Submitted 10 months ago by weirdbeardgame@lemmy.world to games@lemmy.world
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.
Zelda: A Link to the Past
Nethack
check out Caves of Qud if you’re into NetHack
Indeed!
Hades Hollow Knight Noita Super Metroid Prey (2017) DOOM (2016) Factorio Stardew Valley
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.
Yeah, me too… man, I would play 16+ hours on some weekends… I was kinda good, too. Too young, but godly reflexes. I still think about those days sometimes…
Good taste
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,
Is disco Elysium the one with all the talking? Like multiple books worth of text? No thanks
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.
How do you even begin to care about anything in that game when you are basically mashing buttons for hours and just listening to people complain about how shit life is?
I get its an art piece of living the existence you are thrown into but it feels like a confusing mess even gameplay wise for the starting hours that people that have finished it I feel miss how unfun it is at first.
I didn’t even know why I was now stuck on the other side of a wall in a union dispute and I just couldn’t be bothered to restart the game to try something else after how long it took to get dressed the first time.
My biggest issue is I game late at night when everyone else is in bed, so a game like that would knock me out
Flawed Masterpieces
Masterpiece in my heart: Terraria
I’m always curious why people add things like Ocarina of Time to lists like these. While the game was revolutionary at the time, I don’t think it holds up particularly well nor succeeds where later zeldas fail.
To call it an objective masterpiece I feel like it has to be a game that someone picking up today would still enjoy and appreciate. Tetris and Portal for example hold up well even by today’s standards.
The thing that not holds well in Ocarina of Time is the N64 controls and like what they supposed to do to overcome that?
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.
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.
Do you think Return of the Obra Dinn would belong alongside these or is that game too flawed by comparison?
Haven’t actually played these two but from what I gather, they definitely fit the list!
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.
Nioh 2 is one of my favorite soulslikes, but falls short of masterpiece in my opinion due to the repeatedly recycled levels.
Have you played the mainline souls titles? The NG+ system in Nioh 2 leads out into new unique maps (The abyss) rather than being the same game with revamped enemy placement and health nine times lol.
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)
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.
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.
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.
• Sonic the Hedgehog ( Genesis/Mega Drive )
• Chuzzle Deluxe
• Borderlands
• Baba Is You
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)
I didn’t see these listed so I’m dropping three objective masterpieces here:
For be it’s still System Shock 2
Have you played Prey? Only other game to scratch that same itch for me.
Prey 2017 or Prey 2006?
There hasnt been yet a game that could replicate the experience I ld had when I played Planescape: Torment
Was it the game, or was it the life you had while playing the game?
The game itself, for me. I played it through a few times when it first came out, and then very recently I got it on Steam and played again for the first time since. Still as poignant.
Braid Cave story
We’ll see how much is recency bias and how well it will stand the test of time, but I really think Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 will be on this list going forward. It’s definitely one of the best games I’ve ever played, and I’ve played a lot of games. It’s not perfect, but it’s close enough in all the parts that actually matter.
Otherwise there’s your usual suspects:
Disco Elysium Portal Half-Life 2 Bioshock 1 Final Fantasy VI Chrono Trigger Zelda: Ocarina of Time The Last of Us Baldur’s Gate 2
Props for DE being at the top of your list.
I still have to play it, but Clair Obscus seems like this year Baldur’s Gate 3, which is rare. A game that came out of no where and is ready to win goty
I know this is a hot take, but: BG3 is a good game. Clair Obscur is a work of art.
Dreaming_Novaling@lemmy.zip 10 months ago
The DS had plenty of fantastic games, but when it comes to a game I feel had the most beautiful example of using the controls in a creative way, I’d say The World Ends With You takes the cake.
I’ve literally never played a game that needed such a high degree of multitasking, not just for mental multitasking, but also hand-eye coordination. Playing that game on Hard mode felt crazy, and I literally never unlocked Master mode. Balancing between the top and bottom screen characters was such a challenge, especially if you’re actually trying to make use of the green puck for more damage. The fact that each partner has their own battle method is fantastic too, as you never get too comfortable with one character until you finish the game.
Add in fantastic art design, catchy soundtrack, funny & memorable main cast, and you get absolute peak. I can’t believe Square let that game rot for more than a decade. The Neo TWEWY sequel was pretty good too, but nothing will literally ever compare to the original’s controls. It’s just so addicting man.