Another year, another season of The Game Awards, which means another month-long debate over who should win what and who was snubbed for Game of the Year. As we gear up for celebrations and hurt feelings on December 7, let’s take a walk down memory lane.
As we approach a decades-worth of big TGA winners, we’ve got enough to start ranking and really debating the show’s GOTY library. Who were the best of them?
9. Dragon Age: Inquisition
Dragon Age: Inquisition isn’t the best game in the Dragon Age series, but it’s easily the last great game we saw coming out of BioWare in a long while. It was also one of the first titles to truly showcase the power of the PS4 and of the 8th generation of consoles, so it naturally gained a lot of favor among gamers.
Sadly for it, Inquisition got mostly outdone and overshadowed by The Witcher 3, which came just a bit later. Still, fans know that it told a nice story whose biggest problem is that it might never reach a fulfilling conclusion.
8. The Last Of Us Part II
I hate criticizing the games in the Last Of Us franchise — whenever I do, Naughty Dog employees have to make yet another remaster. I’m sorry, but ND has recently announced the remaster of TLOUPII, so I guess this is the least harmful time to do it.
TLOU2 is gorgeous, plays great, and has great performances. It’s also neat that a big blockbuster that could just have taken the safe route decided to instead take so many risks with its narrative. The problem, however, is that the narrative itself plays out in a disjointed manner, and, even if it didn’t, it would never manage to feel as earnest and honest as the original.
This game spends most of its time forcing us to kill enemies — some of them dogs — in very gory ways, then spends the remainder chastising us for doing that thing we had no way of avoiding. Pretty preachy — especially for a game developed under infamously poor conditions.
As a game, TLOUPII remains fresh, but its legacy is far from pristine.
7. Overwatch
To be entirely honest, I believe Overwatch is inferior to Team Fortress 2, a similar game that preceded it by nearly a decade. Still, falling short of being TF2 doesn’t necessarily strip your game from “masterpiece” status.
Overwatch is a damn great game, one that seriously outdoes TF2 when it comes to content and community support. Blizzard’s first foray into the FPS world was an absolute triumph, one that so many would still play today had the game not been purged from existence for bonkers reasons.
6. God Of War
The God Of War requel doesn’t score many points for originality. It’s the themes of The Last Of Us combined with the gameplay of Dark Souls and Resident Evil 4, in the ever-popular setting of Norse Mythology. I don’t think it’s a ripoff, but it sure as hell shares more DNA with the games cited above than it does with the previous games in the series — those of back when Devil May Cry was the hottest action game out there.
Still, NU-GOW is a damn good pastiche and probably the best violent game a parent can play with their (teenage) kid by their side.
5. It Takes Two
Who doesn’t love an underdog story? It Takes Two, a game by Hazelight, a company known mostly for having a hilariously outspoken boss, managed to defeat some of the best games in the Resident Evil, Ratched & Clank, and even Metroid series. My only gripe with it is the story, whose themes I’m not keen on, but there’s always the option to skip cutscenes.
If you do that, you and your lucky co-op partner will be treated to a massive mix of many of the most fun mechanics I’ve ever seen in a game.
4. Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice
Sekiro isn’t exactly a Souls game, nor is it a Tenchu game. It is, however, a near-perfect marriage of the two that results in what feels like more than a sum of its parts.
Sekiro marks the biggest deviation from FromSoftware’s surefire recipe, but it also never strays as far as to become alien.
The shinobi simulator provides players with an exceedingly challenging mix of combat and stealth, old and new. It also features what is by far the least cryptic story and storytelling in recent FromSoft history, so there’s that.
3. The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt
The Witcher 3 is the reason I saved up a lot of money to buy a serious gaming PC back in 2015. I felt obliged to do it after one of my best friends gifted it to me on Steam with a note that read more or less like “PLAY THIS. IT HAS CHANGED THE WAY I SEE GAMES AND LIFE”. I think he was drunk when he did that, but even my sober self had no trouble agreeing with his sentiment.
People in dire need of finding something to criticize here say that the combat feels simpler than it should be. Sure, they might be right, but look — when you’re a superhuman killing machine, destroying your opponents should feel simple.
All good adjectives have already been used to describe this game, so I’m just going to say that The Witcher 3’s greatest strength is how it still feels like a cozy personal affair despite its vertiginously large scope.
2. The Legend Of Zelda: Breath Of The Wild
For over two decades, Ocarina Of Time sat comfortably atop the ranking of usually already stellar Zelda titles. Breath Of The Wild was the only game in the series — and one of the few outside of it — capable of challenging that absolute titan for the title of greatest game ever made.
Only history will tell, but so far Breath Of The Wild still feels unmatched in many of the, welp, wild breaths of fresh air that it brought to the gaming landscape via its marvelous updated gameplay formula and new mechanics.
1. Elden Ring
Recency bias? Maybe, but if I’ve learned anything about FromSoft’s games, it’s that they age like a fine old one.
Elden Ring gave us every tool we loved in the Souls series, then made a huge world to play with them. I was afraid that much of it would just feel like filler, but nothing about it ever feels like bloat or padding. Its lore is as beautifully cryptic as always, as is the bizarre way Hidetaka Miyazaki collaborated with George R.R. Martin to bring it to life.
It feels like the culmination of more than a decade of beautiful experimentation where nothing fails. As an event, Elden Ring is the Avengers: Endgame of games. As an experience, it’s something so far beyond that.
And that’s it for my ranking, which I must remind everyone comes down to personal preference. How would you rank all of these amazing games? I’d love to read your take in the comments, and, since nobody can stop you, feel free to tell me where you’d place Baldur’s Gate 3 even before it gets the award!
