Subnautica (2018)
Minecraft was a huge deal that inspired a legion of imitators. Subnautica borrows liberally from that bag of tricks, but really is almost the opposite of Minecraft. Where most craft-em-ups try to act as digital Lego sets, Subnautica tells a remarkable story in an unforgettable setting. You’ve crash-landed on a mysterious ocean planet. You need to survive and find a way to escape. Part The Martian, part Minecraft, and part Myst, you slowly expand your zone by collecting new resources, crafting new tools, and diving to deeper depths. Not since Portal has a game had such a solid handle on its own tone or such a focus in the story it is trying to tell. The world may seem vast and open, but Subnautica succeeds for trying to be the opposite of every other game in its genre
Persona 5 (2016)
The JRPG seems to be dying and the occasional entry seems to jettison every feature once integral to the genre. Then along comes Persona 5, a game that combines turn-based combat, a visual novel-style high school simulator, anime visuals, and a monster collecting system in a way that feel forward looking. A lot of that is simply aesthetic. From the color scheme, to the perfect menus, to the all-time classic music, Persona 5 is a stylistic milestone. What makes it unique is how different its disparate parts feel, and how unified they really are.
“Take your time,” the loading screen advises you, but actually this is a mission statement. Combat is turn-based, but so is high school. You can only do a few things each day, and the game is on a finite calendar. Doing homework, going on dates, chilling with friends, flirting with sketchy back-alley doctors, and eating huge burgers are all ways you can spend your days as a high schooler, but each choice will ultimately have consequence in your night gig as a heart-stealing thief of justice. Maybe you really want to hang out with the popular girl, but maybe doing your laundry will give you better stats on your next dungeon run. Persona 5 forces the player to be a JRPG hero and a stressed-out high school kid at the same time, in a way that tells new stories about each experience.
UnExplored (2017)
The technology under the hood of UnExplored doesn’t take up more lines of code than any given AAA release, but it is elegant in how it achieves its goals. Procedurally generated dungeon crawlers are a dime a dozen on Steam, but Ludomotion creates levels so intricate, they feel custom curated. It uses something called cyclic dungeon generation, that automatically maps out gameplay loops and puzzles. Often, these are good enough to feel like true Zelda dungeons. You never know what you are going to find, but you are guaranteed that every puzzle has a solution. Stuck in a room full of lava? Backtrack to find a spell that makes you fireproof. A boss getting you down with its magical shield? There’s probably an enchantment-breaking blade hidden on a higher floor. Procedural games are all the rage, but UnExplored has uncommonly good design.
Life Is Strange (2015)
“So-and-so will remember that,” is the catchphrase of any adventure game published after 2012, but in Life Is Strange, that’s not necessarily the case. You are Max, who spontaneously discovers she has limited control over time. This means you can play a conversation through until the end- and then reverse it, and see how you could have handled things differently. Rather than lessen the impact on your choices, it totally heightens every decision. You can offend your bestie or let her go on believing a lie, which is worse? Let the mean girl humiliate her, or crush her in front of everyone? Take all the time you need.
Also notable are the themes and characters, which are very different from most other games. Where the AAA scene is mostly dominated by gruff bearded dads, Life Is Strange is about a girl going to a preppy private school and her townie best friend. It centers on a relationship between two girls, and has more genuine things to say about love than any other game you could care to name. It also has dialogue that sounds like it belongs in a “Homestar Runner” video (“That is a tasty plasma. Maybe I could sneak in and watch ‘Final Fantasy: Spirits Within’. I don’t care what anybody says, that’s one of the best sci-fi films ever made.”) A combination of unique gameplay and unique perspective make Life Is Strange totally unlike everything else in the episodic adventure scene.
Undertale (2015)
I almost feel like I don’t need to justify Undertale, which is one of the most buckwild, absurdist games I’ve ever completed. But enough time has passed that the game has moved on from universal acclaim to backlash, so I’ll try to remind everyone why we fell in love with this weird little experience. Superficially, Undertale sort of resembles the classic era of Nintendo RPGs. There’s a little bit drawn from the more mainstream hits (your Zeldas, your Final Fantasies) and a lot more from more offbeat games (I see the Mother series and the underrated Terranigma in there too). But it can’t be so neatly identified. Combat for example, is a combination of bullet hell, minigames, and dadaist text adventures. The story is emotionally moving, but impossible to describe. Once you really start making your way through it, there’s no denying the high-level meta ideas.
The problem is that everyone reduces the whole Undertale experience to a single part. They focus on the twisty ending, or the strategies, or the font-monikered skeleton brothers you befriend. And sure, you can reduce anything down to such a small sample size that it seems trite or ridiculous (Woshua: “Green means clean!”). Doing that is an affront to what Undertale is. Moment to moment, there’s nothing like it. Looking back at the story, there’s nothing like it. And unless you work hard to be a contrarian, it is a truly unique entry in the gaming medium.
Pyre (2017)
The first nine entries on this list came pretty quickly, but the last spot changed a number of times before I settled on Pyre. I’m always a huge fan of the always creative Supergiant Games, but no one has ever made a game like this, and no one ever will again. The gameplay of Pyre is a combination of visual novel and um, fantasy basketball. There’s this ritual tournament you see, and the winner gets to leave the Downside and return to the real world. You meet strange fantasy creatures (a worm knight, a friendly nomad, a name-shifting vagabond girl) and they join your team. Using their unique abilities, you compete with other, similarly colorful teams and journey across the beautiful, melancholy world of the Downside.
That alone would qualify Pyre as unique. How many fantasy RPGs stray outside the bounds of elf/dwarf/sword/sorcery and get this weird? How many RPGs are rooted in 3v3 magical basketball? All of that is cool, but not what makes Pyre an unmissable gaming experience. In the process of leveling up your characters, you get to know them better; you find out why they are in the Downside and what they want to do if they leave. At the end of a tournament, one winner gets to escape. The thing is, you can never escape. So choosing to reward a character with freedom means you can no longer play with them. You can’t use their abilities, you can’t speak with them, they no longer effect the story. But the game is structured in such a way as to make your best characters the ones you most want to reward. Many video games offer choices, but few are as gut-wrenching as the one in Pyre. It intentionally puts its mechanics at odds with its story and dares you to horde your strongest players, dooming them to purgatory. I’ve never, ever encountered a game that treats momentous choices like this, and it’s unlikely any developers will get hip to it for a long time.
Not every game on this list is good. There is no one person who will have fun with all ten of these titles. (I myself struggled with No Man’s Sky, and Bloodborne). But none of these games are boring. None of these games are forgettable. And all of these games push the envelope of interactive storytelling. If you were returning to gaming after a half-decade away, these are the games you’d owe it to yourself to play.