The 10 Best Video Games of the Past 5 Years

Half a decade of game changing entries into the medium.

Complex Original

Image via Complex Original

The titles produced by the video game industry over the last five years are as diverse and stratified as any other period in the medium's history.

With the seventh generation of gaming rapidly coming to a close, the titles that marked the tail end of this era have been some of the most thematically complex and narratively challenging titles the industry has ever seen. These last five years, 2008-2013, have stood out like a beacon. Their contributions to the medium are the perfect constructs to bridge the gap from the closing of this generation and the beginning of the eigth generation of video gaming.

These 10 titles stand out among the hundreds and hundreds of titles that have been released over the past half decade. Indie titles, massive studio releases, Kickstarter darlings, and mobile games have all contributed immeasurably, but it's these ten games that stand out as the most important in terms of narrative, mechanics, and scope. These are the 10 Best Video Games of the Last Five Years.

Dark Souls

Year of release: October 4, 2011

For a dedicated group of hardcore gamers, it's impossible to talk about the best games of the last five years without mentioning Dark Souls.

It may not have the mainstream appeal of some of the other games on this list, like GTA V, but for those who crave something deeper and darker there can be no other contenders. Dark Souls is so good that other games pale in comparison, and for some fans it can be hard to fully enjoy anything else once its sweet fruit has been tasted. Dark Souls is an evolution of its predecessor, the PS3-exclusive Demon's Souls, which it improved on in almost every way.

It's dark fantasy world beckons players in, then slams the door shut behind them while a half dozen skeletons armed with body-length shivs jump out of the closet and impale them. Players are well accustomed to the ruse by now, but they jump right back in anyway—because unlike other incredibly challenging games, Dark Souls rewards players for every failure with another lesson. You never feel cheated playing Dark Souls; only unprepared. It may not seem that way at first, and it can be daunting for new players to attempt to translate the game's secret language.

But those who do are treated to an incredibly rich and lived-in open world, some of the deepest real-time RPG combat ever devised, truly innovative co-op and competitive multiplayer, and acceptance from a dedicated community of players that, like the game itself, will invite you in, stab you in the back, and then inform you politely exactly where you went wrong.

Mass Effect 2

Year of release: January 26, 2010

It's been well documented that the third entry into the Mass Effect series was, at best, a sloppy conclusion that wrapped up the entire series. And at worst, player agency had no effect on the ending; Mass Effect 3 felt like a betrayal on the part of BioWare to all of the fans that had invested so much time and emotional capital into the Mass Effect universe.

Mass Effect 3 will always be a divisive and polarizing topic for both fans of the series and for BioWare, a company with notoriously high standards in terms of narrative and script writing. The series' ending has been accused of being everything from lazy to dishonest, and destructive to the central tenants set forth by the first two titles. But, before the loss of faith in the series after the third installment, fans of the meticulously crafted space opera still looked fondly on the second entry to the series. And while Mass Effect 2 isn't a perfect game, subjectivity often muddies the very idea of 'perfect', it accomplished that rare feat: Justifying itself as a sequel.

Tonally, comparing Mass Effect to Mass Effect 2 is akin to comparing Alien and Aliens.

It improved upon shortcomings from the first Mass Effect in wholly welcome ways and it furthered the mythology of the series without seeming like a heartless cash grab, as some sequels are wont to be. Technical issues held back the first Mass Effect, a combat system that lacked anything that felt engaging or innovative, and a stiffness that was massaged out of Mass Effect 2 all made the sequel welcome, and in our opinion, superior than the first.

ME2 modernized the shooting mechanic and actually turned the title's combat elements into a component that could easily compete with shooter only titles. The greatest thing about the re-worked shooting mechanics was that it enhanced the RPG elements in the game.

Tonally, comparing Mass Effect to Mass Effect 2 is akin to comparing Alien and Aliens. Both originals established a set of rules the universe adheres to and the sequels take those rules and expands on them. Granted, Aliens exchanges suspense for firefights, but that's more of a Ridley Scott/James Cameron dichotomy. While all entries into the series are thematically dense, Mass Effect 2 embraces the hero's journey and truly makes it its own.

With the 'death' of Shepard in the first ten minutes of the game to the themes of xenophobia and what it means to be human, Mass Effect 2 managed to outshine its predecessor in nearly everyway.

Uncharted 2: Among Thieves

Year of release: October 13, 2009

While we often we talk about video games striving to offer a "cinematic" experience, Uncharted 2: Among Thieves distinguishes itself as a game that you would wish every movie could be: an interactive journey that offers all of the visually arresting, expertly managed details of the silver screen.

Naughty Dog put in the time and money to make Uncharted 2 every bit as transcendent as it could be.

