Perfect Games

With more Spelunky and Tony Hawk around the corner, it got me thinking of perfect games. Not necessarily favorite games, best games, or ground-breaking cinematic achievements, but ones that go for something and execute it to perfection. There are a number of games that fall into that group for me, what some long-lost streamer might call a "masterpiece."

My criteria's simple: There's no part of the game that frustrates me, and I'm always glad to be playing it (at release and today). This eliminates a lot of recent games, because when something's 30 hours long there's a chance that parts of it drags. I love stuff like Bloodborne, Witcher 3, Metal Gear Solid, but those games don't land everything (for those in order, it can be frame rate/pacing, controls, snapping necks needs to be weirdly precise without setting off alarms). The games below have no such problems.

- Spelunky - Endlessly fun, extraordinarily deep, each run feels fresh, with flawless 2D platforming controls.

- Tony Hawk 3 - It's pure joy, really, with outstanding level design and a pitch perfect combo system.

- Super Mario World - The most creative Mario world ever created, with a ton of great challenges and secrets that was never really topped for me.

- Castlevania: Symphony of the Night - The best balance of classic and open-ended Castlevania, where every aspect and system is perfectly tuned.

- Ultimate Doom - The core gameplay of Doom is fantastic any time I play it, no matter what stage I start.

- Sonic 2 - The tightest levels of any Sonic game, with one of the best soundtracks of all time.

- Tekken 5 - Tekken 3 and Tekken Tag were fantastic, but I feel like Tekken 5 is where they perfected the combat without overcomplicating it.

- Guitar Hero III - It had a damn good set list, but it also had the only guitar controller that let me play with a pick and literally taught me how to shred on real guitar. The gameplay perfected what the first two were going for.

- Crash Bandicoot 2 - My favorite 3D platformer controls, with linear level design that puts emphasis on hand-crafted challenges. I routinely 100% this game every few years. (The PS1 version, as the remake changed the feel).

- Streets of Rage 2 - We used to beat this game daily as kids, and I can still sit down any day of the week and enjoy everything about it.

- Halo: Reach - My favorite Halo campaign, with some of the best combat and multiplayer an FPS can offer. And the MCC version makes it feel even better.

- Zelda: Breath of the Wild - I was gonna include this in my "these games have flaws" examples above, but I couldn't think of any. I love the exploration, the combat, the breaking weapons, the vibe, the music, and even the limited backstory. It's masterful.

That's it! I wanna hear yours.

Too Human

I don't think a game running well even needs to be a qualifier for this. If a game works as an experience so well those things disappear or are easily looked past as you play the game. That speaks just as much to the qualities that would bring someone to call a game perfect. The briefest way I have for how to define a perfect game is that while playing it's frame falls away and then your just in it. This is really the same for way any piece of media I'd describe as perfect.

Games I'd add:

- Spelunky - I watched Dan play it for the first time last night on his stream and it was an excellent encapsulation of why this game is, in fact, perfect. Over the course of an hour he came to and recognized so many small and subtle details, then started using that knowledge during play unprompted by the game. Moments of failure felt like success and not a result of the a failing on the games part, but his own. It so easily facilitates player intuition and internalization of it's ideas indirectly. It's both challenging and effortless. Hundreds of hours later and the game still has ways to surprise.

- Kentucky Route Zero - A sense of place and approach to dialogue and dialogue choices that all build on the atmosphere, characters and larger story in beautiful and impactful ways. It's use of interstitial games as part technical test and preview for each act is a really fantastic addition to the experience of waiting for each ones release. I've also said it before in other threads, but this is a game that sticks with and becomes a part of you well after you've played it.

- Halo: Combat Evolved - Decades later and this game still feels contemporary. Level design, the feeling of using the controls, The way it moves from moments of action to calm is so natural. Recently replayed it as part of the MCC, and even with it's original art its still striking.

- Riven: The Sequel to Myst - Still the apex of Cyan's body of work. The world building, design and sense of place is evocative and beautiful in such a rare way. It's one of the many examples of how a strong art direction can help a game hold up more so than anything made after it. Art direction so phenomenal that the act of finding it's box on my Grandfathers bookshelf felt like a part of playing the game.

• Super Metroid is almost there.
• Hard to imagine a better version of Into the Breach.
• inFamous 2 is a good one.
• Ditto Sly Cooper 2.
• Tony Hawk Pro Skater 3.
• Super Mario Odessey.
• Phantasy Star 4 might be perfect.
• Maybe Metal Gear Solid 5.
• Titan Fall 2 is perfect as you can get.

Its interesting that very few of the above are my favourite games in their respective genre. Perfection is kinda overrated isn't it?

