divinity 2/BG3 both took that spot.
Chrono Trigger is the game that I’ll always remember, the singleplayer game that I’ve replayed the most.
Terraria is my favourite indie game.
I have a real soft spot for Bloodstained, I loved Casltevania Symphony of the Night and I waited so long for Bloodstained and the guys delivered what I expected. The first game that I wanted to do 100%.
Not just my mood, but I have different flavors of favorite.
In terms of nostalgia and all-time enjoyment, hard to beat Ocarina of Time.
In terms of pure “this game is so good”, may have to go with Red Dead Redemption 2. Truly a masterpiece.
In terms of most hours played, Civilization 6 at over 2000 hours.
World of Warcraft!
I know people like to look down on it here but it’s trully an amazing theme park metaverse experience.
I don’t have much time for it these days but just playing couple of hours every week is such a joyful experience. There’s just so much to do in the game, great writing, legendary characters, great people playing it. True metaverse experience everyone has been chasing lately.
Dark Souls.
It fundamentally changed me as a person. All of the other fromsoft games are great but none of them really encapsulates the experience that is the first Dark Souls game.
You can’t say something like that without elaborating! How did it change you?
So I first played Dark Souls when I was 17. As a kid that was going into my senior year of high school, completely obsessed with games like Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3 and Uncharted 2 - Dark Souls was such a drastic change in how you interacted with a game. No constant ADHD flick shots in a cod game, no mindless story based progression with a complete lack of difficulty.
Dark Souls taught me three things: Slow down, think critically, and never give up.
Looking back on it, it’s some real basic knowledge to impart on someone. But I feel like they apply to everything in life and nobody around me seems to think the same.
It kinda blows my mind when you look at YouTube and see the absurd amount of videos there are of people describing how dark souls made them a better person mentally. The game is clearly special in a way no other game is to a lot of people and not to mention it popularized a whole new genre.
If anyone reading this hasn’t tried Dark Souls or has tried it once and bounced off of it quickly. I really recommended giving it a(nother) shot.
Gothic 2, Vampire: The Masquerade – Bloodlines, GTA: San Andreas and Arcanum are for og ny favourite games that are a bit too flawed to be all time favourite.
Final Fantasy 6 and 7 were so good, but I can’t play them alone, we used to pass along the controller.
I love point and clicks like Grim Fandango and Monkey island.
I played Planescape: Torment in 2006 and it left such an impression on me.
Of never games there’s Disco Elysium and The Obra Dim.
Not to mention Zelda’s, Illusion of Time, the Mana series, Mario’s, the old Blizzard games, Brotherbound games and other amiga games. Quake…
Maybe Day of the Tentacle?
This is really hard. Dungeon Master on the Amiga500 is up there, as is Unlimited Adventures. Today, these don’t look so interesting, but man they were great at the time. Amiga also had a neat RPG maker as well whose name I can’t recall.
My all-time favorites have been in place for many years now.
It’s a tie between Sonic 2 (Genesis) & Final Fantasy 6 (SNES).
They are two very different games that represent two different concepts in gaming. For Sonic it’s all about smooth, fun gameplay. With FF6 it’s all about the story and the experience of controlling an ensemble cast of characters. I can beat the first in under an hour, as while the latter usually takes 60+ hours. They’re like the yin and yang of videogames for me.
Shadow of the Colossus was barely even a game, it was art. I don’t think I even played it for more than 20 hours total but just a simple masterpiece.
My “nostalgia favorites” will always be Legend of Zelda Ocarina of Time and Sonic 2 (Genesis version). Sonic 2 is just so fun to go back and play any time I want a quick retro sides rolling platformer fix, and I’ve played through it more times than I can count. OoT was the first game I played that showed me what games could be through a combination of story/cutscenes and gameplay, as someone who was never able to get my hands on an SNES to play the epic JRPGs of the console growing up (I loved my Genesis, but let’s be real, those kinds of games on Sega consoles didn’t really come until later).
Nowadays Breath of the Wild and Tears of the Kingdom have eclipsed OoT for me, and for other more modern games another standout fave is Fire Emblem Three Houses, due in large part to its story and setting having everything I look for in a game, and its characters actually being more fleshed out and developed than the one-note units handed to you in many other games in the franchise. Engage has more… Engaging gameplay (sorry not sorry for the pun) but the story and characters hold it back quite a bit for me. Gameplay-wise, my favorite strategy RPG actually has to be Triangle Strategy, in that it has quite creative maps and every unit is designed with the potential to be useful depending on how you approach your own strategy, but I like the story/characters of Three Houses at least a bit more, and I tend to value story more in general in games. I’m also a big fan of the Ace Attorney franchise for the overarching story, characters and writing that it’s built up through its history. Phoenix, Maya, Edgeworth, Apollo and friends are all among some of my favorite characters in gaming, and I’m glad I decided long ago to give that quirky-seeming series a try. AA7 when, Capcom?
Super Mario World - just a fun game. Lots of little secrets and fun to speed run.
Titanfall - I played an absurd amount of this one and really wished there was a 3rd one. 1-2 remind me of the pattern seen in trilogys where 1 sets the stage, 2 deviaties pretty far and polarizes fans and then 3 uses the best of both while trying to feel more like 1. (Mario 1-3, Halo 1-3). My favorites in this pattern tend to be 3 so I’m disappointed I never got Titanfall 3.
Pubg - when it was new. Lost me years ago now but that first 6 months to a year was awesome. So many crazy games and absurd fun.
