Best video game remakes
Video game remakes walk a tightrope between honoring nostalgia and delivering something fresh, and the best ones manage to modernize classics without losing what made players fall in love with them in the first place. From overhauled graphics to reimagined gameplay systems, these remakes prove that revisiting the past can create something that feels brand new. Which remake do you think nailed this balance best? Cast your vote and help crown the ultimate winner.
What counts: The crowd's votes decide the order — seeded neutral.
Resident Evil 4 (2023)▲ Rising
Capcom took a game already considered untouchable and somehow made it scarier, tightening Leon's knife parries and reworking Ashley from an escort-mission punchline into an actual asset. The village siege still hits like a freight train, proving a remake can honor the original's DNA while fixing every nagging flaw fans complained about for two decades.
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48
Final Fantasy VII Remake▲ Rising
Turning one disc of a 1997 classic into a full 40-hour epic was either lunacy or genius, and the Midgar reactor bombings rendered in full orchestral, voice-acted glory argued hard for genius. The ending's timeline-shattering swerve with the Whispers polarized fans, but nobody can say this remake played it safe.
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32
Resident Evil 2 (2019)▲ Rising
The reimagined RPD lobby, dripping with dread and dynamic lighting, set the template for how survival horror could look in the modern era. Mr. X stomping through the halls turned a nostalgic remake into a genuinely new nightmare, earning this its reputation as the gold standard remake.
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18
Metroid: Zero Mission
Nintendo didn't just prettify the original Metroid, it rebuilt the entire adventure with modern navigation, added narrative context via the Chozo ruins flashbacks, and tacked on a stealth-action postgame as Samus sans suit. It's the quiet blueprint every remake since has borrowed from without credit.
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10
Shadow of the Colossus (2018)
Bluepoint took a game defined by its haunting, empty vistas and made that emptiness even more overwhelming, with colossi that now feel like moving mountains of fur and stone. Climbing Colossus after Colossus toward Mono's tomb hits exactly as hollow and beautiful as it did in 2005, just rendered at a fidelity the PS2 could only dream of.
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-5
Link's Awakening (2019)▼ Falling
The toy-diorama art style shouldn't have worked for a game about a nightmare-haunted dream island, yet it turned Koholint into something achingly melancholy and adorable at once. A remake this stylistically bold, on a Game Boy cult classic nobody was clamoring to see redone, is exactly the kind of gamble that pays off.
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-10
Demon's Souls (2020)▼ Falling
Bluepoint's launch-title flex for the PS5 rebuilt FromSoftware's grim, punishing prototype into a next-gen showcase, with the Tower of Latria's rat-infested prisons looking more oppressive than ever. It's the remake that proved a decade-old cult game could still humble a new generation of players who thought they'd mastered Soulslikes.
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-18
Dead Space (2023)▼ Falling
The Ishimura got a full nervous system, literally, with the intelligence system letting limbs and rooms react dynamically, and the seamless no-load-screen presentation makes Isaac's descent into madness feel unbroken and suffocating. Peeling the necromorphs apart limb by limb never felt so tactile or so terrifying.
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-20
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Comments (6)
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The crowd is sleeping on the bottom half of this list.
This order is closer to right than any editor would've gotten.
Exactly the kind of argument the internet was built for.
Voted — and the gap between #1 and #2 should be bigger.