Pretty sure no one does, but if anyone remembers me posting anything in these forums then this wouldn't surprise them:

runner-up: Dark Souls - a fleshed out, polished, feature-complete execution of the genre the team created. This is of course with the caveat of having to install DSFix and waiting for some pretty substantial game balance patches. What really sends this game close to the "perfect" realm for me is just how replayable it is. There are a massive amount of ways to play it, and hundreds of weapons and armor sets to find and mix-and-match.

winner: Bloodborne - the framerate stuff is a hard thing to get past. Every time I load the game up after a long break I have a moment where I think my PS4 must be dying or I'm not in Boost mode (apparently boost mode does absolutely nothing for Bloodborne anyway) or something else is wrong. The game hangs on asset loads constantly, rotating the camera is a guaranteed frame-hitch, and the general framerate is a very dramatic 20-40 FPS even discounting the hitches. BUT... here's the thing: I always eventually forget about all that. My brain acclimates and shuts off any awareness of those issues because the game is just that good. The atmosphere, the music, the combat, the feel is just so good. When I think of perfect games it always comes down to feel, and nothing feels better than Bloodborne. R1+L1+L1+L1 all day baby.

Also probably Spelunky if I had the patience to not sprint through it and impale myself on spikes.

I think it's easier for smaller games to be perfect, so most of my "perfect" games off the top of my head are indies.

• FTL is just absolutely perfect for what it is, so many different strategies and weapon loadouts. Even 8 years later, loading up FTL leads to me losing an hour or two to its addictive loop.
• VVVVVV is a very short platformer, but I'd also call that perfect. Fleshes out its core concept of "flipping" your character in almost every way imaginable, and ends before you can get tired of it. Decent light Metroid flavoring with the hub map as well.
• Thumper achieves exactly what it wants to achieve. Can't think of a single bug or shortcoming in its execution, though it is certainly an acquired taste. (Masochists who like intense drum music that doesn't even sound like music)

Almost every larger game has some "but" that keeps me from calling it perfect.

- Halo: Reach - My favorite Halo campaign, with some of the best combat and multiplayer an FPS can offer. And the MCC version makes it feel even better.

Funny thing about perfect games - they're rarely my actual favorites. See, I would agree that Halo Reach is, from a critical perspective, the best Halo game. Best put-together story, best campaign, no part of that game is bad. It is, at its very worst, "good" and at its very best "exceptional". It's not my favorite, though. My favorite is the original trilogy and I wouldn't take those three games any other way, warts and all, Flood-levels included. And that can be said about so many of the games I've played over and over and over again over the past decade. Recently, that would be Subnautica, a very flawed game that floored me nonetheless when I played it over Christmas last year and I've since spent 200 hours in it. Skyrim is easily one of my favorite games of all time even though, on paper, it looks like a straight-up bad game. I could go on about this, but really I just wanted to make that point - that just because a game is your favorite doesn't mean it's perfect and it's perfectly OK to love a game that you recognize is flawed or even bad.

That said...

There are several things that come to mind, here. Titanfall 2 takes the cinematic linear shooter formula and does it better than anyone else. That game has zero fat on it - every minute of its six hour campaign is meaningful, precise, beautiful, and controls amazingly well. I can't recommend that game's campaign enough to anyone who is even remotely interested in shooters. The multiplayer community is still around, I had no trouble finding some games last time I played it, though it doesn't seem very big anymore. Real shame, as the multiplayer is still a lot of fun, but the single player campaign was worth $60 then and is definitely worth the deep discounts it goes for today.

Minecraft. It's strange to say that the game that kicked off a genre is still better than pretty much everything else in its genre, but then the survival crafting genre has moved so far away from Minecraft's sandbox that the original game doesn't even feel like it belongs in that genre anymore. In any case, vanilla Minecraft is no more and no less complex than it needs to be - it strikes a perfect balance between having so much to do and see and create without any of it feeling impossible.

Metroid Prime is classic Nintendo game-making at its finest. Tons of exploration and enemies, things to find, logs to read, a brilliantly designed world - Metroid Prime is exemplary of all the best stuff that video games have to offer. I think Super Metroid has an even better world to explore, but there are a few rooms in Maridia that are not as fun to navigate as they should be. Metroid Prime has the endgame keyhunt, but I would say that's actually pretty good design. It gives the players a good reason to go on a tour of the world to find things they may have missed and it helps really sink in just how much more powerful you are at the end of the game.

