The most gorgeous, fully-realized open world of its generation that also has an emotional character-driven story with some truly incredible performances.
If you're gonna bounce off this, it'll likely be due to its pacing. This game expects you to take your time with it and it makes that clear to you early and often. But the more that you're willing to meet it on its terms and just vibe in its world, the more you'll be rewarded.
This is just such a deeply beautiful game that knows exactly what it wants to be. I love it so much. In a world where most big game studios were making safer and safer bets, for a game of its size RDR2 made such confident, unusual choices.

A very formative game for me, impossible for me to be objective here. For about 3 years of my childhood, at around age 10-13, on any given day I was at some point in a long, continuous chain of Half Life play throughs. I would finish the game and immediately start up a new one. Sometimes I'd even start a new game before I'd finished my last one.
Sure, it has its flaws. It hasn't aged especially gracefully, the little platforming puzzles aren't the greatest. The last half of the game can really drag. But I could have done a lot worse for an introduction to grown up games.

I have a sick fascination with Neil Druckmann, so I had to circle back and play this despite missing all of the Uncharted games at time of release.
It's a very solid action adventure game. Great, memorable set pieces throughout with excellent performances all around. Wasn't crazy about the gunplay and cover system, but I got good enough at stealth that I was able to avoid combat for the most part.
The game was always at its best when it leaned into that sense of historical wonder, rewarding exploration with interesting bits of environmental storytelling. Also really incredible at conveying a sense of scale at several very memorable points.
At times the dialogue could verge on pretty cringe-inducing "uhh, did that just happen?!" style MCU-speak, but it always managed to pull back before it got too grating.
Unfortunately the ending was a huge dud for me. A big letdown to a story I was enjoying to that point.
But overall this is an extremely good time. Holds up really well and is still absolutely visually stunning, nearly 8 years (!!!) after release

Obsidian made the best open world RPG I've ever played with the same engine Bethesda used to make Fallout 3, somehow.
Fantastic world design that rewards (and sometimes punishes!) exploration, in-game choices are impactful and actually make sense within the game's universe rather than feeling like tacked-on window dressing, which was often the case with many games of this era.
The bit where you can finally talk to Caesar in detail about his ideology and motivations is some all-time great video game dialogue. Figuring out that he'd built his entire ideology around a hilariously surface-level understanding of Hegelian dialectics is one of those bits of video game world building that really stands the test of time.
Brilliant writing and cohesive, deeply-fleshed out world building. Puts all of the Bethesda Fallout titles to shame.

Other entries in the series may do individual things better than Snake Eater, but this is easily the most well-rounded MGS game. If you need to Kojima-pill someone and you can only make them play one game, this should be your choice.
Has solid doses of everything that keeps us Kojima connoisseurs coming back for more: Fantastic gameplay that felt like it was from the future (compare this to other action games from '04, it's incredible), always fun and occasionally brilliantly insightful writing, gorgeous cinematics and stunning set pieces. It has arguably the most emotional ending of any Metal Gear title, too, with one of the all time great boss battles.
Hideo-heads stay winning

A one of a kind masterpiece. This isn't just the best written game of all time, it's the best written game of all time by a fucking mile. This game made me laugh more than every other video game I have ever played combined.
And this game made me emotional in a way that no other game has. Might be in part because the game's devs and I share similar politics, or maybe it's how the game's overarching theme of confronting profound loss, living in the wreckage of it and figuring out how to pick up the pieces and move forward, happened to really resonate with me and my circumstances at the time I played it.
This might not be the game I go back to replay the most often, but I think it's the game whose themes and ideas will live on in my head for the longest.

There was a time when I was about 13 that I would've listed this among my favorite games. The destructible environments did make for an extremely good time, tunneling your way through mine walls or blowing the ground out from underneath enemies never got old. And any game with a working class revolution as the inciting incident is always gonna be right up my alley.
But nostalgia's a hell of a thing. Turns out the destructible environments were pretty limited, the vehicle sections that I remembered fondly were actually monotonous slogs a lot of the time and the writing and plot does absolutely nothing with the potential of the game's premise.
An ambitious game with interesting ideas and fun mechanics that falls flat after its extremely promising beginning.

