I made another list! This one focuses on my favorite types of games, ones that emphasize narrative experiences. Or stories.
Now when I think about games with stories I could be talking about the story of the whole game or just the experience of interactive narratives. Basically I'm ranking these by the ones where I enjoy and feel and care about what's happening plot-wise and to characters while I play, where it's a core part and appeal of the experience.
So it could be a game like Transistor where even though it's just combat and level traversal, I'm invested in what's going on enough to make me care (as opposed to a typical platformer or brawler where technically there's a plot but it's like whatever). Or it could be a game like Skyrim where sure I don't care about the main plot but I very much care about quests and individual stories. And then of course the best ones for me like Mass Effect and Witcher where it's both.
I maybe cheated by throwing some trilogies in there- Mass Effect, original God of War, Assassin's Creed: Ezio, Uncharted. Those are really all connected in my mind and I can't separate them.
Obviously it's a lot of crossover to my general all-time list with two big differences: no games from when I was a kid except Zelda and no FromSoftware. I just don't count "environment story-telling" as story-telling in this calculus. Consequently these are almost all games where characters actually talk! The ability to do traditional narrative with interactive with gameplay and make a greater-than-the-sum-of-its-parts experience is what I'm going for here.
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