5: Sekiro - One of the best modern works of gothic horror in any medium (yes better than Bloodborne and Souls). A tight central narrative tied into a much deeper lore than is apparent at first glance. Also informed by Buddhist morality, which is pretty cool.
4: Ark - You can shoot a rocket launcher at robots from the back of a Giganotosaurus. What's not to love?
3: Spec Ops: The Line - A controversial game, but one of the only shooters in existence to actually critique the bloody imperialist power fantasy that all modern shooter games inherently are. It spat on Call of Duty and gave the finger to every ooh-rah Marine dipshit who thought they were buying another game to fellate themselves with.
2: Disco Elysium - self explanatory
1: Journey - Less a game and more an interactive therapy tool. Helped bring me out of a major depressive spiral way back when. Play it on mescaline and it becomes a spiritual experience. Also a playable deconstruction of The Hero's Journey story framework, which I just enjoyed aesthetically.
Undertale: It set the bar of what you can achieve in video games as a single person. It's deeply creative, charming, funny and one of the few games to truly subvert their outward appearance. And the music is perfect.
Bastion: Supergiant Games are perhaps one of the most wonderful game maker out there and this is where it started. It's deeply atmosphaeric, outright beautiful, has an extremely fun core gameplay loop and the narrator blows it out of the water. The world appearing under your feet is such a terrific effect, it stunned me when i first played it.
Dota 2: Yeah. It's a rage inducing, highly stressfull, super competetive game that requires an absurd amount of knowledge and practice to even get the basic shit done.. but there is nothing quite like it. Making the right play in Dota is an adrenaline rush that is just intoxicating. The skill ceiling is practically infinite, and it still somehow retains a bit of the charme of a game developed by some modmakers in the mid 2000s. I'm playing this shit since 2008 and keep coming back to it.
Dark Souls: I've tried like 5 times to get into it. After the 5th time it clicked and the rest is history. I'm grateful it exists and that is has gotten so popular. It showed that there can be success outside the repetive Ubisoft-"gameplay" garbage they've been selling us for years. That respecting the players intelligence and skill is a virtue, not a fault.
Nuclear Throne: Just throwing a lesser known game out there. It's a chaotic, unforgiving (notice a trend?) , excstatic top-down roguelike shooter. It's the perfect "one more round" game, it's surprisingly deep, tactical and just straight up fun. Vlambeer were a developer duo that excelled in arcade-y, lo-fi, shooters and this is their masterpiece. It's also pretty funny and has some cute lore. If you got some time to kill and like to shoot things, this is it.