Speaking for 2024 tastes only, because there are past game types that I pretty much dropped but had invested a lot of interest and time into. So this isn't 5 that had biggest impact over the course of my total gaming life, but 5 that define what my tastes are right now in August of 2024.
1) The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild… specifically the Switch version, because I have a very, very heavy preference for games that I can play on-the-go on a handheld because of the positive and life-changing impact of Breath of the Wild in particular. I'm not even very typically into "emergent gameplay" open endedness, but the gameplay being familiar design tropes from Zelda that I understand from Zelda being one of my franchises made me take big exception to that, and the world design expanding to an opennness that matched my childhood perception of Zelda as grand adventures, AND being able to suspend my game, take my console with me to work, and continue this amazing grand-scale kind of gaming experience seamlessly? Like, I'm very privileged to be able to play games during downtime at work, and the Switch launching with Breath of the Wild made the case day 1 for Switch form factor and for the eventual Steam Deck purchase I would make. Breath of the Wild wasn't just an excellent game in its own, it powerfully established new preferences for hardware design that I didn't have before. PlayStation and Xbox feel duller every year to me because I can't take my games reliably on the go—streaming is a bad experience as soon as I leave me home (it's fine in-home though). I can still do traditional console hardware, but the longer I go in this post-Switch reality, the less appealing it becomes.
2) Dark Souls. Yeah, like many others, I onboarded into Souls-like gameplay love with Dark Souls in 2011. Dark Souls was a game that finally made paying attention to things like hit boxes, animation timing, etc... appealing and fun. These were realms of thought and approach to play that I was aware of prior to Dark Souls, but I think Dark Souls is the first game where I found it both gratifying and actually instrumental to my success in the game. But, I will say, I don't think this would've worked for me if it weren't for the various communal layers to Dark Souls. There's the way the summon system works in-game. There's the way the community had to get clever with the messaging system to either help or hinder other players. There's the way the community tried to extract a more cohesive storyline through interpretation of super obscure information hidden in flavor text. The gameplay mastery stuff itself was fun to a certain degree, but I think the dual-level experience of engaging with that AND the constant community effort to beat back the challenges of this game and provide levity and understanding to its world really got it across the finish line. That might help explain why I don't like Sekiro -- not only is Sekiro more properly structured and built like an action game, it just completely lacks the community element that really makes the series shine for me. And maybe that's why I have a hard time with the many imitators too. The game design is good, but the community aspect is the secret sauce that takes it to excellence. So, Dark Souls leveled up my critical thinking skills when it came to gameplay, but it was also just a fun experience utilizing the notes and summons of other players to help survive my way through the gauntlet of challenge it provided as well, and that remains pretty distinctive to me in later Souls-like releases from FromSoftware.
3) Dragon Quest XI. I started my enthusiast level interest into video games after experiencing a JRPG: Final Fantasy VII. But that interest waned for a very long time for a lot of reasons. Dragon Quest XI came along and just felt kinda "elemental" in a way -- in that it was pretty simple to understand but also felt classical and well-tread in a way that was extremely comforting and felt inviting for me to get back into the genre. Ever since DQXI released, I've been keeping a much closer eye on JRPGs and generally finding myself having a good time. It's a genre that just feels like nostalgic comfort food sometimes. DQXI was also an exception to some of the tropes feeling wearisome -- my return to the genre on the back of DQXI has run me into some tropes that I find either boring or offputting, so I admit it wasn't a perfect return to the genre, but DQXI itself felt almost entirely unburdened by the worst tropes of the genre in my eyes and just felt kinda like pure, distilled comfort. I'm still seeking the same high I got from DQXI from the broader JRPG genre and has made it one of the most keen genres that I pay attention to in 2024, and I am glad to report that I still occasionally find it here and there.
4) Resident Evil 2 Remake. I gained back personal trust and adoration for the Resident Evil franchise with RE7, with admittedly only a one-game breaking point in RE6, but the lead-up to RE6 with the various spinoffs surrounding its release was a part of that loss of faith too. RE2 Remake kinda infusing that fresh restoration of faith with an absolute jolt of nostalgia from recrafting the narrative of one of my favorite games in the franchise kinda got all of the fires blazing, though. This took a lot of what RE7 laid down as the new identity of the franchise and went back to third-person and set it in a scenario I was delighted to see revisited. Ever since RE2 Remake, there hasn't been a new mainline RE game that I haven't replayed at least 5 times. I just have a feverish love for the current stretch of RE, and Capcom miraculously seems to keep hitting with that franchise right now, and at a pace that I find pretty remarkable as well.
5) Doom Eternal. Oddly enough, this game seemed to have the critical thinking requirements of Souls games but still had the absolute joyful movement with the weapon and enemy feedback of the best "boomer shooters" of yore, and kinda reawakened my latent boomer shooter love. Maybe it started with Doom 2016, but like with RE7 vs RE2, I think Eternal's more advanced design really kicked it into gear for me. And I don't seem to be alone in this, because it feels like a gamut of indie studios have been riding the "boomer shooter" craze extremely well since Doom 2016 kinda inspired a lot of us to look back. Or maybe that was always there and Doom 2016 just made people like me actually start paying attention. But again, it wasn't firmly sealed until I played Doom Eternal. And I know reception to Eternal isn't universally positive--but I will say that for me, in my present general headspace, it feels like a remarkably contemporary and satisfying action game that is charismatically cosplayed as a first-person shooter, and I absolutely love its execution on that perspective. But it also made me re-love the original 90's Doom, and Quake I and II, etc... as NightDive and other indies all revive the games of the past that led to Doom Eternal and create new games in that style. I just beat Selaco's early access "Act I" last week and had an absolute blast of a time. I've been playing that Doom I+II re-release pretty obsessively since it shadow dropped at the start of QuakeCon. I've been just loving being back into boomer shooters. Doom The Dark Ages is up there with Dragon Quest III HD-2D as one of my most anticipated games because I can't wait to get to that unafraid 90's heavy metal imagery and that high-speed movement and weapon frenzy.
Shout-out to: Uncharted 2. It changed how I perceived PlayStation exclusives and made me crave that highly cinematic, technical-boundary-pushing approach when it came to PlayStation exclusives ever since. This doesn't quite make the top 5 because I admit that I'm starting to gradually fatigue on this approach as the actual top 5 kinda move me in different directions, but I've still ended up loving how PlayStation exclusives have felt in style ever since Uncharted 2 dropped. Right through Spider-Man 2 last year... But alas, these kinds of games increasingly don't play nice with my handhelds, their gameplay can feel kind of cookiecutter, and so many studios started matching the high technical marks of Sony's own internal studios some time ago, so it's all starting to feel a lot less special and a bit more cookiecutter. But it's also been a reliably hype and fun thing for me, too -- it's just on the cusp of just no longer feeling unique and maybe even sustainable.
And again, I want to stress that I came at my list as the perspective of what kind of gamer I am in 2024 in particular. This leaves out how I was crack addicted to WoW for the better part of its first decade and I jumped between a bunch of MMORPGs that were trying to be the next big WoW moment for the genre between lapsed subscriptions to WoW. This now excludes how I was only into COD outside of WoW for much of my college years. Now I don't even think about WoW and I just dropped COD a couple of years ago, after long relegating it to casual comfort commitment style engagement about a decade ago. So there's a lot of larger personal history that's no longer in play for me in 2024, but I interpreted this thread more like "what made you who you are in gaming RIGHT NOW" and not "what games made the biggest impact on you throughout your life." This list ain't the latter, it's the former.
