From video gaming to card games and stuff in between, if it's gaming you can probably discuss it here!
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Maybe Tetris? Such a simple concept, and it's one of the most popular games of all time.
Minecraft for similar reasons. Even if it has become more complex in recent years, the core of it is just...you can break everything and build anything. It's hard to say that isn't a perfect sandbox.
More personal opinion though, maybe Super Mario Odyssey.
Tetris is a game that just doesn't get old.
It's really you against your previous self, rather than you against the game.
It's the same reason why I enjoy Mini Motorways so much!
Outer Wilds. I consider it the best video game ever made and I've spent quite some time thinking about if there's something I could add, change or remove that would improve it and so far I've yet to come up with anything of substance (beyond tiny QoL changes or reeeally nitpicky stuff).
I've just joined beehaw, this is my first browse, and one of the first comments I see is for Outer Wilds... Feels good. One of my favourite games / stories / media / art pieces ever. I love it and all of the brilliant minds behind it, I've never thought so about a game once finished anywhere near as much as this one.
I still need to get around playing the DLC but I feel like I'd need to watch a video to get caught up on the story. That said, yeah, the gameplay and story is absolutely incredible. Perfectly-executed mystery box.
You could always add the DLC :D (I'm half joking of course, but it's soooo good. I think it's on par, if not a little bit better, than the main game.)
Outer Wilds is one of the more interesting games to come out in recent memory, but personally I just didn't like the
spoiler
fairly tight (for me) time limit. I like to do things at a slower pace for a variety of reasons, and I'd love to have a way to change the time scale so that things don't happen in just 20-something minutes.
I know it theoretically gives you infinite time to explore and do stuff, but that one cycle is always ~20 minutes, and that's what I'd love to be able to slow down.
Chrono Trigger. It's basically the evolutionary peak of the NES-era console RPG. Every aspect, including the story, art, game mechanics, and music, are best-in-class, with no obvious room for improvement given the technical constraints of the time.
I have great expectation in Sea of Stars exactly because I loved Chrono Trigger suo much.
Holy shit Chrono Trigger rocked my world so fucking hard. I played it on an emulator in like 2000. I've forgotten a lot of stuff yet I still remember the impression this game left on me. It was like holding my breath at the end there goddamn.
The original Deus Ex. The storyline, the way the game world reacted to your actions and made it feel like your actions were relevant to the world around you instead of just being a static place where stuff happened to you...
Super Metroid. It's an amazing game if you play it normally, and you can branch out into sequence breaking tricks pretty easily. It basically created/popularized an entire genre of games.
There are lots of great choices here, but Super Metroid is mine as well.
Gorgeous game, great music, not horrifically difficult once you figure things out.
I’ve said it 1 million times and so have many others, but it is and will always be Ocarina of Time. It’s the only game I play through every single year and still love every single second of it.
I think I would have to go with Stardew Valley. It has something for any mood I’m in.
I can spend my time on the farm, looking after the animals, crops, reorganising. I can go and be social with the neighbours, help them out, do some work towards the community centre. If I feel adventurous I can go explore the mines fighting monsters.
Where I’ve done all that I can start again on a new farm and try a different strategy, I can even play with friends and work together. Its just cozy fun.
Can we go really old with these?
Because Zelda Link to the Past is a perfect game.
I know how ubiquitous it is, but I still replay it on a regular basis. Its perfectly designed, balanced, simple... Im not saying its superior to modern games or something stupid, I just think its pretty flawless. That is all.
Have you ever looked into any randomizers for ALTTP? They'll give you a whole new experience in playing the game.
With Archipelago, you can even play with other people playing other randomized games. A Hollow Knight player might need you to find their mantis claw so they can get to the boss that has your hookshot and so on.
FTL. It took a concept and ran with it. Plus a great soundtrack. It has a great replay value as well.
