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Roughly in order, I think:
- StarCraft: Brood War
- Subnautica
- FTL: Faster than Light
- Spec Ops: The Line
- Risk of Rain Returns
- Portal
- Dead Cells
- Hades
- Team Fortress 2
- Borderlands 2
- Satisfactory
Honorable mention:
- Unreal Tournament 2004
- The first two Golden Sun games
- SOMA
- Diablo II
- Diablo III
- TLoZ: Link's Awakening
Looking over this, it seems like I'm drawn to games that have either unusually good writing, very long skill curves, or (e.g., #1) both.
UT2004 sneaks in for being the absolute best LAN-party game ever (fight me). I think Link's Awakening is mostly just nostalgia though. 😋
Edit: bumped UT2004 down to "honorable mention" because I somehow forgot the billion hours I've sunk into Satisfactory. Still very curious to see where that game goes story-wise after the 1.0 launch, though.
Spec ops is amazing
Funny story about that one: my first time playing it, I actually found it a bit too... visceral, and had to stop after getting a couple hours in - I only came back to play it all the way through several years later.
In the intervening time, I learned that one of the developers, when asked whether the game had a "good ending", said something along the lines of "that's when the player stops playing in disgust".
Guess I got the good ending.
Its a great anti war message marketed to the pro war gamers.
It's also just an incredible deconstruction of the "modern warfare" shooter genre. It screams at the player, "hey, hold up a sec, think about those people you're shooting".
I think it's part of why the only other shooters I like are TF2 and the Borderlands series, both of which frame the violence with a distinctly fantastical, escapist setting, intentionally distancing the game from reality.
Can’t stop playing FTL years later.
Weirdly Monster Train has a similar flavor to me in play style.