I like a podcast by the Crashlands devs, and instead of talking about great or perfect games, they talk about games that “nailed it” vs “missed the mark.” There’s no such thing as a singular perfect game, but games that flawlessly execute their devs’ vision or games that click with you, personally, in a way that other games just don’t.

My personal example is Magicka, because it’s incredibly janky and flawed and has the worst fucking netcode I’ve ever seen that still technically works. But the free-flowing spellcasting and globally-enabled friendly fire, it’s a combination that hit me so perfectly it actually shifted my taste in games ever since. It feels like something is missing now when a game doesn’t trust me enough to give me enough power to be a danger to myself.

Left 4 Dead 2

I consider Factorio very close to perfect. It does what it wants to do very well and has a functional but pretty visual look.

Ori and the Blind Forest and especially its sequel, Will of the Wisps, are both games where I genuinely don’t have any critiques of the gameplay or story. There are some games that I like playing more, like Elden Ring, because they have more things to do and choices and such, but those two games for me have immaculate vibes and perfectly execute the vision of the developers.

It’s very easy for sequels of games to become overloaded in the quest to add more stuff so that they feel like different games, which usually comes in the form of adding lots of discrete subsystems which can be interesting but often not very intuitive for new players especially in aggregate. This is not so for Will of the Wisps, where there are new abilities but all of them feel like completely natural things that you should obviously be able to do, and are very simple. The most “complicated” addition is an improved combat system with more choices especially for boss battles, but the first game relied on chase sequences rather than battles, so it’s not as if you could critique the first game for not having a better combat system for boss battles when it doesn’t even have them (it would be like critiquing Portal for not having a hunger system or something). And the combat system in WotW is kept pretty tight and simple and the animations and how they chain together have the correct physics and weightiness.

A game like Path of Exile on the other hand is really my nightmare game, where it feels like the whole thing is just a shitload of discrete subsystems duct-taped together without a strong skeleton holding it together. Most games fall on a spectrum between the “streamlined, simple, tight” design and the “chaotic, complicated, expansive” design though.