Gaming

Outer Wilds. I consider it the best video game ever made and I've spent quite some time thinking about if there's something I could add, change or remove that would improve it and so far I've yet to come up with anything of substance (beyond tiny QoL changes or reeeally nitpicky stuff).

Maybe Tetris? Such a simple concept, and it's one of the most popular games of all time.

Minecraft for similar reasons. Even if it has become more complex in recent years, the core of it is just...you can break everything and build anything. It's hard to say that isn't a perfect sandbox.

More personal opinion though, maybe Super Mario Odyssey. Just incredibly polished and varied with an amazing movement system.

Chrono Trigger. It's basically the evolutionary peak of the NES-era console RPG. Every aspect, including the story, art, game mechanics, and music, are best-in-class, with no obvious room for improvement given the technical constraints of the time.

Gotta be Portal 2. The puzzles are fun, the difficultly curve is reasonable, and the writing is fantastic. Truly the only complaint I have is that I wish there was more of it.

Super Metroid. It's an amazing game if you play it normally, and you can branch out into sequence breaking tricks pretty easily. It basically created/popularized an entire genre of games.

I would interpret "perfect" as "i can't find anyhing negative to say about this game". So for me the candidates are:

• Portal 1&2
• Factorio
• Outer Wilds
• FTL
• TowerFall: Ascension
• Dishonored 2
• Prey (the Arkane studios one)
• Minit
• and maybe Nidhogg

The original Deus Ex. The storyline, the way the game world reacted to your actions and made it feel like your actions were relevant to the world around you instead of just being a static place where stuff happened to you...

Can we go really old with these?

Because Zelda Link to the Past is a perfect game.

I know how ubiquitous it is, but I still replay it on a regular basis. Its perfectly designed, balanced, simple... Im not saying its superior to modern games or something stupid, I just think its pretty flawless. That is all.

FTL. It took a concept and ran with it. Plus a great soundtrack. It has a great replay value as well.

I think I would have to go with Stardew Valley. It has something for any mood I’m in.

I can spend my time on the farm, looking after the animals, crops, reorganising. I can go and be social with the neighbours, help them out, do some work towards the community centre. If I feel adventurous I can go explore the mines fighting monsters.

Where I’ve done all that I can start again on a new farm and try a different strategy, I can even play with friends and work together. Its just cozy fun.

My answer to this is always Portal, the first one. It was so unexpected and so, so good. Nothing in gaming before or since has been that magical of an experience for me. Maybe early Pokemon, when my little kid eyes were opening to what gaming could be. But there's just something special about Portal. Such a concise, perfect little game.

Factorio. The game automatically adjusts difficulty based on your speed and familiarity. Pros scaling rapidly are going to have a harder time with biters than a noob learning the ropes on the exact same difficulty settings. Difficulty settings can be scaled up for a true challenge. Mods are supported damn near as much as first party devs. It’s a very well optimized game. It’s just technically impressive, psychologically fun, and fundamentally well balanced.

Control seems pretty good at what it wants to do. Nice graphics and soundtrack, fluid movement in combat (closest description I could think of) and cool, intriguing story. It also has one of the best video game quests I've played: Ashtray Maze

Skyrim (despite the numerous bugs) is another one I will say is close to perfect. Really good game and the community is pretty great as well.

I’ve said it 1 million times and so have many others, but it is and will always be Ocarina of Time. It’s the only game I play through every single year and still love every single second of it.

The Hunt for Red October on the C64 - varied levels, great art and music, really good difficulty curve.

Fata Morgana.

Listen, whether you like Visual Novels or not doesn't matter. But Fata Morgana is just somehow...perfect. Everything is resolved and I don't feel any need to complain about any aspect of it. It was an experience to play a game that left me with no questions afterwards. It was just a really good story.

My vote is for Slay the Spire. Invented the deck-building roguelike genre and did so with an interesting setting, simple but appealing artstyle, memorable soundtrack, and very tight balancing across 21 difficulty levels.

Also Tetris, but that's already been said.

