I hate to be that person but the original foreign film was much better. Jake Gyllenhaal slays as usual but I found a lot of the other actors to be not quite up to snuff and it made some of the more dramatic moments feel overly theatrical. The few cuts away from the action that happened took away from the small scale of the film, as well. The restrained set decorating of the original and the extremely spartan cinematography let the actors and their emotions shine where the remake felt... forced? It felt more like a Blumhouse horror film in that the low-budget feeling was more like a conscious marketing choice and not a genuine restriction or even a creative choice. Don't get me wrong I'll sit and watch that man do damn near anything for an hour and a half, but as a movie it didn't hit quite the same way.
Your points about the writing are probably what I actually miss most about The Darkness over its sequel. Machine Games, or the Starbreeze of yesteryear, had a really fascinating dedication to letting you really live in the head of the character you were playing as. The Darkness 2 keeps that dedication to the viewpoint but ends up missing out on exploring Jackie as a fully-fledged character in the same way that the first game did. And also, I am not a fan of the whole "is this real or are you craaaazyyyy?" fakeouts in stories, because it entirely derails the actual plot and is rarely done with an eye towards theme and is more for shock value.
I feel like your argument against God of War (a game I have no interest in) not deserving the win because of how iterative it is falls a bit flat when your finalists are Super Mario World (directly building on SMB 3 which is a massive step up from Super Mario Bros) and Civilization IV. I think SMW is great and really enjoy the Firaxis output, but I don't see how either of them are less iterative than God of War which at least had interesting artistic direction with its single shot camerawork.
But yes, agreed with others here that lists like this are stupid as there is no objective best game of all time. The only thing more silly than creating a "Best game of all time" bracket in the first place, is to then argue with it and talk about the real best game of all time the other list missed.
The problem with the single-shot GoW thing is that the game was constantly broken up by pausing every 35 seconds to put on better pants. It would be like if Victoria the film had an intermission every ten minutes. It was absolutely pointless.
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