I'd also count Chrono Trigger as perhaps the closest to perfect that a JRPG can be. Much like Titanfall 2, it feels like there's almost no filler in this game. It's probably got some plot holes somewhere, but Back to the Future probably also has plot holes somewhere and nobody brings that up because those movies are just too much damn fun. Chrono Trigger, in particular, has an amazing soundtrack, a wonderfully fun cast, a world that's always beautiful and interesting to explore, a story that's got a lot of stuff going on without ever forgetting that the whole thing is silly adventure-y fun.

There are probably some other things I could think of, but I'll go back to what I said before - I don't think that perfection necessarily means the most memorable, and what bothers some people might be A-OK for others so I wouldn't be surprised if someone sees my post and goes "ew, no, fuck that". I've seen Dark Souls mentioned a few times already and I have to wonder if those people have already forgotten the Bed of Chaos or Blighttown or the awful netcode that makes invasions kinda suck - no matter how much I wanted to put Dark Souls on here, I didn't for those reasons.

I can't agree with this at all. If I play a game that's running at less than 60FPS, I'm doing so in spite of the framerate. I'm certainly not forgetting about it. In the case of something like Bloodborne, which has really bad frame-timing and can't even keep 30 most of the time, I just stopped wanting to play it even though it's a game I really want to get into. I've been on PC so long that going back to 30 is unpleasant. It's not unplayable and I can "get used to it" again, but I don't want to.

It's like if you were to watch Pulp Fiction, but the cameras were running at 12FPS and not 24 (or whatever it was recorded at, as movies have variable framerates if I'm not mistaken). You could still understand everything about the movie, sure, and maybe even enjoy it, but it would certainly be a worse experience.

@development: Bloodborne, I mentioned frame pacing, but I really did forget about that pretty quickly (although it's more apparent now since the Pro came out and I'm accustomed to more stable games). It's a very minor gripe in that grand scheme of things, though, and it's one of my top games of the generation.

Since it relies so heavily on frame-perfect timing windows, it's probably the reason why it stands out more to me. I feel like once it gets an optimized version it'll be even better. So I guess my gripe with Bloodborne is that it's like 99.9% of the way there.

Metal Gear:Solid

WCW/NWO REVENGE

Zelda: OOT

Basically 1998 lol

Blood Omen: Legacy of Kain might be the most perfectly crafted piece of software.

Burnout Paradise

To this day there still hasn't been an open world racing game that comes anywhere near close to being as much fun or addictive.

A perfect game is a game that i can always play so my answer is none.

Well, using the OP's criteria for forming my "perfect games list":

Fallout 4, Senran Kagura Estival Versus, Need for Speed 2015 and Heat, Doom 2016, Dark Souls 1, Devil May Cry 3, and Persona 4.

@nexivselecaf: Hey, I thought I was the only one that really liked NFS: Heat.

I haven't actually played it myself, but from seeing someone else go through it, Baba is You honestly does seem like the perfect game to me. I can't think of a single blemish it has. It's difficult, but you don't have to play through every level linearly. It has completely consistent rules, which are both simple and used in a very creative way and it never gets dull or monotonous. The style is very distinctive and clear, and the music doesn't get distracting. It also doesn't have any story indie nonsense that Blows distractingly in its way.

I think indies and especially puzzle games have a very large advantage regarding perfection as they need to be accessible to people, are generally not resource intensive and can look and feel great while still having a single "vision" behind them (Baba was only made by one person). I have a very difficult time coming up with any non-indie game I would label as perfect. That being said, like some others said, most all of my favourites have some very clear flaws and I generally prefer it when games take risks that won't all pay out to when they completely rune off every corner.

@csl316: I know what you mean, since almost everyone else is on Forza Horizon's dick. NFS 2015 and Heat are basically Underground 3 and 4 which work very well for me since that's what I've been wanting since Criterion's Hot Pursuit.

@nexivselecaf: And bonus, DMC 3 was gonna be on my list. But I liked some of the combat additions later in the series enough to take it off. Although the quick-switching in the latest rerelease might be enough to win me over.

Based on OP's criteria, my personal perfect games are Assassin's Creed Odyssey, Fallout New Vegas and Batman Arkham Asylum. I can't think of any point in the many, many hours I've spent in those games where I've been frustrated or unhappy to be playing. Weirdly, even though I think it's "perfect" by OP's definition, I don't even know if Odyssey cracks my top 10 favorite games, and definitely not the top five. Most of my favorite games don't come close to the criteria, instead being sufficiently superlative in certain aspects that the bad parts get blotted out. The opening sewer sequence in Oblivion, the slog of quests to get the full Fus Roh Dah shout in Skyrim, the RC missions and the Wrong Side of the Tracks mission in San Andreas, the UI in Crusader Kings II, and the racing and herding missions in Red Dead Redemption are all disqualifying.

