What game do you think came closest to being "perfect"?

Maybe Tetris? Such a simple concept, and it's one of the most popular games of all time.

Minecraft for similar reasons. Even if it has become more complex in recent years, the core of it is just...you can break everything and build anything. It's hard to say that isn't a perfect sandbox.

More personal opinion though, maybe Super Mario Odyssey. Just incredibly polished and varied with an amazing movement system.

Tetris is a game that just doesn't get old.

It's really you against your previous self, rather than you against the game.

It's the same reason why I enjoy Mini Motorways so much!
Tetris is an interesting one because you've got 3+ decades of variations on the original, but the original is still the best. I'd argue it's a perfect game.
- I personally disagree that the original is best. It's high up there, but I think some of the later titles have improvements that eek out the #1 spot.
  
  I'm a fan of the "piece swap" feature, and later games have polished the piece lock over the original. Tetris 99 was the sweet spot for games that I've played.

Outer Wilds. I consider it the best video game ever made and I've spent quite some time thinking about if there's something I could add, change or remove that would improve it and so far I've yet to come up with anything of substance (beyond tiny QoL changes or reeeally nitpicky stuff).

I've just joined beehaw, this is my first browse, and one of the first comments I see is for Outer Wilds... Feels good. One of my favourite games / stories / media / art pieces ever. I love it and all of the brilliant minds behind it, I've never thought so about a game once finished anywhere near as much as this one.
I still need to get around playing the DLC but I feel like I'd need to watch a video to get caught up on the story. That said, yeah, the gameplay and story is absolutely incredible. Perfectly-executed mystery box.
You could always add the DLC :D (I'm half joking of course, but it's soooo good. I think it's on par, if not a little bit better, than the main game.)
Outer Wilds is one of the more interesting games to come out in recent memory, but personally I just didn't like the

spoiler

fairly tight (for me) time limit. I like to do things at a slower pace for a variety of reasons, and I'd love to have a way to change the time scale so that things don't happen in just 20-something minutes.

I know it theoretically gives you infinite time to explore and do stuff, but that one cycle is always ~20 minutes, and that's what I'd love to be able to slow down.

Chrono Trigger. It's basically the evolutionary peak of the NES-era console RPG. Every aspect, including the story, art, game mechanics, and music, are best-in-class, with no obvious room for improvement given the technical constraints of the time.

I have great expectation in Sea of Stars exactly because I loved Chrono Trigger suo much.
- Had the same expectations for I am Setsuna, but from what I saw in gameplay and reviews, it was disappointing. Hopefully Sea of Stars will be a good one
Holy shit Chrono Trigger rocked my world so fucking hard. I played it on an emulator in like 2000. I've forgotten a lot of stuff yet I still remember the impression this game left on me. It was like holding my breath at the end there goddamn.

Super Metroid. It's an amazing game if you play it normally, and you can branch out into sequence breaking tricks pretty easily. It basically created/popularized an entire genre of games.

There are lots of great choices here, but Super Metroid is mine as well.

Gorgeous game, great music, not horrifically difficult once you figure things out.

Gotta be Portal 2. The puzzles are fun, the difficultly curve is reasonable, and the writing is fantastic. Truly the only complaint I have is that I wish there was more of it.

Can we go really old with these?

Because Zelda Link to the Past is a perfect game.

I know how ubiquitous it is, but I still replay it on a regular basis. Its perfectly designed, balanced, simple... Im not saying its superior to modern games or something stupid, I just think its pretty flawless. That is all.

1000% agree. Im a huge fan of all things Legend of Zelda and this one still stands as a masterpiece to me as well.
Have you ever looked into any randomizers for ALTTP? They'll give you a whole new experience in playing the game.

With Archipelago, you can even play with other people playing other randomized games. A Hollow Knight player might need you to find their mantis claw so they can get to the boss that has your hookshot and so on.

FTL. It took a concept and ran with it. Plus a great soundtrack. It has a great replay value as well.

The original Deus Ex. The storyline, the way the game world reacted to your actions and made it feel like your actions were relevant to the world around you instead of just being a static place where stuff happened to you...

I think I would have to go with Stardew Valley. It has something for any mood I’m in.

I can spend my time on the farm, looking after the animals, crops, reorganising. I can go and be social with the neighbours, help them out, do some work towards the community centre. If I feel adventurous I can go explore the mines fighting monsters.

