The Top Games of All Time (according to me)

My methodology is simple: if I played it, and I enjoyed the experience, it gets to go on this list. There are sure to be games I have played and am forgetting, or that I've played so little of I don't feel equipped to rank it. Games that occupy a similar niche to me (ie, Mario Kart and Smash Bros) will be on this list together. Ideally, this list would be thousands upon thousands long and be overwhelming to even see, but alas, I must have a job.
I will write snippets for my Elites, but after that, the plain ranking will suffice.
Let us begin.

The wheat rises to the surface.

Starting with my S-Rankers, load-bearing parts of my soul.

  1. Minecraft

    Sometimes, loving a game makes it easier to write about, and sometimes it makes it harder. Without any hesitation, there does not exist another game I have put more hours into than Minecraft. And while I do enjoy Minecraft as a game, as an artistic experience crafted by developers from nothing but milk and love, I also love Minecraft as an artistic medium itself. I've always been amazed at incredible builders; I remember playing adventure maps and being amazed at how Minecraft (the game) was turned into Herobrine's Mansion (the game) running on Minecraft (the gaming engine); I remember watching resource packs change how these maps were deleloped; I remember watching as each new restone block allowed for things never previously thought of; I remember watching the scale and complexity of builds expand to incredible heights. I remember learning that all that beauty I saw, I could create for myself.
    I have been playing this game for over half of my life, and I still cry at the end poem.

  2. EarthBound

    While I do in fact, think this is an incredible game, I do have to admit I played it at a formative moment in my life. I was a teenager, and it was one of the games I could get working on my Rasberry Pi emulator that I enjoyed as more than an oddity. A lot of those older games are just hard for me to parse, I really need to give Chrono Trigger and Super Metroid another shot. But EarthBound has such a perfect atmosphere, it's light and goofy and fun, but not like a comedy, more like the banter you have with an old friend. It uses this to build a relationship with you, until you reach the end and it can fully deliver on it's message with blinding sincerity.

  3. Mother 3

    I do think Mother 3 is better than EarthBound, whatever that means. I just played EarthBound at 15, is all. These games come together for me, I cannot fully seperate the impact they have on my soul. I am a person prone to depression, I always have been. But even in the midst of it all, some part of me stubbornly holds on to hope. You may say I'm a fool, feelin' the way that I do. But I still belive in miracles, I swear I've seen a few. The time will surely come when you see my point of view.

    Also I'm a Hobonichi user and it's Itoi too so their Mother stuff is amazing and I need to save up and get some and yeah

  4. Celeste

    I played this game before I knew I was trans. I think I played it before Maddie knew she was trans? And it was good, and I loved it then too. Often, while overwhelmed and stressed, I would take a walk while listening to the soundtrack, reminding myself that I had climbed mountains before, and I could do it again. And it was an impactful game to me.
    And then my egg cracked. Maybe my favorite genre of fiction is "'no, this isn't about being queer, it's about being me!' ... 'Hey uh update, I'm queer'". And suddenly, what had been an important game to me was recontextualized and that experience was shared with the creator, but also a new-found community. A massive part of my gender exploration came from exploring the music of other trans women, and that started with Lena Raine and the Celeste soundtrack. I own it on CD, actually (because CDs are better than vinyl and I genuinely don't understand why vinyl is a thing to music people but that's a whole rant).
    The gameplay, also is excellent. I mean it's Celeste, you knew that. Does there exist a game that feels nicer to control?

  5. Metroid Dread

    I'm not a Metroid super-fan. I mean I like them, I just don't have the history for them. I had dabbled in Super Metroid, but it was always just a bit clunky to me. But Metroid fans went berserk over the trailers, and I was interested anyway, so I picked it up on release. As soon as I started moving Samus around, I knew the entire control scheme for the game, I could see the shape of powerups I was yet to gain. I didn't have the context for any of the lore or storytelling, and it was subtle andyway. But I feel at complete ease whenever I play, it sits exacltly in grooves that I did not know where there. One hot take I have is that Hollow Knight isn't very good, I've tried to play it a few times, and whenever I do, I inevitable think "ugh I'm bored, why don't I start a good Metroidvania?" And then I play it yet again.

  6. Sable

    Another game at a formative time. I had just moved out of my parents home again (I moved out, but rent there kept drifting upwards out of my reach, and I was unable to find a home of my own before the lease ended). I knew I was trans at the time, but I was still unsure what exactly to do about it. This game, about a young woman, journying though the world to find her path, getting the oppourtunity to explore and find what she enjoyed, it spoke to me in an intensely specific way. I hit credits, and soon determined what I was going to do. It's been a rough few years since then, as expected what I feel after a game is not how my life will actually go, but it was such an profoundly cathartic experience.