Starcraft BW, Secret & Curse of Monkey Island, Tetris, Sudoku, Diablo II, Age Of Mythology, Civilization 5, Dota 2, and Warcraft 3.

Oh, man. If we are talking perfection, then I could not tell you any game that has done this for me, other than tic-tac-toe. That is the most simple, easy to pick up and understand the game and does not frustrate you due to poor game mechanics and non-intuitive interface.

Even my most favorite games, I could not call perfect as they mostly frustrate me due to either engine limitations, bugs, or poor UI design.

@danwoods: Tic Tac Toe is quite flawed though. If you know what you are doing, you can't lose at Tic-Tac-Toe. If your opponent knows what they are doing, you can't win at Tic-Tac-Toe. The game is a zero sum game. If both players are playing with an optimal strategy, every game will end in a tie.

The perfect strategy is to place your symbol in the corner and hope that the opponent doesn't put his symbol in the middle. If the opponent does, it's a draw unless he's making mistakes.

If you go 2nd, it's almost impossible to win and requires your opponent to make mistakes. The best you can do if you play a decent player is a draw.

It's a super simple game to understand and play, but the actual game mechanics are very limited.

@csl316: Wow, Crash 2 and Sonic 2 are two of my favorite games growing up that I feel like are usually overlooked in these types of lists. Although I absolutely hate (the THREE??) Metropolis Zones.

Echoing Into the Breach, Burnout Paradise, and Mario Odyssey as deserving of this list.

I would also say either Mario Kart 64, DS, or 8 as being perfect entries in the series. Also, I haven't played it in a while, but I would maybe include Towerfall- the last time we played there was a room full of people of all ages and gaming experience playing it for hours.

Earthbound is perfection.

It's adorably charming, it flows well, it doesn't waste the player's time despite being a SNES JRPG, and when it takes a dark turn, it feels earned AND like it doesn't sacrifice all the charm and positivity that came before just to "stick it to the player." It starts on a high note and ends on one, and the journey to get there is perfectly paced.Also it's aged REMARKABLY well.

@inevpatoria: you joke but I actually liked that game. At the very least they were ahead of the loot based RPG stuff. And having Norse Ragnorock but with cyborgs and robots isn't too bad of an idea

Portal.

@slaegar: Yes, Portal. I still prefer the first because it's just so expertly designed and paced.

Original Starcraft.

Story was and still is one of the best old Blizard did. Not to mention if started e-sport scene and is still played in Korea to this day.

Off the top of my head, Hollow Knight, VA-11 Hall-A, and Tomb Raider reboot.

I have plenty more but some have already been cited.

Halo odst... semi open world + sandbox combat + great linear level design + sweet night vision hud + amazing soundtrack + interesting story. Perfect game.

Here's is the list I came up with while I should have been paying attention to my Company's virtual training:

Picross - I only recently started playing this, but my Switch's most played games are Picross S 1, 2, and 3. Fun to play, fantastic clues to get through, and Mega Picross is the evolution I didn't know I needed after finishing all the basic puzzles. Can't wait to go in on Color Picross next.

Tetris - The king of puzzle games. An undefeated OG that will never go out of style. Easy to pick up, nearly impossible to master (for me anyways).

Hitman's current trilogy - Sandbox perfection! Completely relies on the player to explore and experiment on their own, with a few guided missions. There is a hell of an art of learning a level and methodically picking it apart.

Overwatch - Kinda have second-thoughts about this one since they are constantly tweaking the heroes, but boy is it the best multiplayer game I played this decade.

Sekiro - Difficulty issues aside, once that game clicks, it fuckin CLICKS; bonus points for having it all rely on the player's skill and immediately testing that skill through boss fights, both large and small.

Outer Wilds - A behemoth of game design. The absolute craft that went into the design of the loop and the subtle clues that give the player the tools to solve the giant puzzle is unlike anything I have ever seen up to this point in games.

Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare "All Ghillied Up" mission - Not technically a game, but I dare you to find a better FPS campaign mission better than this one (besides Titanfall 2's Effect and Cause). The maximum level of cool guy shit all in the span of 15-30 minutes. Flawless in execution.

For this I'll exclude really sprawling, complex games and focus on smaller games that do one thing and do it really well. As I thought about more examples, there were a few categories that come to mind.

- Games that invent a perfectly fun control scheme and then design levels around it.

Mario 64. They narrow their focus to mostly just two things: 1) excellent controls, to the point where traversing itself is fun even without challenges or obstacles and 2) excellent level design. To this day no 3D platformer feels better to play except for its sequels which smooth out a few rough ends. The original Super Mario Bros. also falls into this category.