Where I’ve done all that I can start again on a new farm and try a different strategy, I can even play with friends and work together. Its just cozy fun.

Don't forget the rich modding possibilities and the exhaustive mod landscape.
- I couldnt speak to them as Ive never tried the mods. They look cool though.
  
  I first got Stardew, on my switch, during my university days. My wife and myself spent a couple of weeks over christmas playing everytime we could. I have purchased it on PC but not really played it.
  
  I mainly play it now on my phone, its a perfect stress reliever, I can nip on for 5 minutes and still achieve something. Neither support the mods!
  
  One day I will get into the mods! oh yes

I would interpret "perfect" as "i can't find anyhing negative to say about this game". So for me the candidates are:

Portal 1&2
Factorio
Outer Wilds
FTL
TowerFall: Ascension
Dishonored 2
Prey (the Arkane studios one)
Minit
and maybe Nidhogg

The Hunt for Red October on the C64 - varied levels, great art and music, really good difficulty curve.

Factorio. The game automatically adjusts difficulty based on your speed and familiarity. Pros scaling rapidly are going to have a harder time with biters than a noob learning the ropes on the exact same difficulty settings. Difficulty settings can be scaled up for a true challenge. Mods are supported damn near as much as first party devs. It’s a very well optimized game. It’s just technically impressive, psychologically fun, and fundamentally well balanced.

Control seems pretty good at what it wants to do. Nice graphics and soundtrack, fluid movement in combat (closest description I could think of) and cool, intriguing story. It also has one of the best video game quests I've played: Ashtray Maze

Skyrim (despite the numerous bugs) is another one I will say is close to perfect. Really good game and the community is pretty great as well.

Skyrim. It's a beautiful game, even now when I play it I take a moment to just look at how gorgeous the scenery is. I love the quests and that you can own a horse/house/child/ get married. I love the potions and crafting and customisation.

I don't think there are many games quite like Skyrim

Hades. I don't think I've come across a game so carefully paced as Hades, both plot-wise and in the gradual introduction of game mechanics. Which is bloody impressive considering that it's a roguelite.

My vote is for Slay the Spire. Invented the deck-building roguelike genre and did so with an interesting setting, simple but appealing artstyle, memorable soundtrack, and very tight balancing across 21 difficulty levels.

Also Tetris, but that's already been said.

Fata Morgana.

Listen, whether you like Visual Novels or not doesn't matter. But Fata Morgana is just somehow...perfect. Everything is resolved and I don't feel any need to complain about any aspect of it. It was an experience to play a game that left me with no questions afterwards. It was just a really good story.

My answer to this is always Portal, the first one. It was so unexpected and so, so good. Nothing in gaming before or since has been that magical of an experience for me. Maybe early Pokemon, when my little kid eyes were opening to what gaming could be. But there's just something special about Portal. Such a concise, perfect little game.

Portal's beauty is in it's shortness. Perfectly paced, it takes the basic idea, plays with it, twists it, and finishes before it can overstay its welcome. In and out in an afternoon.

For a game to be perfect I think it's got to be absolutely pinpoint in achieving what it sets out to do. Doesn't matter if it's a small game, or an expansive open world.

I'm gonna go with Superhot. For my money it took an idea, and ran with it to its natural conclusion. It's laser focused on that one core mechanic and pulls it off so well that I don't think anyone else has even tried to replicate it.

I’ve said it 1 million times and so have many others, but it is and will always be Ocarina of Time. It’s the only game I play through every single year and still love every single second of it.

Chrono Trigger: every aspect (graphics, gameplay, story, music, replayability...) has such level of polishness that it's still outstanding almost 30 years later.
No other JRPG has come even close and, as a Final Fantasy fan, that's hard to admit

Both Portal games are perfect. Portal 1 did some much great stuff and portal 2 said fuck it and decided to be more perfect then the first.

I respect this, but always had trouble with portal 2. It has some great parts but is also way too long.

A big one for me is Fallout 1. I only played it for the first time a few years ago and it is one of the only games where as soon as I finished it I wanted to start it again. The only reason I didn't was to play Fallout 2. There is an extremely valid argument that Fallout 2 is better, but the pacing of 1 is so good. It opened up a whole (niche) genre of games I thought I didn't like, isometric crpgs, especially ones with turn based combat, relatively low player power, and serious consequences.

