Submitted 2 days ago by weirdbeardgame@lemmy.world to games@lemmy.world
My Picks…
Deus Ex (So many games try to be this and fail) Cyberpunk (This one eventually measured up) Alpha Centauri (Innovation mixed with familiarity and setting) Fallout 2 (they’re all good. Fallout 2 is special) Kotor (Star Wars story telling in a beautiful way) Baldur’s Gate 2 and 3 (I’m stunned that 3 was a worthy successor) Homeworld (One of the World’s truly beautiful games)
Phantom Liberty is where Cyberpunk becomes a masterpiece.
I remember trying the demo to Homeworld when I was a kid, it came with one of those old school PC GAMER demo CDs. I think I was too young to understand how to play it effectively, but still loved it because I found the ambience of the experience so memorizing while hyper-cozy. Would you say it she’s well as something worth going back and playing now, and what of the sequel(s)?
I still repplay now and then, there’s no game like it.
Sadly the sequals failed to capture the grace of the original, though I’ve not tried 3 yet.
Hades Hollow Knight Noita Super Metroid Prey (2017) DOOM (2016) Factorio Stardew Valley
Supergiant games’ holy trinity: Bastion, Transistor and Pyre.
Also, the only Borderland games 1 and 2; don’t believe the lies there are no more true Borderlands games and no there most certainly is no movie.
There’s also one other, but you’ll need a crowbar or a gravity gun in hand for me to tell you about it.
You are wrong about borderlands as there is one more and it is pretty muc h perfect.
Tales from the Borderlands.
Shame they never made a sequel for it but the artistry, music and story are all so well crafted. Someone loved Borderlands making that.
Feels odd to include Hades over Pyre.
Bastion and Transistor, sure. Without a doubt, imoactful clever stories that were well delivered.
Pyre always felt like a buggy mess tho. I tried multiple times to get into it but it’s just not on the level of the first two.
For me it’s Journey. That game gave me an emotional experience I’ve never had in any other.
Absolute embodiment of less is more. Controls are simple but intuitive, you can beat it in one session, there’s no major payoff in the end. It’s just a game about the journey and the friends made along the way.
I still remember having my mind blown that the other figure I met after the tutorial level was not just an NPC, when I noticed their movements were too deliberate and they were solving some puzzles for me.
I made it all the way to the end of the game with that person. Never knew who they even were until their name showed up at the very end. What a cathartic experience. I’ve also never been able to achieve anything similar since then.
This game will forever live in my heart as an absolute masterpiece. I cry every time I play it because something about it just completely sucks me in.
I added the buddy I ran through the game with and he’s still on my friend list decade or so later, amazing experience
There is no “objective” when talking about subjective terms.
My personal, SUBJECTIVE favorites are Mass Effect, Titanfall 2, Subnautica, Stardew Valley, Ori and the Blind Forest, Dave the Diver, Balatro, and Portal 1 and 2
SOMA was great
I’ve been craving another experience like SOMA but unfortunately nothing even comes close. It was probably the coolest and most disturbing story I’ve ever seen. Finishing that game gave me an existential crisis for like 2 days after. It was that good.
I feel like Soma was a decent metaphysical question wrapped in a okayish walking simulator.
It got a lot of praise, but basically boils down to the question “what makes you you” with nothing else about it standing out.
If the gameplay isn’t a driving factor of making the game objectively good, then I don’t think it counts.
Personally I think story can make a game stand out far more than graphics or gameplay. I also disagree that the game boiled down to one question. While it was the primary focus of the narrative, the underwater laboratories and world building/history was amazing.
The lack of gameplay is fine, and very much important to call out for any new players. There’s a whole genre of “you’re playing a movie” that SOMA fits nicely into
Hotline: Miami
Beyond Good & Evil
Final Fantasy X
Celeste
Hades
Ace Combat Zero/5
Way more to choose but top of my head
+1 for Beyond Good & Evil.
For those unfamiliar with this game, this was early 2000s Ubisoft when they used to be creative, celebrated, and original.
