But unbeknownst to them, one member isn’t who he seems. During this Illuminati-esque gathering, the members of this privileged elite wear masks to conceal their identities-to discuss how they will profit from fixing the climate change disaster they created. In the exclusive VIP room of the Isle of Sgàil castle, the five members of the Ark Society council gather to discuss their plans to hold power over the world. Players can only focus on the beauty of a blood-orange sandstorm for so long before it dissipates, revealing the gruesome consequences of your violence within it, just as the bird’s-eye view from a dispassionate drone eventually gives way to the revelatory moment in which your squad must wade through the charred bodies of the innocent civilians they just mistakenly dropped white phosphorus upon. Spec Ops: The Line never permits players to rest easily in the distance or abstraction of a long-range war or the novelty of a video game. The game’s “Damned If You Do” and “Damned If You Don’t” achievements, earned from killing either a soldier or a civilian, make it clear just how blurry that titular “line” is. The military, squad-based action also fits with the theme of responsibility, frequently forcing players to choose between two equally unsavory options. The ever-shifting sands of Dubai make for a good setting in Spec Ops: The Line: It’s an unreliable environment that matches what turns out to be the game’s unreliable narrator. Developer Croteam’s gradual integration of several puzzle types is as accessible as it is shrewdly brain-twisting. The world design allows you to bounce between puzzles while also requiring a certain degree of completion to try higher challenges. Even if the philosophical angle in The Talos Principle didn’t exist, the game would still be outstanding. This conflicted but life-affirming perspective trumps the adolescent nihilism that oversimplifies player choice as an illusion. ![]() Without moralizing about sin or catering to secularist values, the game implies that inquisitiveness mechanically binds humanity to a common fate. This juxtaposition comes in the context of a series of puzzles, implying that human and deity have a natural interest in making sense out of chaos. The Talos Principle articulates the conflict between skepticism and the order of God. While the gameplay itself is basic puzzle-solving and crude combat, it’s the mood that makes it special, the constant sense that there’s something vast just outside the frame. Just like Princess Yorda’s gnomic utterances imply a story that she just can’t share with you, so does the game’s environment imply a vast narrative of which this story is only a part, creating a potent illusion of context through the very act of withholding backstory. Ico made loneliness feel magical by giving you a companion, even as it constantly reminded you how alien her mind must be. Steven ScaifeĮditor’s Note: Click here for a list of the titles that made the original incarnation of our list on June 9, 2014. We’ve chosen to cast a wide net, so as to best represent the individual passions incited by saving planets, stomping on goombas, or simply conversing with vivid characters. The titles on this list come from every corner of the medium-represented for the precision of their control or the beauty of their visuals or the emotion of their story. It’s as much about feeling, about the way a game can capture the imagination regardless of genre or release date or canonical status. Greatness, to the individual, isn’t just about impact and influence. When compiling this list, my colleagues and I elected to consider more than historical context. How can the same narrow handful of games, the accepted canon that looms large over every games list, hope to represent that diversity? How can a list of the greatest ever be anything but constantly in flux? Those changes speak to the fluidity of an evolving medium as well as to the broadness of experiences to be had within it. Some games from the two prior iterations of our list have shifted positions, while others are absent entirely old favorites have claimed the spots of what we treated as new classics, and vice versa and some of the ones that vanished have triumphantly returned. The medium continues shifting, regardless of when we decide to stop and take stock. If four years is just about an eternity, two years is only slightly less so. The same can be said with the Nintendo Switch and our 2018 iteration of the list. When we published our initial list of the 100 Greatest Video Games of All Time in 2014, the Xbox One and PlayStation 4 were only a year old. Trends come and go, hardware changes, and brand-new games emerge as towering influences on the medium. Two years doesn’t sound like a long enough time to justify updating a list, but as a medium, video games move in bounding strides.
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