The other game I could replay over and over again was Metal Gear Solid 1. In my opinion it is the best in the series relative to its time of release, if that makes sense.

Also obviously Halo CE.

Zelda Links Awakening. It's a perfect clock, every wheel in place.

I’m more into links awakening, but they are really the same era and similar in many ways.

It's hard to define perfection but Return Of The Obra Dinn has very few flaws IMO. I can only complain about relatively minor UX problems. Everything else is incredible. I still think about the story years later and the music gets stuck in my head to this day. It is such a consummate achievement of game dev and its design achieves maximum results with the limited resources of a solo gamedev.

Guild Wars, especially for the PvP mode. I loved the visual feeling of the game, it felt sharper and less cartoony than a WoW.

Some classes were kind of novel too at the time.

And the feature I loved was the limited skillset you had to chose : you could be lvl 20 (max) and know 30 spells but you could only pick 5 in your active bar. It made for so many interesting builds and combinations !

I have to agree with you there. The music, the scenery, the plot, just the general aesthetic of the game was incredible. It created an experience in play. I can't tell you how many times I restarted characters and classes to play through in a slightly different experience. I still pick it up and play occasionally, even though I'm the only one from my guild who has logged in for the past 3 years, it's nice to just see and experience the game again.
Guild Wars

Aaah, that game really left a hole in my heart that was never really filled again. Build crafting during school, playing in the evenings -- those were the days. I also loved how the game forced team play much more than other MMORPG's. And then there's the lore, the beautiful zones... Truly pretty close to perfect!

Undertale, for me. I have 0 problems with the game. Art style is great. Controls are great. Story is likely the most compelling I personally have seen. Not to mention the very appropriate humour.

Lots of contenders for me: Resident Evil 2, A Link to the Past, Ocarina of time, Goldeneye, Half-Life, Diablo II, Skyrim, Alien: Isolation, Borderlands 2, Mario 64

But I gotta go with Runescape

My vote goes to Shadow of the Colossus. The story, the mood, those damn creatures. Just enough frustration to keep you going and enough variation to not make it boring.

If we're going really old school, then Space Invaders. Its way of leveraging the hardware at the time to make the enemies and music speed up after you defeat more of them is elegant. Back then, the more things a game had on screen, the slower it ran. So, destroying more enemies removes more things from the screen, causing both enemies and music to speed up.

This is something that's taken for granted today, but I think at the time, it was genius.

Apparently that speed up was originally a bug https://www.svg.com/293293/details-you-didnt-know-about-space-invaders/

Metroid Prime has to be pretty far up there. It was a bold step forward for an established franchise that could have gone wrong so many different ways, but holy cow they nailed it. The controls are probably the only weak part, but to be fair dual analog controls hadn't really caught on yet. Every area of the map has character. So many of the boss fights are memorable, from Omega Pirate being fueled by raw Phazon and destroying its own soldiers, to Thardus whiting out the whole arena, to Meta Ridley wrecking the shit out of the Artifact Temple. The music is great, bringing back bangers from previous games, subtly remixing in other motifs from the past as well to give the game a familiar feeling, while adding beautiful new ambient music of it's own. The plot progresses forward with only a limited amount of cut scenes and dialog. It combined two genres in an innovative new way that 20+ years later still hasn't really been recreated yet.

And then once you've finished playing everything and finding every last thing as intended, there's still more fun to be had in learning some of the more basic glitches to get items way earlier than intended. Giving the devs the middle finger by getting items the first time around without taking a long backtracking trip later to come back and get it. Speeding through areas and blasting through boss fights with equipment and weapons you're not supposed to have yet. It contributed in large part to the birth of the modern speedrunning scene as people came up with more and more creative ways to get around formerly impassable obstacles.

20+ years old now, and it still holds up (as long as you play Primehack or Remastered to get more modern controls).

The only thing I feel could've been done better in Prime 1 is the map. I don't think it aged well in that aspect, but you couñd argue that's a nitpick

In very recent times, I honestly believe Zelda:TotK is very close to being perfect.

Bioshock I think, loved it so much. Excellent writing and graphic design. Wish the remaster had improved the visuals more tho

Yesssss loved this game. Played all three and nothing hits like the first one.
- Truth. I still love Infinite, though. I may be in the minority for that, but it's such a bizarre atmosphere and the imagery and soundtrack really stuck with me. Welcome to the circus of VALUE!

I think Terraria? Especially with the years it's had to grow and improve.