  7. Scarlet Hollow

    By some miracle of a Steam reccomendation, I played Slay the Princess. I loved it, of course, and as soon as I rolled credits I knew I had to look up what else Black Tabby had done. I was surprised to learn the Slay the Princess was kind of a side project for them. All that time a quality and polish was not the main endeavor. Scarlet Hollow is where their big bucks go. The art is incredible, it's more realistic than StP, but in ways that heighten the disconnect of the horrors. It's ominous and bleak, but still full of color and character. The writing is amazing, I'm not really sure how you make writing that good but they did it. It's small and specific to each interaction, and then you play a different route and you start to see the scope of it all. The level of branching paths is truely staggering.
    Aesthetically, it feels so nice. I was super into crypozoology as a kid, I grew up and started a YouTube channel, I'm gay, Stella was basicaly designed exactly for me. The game takes place in the South, which I've never even been to, but I did grow up in Mormonville, Utah. A lot of the smalltown, close-knit enviroment feels familiar to me. But it's also deeply queer, like, the game lets you pick from She, He, and They pronouns at the start, one of the first people you meet and befriend is Avery (we love them), You can kiss Stella (apparantly, I'm a disaster in-game too), Stella and Tabitha feels like a crack ship the way so many headcanon queer ships do except that it's canon and the devs love Stabby too. Scarlet Hollow effortlessly takes what I loved as a kid and integrates it into what I've grown into as an adult. It makes me want to get back onto BRFO.net.

  8. Outer Wilds

    Basically this game is magic. It loops time to lower the stakes and make it easier for you to explore, gradually letting you learn more and more until you know all that you can learn, and then tops it off with an poignaint message. It's beautiful, and it's incredible. Sometimes you'll think that you can't solve a certain puzzle, but then the sun will explode, and you can take a break and investigate something else. Each thread is connected, so you'll always work your way back to what you need to do. If I could forget everything about and play it for the first time again, I would.

  9. Silent Hill

    It's strange this game is up so high, given that I did not finish it myself. I played the vast majority of it myself, but I could not deal with combat nearing the end of the game. Combat I couldn've avoided, knowing what I know now.
    But I didn't play all of it, and yet still I rank it this high. I had issues with it's gameplay and controls and it always felt clunky and here it is. I only bring those up to show just how powerful the atmosphere is. It's an immaculately constructed experience. Every visual, from it's design to execution knows exactly what it has to do and how to do it. Each sound is the same. It can reach moments of beauty, but they're always in such a strange context that everything is just a bit unsettling, always uncanny. I played this game and my design style shifted immediately.

  10. Resident Evil 4

    I didn't really have access to games growing up. There was the family Wii, but we didn't have that many games for it, and I only knew about the games we had. There was the family computer, and old Mac Mini that ran Minecraft at 15fps on a good day. When I moved out and got a job, one of the first things I bought was a Switch. I played BOTW first, naturally, but personally I'm not a huge fan. I played some other stuff as expected, but then I bought and "old" game: Resident Evil 4. It came in a bundle with 5 and 6 too, but I still haven't gotten to those two. I thing "old" things are where you learn your love for the medium. Doing marching band I loved in high school, I loved watching DCI, but everything I watched was at most 1-2 years old. It was watching classic Cavaliers and SCV, finally seeing why people thought the old days were so good. That was when I really fell in love with it as a medium, more than just entertainment.
    And for games, that's Resident Evil 4 to me. I had a really rough time with the controls at first, and when I reached the castle I was really hoping I would be done soon. But it grew on me, and it just got better and better. When I finished, I realized how much I really did love games. I liked them before, but it was different playing this. I don't know why Resident Evil triggered this and not Mother, or Pokemon, or Punch Out, but it did. Maybe because it was older but still 3D? An early marker of what modern games would be? An early, giant AAA game, something that looks like the giant mainstream hits of today? I don't know exactly what it was, but it got me excited to learn more about the medium for myself, rather than just belive what I'd heard others say. I could go back and play those games too.
    And outside of that context, it is good too. There's a reason so many games pulled from it. Plus I love Leon and Ada. T4T in my heart.

    11. The chaff in the wind.

  11. If Found
  12. Secret Litle Haven
  13. Slay the Princess
  14. Signalis
  15. Black Mesa
  16. Metroid Zero Mission
  17. Resident Evil 3: Remake
  18. Animal Crossing New Horizions
  19. Hatsune Miku: Project DIVA
  20. The Walking Dead: Season 1
  21. Unpacking
  22. Starwhal
  23. Cloudpunk
  24. Iron Lung
  25. Beatsaber
  26. Crow Country
  27. Cultic
  28. Mario Kart 8
  29. Smash Bros Ultimate
  30. Portal 2
  31. Guilty Gear Strive
  32. Ghost Trick: Phantom Detective
  33. Portal
  34. Umurangi Generation
  35. Ikenfell
  36. Pokemon Emerald
  37. 20 Minutes Till Dawn
  38. Street Fighter 6
  39. Mike Tyson's Punch Out!