The 6 Best Video Games Released Since 2020, Ranked

Published Oct 15, 2026, 1:08 PM EDT There are games you finish, and there are games that temporarily reorganize your life. You start thinking about builds while brushing your teeth. You hear a soundtrack cue in your head when nobody is playing anything. You swear you are only checking one side path and somehow it is 2:17 a.m. and you have accidentally discovered an underground civilization, adopted three strangers, betrayed a god, or spent forty minutes trying to launch a wooden cart off a mountain because the physics looked funny. That is the level we are dealing with here. These games do not merely contain great combat or good stories. They create obsession through completely different means. These are my 6 favorite video games released since 2020. 6 'Clair Obscur: Expedition 33' (2025) Image via Sandfall Interactive Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 begins in Lumière, where an entity known as the Paintress wakes once a year and paints a number on a distant monolith. Everyone of that age immediately disappears. When she paints “33,” Gustave and the latest expedition cross the sea with one purpose: reach her and somehow stop the cycle before another generation is erased. That premise already has teeth, but what floored me was how beautiful the game is willing to be while talking constantly about death. Sandfall Interactive built Belle Époque elegance into something dreamlike and rotten, full of impossible landscapes, broken architecture, and characters who know their own clocks are running out. Then the combat starts asking you to stay physically engaged instead of hiding behind menu choices. Parries, dodges, timed attacks — suddenly a turn-based battle has your entire body leaning toward the screen. And the story keeps taking emotional swings I genuinely did not expect. This is one of those games where saying too much is vandalism. Go in knowing the expedition is doomed enough to understand the urgency. Let the rest hit you properly. 5 'Astro Bot' (2024) Image via Team ASOBI I had forgotten how good it feels when a game simply wants you to smile. Astro Bot sends the tiny robot hero across a galaxy of compact platforming worlds after his PS5-shaped mothership is wrecked, scattering his crew and vital ship parts across dozens of planets. Team Asobi takes that excuse and turns it into a toy box. One level gives Astro giant punching gloves. Another shrinks him. Another lets him absorb water until he becomes an adorable walking balloon. The references to PlayStation history are wonderful, but nostalgia is almost the least interesting thing about it. The reason this game landed so hard is movement. Astro’s feet patter differently across metal and glass. Sand shifts. Controllers vibrate. Tiny robots cheer when you rescue them. A hidden platform can make you laugh before you even land on it. There is no insecurity here about being colorful or cute or straightforwardly fun. In an era where every major release sometimes feels pressured to become a hundred-hour lifestyle, Astro Bot strolls in, hands you a penguin power-up, and reminds you that delight is still a serious design achievement. 4 'Hades II' (2025) Image via Supergiant Games Melinoë has a wonderfully horrible family problem. In Hades II, the immortal witch-princess trains in the Crossroads to defeat Chronos, the Titan of Time, after he seizes the House of Hades and imprisons much of her family. Supergiant Games takes the foundation of the original Hades and shifts the entire emotional temperature. Zagreus was trying to escape home. Melinoë is trying to reclaim one. You feel that difference everywhere. Her combat is more ritualistic, more deliberate, full of witchcraft, cast circles, Ω attacks, familiars, incantations, and boons from gods who somehow remain extremely attractive while discussing divine warfare. But the secret weapon is still failure. You lose a run and come home richer in conversation. Hecate comments on your progress. Nemesis gets under your skin. Odysseus has advice. Moros appears with that wonderfully doomed energy. Then you go out again because maybe this combination of Apollo, Aphrodite, and Hestia will turn you into an unstoppable catastrophe. Supergiant somehow understands that a roguelike becomes addictive when dying feels less like losing progress and more like returning to people you wanted to see anyway. 3 'The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom' (2023) Image via Nintendo The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom starts with Link and Zelda exploring beneath Hyrule Castle, where they awaken an ancient evil connected to Ganondorf. Zelda disappears, Link loses much of his strength, the Master Sword is shattered, and enormous islands suddenly hang in the sky above a Hyrule that now has an entire nightmare world hidden underneath it. And Nintendo’s response to all of that is basically: here, glue this wheel to a plank and see what happens. That should not work. It works magnificently. Ultrahand lets you attach objects together, which means the game stops treating environmental puzzles as questions with one respectable answer. Need to cross a ravine? Build a bridge. Build a car. Build a terrible aircraft that flips over immediately. Strap twelve fans to a sled and become an enemy of engineering. Fuse turns random junk into weapons. Recall lets you reverse an object’s movement. Ascend makes ceilings feel suspicious because suddenly every roof might be a doorway. I love Tears of the Kingdom because Nintendo gives you godlike tools and then tolerates your stupidity with extraordinary patience. Half the adventure is saving Hyrule. The other half is discovering whether a machine powered by six rockets can launch a Korok into low orbit. 2 'Elden Ring' (2022) Image via FromSoftware The first person in Elden Ring who tells you your destiny also insults you. You are Tarnished. You have returned to the Lands Between after the shattering of the Elden Ring, and eventually you are supposed to gather Great Runes and become Elden Lord. That sounds like a standard heroic mission until FromSoftware actually lets you loose and you realize practically every beautiful object on the horizon has something underneath it capable of killing you in two hits. Nothing prepared me for walking out into Limgrave the first time. There is the Erdtree dominating the sky, ruined churches in the distance, a mounted knight patrolling five minutes from your starting point, and absolutely nobody explaining which direction is “correct.” So you wander. That generosity is what makes it extraordinary. Miyazaki and the team at FromSoftware did not make discovery a checklist reward. They made discovery feel slightly illegal. You constantly stumble into things that seem too significant to have been hidden where you found them. Malenia can become an optional obsession. Ranni’s quest can consume an entire evening of reading item descriptions and texting friends, “Where the hell is Blaidd?” Elden Ring trusts curiosity more than instructions, and once a game gives you that feeling, normal open worlds start looking suspiciously organized. 1 'Baldur's Gate 3' (2023) Image via Larian Studios My favorite thing about Baldur's Gate 3 is that it is completely willing to let you be an idiot and then honor the consequences. The game opens with your character infected by a mind flayer parasite that should eventually transform you into one of the creatures responsible. You escape the nautiloid carrying that problem into the Forgotten Realms, meet other infected survivors, and start looking for a cure while the situation grows into something vastly larger involving the Absolute, ancient powers, rival factions, and a collection of companions whose personal disasters could each support their own RPG. That explanation barely captures what playing it feels like. Larian Studios built a world where ridiculous ideas keep receiving legitimate responses. Talk your way through the encounter. Pickpocket the important object. Turn into an animal. Stack crates until geometry stops being somebody else’s problem, and so much more. Shove the enemy off a cliff. Throw another enemy at the first enemy. That is why it sits at number one. Choice in games is usually advertised through branches. Baldur's Gate 3 makes choice feel behavioral. Who did you trust when you did not yet understand them? What did you forgive? That is absurd. That is also the dream. Baldur's Gate 3 Released August 3, 2023 ESRB M Developer(s) Larian Studios Publisher(s) Larian Studios Franchise Baldur's Gate