Games

Games I recommend, and what I want to play next.

Red Dead Redemption 2 Red Dead Redemption 2 Metacritic 97

The most fully realized open world ever built. A meditation on loyalty, decline, and the end of the frontier. Arthur Morgan's arc is one of the great tragic narratives in games.

Grand Theft Auto V Grand Theft Auto V Metacritic 97

American capitalism as open world satire. Three protagonists, three relationships with money and violence, none of them redeemable. Rockstar built a system so detailed that the parody became indistinguishable from the thing it mocks.

Civilization VI Civilization VI Metacritic 88

Institutions, trade, diplomacy, and war across six thousand years. The game that makes you understand why empires expand, overextend, and collapse. Every session is a lesson in compounding decisions.

Age of Empires II: Definitive Edition Age of Empires II: Definitive Edition Metacritic 88

The RTS that taught a generation how civilizations rise and fall. Resource management, military strategy, and historical campaigns that still hold up decades later. The definitive edition proved the design was timeless.

Diablo II Diablo II Metacritic 88

The game that defined the action RPG. Loot, builds, and one more run. Blizzard at their peak, before they forgot what made them great. Every ARPG since is either copying it or reacting to it.

Command & Conquer: Red Alert 2 Command & Conquer: Red Alert 2 Metacritic 86

Cold War absurdity as real-time strategy. Soviet Tesla coils versus Allied Prism tanks, played completely straight. The best C&C game and the peak of Westwood Studios before EA buried them.

Total War: Warhammer III Total War: Warhammer III Metacritic 87

The culmination of the Total War fantasy trilogy. Grand strategy meets spectacle, with the Immortal Empires campaign offering more strategic depth than any other game in the genre.

Want to Play

Baldur's Gate 3 Baldur's Gate 3 97 (2023)

The most complete RPG in years. Consequences that actually matter, characters that remember what you did, and a level of systemic depth that rewards creative problem-solving. Peak of the genre.

Elden Ring Elden Ring 96 (2022)

FromSoftware's open world. Exploration, difficulty, and a world that refuses to explain itself. The most complete world-building achievement in the medium, designed by Miyazaki with lore by George R.R. Martin.

The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt 92 (2015)

Moral ambiguity as game design. Every choice has consequences, none are clean, and the world does not wait for you to decide. The closest games have come to prestige television.

Crusader Kings III Crusader Kings III 91 (2020)

Political simulation across centuries. Dynasties rise, overextend, and collapse through marriage, murder, and mismanagement. Succession the show as emergent gameplay.

Factorio Factorio 90 (2020)

Systems building in its purest form. Design, optimize, scale, and watch complexity emerge from simple rules. The game equivalent of infrastructure engineering.

Disco Elysium Disco Elysium 91 (2019)

Essentially an interactive novel. A detective with amnesia investigates a murder in a politically fractured city. Deeply political, philosophically dense, nothing else like it in any medium.

Pentiment Pentiment 86 (2022)

A small, slow historical mystery set in a Bavarian abbey. Ideas, legacy, and the tension between institutional authority and individual conscience. Obsidian at their most literary.