How does a title go about inspiring such praise? Through ways both large and small, whether it's the awe-inspiring scale of Nathan Drake's surrounding environments, the ease and fluidity with which he's able to explore these vast, undiscovered territories, or the compelling chemistry and dialogue between the characters that inhabit them. For whatever minor flaws Uncharted 2 may have—complaints about slight control issues were common upon its release—it manages to make up for them through its pure, unassailable ambition.

Simply put, this game wanted to be more than just a game, and Naughty Dog put in the time and money to make Uncharted 2 every bit as transcendent as it could be. What do over 200 Game of the Year awards really mean when a game redefines the possibilities of its genre like this? The accolades were a foregone conclusion. The legacy lies in the fact that, for a time, Uncharted 2 really made us believe that it was the best gaming experience we could ever hope to have.

Hotline Miami

Year of release: October 23, 2012

"Do you enjoy hurting other people?"

Hotline Miami operates with the same brutal elegance as a virus. Deceptively simple in design and its more insidious elements are almost imperceptible to the naked eye, but the infection it's responsible for is something to be marveled.

Why did a title like Hotline Miami make a list of the most important and best games of the last five years? Cursory evaluations may credit the game’s impeccable music direction, the glorification of its deeply rewarding, visceral violence, or the seemingly innocuous decision to create a top down 2D shooter that intentionally forces your guard down thanks to a triggered nostalgia response in your brain. But the game is phenomenal on those levels and many more.

These baseline explanations barely begin to justify the wholly welcome experience of Hotline. Visually, Hotline Miami is representative of the contemporary trend of embracing the medium’s Neolithic forebears. Titles that bill themselves as ‘retro’ ‘vintage-inspired’ and ‘16-bit throwbacks’ are found everywhere with varying degrees of success. Hotline Miami distinguishes itself by employing a visual minimalism that camouflages the title’s jarring and gloriously disturbing narrative.

No conversation about the game can be had without immediately addressing the influence of Nicolas Winding Refn's Drive. Dennaton Games, a team composed of Jonatan Söderström and Dennis Wedin, have stated that film was instrumental in creating Hotline Miami’s aesthetic. Both pieces of media employ the same brutal economy of tension punctuated by instants of extreme violence. Hotline Miami's nameless protagonist has been dubbed jacket by fans, as both Gosling's Driver and Miami’s Jacket share a fondness for varsity letter jackets and the complete lack of a given name. It is this anonymity that is the first clue of Hotline Miami's deeper thematic thrust.

The game employs a wraith like effectiveness through its narrative, soundtrack, and gameplay. You may not even realize the deeper themes and sub-text that exist, but they are there, they are challenging you, and they are amazingly fucked up.

The gameplay is simple: you receive a voicemail recording of a location and a target. Simple. Go to point A, assassinate target B. And just like that the player is unquestioningly off to perform some of the most admirable ultra-violence found in recent games. Each stage is broken down into multiple sections where players traverse the interiors of apartment buildings, hotels, and condos. The shooting/moving mechanic is such a finely-tuned test of gaming reflex, you only start to master it after you've been cut in half by a gangster's shotgun for the thirtieth time. The learning curve is steep, but also extremely gratifying. You are going to die. A lot. And with each successive death, you are forced to come to terms with the fact that you suck and you better step it up. It's an instant gratification kept warm by the arterial spray of another murdered gangster.

The player is introduced to the game through a conversation with three masked figures in your squalrous apartment. An owl, a chicken, and a horse inhabit the decay that is your living space. Or, perhaps, this isn't your home at all. Perhaps these three figures merely exist as components of your very fractured psyche. Perhaps all of this is just happening in your mind, and there exists no justification for your unhinged brutality other than the shortcomings of your own psychology. How can we trust anything if we can't even trust ourselves?

Employing the literary device of the unreliable narrator, the game unfolds as an exploration of pervasive mental sickness as much as a game about executing targets as a hitman. The shifting, out-of-sync chronology only furthers the notion that events can not be take at their given value. Not to spoil any of the major plot points of the title, but it becomes clearer and clearer that this game is asking bigger questions of the player than originally advertised on the tin.

Who is leaving you these messages? What is the impetus behind these spectacular acts of violence? Am I even control of my own actions? Is this all just a hallucination?

It is with these questions that Hotline Miami begins to reveal the larger themes it represents. How accepting of violence in video games have we as a culture become? How comfortable are we with bashing in the head of an enemy and then leaning down to silence him by slitting that enemy's throat to end the threat he represents?

Hotline Miami is a prism that refracts and reflects. In our Grand Theft Auto/Call of Duty world, how at home with violence have we been conditioned to be?

The real trick is how subversive Hotline actually is. By forcing you to move so quickly that you are never really given adequate time to pose these questions. You check your messages. You return to your car. You have to kill again. You aren't given a moment to consider just how comfortable you are, and in turn, all of us have become with how secondary our reactions to violence have become.