Both Portal games are perfect. Portal 1 did some much great stuff and portal 2 said fuck it and decided to be more perfect then the first.

For a game to be perfect I think it's got to be absolutely pinpoint in achieving what it sets out to do. Doesn't matter if it's a small game, or an expansive open world.

I'm gonna go with Superhot. For my money it took an idea, and ran with it to its natural conclusion. It's laser focused on that one core mechanic and pulls it off so well that I don't think anyone else has even tried to replicate it.

Skyrim. It's a beautiful game, even now when I play it I take a moment to just look at how gorgeous the scenery is. I love the quests and that you can own a horse/house/child/ get married. I love the potions and crafting and customisation.

I don't think there are many games quite like Skyrim

Hades. I don't think I've come across a game so carefully paced as Hades, both plot-wise and in the gradual introduction of game mechanics. Which is bloody impressive considering that it's a roguelite.

Chrono Trigger: every aspect (graphics, gameplay, story, music, replayability...) has such level of polishness that it's still outstanding almost 30 years later.
No other JRPG has come even close and, as a Final Fantasy fan, that's hard to admit

Outer Wilds

Guild Wars, especially for the PvP mode. I loved the visual feeling of the game, it felt sharper and less cartoony than a WoW.

Some classes were kind of novel too at the time.

And the feature I loved was the limited skillset you had to chose : you could be lvl 20 (max) and know 30 spells but you could only pick 5 in your active bar. It made for so many interesting builds and combinations !

Zelda Links Awakening. It's a perfect clock, every wheel in place.

If we're going really old school, then Space Invaders. Its way of leveraging the hardware at the time to make the enemies and music speed up after you defeat more of them is elegant. Back then, the more things a game had on screen, the slower it ran. So, destroying more enemies removes more things from the screen, causing both enemies and music to speed up.

This is something that's taken for granted today, but I think at the time, it was genius.

My vote goes to Shadow of the Colossus. The story, the mood, those damn creatures. Just enough frustration to keep you going and enough variation to not make it boring.

In very recent times, I honestly believe Zelda:TotK is very close to being perfect.

Metroid Prime has to be pretty far up there. It was a bold step forward for an established franchise that could have gone wrong so many different ways, but holy cow they nailed it. The controls are probably the only weak part, but to be fair dual analog controls hadn't really caught on yet. Every area of the map has character. So many of the boss fights are memorable, from Omega Pirate being fueled by raw Phazon and destroying its own soldiers, to Thardus whiting out the whole arena, to Meta Ridley wrecking the shit out of the Artifact Temple. The music is great, bringing back bangers from previous games, subtly remixing in other motifs from the past as well to give the game a familiar feeling, while adding beautiful new ambient music of it's own. The plot progresses forward with only a limited amount of cut scenes and dialog. It combined two genres in an innovative new way that 20+ years later still hasn't really been recreated yet.

And then once you've finished playing everything and finding every last thing as intended, there's still more fun to be had in learning some of the more basic glitches to get items way earlier than intended. Giving the devs the middle finger by getting items the first time around without taking a long backtracking trip later to come back and get it. Speeding through areas and blasting through boss fights with equipment and weapons you're not supposed to have yet. It contributed in large part to the birth of the modern speedrunning scene as people came up with more and more creative ways to get around formerly impassable obstacles.

20+ years old now, and it still holds up (as long as you play Primehack or Remastered to get more modern controls).

It's hard to define perfection but Return Of The Obra Dinn has very few flaws IMO. I can only complain about relatively minor UX problems. Everything else is incredible. I still think about the story years later and the music gets stuck in my head to this day. It is such a consummate achievement of game dev and its design achieves maximum results with the limited resources of a solo gamedev.

I have always been a fan of stealth games. Dishonored (especially the first) scratched the itch perfectly! It's atmospheric. It's not open world, but each level has its own area to explore that is filled to the brim with stories, sometimes a small side quest etc. I also love how you get to influence the ending.

Celeste has just perfect controls and pacing. I still think about it. I wasn't as touched by the story as others but many were. I'm still playing Super Mario World and find it so impressive and charming.