Best video games of all time

The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild▲ Rising

Climb any mountain, cook anything, burn any grass — Nintendo threw out thirty years of Zelda rules and rebuilt open-world design from the chemistry engine up. The Great Plateau taught an entire generation of developers that 'go anywhere' could mean something again after years of icon-cluttered checklists. It didn't just win Game of the Year; it embarrassed the genre it entered.

Year: 2017Critic score: 9.7/10

added by IJRin 9 rankings

The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time▲ Rising

The moment Link stepped out of Kokiri Forest into Hyrule Field, 3D adventure games found their template. Z-targeting alone reshaped how every action game handles combat and camera for decades after, and the Water Temple became shorthand for both brilliant and maddening design. It's the game every 'greatest of all time' debate has to reckon with first.

Year: 1998Critic score: 9.9/10

added by IJRin 9 rankings

Super Mario World▲ Rising

Yoshi's debut, the cape feather's soaring flight, and the secret exits scattered across Dinosaur Land turned a launch-adjacent SNES game into the platformer that taught secrets and speed could coexist. It packed 96 exits into a map that rewarded obsessive replay long before that was a design philosophy anyone named. Four decades on, its DNA is still visible in every Mario game that's followed.

Year: 1990Critic score: 9.6/10

added by IJRin 8 rankings

Super Mario Bros. 3▲ Rising

The curtain-raiser world map and the raccoon suit's flight turned a sequel into a masterclass in variety, packing airships, deserts, and Kuribo's Shoe into a single cartridge that still feels inexhaustible. Miyamoto himself has called it his favorite Mario, and The Wizard's fake-out reveal made it a cultural event before it even released in the US. It's the platformer that proved a franchise could keep escalating without ever repeating itself.

Year: 1988Critic score: 9.7/10

added by IJRin 6 rankings

Super Mario Odyssey▲ Rising

Cappy possessing a T-Rex to smash through New Donk City is the purest distillation of joy 3D platforming has produced since 64. The Kingdoms are stuffed with thousands of Moons, rewarding curiosity over completionism checklists, and the wedding-crashing finale is pure, unfiltered Nintendo confidence. It proved Mario could reinvent himself again, decades after Odyssey's spiritual predecessor did the same.

Year: 2017Critic score: 9.7/10

added by IJRin 8 rankings

Grand Theft Auto V▲ Rising

Three protagonists, one heist structure, and a satire of Los Angeles so vicious it's aged into prophecy — GTA V rewired open-world storytelling and then refused to stop selling for over a decade via GTA Online. Trevor Philips alone redefined how dark a mainstream game's antihero could go. Its commercial numbers are almost beside the point; it's simply the modern open world against which all others get measured.

Year: 2013Critic score: 9.7/10

added by IJRin 8 rankings

Elden Ring▲ Rising

FromSoftware handed George R.R. Martin's mythology to Hidetaka Miyazaki and the result was Soulslike design blown open into a horse-riding, dragon-fighting open world where you could just walk away from a boss that was kicking your teeth in. Malenia, Blade of Miquella became the internet's shared scar tissue, a boss so brutal she united strangers in collective trauma. It's the moment 'punishing' game design went fully mainstream and won Game of the Year doing it.

Year: 2022Critic score: 9.6/10

added by IJRin 13 rankings

The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom

Ultrahand let players duct-tape rockets to shields and build functioning mech suits out of Zonai parts, turning Breath of the Wild's sequel into the most creatively unbound toolbox Nintendo has ever shipped. The Depths flipped Hyrule's map upside down and gave the same world a genuinely unsettling second layer. It's a sequel that somehow out-scaled a game many thought was already definitive.

Year: 2023Critic score: 9.6/10

added by IJRin 6 rankings

Red Dead Redemption 2

Arthur Morgan coughing blood into his journal while the Van der Linde gang slowly implodes is one of gaming's great character studies, wrapped inside an open world so dense you can watch a bear maul a hunter three counties away from anything you're doing. Rockstar spent years obsessing over horse testicles and campfire chatter, and it shows in a game that feels less designed than discovered. It's the argument that games can be slow, sad, and enormous all at once.

Year: 2018Critic score: 9.7/10

added by IJRin 11 rankings

Baldur's Gate 3▼ Falling

A game that lets you seduce a druid, turn into a bear mid-negotiation, and still track every consequence across a hundred-hour campaign shouldn't have been commercially possible — yet Larian shipped it, fully voiced, with the depth of a tabletop session. The bear scene became a meme and a mission statement simultaneously: total reactivity, no shortcuts. It reset expectations for what 'choices matter' actually means in an RPG.

Year: 2023Critic score: 9.6/10

added by IJRin 8 rankings

Super Metroid

Dropping Samus into Zebes with almost no hand-holding, Super Metroid let atmosphere and backtracking do the storytelling, birthing the 'Metroidvania' label an entire genre now carries. The Wrecked Ship's shifting lights and the final Mother Brain confrontation remain masterclasses in mood and pacing on 16-bit hardware. Three decades later, indie darlings are still chasing the isolation it perfected first.

Year: 1994Critic score: 9.6/10

added by IJRin 7 rankings

Chrono Trigger▼ Falling

Time travel as a structural mechanic, not just a plot device, let a single choice — save or don't save a kingdom — ripple across eras and endings in ways RPGs simply hadn't attempted. The dream team of Horii, Toriyama, and Sakaguchi produced something so tightly paced it never overstays a single dungeon. It's the JRPG that convinced a genre obsessed with length that brevity and craft could be more powerful than either.

Year: 1995Critic score: 9.6/10

added by IJRin 7 rankings

GoldenEye 007▼ Falling

Four-player split-screen deathmatch in the Facility level turned N64 living rooms into ground zero for console shooters, proving analog-stick aiming could actually work years before dual-sticks became standard. Rare buried absurd cheat codes and a fully destructible Bond mythology inside a licensed game that had no business being this good. It's the reason console FPS exists as a genre at all.

Year: 1997Critic score: 9.6/10

added by IJRin 8 rankings

Half-Life 2▼ Falling

The gravity gun turning a saw blade or a toilet into a weapon of last resort embodied Valve's obsession with physics-driven emergent play, and the Ravenholm chapter remains one of gaming's most atmospherically terrifying stretches. City 17's oppressive dystopia told its story entirely through environment and NPC chatter, no cutscenes required. It's the shooter that proved narrative immersion and mechanical innovation didn't have to trade off against each other.

Year: 2004Critic score: 9.6/10

added by IJRin 8 rankings

BioShock▼ Falling

'Would you kindly' turned a decade of 'the player is always in control' game design into the setup for gaming's most devastating twist, retroactively indicting every quest marker you'd ever blindly followed. Rapture's crumbling Art Deco splendor made a shooter feel like a philosophy essay about Ayn Rand gone horribly wrong. It's the game that proved a big-budget FPS could carry real ideas without sacrificing a single Big Daddy fight.

Year: 2007Critic score: 9.6/10

added by IJRin 9 rankings