Metal Gear Solid 4: Guns of the Patriots

Year of release: June 12, 2008

In a way that only Hideo Kojima could imagine it, Metal Gear Solid 4: Guns of the Patriots is the violent, twisted, sobering, and poignant conclusion to a franchise that continually redefined what a video game could be in terms of gameplay, conscience, and complexity. Amazingly, though, Kojima wasn't even supposed to be a part of this title. Though Shuyo Murata—the co-writer of Metal Gear Solid 3—had already been tabbed to take the lead on MGS4, substantial fan demand, including death threats, forced Kojima back into action for the series finale.

Guns of the Patriots was the Metal Gear title that sanded out all of the franchise's previous nicks and imperfections to form one, big, beautifully fucked-up game, and a painfully gripping end to a series that never wanted to show us the easy way out.

The result? A benchmark title for the series, and gaming as a whole for the previous decade. But what is it that so clearly demarcates Metal Gear Solid 4 from its predecessors? Snake's chilling flirtations with suicide? The brutally vivid realism of the game's dystopian, war-obsessed economy? The manner in which the developers managed to, once again, innovate stealth gaming with the introduction of OctoCamo?

More so, it has to do with the fact that, when all of these elements came together, they were somehow able to avoid the philosophical slip-ups of Sons of Liberty, or the compensatory simplicity of its follow-up, Snake Eater.

Guns of the Patriots was the Metal Gear title that sanded out all of the franchise's previous nicks and imperfections to form one, big, beautifully fucked-up game, and a painfully gripping end to a series that never wanted to show us the easy way out.

Portal 2

Year of release: April 19, 2011

It’s not apparent just how funny the Portal series is when players first fire up the game, but like a good joke it slowly unfolds into one of the funniest and most rewarding games ever.

The original Portal introduced us to a seemingly simplistic world of puzzles and a calming voice with the ever-present prospect of cake in the future. Players take on the mysterious role of Chell, a human lab rat guided through puzzles by the mysterious and deceptive artificial intelligence (AI) named GLaDOS in a long-deserted test facility known as Aperture Science. At the end of Portal Chell is able to destroy the wily AI and momentarily escapes the facility only to be dragged back in and put into stasis.

Many years later Chell is again awoken to find that many years have past and Aperture Science’s facility has become dilapidated and overgrown. She accidentally activates the murderous GLaDOS again. Portal 2, while hiding under the guise of a puzzle game, manages to weave an interesting and compelling story through the use of very limited characters and repeated motifs. Portal 2 does the job of any good sequel by easing the character into play then offering something brand new. Players can get out of the test chambers and view the monolithic and crumbling buildings that previously made up the madman-inspired, black-project government funded facility to reveal a vast mechanical empire.

So if someone asked you if you like puzzle games what would you say? Chances are, if you’re like many gamers, most traditional puzzle games don’t offer enough variation much less story to keep anyone interested besides the masochistic sorts who torture themselves with such things. But Portal 2 at its heart is puzzle game. What makes it different is the level of detail and variability built into those puzzles. The designers took great pains to make sure players wouldn’t get fatigued or bored with the levels. While the mechanics of, shoot portal, lift block, direct laser, may be simple the various ways they’re used is what really sets it apart. Each puzzle was intended to be solved in one way, players know this going in, but we can’t help but feel like geniuses when we figure it out.

Portal 2 does the job of any good sequel by easing the character into play then offering something brand new. Players can get out of the test chambers and view the monolithic and crumbling buildings that previously made up the madman-inspired, black-project government funded facility to reveal a vast mechanical empire.

Where the original story of Portal was built around what Chell could see in her surroundings, Portal 2 pulls back the lens not only on the test facility but also on other characters as a way to tell a broader story. Players are literally dumped down into Aperture Science’s depths to discover the darkly comic history of the company and its founder. Eventually forming a shaky alliance with an almost-human AI and again having to survive the deathtraps of the laboratories eventually gaining her freedom into an unknown land.

So why is Portal 2 one of the best games of the last five years?

Because it not only ties in perfectly as a sequel but it is able to ask a few questions about the morality of machines by using comedy to come off as unimposing and doesn’t overwhelm the player with story. It gives us just enough to keep us interested while rocking back and forth between dark humor and grim questions about humanity. The game unfolds the various components of play in such a way that we feel, as a player, like we’re learning something.

The concept of showing the player how to play and letting them discover it for themselves is far more rewarding that telling the player how best to play a game. Besides the narrative, it’s a great puzzle game that is so rewarding you might convince yourself you’re a genius too.

Bioshock: Infinite

Year of release: March 26, 2013

BioShock was a breakout hit from a visionary developer who wanted to change the way we look at games by bringing powerful storytelling to gaming.

Ken Levine, brought us into a whole new dark world that featured powerful elements of history, politics and uncomfortable questions about our own humanity. Not to mention that players got to storm around a world full of characters driven mad with power while shooting fireballs and electricity out of their hands. The ability to balance a great story and fun gameplay is a rare mix that BioShock successfully pulled off. Irrational Games began BioShock Infinite’s development as soon as it finished the original BioShock.

