Nethack
this post was submitted on 27 May 2025
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Games
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founded 2 years ago
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Hades
Hollow Knight
Noita
Super Metroid
Prey (2017)
DOOM (2016)
Factorio
Stardew Valley
Games I haven't seen mentioned yet:
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Fez - cute little 2D/3D platformer. It's amazing and very wholesome
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Stalker: Shadow of Chenrobyl - dunno what exactly is it, perhaps the settings and the grit, but it has a special place in my heart. It's about average FPS, but not too long and for me enjoyable
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F.E.A.R. - very good FPS, with amazingly scripted enemies, decent horror elements (not compulsory - you might miss some of them if you're not looking).
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Prince of Persia: Warrior Within - for me the best 3rd person action adventure ever. Best combat hands down (or head, or torso, you choose), streamlined blade dance at your fingertips. You play with your enemies, and you get many tools. There are some locked camera issues.
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Touhou: Lost branch of time - If you liked Slay the Spire, but wished for colorful mana, this is the game for you. It has anime artstyle, I usually focus on the cards, though it might turn some people off
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Dota 2 - Dunno if it was mentioned and I didn't see, but the mechanics are absolutely amazing, the things the game lets you get away with are incredible. 10/10, but other people might bring your experience down. Specially friends. Can play against custom (workshop) bots. Still takes too long to git gud. I studied the game for 10 years and still sucked.
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Divinity 2: Original Sin - also haven't seen a mention, everybody talks about BG3, I haven't yet played it, but D2:OS was also a masterpiece. Haven't played a lot of TRPGs, this was a blast, with easily set up multiplayer. Played through it twice completely, with many abandoned runs.
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CS 1.6 - remember that? I lost my childhood to that. They don't make counter strikes this good anymore.
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Synthetik - top-down rougelike shooter, with amazing weapons and physics and classes and enemies and mechanics and 2 person multiplayer
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Dwarf Fortress - the real objectively best game :D strategy simulation of the 3D box world, predecesor to both Minecraft and Terraria, but with A LOT more sand in your box. They are still extending it. And it's on Steam if you want a UI.
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Terraria (Calamity mod) - Terraria is obviously a great game, but what makes it 20/10 is the mods. Calamity specifically. Tripple the content, 5x the difficulty (20x if you try Infernum), amazing multiplayer experience. Don't install Infernum if you haven't beaten at least Revengeance on Calamity. Trust me, it will fuck you up.
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Yakuza 0 - how could I forget about this masterpiece? Story done absolutely right, that game had no business making me feel so strongly about it. Cool combat, very funny moments, but I cried during it. If you haven't tried it, check it out. You won't regret it.
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OpenTTD - Trains. Do you like to create and manage big rail systems? This is for you. And your friends. Only noobs use planes. Only psychos use boats. Nobody uses only vehicles.
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.
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Is disco Elysium the one with all the talking? Like multiple books worth of text? No thanks
Btw how is RDR2 not on the list?
Disco Elysium is definitely closer to the visual novel spectrum of video games than it is to something like Tetris. But make no mistakes, its narrative and impact would be much lessened were it delivered in any other medium. It is absolutely a perfect example of how you use video games to make art.
My biggest issue is I game late at night when everyone else is in bed, so a game like that would knock me out
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- Chrono Trigger
- Disco Elysium
- Sekiro
- Zelda Ocarina of Time
- Bioshock
- Portal
- Half Life
- Nier Automata
- Tetris
Flawed Masterpieces
- Minecraft (surprising)
- Dragon age Origins
- Team Fortress 2
- Fallout New Vegas
- Dark Souls
- Every Baldur's Gate
Masterpiece in my heart: Terraria
Good list. I desperately wanted to put Dark Souls on my list, as the first blind playthrough of it was a magical experience. But I don't think it's correct, no matter how much I love it. Flawed masterpiece is about right.
Yeah the souls games are something I like in spite of all of the things wrong with them. There is just so much jank and bizarre design decisions.
I kinda hate that all of the games that have tried to copy them have done so to a point of not critically evaluating everything in them. And then they have all the same flaws, but none of the unique charm that makes me look past them for FROM’s games.
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Factorio.
Prey, System Shock 2, Outer Wilds, and Undertale are fully-realized microcosms where the primary game is unfolding the complex origami of the setting. All of them absolutely beautiful to experience.
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I see Outer Wilds here but not Nioh 2, so I'm posting about Nioh 2.
Soulsian adventure with ninja gaiden blood, extremely high amount of endgame content, wild depth of character building, lots of avenues to increase your character's power with many "correct answers" to the question of "how should I make my dude stronger". Dropped a while before the most recent push for graphical fidelity with AI upscaling/antialiasing so it actually runs well on a large majority of steam hardware surveys machines.
It's hard early on, but provides the player with tons of options when it comes to progressing through stages and bosses, flexible movesets for each class of weapon and access to potent tools like Gun and turning into an enemy that killed you a dozen times the first time you saw it briefly. The endgame goes beyond replaying through the game into dungeons made of fragments of the stages and some more unique maps (The Abyss). There's a hefty amount of individual bosses to learn, and incentive to do some of the more fun fights in the game multiple times - a lot of which do not require a run back through a stage to get to them. The game does itself a service by breaking up gameplay into chunks with a world map you launch missions from, some of which are just a singular straight up boss fight.
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I don't see them in the comments so: UFO 50 and OneShot.
ketsui deathtiny
castlevania: aria of sorrow
Oh forgot. Best multiplayer game ever has to be Counter Strike 1.6, CS:GO and potentially CS2 in a few years.
Metal Gear Solid 1-4. Ecco the dolphin? 😂 Good one!
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)
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Albion by BlueByte
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.
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.
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.
...Just don't look at it too hard when you go to the Great Deku Tree in BotW.
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• Sonic the Hedgehog ( Genesis/Mega Drive )
• Chuzzle Deluxe
• Borderlands
• Baba Is You
Those would be some picks I would say are objective masterpieces, but that's subjective, I guess.
Inside.
Came here to say Limbo
Half-Life 2, both Psychonauts games, the Arkham series
"Abzû". That's a hill I'm willing to die on. Got to me even more than Journey or Jusant.
Also, thought very differently, "Senua Hellblade" because it perfectly displayed a condition that I could never fit into words.
Rogue
Dungeon Keeper (with KeeperFX)