It’s so French and weird and amazing
I’m going to take this as “games that I never see anyone question their quality.” (I don’t even like all these games myself)
Sonic 3 & Knuckles
Kirby Planet Robobot
Doom 2016
Street Fighter III: Third Strike
Pac-Man
Balatro
Steins;Gate
The House in Fata Morgana
Castlevania: Symphony of the Night
Gran Turismo 4
Mario Kart 8 Deluxe
Mega Man X
Mega Man X4
Super Mario Bros. 3
I am here to question Elden Ring’s quality
Baldur’s Gate 3 is a good game and a worthwhile experience but you can absolutely make quite a lot of very valid critiques about it.
Yeah for a third person isometric RPG with non-linear branching storylines and deep thoughtful story, Disco Elysium positively blows BG3 out of the water.
I’d take SMW over SMB3, but I can’t really fault anything else in this list! 😅
I like SMW better myself (actually not a single franchise entry on that list is my favorite in the series) but it doesn’t have the kind of unanimous praise SMB3 does.
Steins;Gate my man cultured AF
Metro 2033. Played it in the dark with good surround sound headphones on, and it’s positively claustrophobic.
Last Light is good too, but at little too optimistic IMHO. 2033 nails that endless pit of despair feeling, with just enough lucky breaks that you might make it through.
I would absolutely put that game up high on the lists as it is a perfect piece of atmospheric gameplay of misery incarnate.
Bastion, Hades, Disco Elysium, Planescape: Torment, and Tyranny (even if the last act is rushed in the last two) come to mind for me
Bastion is amazing.
Thomas Was Alone
I’ve never felt so much for quadrilateral shapes.
That’s a great game indeed. The narration is on point.
Games I haven’t seen mentioned yet:
I love that you included 1.6. I spent my all teenage years staying up all night playing this. I was thinking single player epics but this is absolutely a masterpiece.
I love STALKER with all my heart, and if we’re talking atmosphere and vibes and even world building it is up there. But it does not really belong in the objective masterpiece category. Flawed masterpiece, maybe.
Also I think Call of Pripyat is the better STALKER game, but it might be controversial.
Yeah, but it still popped into my mind sooner than other games, dunno why,
Good taste
Clair Obscur has been the best game I’ve played in a long while, absolute masterpiece
How come no one has mentioned “Life is strange” yet? Also, “A plague tale”.
The intro to a plague tale… Jesus.
Team Fortress 2
The best teamshooter game to date, endless copy cats that suck ass.
And the character trailers are hilarious.
“That thing … It scares me,” Pyro shooting bubbles and lollypops in his mind actually causing pure death and destruction
It does have a couple sore points. The whole aimbots running rampant was awful. And it was one of the first major games to introduce and popularize micro transactions.
Both true points, however Its still my favorite game of all time. To be fair I am a fanboy, my steam year in review last year was 99% TF2. I don’t really play any other games besides tf2 still.
Age of Empires 2 /w The Conquers expansion pack.
Roller Coaster Tycoon 1. (2 was weaker without OpenRCT2, the real masterpiece, but idk if unfinished projects should count or not)
Quake 3 Arena, Unreal Tournament 1999 GOTY, Worms Armageddon, SimCity 3000 Unlimited, Forza Horizon 2 / Motorsport 3, Need for Speed Underground 1, Clonk! Rage, Metal Gear Solid 1/2/3, Ace Combat 4, Okami, Tokyo Jungle, Zelda BOTW, Mario Odyssey, Sven Co-Op, Killing Floor 1, Final Fantasy 7, LISA: The Painful, Everhood 1, Deus Ex 1, Left 4 Dead 1/2, Portal 2, Battlefield Bad Company 2…
I could go on and on.
Doom
Tetris
Chrono Trigger
Wizards got all up in Commander and killed my interest in it.
UB are getting all up in my standard and pioneer formats and killing my interest for them/Magic as a whole outside of “limited” precons.
Doom (93) I guess ?
Also HL and HL2
Super Metroid
Psychonauts 1 and 2.
Some of the most imaginative big budget games in existence, from themes to art style to level design
Hollow Knight is peak
Curious to hear what the criteria for “masterpiece” is, otherwise I think it is just peoples’ subjective opinion of what makes a great game that they also think others might agree about being a great game. Genuinely curious, interested in discussion, not saying this to shut down any of the answers here.