Tony Hawk definitely comes to mind; for me the best is 2. They took a similar approach here to Mario. There are no gimmicks, no nonsense, just very tight controls and excellent level design.

Doom (OG) is another one in this category. It's just fun to run around exploring and shooting demons with shotguns. There's no need for anything else like complex worldbuilding, skill trees, currency, dialogue. Those could be fun as well, but they would have taken the devs' focus away from perfecting what the game is best at. Early on I think there were plans for a much more ambitious game along these lines, but it was all stripped away to leave the core, fun elements. I hope someday Id goes back and does something this simple again. (Doom 2016 may be good but it gave me a headache to play.)

- Games that design a simple, core ruleset for fun, tactical battles, with few other extraneous systems.

FTL and Into the Breach. Both are in the same category for me: they take a very simple battle system and polish the hell out of it, extending it in interesting ways and removing all extraneous systems from the game that don't make contribute to making the battles more interesting. Slay the Spire, Advance Wars, Final Fantasy Tactics, and X-Com are also in this category.

- Games that take a simple core mechanic for mind-bending puzzles and push it to its fullest.

Portal 1, absolutely. There's really nothing to complain about (except maybe that it could ramp up a little faster in the beginning.) It's a game that takes exactly one great idea and pushes it to its full extent. (Portal 2 is also excellent but is a little long in the tooth and sometimes seems to be trying a bit too hard in the humor department.) Braid and The Witness also fall in this category. Also Chronotron comes to mind, a classic old flash game involving time travel.

ZeroRanger - extremely underrated, innovative even, actual perfection though. Legitimately without fault. Perfect music, perfect gameplay, perfect balancing system, great twists, insanely good level design, massive replayability, gorgeous art even if it is simplistic. And though it has a ton of influences in there, they are in there respectfully and with a twist.

Others that come to mind:

Dead Cells - they keep adding to it, it actually somehow gets "perfect-er" every few months

Dirt Rally

Into the Breach

Pokemon Fire Red / Leaf Green - probably others but like seriously these remakes of red/blue are perfect

Advance Wars

Rock Band 4

Celeste

Super Meat Boy

Zelda Minish Cap

SuperHot / SuperHot VR / Mind Control Delete

Skate 1 ( I think Skate 2 is more fun and Skate 3 has more stuff, but they're not "perfect")

Soul Calibur Dreamcast - as a fighting game package (extras, single player, multiplayer, costume unlocks, character unlocks, looked better than arcade, 60fps) and one of the best launch games of all time

to OP, I think BOTW is damn close but has 2 small flaws - 1.) I don't believe the way stamina works while climbing adds anything meaningful to the game and just makes it so you use your climbing clothes pretty much all the time. If anything have the stamina but then keep the max static and design the game's world around it. Also stamina need not be expended when you're running. If it can be overcome by grinding or harvesting items, I don't believe it adds anything except fluff to the actual game itself, which is massive and needs no more reasons "not" to "go over here". Just let me climb up there and search for Korok seeds for 5 more hours. 2.) The story and ending were both straight whack. I love BOTW, I think it is definitely my favorite 3D zelda game.

Games that are damn close but I get why people get frustrated by them, they do have small flaws:

Sekiro - too specific, and when it's teaching the player, it doesn't do a great job of it. Like a fighting game without a tutorial explaining everything from i-frames to recovery to punishment.

Bloodborne - if they took all the best chalice dungeon ideas and put them in the main game, and replenished blood vials upon death, cleaned up the frame pacing - it would be perfect.

Hollow Knight - map and save points, I like the system but I get why people don't

FTL - its just too punishing, and the RNG can be merciless, maybe that's the fun, but honestly "Normal" should be labeled "Hard" and there should be more options

Super Mario World - it's real damn close but I think towards the end the levels get a lot less fun, and less imaginative, and going back to"level x" to grab a yoshi or a cape and then come back to a level to find the exit, isn't fun, it's tedious.

Jet Set Radio - reallll damn close but sometimes the level design and map can be too confusing and break the flow of the game, I get that is the discovery aspect but I don't think it really adds anything.

I'm probably ranting - that's all that came to mind

@aktane: My experience with BOTW is weird. Because I played it and loved it but went "eh" on the story. Then I bought the art book, which has a ton of backstory and makes the world feel way richer.

So then I went back to do the DLC, and my current memory of BOTW is running around this land and imagining all the history I read about. "I'm standing at the battle of Akkala Citadel! Look at the remains of Fort Hateno!" Which is kind of bs because that stuff could've been incorporated into the game, but my memory merged the game and the book and that's where I stand now.

@csl316: oh I fucking need this book is what you've just proven to me!!! :)