My vote is for Slay the Spire. Invented the deck-building roguelike genre and did so with an interesting setting, simple but appealing artstyle, memorable soundtrack, and very tight balancing across 21 difficulty levels.
Also Tetris, but that's already been said.
Gotta be Portal 2. The puzzles are fun, the difficultly curve is reasonable, and the writing is fantastic. Truly the only complaint I have is that I wish there was more of it.
I would interpret "perfect" as "i can't find anyhing negative to say about this game". So for me the candidates are:
Control seems pretty good at what it wants to do. Nice graphics and soundtrack, fluid movement in combat (closest description I could think of) and cool, intriguing story. It also has one of the best video game quests I've played: Ashtray Maze
Skyrim (despite the numerous bugs) is another one I will say is close to perfect. Really good game and the community is pretty great as well.
Hades. I don't think I've come across a game so carefully paced as Hades, both plot-wise and in the gradual introduction of game mechanics. Which is bloody impressive considering that it's a roguelite.
Chrono Trigger: every aspect (graphics, gameplay, story, music, replayability...) has such level of polishness that it's still outstanding almost 30 years later.
No other JRPG has come even close and, as a Final Fantasy fan, that's hard to admit
Both Portal games are perfect. Portal 1 did some much great stuff and portal 2 said fuck it and decided to be more perfect then the first.
For a game to be perfect I think it's got to be absolutely pinpoint in achieving what it sets out to do. Doesn't matter if it's a small game, or an expansive open world.
I'm gonna go with Superhot. For my money it took an idea, and ran with it to its natural conclusion. It's laser focused on that one core mechanic and pulls it off so well that I don't think anyone else has even tried to replicate it.
Celeste has just perfect controls and pacing. I still think about it. I wasn't as touched by the story as others but many were. I'm still playing Super Mario World and find it so impressive and charming.
Factorio. The game automatically adjusts difficulty based on your speed and familiarity. Pros scaling rapidly are going to have a harder time with biters than a noob learning the ropes on the exact same difficulty settings. Difficulty settings can be scaled up for a true challenge. Mods are supported damn near as much as first party devs. It’s a very well optimized game. It’s just technically impressive, psychologically fun, and fundamentally well balanced.
Skyrim. It's a beautiful game, even now when I play it I take a moment to just look at how gorgeous the scenery is. I love the quests and that you can own a horse/house/child/ get married. I love the potions and crafting and customisation.
I don't think there are many games quite like Skyrim
My answer to this is always Portal, the first one. It was so unexpected and so, so good. Nothing in gaming before or since has been that magical of an experience for me. Maybe early Pokemon, when my little kid eyes were opening to what gaming could be. But there's just something special about Portal. Such a concise, perfect little game.
Lots of contenders for me: Resident Evil 2, A Link to the Past, Ocarina of time, Goldeneye, Half-Life, Diablo II, Skyrim, Alien: Isolation, Borderlands 2, Mario 64
But I gotta go with Runescape
The Hunt for Red October on the C64 - varied levels, great art and music, really good difficulty curve.
Witcher 3. They very well combined open world with story telling, with tons of side quests, many of which affect the story. The characters aren't one dimensional. For example Bloody Barron is a low life, but also draws sympathy as he pays for his sins from the past. The world is also unforgiving, many times you have to make a decision between shitty option and even shit tier option. The graphics and characters are also very detailed. All of that creates a great atmosphere.
If you haven't played it, you should give it a try.
I think Terraria? Especially with the years it's had to grow and improve.
I have always been a fan of stealth games. Dishonored (especially the first) scratched the itch perfectly! It's atmospheric. It's not open world, but each level has its own area to explore that is filled to the brim with stories, sometimes a small side quest etc. I also love how you get to influence the ending.
