Dozens of publications used the final weeks and months of 2019 to pick the Best Games of the 2010s, but Keza MacDonald and Keith Stuart stood apart from their peers.
Instead, the Guardian’s game journalists decided to poke convention in the eyeballs and reminisce about the 20 years since the turn of the millennium with a ranking of “The 50 Best Video Games of the 21st Century.”
But now here we are in 2021, a full two years later, and they’ve decided that the time is finally right to publish their ranking of “The 15 Greatest Games of the 2010s.” And even though they’re (technically) playing catchup with their colleagues, MacDonald and Stuart didn’t take the assignment lightly, crafting an epic-length blurb for From Software’s Dark Souls, which was selected as the best game of the decade…
Dark Souls’ predecessor, Demon’s Souls, challenged every convention of its time when it came to what players needed from a game. Comprehensive tutorials? An easy-to-follow plot? Characters or maps telling you what to do and where to go next? Nah. Just drop them into a dark fantasy full of fascinating, terrifying undead things, leave some weapons around, and let them work it all out. This approach to play, informed far more by old fantasy novels and history’s earliest, most challenging games than by the slick blockbusters of the time, gave players a thrillingly rewarding gauntlet to overcome.
But then Dark Souls took those ideas and weaved them into a forsaken world so intricate, desolately beautiful and fascinatingly interconnected that it still feels bottomless. This is a game in which every encounter can surprise you, every misstep can lead to an ignominious death, and every scrap of dialogue or discarded ring provides a clue to what happened in this towering kingdom of fetid swamp-towns, crumbling castles and cities abandoned to ghosts. This game would enthrall millions and make a cult celebrity out of its creator Hidetaka Miyazaki, the one-time unenthusiastic coder who is now president of From Software. It has proven extraordinarily influential, and yet none of the “Soulslike” games that followed have captured its mystery and exquisitely exciting combat (except perhaps Miyazaki’s own gothic horror game, Bloodborne).
That’s a rather fitting tribute to a game that infuses so much life into even the smallest stone.
The rest of the list features a stalwart collection of well-liked games, including mega-best-sellers (Minecraft at #3) and small indies (Papers Please at #14), as well as three from Nintendo (The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild at #2, Super Mario Galaxy 2 at #10, and Pokemon Go at #15), and two from Rockstar (Grand Theft Auto V at #4 and Red Dead Redemption at #8).
Rounding out the remainder of the Top 10, you’ll see Portal 2 at #5, The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt at #6, The Last of Us at #7, and Mass Effect 2 at #9. And as for the lower third of the list, there’s Spelunky at #11, Forza Horizon 4 at #12, and XCOM: Enemy Unknown at #13.
The Guardian – The 15 Greatest Games of the 2010s
- 1. Dark Souls
- 2. The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild
- 3. Minecraft
- 4. Grand Theft Auto V
- 5. Portal 2
- 6. The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt
- 7. The Last of Us
- 8. Red Dead Redemption
- 9. Mass Effect 2
- 10. Super Mario Galaxy 2
- 11. Spelunky
- 12. Forza Horizon 4
- 13. XCOM: Enemy Unknown
- 14. Papers Please
- 15. Pokemon Go