Kait’s game, and the first with open areas, a skiff on the ice and a choice at the end you cannot undo.
JD Fenix, twenty-five years on, against windflares and a swarm that turns out to be old news.
Baird and Cole on trial for the mission the game is telling in flashback, with a star rating on every fight.
Borderlands played as a tabletop campaign Tiny Tina is making up as she goes, on a board you walk across.
The 2025 entry moves to Kairos, drops the level gates and gives every vault hunter a grappling hook.
Two Calypso twins streaming their own cult, and a billion guns across four planets.
Handsome Jack before he was the villain, on Pandora’s moon with low gravity and oxygen kits.
A Caribbean island under Anton Castillo, played by Giancarlo Esposito, and a guerrilla war fought from the jungle.
Montana seventeen years after the nuclear ending of Far Cry 5, in pink bloom and scavenged weapons.
Ten thousand years BC in the Far Cry 4 valley: no guns, a spoken Proto-Indo-European language and animals you tame.
The 2010 reboot by MercurySteam, with Patrick Stewart narrating and a combat system borrowed from God of War.
Soma Cruz absorbing the souls of everything he kills, and the best of the DS trilogy.
The first handheld Metroidvania of the run, with a card system that stacks two decks of magic.
The Mega Drive entry: 1917 Europe, two playable hunters and a stage that walks up the leaning tower of Pisa.
The whip finally aims in eight directions; the 1991 remake of the first game and its high point on the SNES.
Open zones for the first time, with a grind rail bolted to a hillside and titans to climb.
An alien amusement park in orbit and the Wisp powers; the game that pulled the series out of its worst decade.
Teams of three switched on the fly, speed, power and flight in one control scheme.
Two campaigns, the Chao garden, and City Escape - the last Sonic game Sega made for its own console.
Time travel through four versions of every zone, and two soundtracks depending on where you bought it.
The story-led one: 47 on the run protecting a girl, with checkpoint levels instead of open sandboxes.
A wounded 47 remembering earlier jobs in a Paris hotel room; the darkest the series has been.
Mark and execute, interrogations in real rooms, and objectives projected onto the walls.
Fisher undercover inside a terrorist cell, with a trust meter that makes every mission two missions.
Sam Fisher in Indonesia and Paris, and the asymmetric spies-versus-mercenaries multiplayer nothing has matched since.
The 2025 entry: 1960s Japan, a town swallowed by fog and flowers, written by Ryukishi07.
A prisoner loose in the town after a crash, in rain that makes the monsters worse; the last one Konami published before the reboot.
A retelling with no combat at all - you run, and the game quietly psychoanalyses you and rewrites itself.
A soldier comes home to Shepherd’s Glen looking for his brother; the first made outside Japan.
The prequel: a lorry driver stops at a burning house seven years before the first game.
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