Ken Levine, its creator, said that it didn’t want players to think of BioShock universe as one place or time.

“I think the one thing that Infinite is intended to demonstrate is that BioShock doesn’t mean a particular place. It means a lot of other things. We knew we basically had to start from scratch in a lot of areas but it still had to be a BioShock game. And that was a real interesting challenge.”

BioShock Infinite is, at its core, a first person shooter with many adventure and role-playing elements. Saying that, it doesn’t play like any other first person shooter you’ve experienced nor does it fit easily into these other play categories. Its story is one about the how the smallest decisions can lead to huge consequences later down the line in an utopian society slowly crushing itself under the weight of its own heady morals. The story is full of decisions that the player has no way of knowing if the consequences will leave them the “good guy” or the “bad guy” and ultimately asked the question if either can really exist. Infinite’s story happens directly to the player.

There are no third-person cut scenes to take players out of the main character, Booker’s, view of things. It pushes the player into an uncomfortable role of a man battling demons that slowly become more and more horrifying. Booker starts as an innocent pawn and becomes the architect of a world’s demise. The story begins will the private investigator Booker is charged with finding a girl in exchange for wiping away the debt he owes with gruesome scenes illustrating the consequences of failure.

It asks the question: What is salvation and what are the dangers of building a perfect, just society? From the moment that the player is birthed into Columbia, ever detail of game, from the dancing hummingbirds in the garden, to the race rally in the park, is damn near perfect

He’s quickly found out as being the bad-seed in a perfect world and forced for join a rebel group, the Vox Populi, and raid the hidden corners of a massive city floating in the clouds. Throughout the game with the critical eye of Elizabeth, a mysterious girl, trapped in a tower who has the power to manipulate tears in time-space, Booker begins to see that he’s not the man he thought he was. The player must face Booker’s reality that he is a murder, a war criminal, and asks if faith or religion should allow us the clear away these sins. All this culminates in an ending that will leave you shocked and wowed that won’t pull its talons out of you mind for days.

The gameplay of BioShock Infinite sits somewhere between a first-person shooter and an adventure game. Players will use recognizable guns and bombs in one hand but will balance that power with “Vigors” that allow them to launch fireballs, crush enemies and launch swarming attacks. All these can be chained together to create critical killing blows allowing Booker to wipe a battlefield clear in moments. The maps are built around a rail system that connects the floating cities together and players will need to use a Skyhook to ride the rails using them as a strategic vantage to drop attacks on enemies or lure them into gruesome melee killing blows.

Elizabeth also plays a part in battle by throwing booker ammo and health when he needs it and also by using her ability to manipulate tears in space, to pull-in objects to help Booker. When the player is getting shot-up in battle and needs to hunker down Elizabeth is right there by Booker’s side, hiding in cover, flinching at the bullets flying by your heads giving a sense that the player and Elizabeth are really in it together. One of the most shocking things about Infinite is the enemies Booker will face.

The highly stylized bad guys perfectly capture the feeling of the city. The most memorable of these being the George Washington automatons, wheels spinning and chain-gun spitting fire but with a happy revolutionary song playing with patriotic flags trailing behind. It’s a near-perfect metaphor for what the world of Columbia is, an incredibly self confident slave state. Another memorable character is the Handy Man, hulking brutes that were once terminally ill patients who were given a choice: death, or a life of slavery in as a metal beast. So as slaves they try to kill Booker all the while begging to stop, there is something deeply disturbing in being pummeled to death by a creature pleading you to stop hurting them.

One reason Bioshock Infinite has succeeded in being such a compelling game is that while gameplay is fun and challenging all the rewards are in the story telling. There are no real boss battles here; players are not driven to reach a high-level of experience points. But they will face epic, ever-changing battles that will lead them into a confrontation with Booker’s own demons. As the story unfolds the player becomes an unwilling hand in the destruction of not only himself but of an entire world, through the madness of extremism and the perils of forgiveness. Infinite is one of the best games of the last five years because it brings together seemingly unrelated content and an ambitious, complicated and controversial story and somehow manages to pull it off for a mind-blowing ending.

The Last of Us

Year of release: June 14, 2013

The greatness that is The Last Of Us starts out simply, which is: It shouldn't have been so great. It goes without saying that it was gonna be really good, of course. Naughty Dog—makers of the Uncharted series—makes smart, funny, cinematic games that get bigger with each installment. Sure, early previews of this one looked really impressive. But the Uncharted series suffered from getting bigger, and we were all told again and again how ambitious and big The Last Of Us would be.