In my mind a masterpiece video game can’t be copied. Or at least if someone tried it would just be called a cheap clone of the original.
Then again everything can be copied but the more difficult it is to copy the closer it is to a masterpiece IMO.
Historically a masterpiece has been a (or the) work that demonstrates an artist is capable of utilizing their medium to its fullest extent, i.e. it has been mastered. Per ye olde Wiki:
Historically, a “masterpiece” was a work of a very high standard produced by an apprentice to obtain full membership, as a “master”, of a guild or academy in various areas of the visual arts and crafts.
In that light, I’d say the best qualified would be games that completely utilized the capabilities of the platform they were designed for or, perhaps of interest to more people, expanded what everyone thought could be done with those systems. Games which were furthermore well polished and complete, and did not have much room for improvement taking into account the constraints they had to work with at the time. (For instance: No duh we could make Mario 64 run at a higher framerate and have better textures to look nicer on hardware now. That doesn’t mean it wasn’t arguably a masterpiece of its time, on the system it was on.) This doesn’t just have to be technical stuff – It could be the way the game used storytelling, its gameplay mechanics, or anything else.
Spyro and Crash trilogies on the PSX, as well as the Quake 2 port, would definitely merit being called technical masterpieces
On the original Xbox, Phantom Dust would fit that bill, despite being a commercial failure at the time. The tldr is that you create a collection of spells (attacks, traps, dodges, curses, buffs) and try to grab them and the “mana” during the real time duels, in order to beat your opponents. Terrain is semi destructible and you have to take into consideration the trajectory of your spells - www.xbox.com/games/store/…/9PCDNBHR11MR
Then Breath of the Wild and Tears of the Kingdom belong to that category - run smoothly as fuck on one of the lamest consoles there is, and are beautiful and complex.
Chromehounds was the greatest mech game on shitbox 360 and you can’t change my mind.
The sheer variety in player created metas was glorious to behold. Sure, you could play how the game encouraged you to play and hang your weapons in “normal” configurations. But you could also bury whole teams in indirect fire with a triple double from across the map. You could build a little punchy boi buggy with a dick piston, cockpit, wheels, and nothing else. You could even try to sweat the meta in the chicken leg howitzer or the turtle up in the armored crab.
The only limits were creativity and spacer availability lmfaooo
It’s pretty wack that we haven’t since had a game that captures many of the better elements of Chrome hounds.
Factorio.
Someone likes a challenge. :)
Witcher 3 for me.
MAD MAX from 2015, while not tied directly to the new movies it scratches an itch I haven’t found in any other game. It’s dark and bleak and brutal. The combat on foot and behind the wheel are both incredible. Nothing quite like being in the middle of ripping a convoy 7 new assholes and being hit with a dust storm. It can be repetitive if you want to complete everything but BY THE GODS OF VALHALLA is it a fucking blast.
Red Alert 2
Heroes of Might and Magic 3
Super Mario Brothers 3
Hades. Transcends the rogue-like genre through incredible writing, art direction, and music. The gameplay is some of the most addictive I’ve ever played. I’m at over 200 hours logged and I still get lost in it.
BastingChemina@slrpnk.net 2 days ago
Journey
There is not a single word in the game, barely any control but the game take you through an emotional story.
It’s multiplayer in a sense that you might meet another player, they can help you, you can help them or just continue on your path and despite not having any words it just fell like a genuine, pure connection with someone.
And the music is amazing.
Dremor@lemmy.world 20 hours ago
Journey is an Art masterpiece, but one that you need to already appreciate Art to enjoy.
I got friends to try it, some of them enjoyed the experience, some other hated it.
dual_sport_dork@lemmy.world 2 days ago
Journey is indeed absolutely fantastic. It finally got a PC port a while ago after languishing on the PS3 for quite some years, and its hardware requirements are probably low enough in the modern era that practically anybody should be able to experience it.
My only gripe is that online randos seem not to understand the meditation achievement, and get antsy when you try to entice them to sit there with you until the achievement pops. And since you can’t type at them you can’t communicate to them what’s going on.
I got the trophy on PS3 back in the day but I haven’t successfully wrangled anybody into helping me get the Steam achievement for that yet…