The first catch is that I think I love long sentences, and I'm very aware that I love ellipses and parenthesized comments.

The second catch is... If you know enough about a game that is not quite perfect and have spent enough time with them, sometimes your love and attention comes through as a detailed and needlessly constructive identification of flaws. This is a habit of mine that I often use as a tool for an exploration of ideas, but it’s completely uncalled for in a celebration of a long, long decade of the vast, vast growth of video games, and they're mostly re-raising issues that the devs are probably already well aware of and couldn't (and probably shouldn't) even address. Given *any* of these games, I absolutely can go for a long time discussing the ins and outs of them. It takes a fine touch and the right context for constructive criticism to be properly constructive, and there's a wide gulf between convincing you that I care about something versus convincing you that you should care that I care about something.

Overall, though, the biggest limitation for any list that I can muster up is whether or not I got around to playing something. It’s rough. If you don't see a game here, it's because I haven't gotten around to it, for some reason or other. ...or I forgot about it. There are a lot of people out there, and therefore there are a lot of games. Even in the depths of the trench of derivative games built for quick money, there is exploration of the space of possible games, and there is often some morsel creativity itching to reach something new.

I also tend to take a long time before I "feel like" playing something. My backlog is huge.



But before we get to the games...

On to the actual lists! I've divided this fine burlap sack of games-of-the-decade into three lists, if only because I primarily want to talk about the games that aren't talked about. This is not a good habit, but at least it makes for clean breaks between the lists.
Except for the first list (which is completely random), these lists are (very) softly ordered. The ordering that you see isn't permanent and involved minimal agonizing-over, but I stand behind it.

I'll start with a shoutout of games that range from ones that I’m not necessarily entirely positive on, but I either admire them or think they cover an important niche, to ones that barely missed making the ‘top’ top list. These are in a random order:

You know these games. These are softly ordered, and cover the same span of positivity as the two other lists, but… you already know these games. There is an enormous number of places where you can find more comprehensive takes, and for me to add to this would take much more work than I have time for -- if only because this is quite a long list!

My top picks, both excellent and unique, ones I feel I want to shout out the most.