We also knew, prior to its release, that it was a game that involved a zombie outbreak, or something that looked like a zombie outbreak, and if there's one thing we really don't need, it's yet another zombie game, and especially another zombie game with ambitions to revolutionize other games (see: Dead Island, Left 4 Dead, any Resident Evil game, et al). And the gameplay looked weirdly slow, and basic. There didn't seem to be all that much to talk as far as action gaming went—it had stealth elements with what looked like yet another duck-and-cover system. Again: It had all the makings of a really good game, sure, but nothing mindblowing.

Or so we thought. From the very first moments of The Last of Us, you not only realize that something is wrong—playing as the daughter of blue-collar Texas contractor Joel, padding around her house in the middle of the night, rubbing her eyes in the mirror and watching news reports about a viral outbreak—but that something here was so, so different. And so right.

So many of the narrative issues and engagement issues that video games have been trying to revolutionize and take further over the last few years were being worked on, here. Without spoiling anything about it, the opening sequence of the game is, in and of itself, one of the greatest achievements in video games and interactive narrative you'll ever see.

It's not just one of the most realistic and intense takes on what a zombie apocalypse would look like in video games, it's one of the greatest takes in any medium. In the first twenty minutes of this game, an entire origin story and mythology for that backdrop is developed: Laws, logic, worldviews, character motivations, all of it. The sequence is nail-biting, fun, exciting, and at points, jaw-dropping: Being able to crawl around the back seat of Joel's jeep, and watch the world begin to fall apart around you was nothing we'd quite seen before. But the moment it really hits home that this game will be different is in this sequence's closing moments, which had most people tearing up, if not outright sobbing.

In twenty minutes—in the first twenty minutes—this game doesn't just show you how beautiful and fun and impactful it's going to be. It also lays out a vital, previously unseen worldview in almost any video game, ever. It shows you that it's a game that recognizes the brutality of its own senseless violence, and how its body counts will be gruesome, and terrible, but also, how they're the product of a much worse scenario: The one that takes place when the delicate fabric of society's humanity is ripped apart, and what happens when we're forced to find out just how animalistic the human race is at its core.

Is it depressing? Absolutely. And is it cliched? Of course it is: Almost every halfway decent apocalypse narrative has some element of humans forsaking humanity to fend for themselves. But it's also riveting in ways we never imagined video games would be, by exemplifying a key value of great storytelling: That the best stories are about great characters and the emotional journeys those characters take. It doesn't take long after this opening sequence to realize that this isn't a game about whether or not Joel can save humanity from the zombie apocalypse, but a game about whether or not Joel can save what little humanity he has left within him.

In The Last of Us, zombies aren't brain-hungry demons so much as they are instruments of a virus attempting to spread itself. In other words: Nature. Their primal impulses aren't guided by a desire to eat brains and feed their bloodthirst, but more simply—like a flu—to spread their sickness. Which is why as terrifying and scary as they can be in the game, they have nothing on the humans, who are savage, and driven by things only humans can be driven by: Greed, power, paranoia, and so on. When we find Joel, we find a character who has killed and stolen and betrayed, who's done all he's can to survive, and this process has ravaged what little of the humane, loving, caring father we met at the beginning of the game. Tasked with escorting the teenaged Ellie to a citizen-driven rebellion against the militarized American government (or what's left of it), Joel's not just annoyed, he's downright pissed, and utterly disdainful of the first truly lovable character we meet in the game.

As Joel takes Ellie through the remains of Austin, Texas in the game's first chapter, they travel through collapsing buildings, and see first hand the process of nature resuming a natural growth without humans destroying it en masse. The result, again, is glorious. There isn't a boring setting in the game; everywhere around you, scenery represents story, and the graphics—from deteriorating walls to floating spores and wake created by walking through water-logged basements—respond in kind. The visuals are as close to perfect as we've seen in games, and they all serve that ever-crucial purpose of relaying a world in decay, or rebirth, depending on how you choose see it.

And about those zombies: They're crafty. From sound-detecting clickers to screamers, they, too, all make sense in their places, and in their placement in the game. More often than not, the zombies present challenges for the stealth elements of the game, which are mapped out with precise sectioning, and as part of a tiered difficulty system that strikes a virtually perfect balance between achievable and frustratingly difficult. Being good at duck-and-cover shooting games won't be enough here, but neither will simply having a gift for stealth action gameplay. The duck-and-cover system—and all of the action gameplay—seems a little slow at first, at least compared to the swinging, swashbuckling pace of Uncharted games. That's because this is how people would actually move in this situation, and it ratchets up the tension as well as a regard for precision.

In a real combat scenario, you can't just eat a square health pack and get back to work, part of why the real-time assembly of health kits and weapons during combat sequences is a mechanic that works so well. You can only live through some fights if you have good cover. It's not just great game design, but smart game design. And yes, the melee combat is a little absurd, with Joel punching zombies in the face. Then again, every time Joel breaks a brick over someone's head, it may occur to you that—in that situation—it's one of the few options he might have.