Fallout: New Vegas. Wait now, don't laugh at me. I'm painfully aware it was built on an engine that just does not cooperate and crashes regularly. BUT, the gameplay itself, the roleplaying, the fights (yes I do like VATS), and the choices by god the choices. So many choices with so many consequences, telltale wishes they were this cool. The only thing for me that's holding this game back is 1) the rickety engine it's attempting to balance on, and 2) unfinished quest lines. The devs for this game had so many brilliant ideas that never made it on screen, I don't know if they shot themselves in the foot, or if the deadlines were unrealistic. Even though some of the main quests between the warring factions feel lopsided, and some interesting things seem to go to a dead-end, the game never felt unfinished to me. There was so much to do and try, I never felt cheated by the game in narrative. Instead, I just want more because it was awesome how interactive the world was. It responded to my decisions and made a unique playthrough because of my decisions, I don't believe the predecessors even come close to this. Sure 3 and 4 kept similar mechanics, but the game didn't react to your choices. If I had one wish it would be to see Fallout New Vegas as the devs intended, with every plot line completed and polished, I'd even continue to play it on its rickety system. Though this would need to be a magical wish because there's no way that engine could handle the work needed, and converting this content to a new engine would be very expensive (so I'm told). I know she's not perfect, but goddamn she has the potential to be.
Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri.
It was just this perfect storm of a game from a bygone era in game design. It iterated on Civilization 2 in a way that wouldn't be replicated until Civilization 4, what with the social engineering screen. It had a bunch of user customization options for units that, yes, the AI didn't know how to do, but I'm of the opinion it's better to focus on the user experience than to try to make a game that is "fair" for AI players.
The factions perfectly encapsulated the political divisions of the era, with each faction having its own ideas about what went wrong back on Earth, and therefore what the path forward was necessary to avoid those problems on Chiron. Each faction would have an opinion of the other factions based on a number of different things, including their social engineering choices (form of government, economic model, publicly promoted values, future society model), with each faction having a gameplay restriction that prevented them from adopting the model favored by their philosophical opposite.
And then there was the tech tree. If there is a more beautiful way to build high quality speculative fiction right into the gameplay, I've never seen it. It wasn't just "red lasers to blue lasers" as so many Sci-Fi 4x games do. Every entry in the tree was proper science fiction, with a description and a quote, with some of the quotes being from actual historical figures ("God does not play dice." - Albert Einstein) and some being from fictional characters invented for the game ("Einstein would turn over in his grave. Not only does God play dice, the dice are loaded." - Chairman Sheng-ji Yang).
This was a special era in art generally, that gave us such masterpieces as Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri, The Elder Scrolls 3: Morrowind, and Star Trek: Deep Space Nine. It was an era where media models were changing and the artists were running out ahead of their coproate masters, operating at a nexus of increasing resources and increasing oversight.
I was going to say Outer Wilds but somebody beat me to it, so I'll say Final Fantasy 6 instead.
The Pixel remaster on mobile and Switch is a great version but it's missing the bonus content from the GBA release.
Guild Wars, especially for the PvP mode. I loved the visual feeling of the game, it felt sharper and less cartoony than a WoW.
Some classes were kind of novel too at the time.
And the feature I loved was the limited skillset you had to chose : you could be lvl 20 (max) and know 30 spells but you could only pick 5 in your active bar. It made for so many interesting builds and combinations !
It's hard to define perfection but Return Of The Obra Dinn has very few flaws IMO. I can only complain about relatively minor UX problems. Everything else is incredible. I still think about the story years later and the music gets stuck in my head to this day. It is such a consummate achievement of game dev and its design achieves maximum results with the limited resources of a solo gamedev.
For me, probably Half-Life 2. Especially at the time? It was such a leap ahead in both technology and overall world immersion. I still revisit it sometimes and get sucked right back in.
I’ll agree with you on Beatles Rock Band too, though. It’s a work of art.
Fata Morgana.
Listen, whether you like Visual Novels or not doesn't matter. But Fata Morgana is just somehow...perfect. Everything is resolved and I don't feel any need to complain about any aspect of it. It was an experience to play a game that left me with no questions afterwards. It was just a really good story.