I have always been a fan of stealth games. Dishonored (especially the first) scratched the itch perfectly! It's atmospheric. It's not open world, but each level has its own area to explore that is filled to the brim with stories, sometimes a small side quest etc. I also love how you get to influence the ending.

Celeste has just perfect controls and pacing. I still think about it. I wasn't as touched by the story as others but many were. I'm still playing Super Mario World and find it so impressive and charming.

Witcher 3. They very well combined open world with story telling, with tons of side quests, many of which affect the story. The characters aren't one dimensional. For example Bloody Barron is a low life, but also draws sympathy as he pays for his sins from the past. The world is also unforgiving, many times you have to make a decision between shitty option and even shit tier option. The graphics and characters are also very detailed. All of that creates a great atmosphere.

If you haven't played it, you should give it a try.

I was going to say Outer Wilds but somebody beat me to it, so I'll say Final Fantasy 6 instead.

The Pixel remaster on mobile and Switch is a great version but it's missing the bonus content from the GBA release.

For me, probably Half-Life 2. Especially at the time? It was such a leap ahead in both technology and overall world immersion. I still revisit it sometimes and get sucked right back in.

I’ll agree with you on Beatles Rock Band too, though. It’s a work of art.

ive never played a half life game before. maybe i should start
- The original Half Life is pretty fun, but I'd recommend checking out Black Mesa. It's a remake of the original game in the same engine that Half-Life 2 uses, and changes some things for the better.

Fallout: New Vegas. Wait now, don't laugh at me. I'm painfully aware it was built on an engine that just does not cooperate and crashes regularly. BUT, the gameplay itself, the roleplaying, the fights (yes I do like VATS), and the choices by god the choices. So many choices with so many consequences, telltale wishes they were this cool. The only thing for me that's holding this game back is 1) the rickety engine it's attempting to balance on, and 2) unfinished quest lines. The devs for this game had so many brilliant ideas that never made it on screen, I don't know if they shot themselves in the foot, or if the deadlines were unrealistic. Even though some of the main quests between the warring factions feel lopsided, and some interesting things seem to go to a dead-end, the game never felt unfinished to me. There was so much to do and try, I never felt cheated by the game in narrative. Instead, I just want more because it was awesome how interactive the world was. It responded to my decisions and made a unique playthrough because of my decisions, I don't believe the predecessors even come close to this. Sure 3 and 4 kept similar mechanics, but the game didn't react to your choices. If I had one wish it would be to see Fallout New Vegas as the devs intended, with every plot line completed and polished, I'd even continue to play it on its rickety system. Though this would need to be a magical wish because there's no way that engine could handle the work needed, and converting this content to a new engine would be very expensive (so I'm told). I know she's not perfect, but goddamn she has the potential to be.

Outer Wilds

Agreed. There is something very special about Outer Wilds

Dragon Age. I literally fell in love with Alistair while studying for my masters, so it must have been an excellent storyline for an RPG. I also played it through in full twice because it turned out my initial character choice made my perfect ending impossible..

The two games I wish I could play for the first time again are Dragon Age and Bioshock.

The events that transpired at Ostagar, man, got you into that game REAL quick.

Perfection is overrated. Most of my favorite gaming experiences are with games of which I would be able to cite plenty of flaws.

I like games with sharp edges.

That said, there are a lot of good games being mentioned in these comments.

What's a favorite example of a game you love in spite of genuinely painful sharp edges?

Super Mario RPG for SNES. ... I'm old

Easily one of my favorite RPGs.

Also it's getting a remaster(and I'm not old :P) so there are and/or will be more young fans than what you realize

Outer Wilds

It's always Outer Wilds

I'm a little conflicted. The experience of the game was definitely perfect, but the nature of it also means replay value is low. It almost feels weird to try to compare it to, say, a Skyrim or whatever.
- I don't think a game has to be replayable to be perfect

To The Moon

Firstly, it's fairly short, which I appreciate in a game that's primarily story-driven. Secondly, the story is damn near perfect. When I got to the reveal towards the end I actually sobbed (quietly, in a manly way). No other game has ever affected me that way.

I feel the same!! It's been almost ten years since I played it and it STILL sticks with me.

Hollow knight. The gameplay, the smoothness of the controls, but also the universe, the atmosphere, the fantastic music. Absolutely wonderful game.

Hollow Knight is the best game I've inexplicably never finished