The gameplay is taut, refined, and works in every single way it needs to. As the story moves forward, and the relationship between Joel and Ellie with it, the moments in the game become more profound, each fight with an enemy (human or otherwise) more meaningful: Usually, this works the other way around. Not here. That relationship, of course, wasn't without its share of controversy from game writers.

In the New York Times, Chris Suellentrop now famously bemoaned the game's "[frustrating] treatment of women," and noted:

"In the game's resistance to allowing the player, for much of the story, to control—or, to use a more accurate word, to inhabit—Ellie, The Last of Us casts her in a secondary, subordinate role."

Suellentrop's critique came at a moment when the role of women in the video game industry was a firebrand topic hitting critical mass, and while the message behind the critique—that women are relegated to secondary roles in the world of video games, both in the games and outside of them—still stands true, we respectfully submit here that his knock on this particular game couldn't have been further off the mark.

In Ellie, Naughty Dog created one of the greatest female characters of all time, and the desire to play as her throughout the game (and take control of her fate) is part of the narrative tension that makes the sequences in which you do control Ellie—two of which rank among the game's three best—all the more meaningful. You might play as Joel for most of the game, but few people would argue that this game belongs to anyone but Ellie. She's the driving force of the story, and while Joel's emotional journey and its relationship to her fuels the plot, it's Ellie's coming-of-age that's the most crucial conclusion, and the knockout emotional punchline of The Last of Us that's anything but secondary. That duality doesn't work if you play as her for an entire game, and it'd be a shame if this game's legacy becomes a victim to the reputational politics of one writer (it'd also be a shame if the world of video games continues actually alienating and disenfranchising women where it does, but again, that's another thing entirely).

And as far as that ending goes—again, without ruining anything—we can only tell you that it's brilliant, and satisfying in the way a game ending never has been. It requires a certain amount of thinking, and not the kind of 'What the hell just happened?' thinking that dominates the discussion of game endings like Bioshock: Infinite or Limbo so much as the kind of 'What the hell just happened?' thinking that's usually reserved for Harold Pinter plays.

It's emotionally draining, and it's the kind of thing we've wanted for so long. None of this would work without the creative flourishes of this game's sound design, which is the last—and maybe, most crucial—piece of its greatness. You've likely heard enough about the Oscar-worthy score of Gustavo Santaolalla (who is, in fact, an Oscar-winning composer), a minimalist masterpiece that serves the emotions of the story and the terse dynamics of the characters, tightening and relenting, inhaling and exhaling.

But it also is perfect in that it gives room to the game's actors, who all deserve to be noted (especially underrated was Deadwood actor W. Earl Brown's performance as paranoid survivalist Bill). But ultimately, it's Ashley Johnson's Ellie and Troy Baker's Joel—who was fresh off of Bioshock: Infinite, a stellar performance, but goes above and beyond, here—who are the glue that bind this game together. Their chemistry and rapport draw you in, in a way no game has done before it, in a way that makes moving them forward through the game as much as physical act (pushing an analog stick upwards) as it becomes an emotional one.

Their journey and the strength of their performances forces us to relate to them, to cheer for them, to hope for them, and ultimately, to put ourselves in their shoes, and wonder how far we really are from being them. It's a trick that we've been on the cusp of achieving in video games so many times before, but one that's ultimately been hedged by technological shortcomings or disregard for the importance of storytelling in creative an immersive experience over, say, creating the coolest looking action sequence or the most realistic FPS possible.

Those games are Michael Bay to The Last of Us' Christopher Nolan, or maybe even Terrance Malik. Other games might have bigger guns, bigger explosions, better superpowers, scarier zombies, or harder hardcore gaming flourishes. But, compared to those, this one isn't just content to hold its own where fun and excitement's concerned, but it's got a bigger brain, and especially, an even bigger heart to go with it. —Foster Kamer

Grand Theft Auto V

Year of release: September 17, 2013

I’m fifteen hours into Grand Theft Auto V, and I can’t stay focused.

I’m playing as Trevor, the psychopath of Los Santos, and as I drive to my next mission – it involves hijacking a submarine for a big heist – I hear a woman scream. “Help! That man stole my purse!”

Well. All right. Here we go again.

A red tracking dot appears on my map, and I’m off. I floor the gas in reverse, chase the mugger down on foot, and push him to the ground – five seconds and three stab wounds later, he’ll never virtually mug someone ever again. I then return the woman’s purse (I could have kept it, but I’m feeling magnanimous today), get back in my pickup, and continue driving to the docks. The first thing you notice about Grand Theft Auto V is that there is an overwhelming number of things to do – your initial impulse is to try everything at once.

All sandbox games claim to offer free will and choice, but it’s often an on-the-rails experience – you’re allowed to explore, but only within the preordained boundaries that the developers have set for you, and only when they want you to. Earlier Grand Theft Auto games suffered from this as well, hermetically sealing you off from the best cars, guns, and neighborhoods with improbable excuses. Grand Theft Auto V throws all of that out the window, allowing you to explore the entire city within the first several hours of play.

