My Top 10 Games of All Time
Let's get the disclaimer out of the way first: this is a personal list. Not the ten most important games ever made, not the ten best-reviewed, not the ten I'd defend in an argument about objective quality. These are my ten favourites — the games that meant something to me, that I've thought about long after finishing, that I'd reinstall tomorrow without hesitation.
Your list will look different. That's the point.
10. Golf Club Wasteland
Starting with the outlier, because every honest list needs one.
A small, strange, beautiful game about playing golf across the ruins of an abandoned Earth while a radio DJ broadcasts to the last people left. It's a puzzle-platformer disguised as a golf game disguised as a piece of environmental storytelling, and it's shorter than most games' tutorials.
I've played hundred-hour epics that left less of an impression. There's something about the combination of the melancholy soundtrack, the radio broadcasts filling in what happened to the world, and the utterly mundane act of lining up a putt in the ruins of civilisation that has stuck with me for years. It costs almost nothing and asks almost nothing of you. It gets a spot on this list anyway.
9. Grand Theft Auto V
The game I've come back to more times than anything else on this list.
There's an argument that GTA V is here on sheer hours logged rather than merit, and I'd push back on that — the three-protagonist structure is genuinely clever, letting Rockstar tell a story that switches perspective mid-heist and give you three characters who don't particularly like each other but need each other anyway. Trevor is one of the most committed pieces of characterisation in any big-budget game, in that Rockstar wrote someone genuinely unpleasant and then refused to soften him.
But mostly it's Los Santos. Over a decade on, it's still one of the most convincing cities ever built — dense, satirical, and detailed enough that I still notice new things. The heists remain the high point of Rockstar's mission design, and the freedom to just exist in that city, driving nowhere in particular with the radio on, is a specific pleasure I've never quite got from anything else.
It's not the deepest game here. It might be the most fun.
8. Ghost of Tsushima
The most beautiful game I've ever played, and I don't think it's especially close.
Sucker Punch built a version of Tsushima that treats wind, grass, and falling leaves as narrative tools rather than set dressing, and the result is a game where I regularly stopped playing just to look at things. The photo mode isn't a feature here — it's practically a second game.
But it earns its place for more than looks. The combat is clean and confident, the duels are genuinely tense one-on-one tests, and Jin's arc — a man abandoning the code that defines him because the code isn't working — gives it real weight underneath the spectacle. It's an open-world game that understood atmosphere matters more than checklist density, and it's better for it.
7. Little Nightmares 1 & 2
Cheating slightly by counting both, but they're one continuous experience to me.
No dialogue. No exposition. No tutorial explaining what's happening or why. Just a tiny character in a raincoat moving through spaces built by something enormous and hostile, and the growing understanding that you are very small and very edible.
What makes these special is restraint. The horror comes from scale and implication rather than jump scares, and the games trust you to piece together what's happening without a single line of explanation. The Hunter section in the second game is one of the most tense stretches of anything I've played. They're short, they're strange, and they're the closest games have come to feeling like a nightmare you can't quite describe afterwards.
6. The Witcher 3
The game that ruined side quests for me in every other RPG.
I've written about this at length elsewhere, but the short version: The Witcher 3 treats its optional content with more care than most games give their main story. The Bloody Baron questline alone is better written than the entirety of most games I've played. Wander off in the wrong direction and you'll find a fully realised tragedy waiting for you instead of a bandit camp.
The combat is clunky. It's clunky in a way that would sink a lesser game. It doesn't matter, because everything around it is so good that I forgave it within about three hours and never thought about it again.
5. Baldur's Gate 3
The most freedom I've ever been given in a game, and the most consequences I've faced for using it.
What makes BG3 extraordinary isn't the scale — it's that Larian wrote responses to things I didn't think anyone would write responses to. I killed someone I shouldn't have, expected a game over, and instead watched the story reroute around my mistake and carry on.
The companions are the reason it's this high. These aren't approval bars — they're people with opinions about you who will let you down and be let down in turn. Nothing else has made me care this much about whether a fictional group of criminals thought I was a decent person.
4. Cyberpunk 2077
The redemption arc I didn't expect to be part of my top five.
I bounced off this at launch like everyone else. Coming back to the patched, overhauled version years later, I found the game everyone had originally been promised — and Night City remains the densest, most convincingly built city I've spent time in.
But it's the side quests that got it here. The best moments in Cyberpunk aren't the heists. They're the small, sad stories about people trying to hold onto something in a city designed to take it from them. And the endings — none of them clean, several of them quietly devastating — are the correct ending to this specific story.
3. Red Dead Redemption 2
The game I'd point to if someone asked what games are capable of.
It's slow. It's deliberately, aggressively slow, and it demands patience most games would never risk asking for. Meet it on those terms and it gives you a world that behaves like it doesn't know you're in it, and a protagonist whose arc is genuinely tragic rather than merely dramatic.
Arthur Morgan is the best-written character in any game I've played. Not the most interesting, not the most complex — the best-written. The gradual realisation that the life he's given everything to was rotten from the start unfolds so patiently that by the time the ending arrives, it's fully earned. I've thought about that ending more than most films I've seen.
2. Clair Obscur: Expedition 33
The newest game on this list, and the one I'm most confident will still be here in ten years.
A debut from a small French team that had no business being this polished, this ambitious, or this emotionally devastating. Turn-based combat that stays engaging by making every enemy attack dodgeable and parryable in real time. Art direction that looks drawn rather than modelled. A soundtrack I still listen to.
But it's the writing. The party members aren't archetypes — they're people processing grief and guilt and the knowledge that they're almost certainly going to die, and the game is unafraid to sit in that. It's funny when it needs to be and merciless when it needs to be. I finished it and immediately wanted to talk to someone about it, which is the highest compliment I have.
1. Elden Ring
Number one, and it wasn't close.
The moment that decided it: stepping out of the tutorial cave, seeing the Lands Between open up in front of me, and realising nothing was going to tell me where to go. No waypoint. No objective marker. Just a horizon full of ruins and a game that trusted me to find my own way into it.
Everything I love about games is in Elden Ring. Discovery that feels genuinely earned rather than dispensed. A world where every visible landmark is real and reachable. Combat that punishes you until you learn it and then makes you feel unstoppable. Bosses that are genuinely awe-inspiring the first time they appear. And a lore system that refuses to explain itself, leaving a world people are still arguing about years later.
It's also the game that made difficulty feel fair by giving me options. Stuck on a boss? Leave. Level up. Find a weapon nobody told you about. Come back and win on your own terms. That single design choice transformed frustration into curiosity, and it's why I finished this one when I'd bounced off every FromSoftware game before it.
It's the best game I've ever played. I don't expect that to change soon.
Honourable Mentions
Games that came close and would probably make the list on a different day: Hades, Yakuza Games, Fallout Games, Octopath Traveller Games, Final Fantasy Games.
What's on your list? Genuinely curious how different it looks — drop it in the comments or come argue with me on socials.