Red Faction was a game with some interesting ideas and fun gameplay that ended up mediocre thanks to a lack of focus and bad writing. Red Faction 2 doubles down on that in the worst possible way - more destructible environments and more guns, sure, but with even more lazy, uninspired world building and terrible writing in general. Some of these characters, man. Calling them cartoonish would be unfair to cartoons.
Could've been a great game if they focused on improving RF's biggest weaknesses, but instead it was a huge missed opportunity.

Naughty Dog has never been great at writing well-developed, complex characters IMO, instead relying on quality performances from their stable of usually very talented actors. And it's not that the performances for Chloe and Nadine were particularly bad or anything - Chloe's voice acting was actually quite charming at times - but they weren't great enough to lift this game above "pretty good!" tier, for me.
Some gorgeous, memorable set pieces, as you would expect from an Uncharted title. But relatively cookie cutter characters and a formulaic, Macguffin fetch-quest story makes for a fun, lighthearted, and good! but not great, game.
Worth checking out for any big Naughty Dog heads, but not a game that's gonna convert many skeptics.

KRZ is an impressionistic, magical realist game about legacy, traditions - the things that are passed down from one generation to the next both in the sense of regular people and the communities that they populate, and of artists and the history and traditions of their schools of art. The game is very aware of its own influences and the wide variety of artistic mediums and traditions that it draws from, it's extremely dense with references and allusions (I caught just enough of them to know that there were way more that went over my head).
KRZ is more interested in being thought-provoking and evocative than it is trying to make any bold declarative statements about the way in which society is constructed or anything like that. In that way I find it very interesting that this game is compared so often to Disco Elysium, a game which had a direct and very materialist political analysis, whereas KRZ is much more descriptive than prescriptive.
It is extremely effective at evoking feelings of loss, decay, and mourning, while always making sure to remind that there is no decay without regrowth. Death and disposal - of people and communities, of artists and their art, even of office supplies (keep an eye out for those cute lil crabs just making the best of what they've got) - is never the end of anything, just another transformation, part of an ever-ongoing conversation echoing back and forth into itself forever. You take what you need and leave the rest.
The headiness, amount of reading required and lack of an immediately gratifying "fun" gameplay loop will probably make a lot of people bounce off of this game, which is a shame, because it's the rare game that truly rewards deeper examination and carries en emotional heft that will have me thinking back to certain scenes, songs and lines for years to come.
A true classic, one of the best games of its size that I've ever played. Just missed being one of my GOAT's, but wouldn't be surprised if later reexamination bumps this game up there for me.

GoT doesn't really do anything poorly, does a few things very well, and ultimately adds up to "Really good! if you're into that kind of game."
Extremely beautiful, naturalistic huge open world, but not a ton of environmental storytelling going on (unless endless destroyed homesteads and massacred villagers really gets you going). Would've loved to have learned some more about the people, culture and history of Tsushima, could've added a lot of emotional weight to the invasion.
The swordplay is the game's strongest asset, it's something that I crave every few months now since the game's release. I'll load up the game, wipe out a few enemy camps, fight a duel or two, and then put the game away, satisfied, until the craving returns again.
The biggest disappointment here is the writing. I played in Japanese w/ English subtitles, which I absolutely loved having as an option. That, combined with the excellent audio design and gorgeous world, had me fully bought in for the first few hours, but I gradually lost interest in the story and characters.
Characters are largely forgettable, basically serving as archetypes to play their part in the story that broadly deals with family, honor and tradition. It's all fine, very well-executed, but very safe and without a ton of personality.
By far the biggest highlights were the mythical tales that unlocked Jin's special abilities, the art style was great, stylistic and distinctive. Some of the best-designed quests too, usually ending in one of those ever-satisfying duels.
Loved the slower-paced flourishes too, composing haikus was surprisingly rewarding and the fox dens and hot springs provided excellent little moments of serenity. More of this in GoT2, please!

In all, I feel roughly the same way about this game as I do the Horizon series: I am begging you, please find some really talented writers and give them creative control of these games! You add a good story with some memorable characters to these open worlds and this quality of gameplay, you could have an all-time great game on your hands!