You want to pick street fights with the Grove Street gangs? Check. You want to sneak around in the backyards of ritzy, gated communities and hijack convertibles? Check. You want to escape to the countryside and go swimming? Check, and make sure to dive beneath the water’s surface – there are meticulously detailed coral formations and tropical fish that should not be missed – not to mention a downed flying saucer and a whale skeleton for the most intrepid explorers. The detail. Good Lord, the detail.

Los Santos residents are always up to something – they’re texting their friends, they’re relaxing on a smoke break, or they’re arguing in the streets. Residents run for cover when it starts to rain. Main characters update their social networking profiles to coincide with the game’s events. The movie theaters play actual films, with funny scripts and narratives that are all their own. The moon even has phases to correspond with the week. Imagine what it’s like to be a developer on this game, painstakingly illustrating landscapes and details that 99% of players will never appreciate or see. Or, to be a voice actor, recording three years worth of dialogue that most people will never stick around long enough to hear.

The cumulative effect of all this aggravation, however, is well worth it. It creates a beautiful illusion – of a living, breathing city with many stories to tell – a city that will continue to live on long after Michael, Franklin, and Trevor get arrested or drop dead. It’s resonating to know that with so much detail, one player’s experience will never be exactly like another’s.

Long time Grand Theft Auto fans know to brace themselves for the provincial, ‘moral outrage’ whenever a new game drops. The pearl clutching usually focuses on singular elements of the game play – the virtual lap dances, the Rampage mini-games (although you are defending yourself against murderous, ‘post-ironic’ hipsters, to be fair), and the high-speed police chases. But let’s be real here – if wanton killing and virtual boobs were all that there was to this franchise, it wouldn’t have racked up billions in sales. It would get old, very quickly. What propelled this franchise – and particularly, this game – to record breaking heights was not its adrenaline rush highs, but its downtime lows - the way it satirized the mundane rituals and behavior of every day life.

In Grand Theft Auto V, nobody is safe – guilty liberals, redneck conservatives, gun enthusiasts, and pot smoking, yoga hippies are all skewered with aplomb. The game saves its harshest criticisms, however, for the celebrity worship that dominates American culture. From the materialistic celebrities themselves to the paparazzi that follow them to the slavering fans who imitate their every move, it’s a cyclical clusterfuck that drives the game’s humorous tone. Back to the game. After successfully parking the submarine in a warehouse, I switch characters from Trevor to Franklin, the rags to bitches gangbanger of my crew. I’m on the roof of a building with a sniper rifle, and I’m trying to head shot the CEO of a tobacco company. I’m manipulating the stock market – if I kill this guy and then immediately invest in his rival’s company, I’ll make a ton of money. I’ll also hear about it on the radio right after it happens.

And then I’ll conquer another mission. And another mission. And a stunt jump. And another mugger who snatches an old lady’s purse. It’s all about those little things, those moments of wry eccentricity, that make Grand Theft Auto V one of the best games of the year, but one of the best game of the past five.

Red Dead Redemption

Year of release: May 18, 2010

It's Grand Theft Auto on a horse, basically. But who would've thought a concept so superficially stupid would turn out such an utterly complete game that's (still, to this day) arguably the best game Rockstar's ever made? Maybe Rockstar, and maybe Rockstar's biggest fans, but few others. Because here's the thing with cowboy western games: Every genre of game has one great one, and almost always, only one. And more often than not, they're less than memorable. Think about this for a moment: What other video games that use westerns for a backdrop have really changed the course of gaming? Side-scrollers had SunsetRiders, light-gun games had Mad Dog McCree, RPGs had Wild Arms (kind of), but otherwise? Not much there.

A definitive or at least important video game western hadn't been achieved, and had barely been attempted. And the thing with Red Dead is that it could've only been GTA on a horse, and it probably would've been a great game, too. But we got so much more than that, didn't we? This is a sandbox game where the transportation mechanic isn't holding a shoulder button and careering through streets, but tapping a pad button repeatedly, setting a pace for the horse—walk, trot, gait, or gallop—and continuing to maintain that pace. Each step the horse took reverberated on the controller. And unlike a car, the horse would occasionally fight back at you, maybe even throw you off. It was the perfect way to create a world where virtually no corner could go untouched, where you could literally ride off the beaten path, something you were sometimes encouraged to do, and sometimes something you had to figure out how to do for yourself, and for your own benefit.

The way we're introduced to Marston—seeing him left for dead on his first confrontation with Bill Williamson, and having to start putting his life back together on Bonnie MacFarlane's ranch—isn't how we're used to meeting our heroes.

