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.

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

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.

Perfection is overrated. Most of my favorite gaming experiences are with games of which I would be able to cite plenty of flaws.

I like games with sharp edges.

That said, there are a lot of good games being mentioned in these comments.

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).

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 !

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).

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.