It wasn't just that, though: The mere act of continuing to tap and hold that button, and the pace it set, and the way you felt each step, and the way each step and its controller reverberation shifted depending on what ground was underneath it? That was a kinetic experience. It connected you to the action of moving around the map in a way only one other game—the meditative Japanese epic Shadow Of The Colossus—had attempted to get right in a meaningful way. But where the idea of traveling by horse over landscapes was a way for Shadow Of The Colossus to convey an atmosphere of existential loneliness, in this game, it was a way to convey loneliness, romanticism, longing, adventure, exploring, and the actual feeling of moving a significant distance over a map in ways we had never seen no less felt in a game before. When the simple act of tapping a button repeatedly to move around a game becomes transcendent, you know you've got something extraordinary on your hands.

And that's just where Red Dead gets started. John Marston was unlike any Rockstar character we'd ever seen: An antihero, of course, but aren't they all? This one, however, seemingly deserved a shot at a better life. Having been an outlaw, he's forced by the government to smoke out his old gang in order to get back to his family. The way we're introduced to Marston—seeing him left for dead on his first confrontation with Bill Williamson, and having to start putting his life back together on Bonnie MacFarlane's ranch—isn't how we're used to meeting our heroes. But Marston's gruff, even-handed charm was the first time we saw a character who wasn't overtly anything, really, so much as a straight-shooting canvas for other characters to project their emotions and ideas on, which is why the characters of Red Dead work so well: Almost all of them are despicable. The few who aren't are truly lovable. But almost all of them have personas that brighten and deepen the game's narrative depths in meaningful ways, right through the game's end.

The gameplay is still the best of any Rockstar game to date, as well. Another duck-and-cover system, of course, but also, the bullet-time-esque Red Dead targeting system, a cinematic, insanely fun, ever-addictive way of taking out scores of opponents, who could also be disarmed by shooting in different parts of the body (rather than simply taking them down wholesale). Of course, the driving-and-shooting mechanic was more flexible, too, with the point of the horses as open-sided, versatile game transport proving itself critial: Never has a run-and-gun—let alone a drive-and-gun—mechanic been so much fun before or since. And then there were the climactic dueling mechanic sequences, which while not perfect, and easy to get a grip on, could still make for climactic sequences. The gameplay was that of your third-generation sandbox game, a generation we're still in now: Chapters are chopped up into missions, each chapter opens up a new part of the map, there are side-quests, and side-games you can play to earn more money.

But the side games in this one were different, too: Poker. Herding cattle. Whatever it was, Red Dead has a calm, almost meditative feeling to the game's story, of helping John Marston get back home, if he could. The question that we all ask ourselves at some point—Can you really ever go home again?—feels like it lingers throughout the proceedings, even when you make it back to the Marston ranch in the game's final section. And while individual missions weren't the most memorable part of the game, the chapters, and the way the game was sliced up most certainly were. Marston's story had a serious emotional hook to it, yet chapters kept you immersed in that part of the game's world, one you wouldn't necessarily rush to get out of so much as linger in, soaking up, right until the point you knew you had to drop back into the current of the game's plot. By the game's conclusion, despite a short total running time, you felt like John Marston had, to paraphrase T.S. Eliot, lived a very, very long life.

And about that ending: It is, without a doubt, one of the most famously smart, surprising, great moments in video games, and it happens multiple times. Again, we're not in the business of spoiling game endings, but anyone who's seen it has excitedly talked about what it was like experiencing it with someone else that'd seen it, and not simply the ending itself, but 'holy shit, it ain't over yet' feeling of moving through it. And that's ultimately so much of what makes Red Dead that much better of a game than any other sandbox game ever created: It had heart, and heart it wore in every element of the game in that it was about more than great gameplay (the last time Rockstar got it perfect) so much as about bringing games into a world of romanticism, one devoid of an inherent cynicism so much as truths about the nature of people and the individual's place in the world.

Of course, no more is this evident then in The Mexico Sequence. It's impossible to talk to anyone who's played this game without talking about The Mexico Sequence, one of the most spectacular moments we'd ever seen in a video game, and amazingly, one in which not all that much happens. In it, John Marston has finally forded the river and made his way to Mexico. He mounts a horse, and starts riding. And riding. And riding. And then, one of the greatest pieces of music ever composed for a video game—Jose Gonzalez's "Far Away"—kicks in. And it's just you, the horse, and the Mexican hills.

Tapping the button. Riding away, just another hero on a hero's journey, heeding the call to adventure, going deep into the desert, further from home than he's ever been, with, for now, just one thing to focus on: That ride. It was as transcendent a moment video games have ever had, and ultimately, one of the most perfect sequences in any game, ever, and served to represent the evolution of games and gaming culture so much more than any action-filled moment in that game (or really, any Rockstar game) ever could.

The only other way to understand the appeal of Red Dead is by talking to anyone who still holds onto their copy of them. Ask them, and they'll probably tell you, yeah, they pop it in every once in a while, just to take a ride. —Foster Kamer