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What is your eleventh favorite video game?
Now that we know everyone's favorites, I'd love to hear about games that are further down the list -- the ones that don't necessarily rise to the high heights of definitive favoritedom.
So, share your eleventh favorite game this time. You know, the one that doesn't quite make it into your top 10.
Feel free to share your top 10 if you like as well, but lead with your 11th, as those are the ones I'm interested in seeing highlighted.
The Witness is a strange game. On the surface it's one of the most meticulous puzzle games ever crafted: you go from panel to panel drawing a single line. The lines start off easy, being a simple maze, but then new elements are added to the panels. The game never tells you what they mean, instead you are expected to learn by solving the puzzles.
The game is first person. For a game about drawing lines on panels. On the surface this does not make sense. The game never tells you why it's first person, instead you are expected to find out why by examining the world around you.
If you fire up the minimum number of lasers and make your way to the end, the great glass elevator flies around the island, your work is undone, and your game is reset back to the very start. You were not ready. Try again.
The Witness has a moment, an epiphany, and it's usually different for everyone. There is a place in the game that explicitly to try and get you to have this epiphany, but I have watched two friends engage with part 1 then fail to recognise part 2 directly in front of them. It's ok, they got it later. The game almost directly tells you this epiphany, in its own way.
There are audio logs with quotes from various people: philosophers, religious leaders, scientists, poets. Why would you think I'd want a sandwich? The game never tells you why these were placed here, instead you're expected to ruminate on them, their text, why they were placed where they were, and why they would be included at all in the game.
If you fire up all of the lasers and go down, you might notice a new panel is lit up. There are some tough panels behind it, with paths that wind past areas you've been in. This leads to a timed Challenge, in which you must put together your knowledge of the game's mechanics solving some of its hardest problems as either Anitra's Dance or In the Hall of the Mountain King (from Edvard Grieg's Peer Gynt) play. You will likely hear these pieces a lot. If you succeed, your reward is an hour long talk about... well, a lot of things. The game expects you to think about it.
Behind the Challenge is a box with a piece of paper inside. Detailed on the paper is a panel layout. It exists in the game, in one specific location. The game does not tell you where this panel is, instead you're expected to know what to do.
The Witness is Art, with a capital A. It's a game, too, but primarily Art. You could put this game in a modern art museum and it would not be out of place. You could put a modern art museum in this game and it would not be out of place. Like all good Art, the game does not tell you what it is about. Instead, it expects you to absorb it, introspect, and interpret.
The director, Jonathan Blow, is a proficient, pretentious (said with as much love as I can while calling someone pretentious. He is opinionated and loud about it in a way that comes across as a sore winner), and politically problematic (publicly anti-vax, Trump supporting, repeating anti-"woke" talking points on the ghost of Twitter) person. Their next game comes out later this year. The author of this comment does not tell you how to spend your money, but you are expeced to be aware that it is possible to obtain games without monetary transaction if you know what you're doing.
Quote pertaining to Jon Blow's political stances
https://www.thegamer.com/jonathan-blow-controversial-politics/
Also there's a pretty good parody called The Looker. You need to have played The Witness to understand what it does to break down and reconstruct the original game.
I wished so much to be able to enjoy Witness and The Looker. But the motion sickness is way worse than even playing Minecraft (sans active combat) . Truly missing out on an experience.
As for separating the art from the artists, as long as he hasn't done a lot of evil, I'm okay if the dude is kooky and holds views different from my own, especially for media that is completed and not awaiting further episodes from.
The first demo of the game is also currently available to play for free until next Monday as part of Steam’s Next Fest. They say it features over a hundred puzzles and dozens of hours of playtime. The save file should carry over to the full release. I spent about an hour with it yesterday and enjoyed the experience.
The Witness is fascinating. I've finished it twice. Once felt like an ending, the other really felt like an ending, and I'm still not confident I reached the end of it.
I finished it and thoroughly enjoyed it, right up until the (optional?) part at the end that's accompanied by In the Hall of the Mountain King playing, which I spent days attempting over and over again and eventually gave up in frustration. I've since had the itch to replay the game a few times but never pull the trigger because I remember how annoyed that made me.
My eleventh favorite game is probably Syphon Filter 2, released in 2000 for the Sony PlayStation. I first played this game on a JAMPACK demo disc where there was only one level included, and by the time I was able to get my hands on a real copy I had that level memorized to the point I could probably do it with my eyes closed.
The game is a 3rd person shooter with a mix of action and stealth and extremely corny one-liners from our main character, Gabe Logan. The best part of the game is the air taser, a fantasy weapon with unlimited ammo and a shock so powerful it will set enemies on fire if you hold the button long enough. There's a story and it has something to do with a virus, that's all I can tell you in that department.
It also has split-screen versus, and up until a few years ago my younger brother and I would bust out our old ps1 once or twice a year and play a few matches when we were home for the holidays.
So yeah, it's my eleventh favorite because there's a lot of good memories associated with it but I'd actually probably hate it today. The forced stealth sequences were super frustrating back then, and I like stealth even less now.
I didn't participate in the other thread, but my all-time favorite game is probably Dark Souls.
Syphon Filter was the first stealth game I ever played. I was terrible at it (was a kid), and didn't get very far, but that definitely got me wanting to play more of them. Pretty sure I tried out the second one, like rented it at Blockbuster, but I really don't remember any of it.
Yeah, same here. I rented it a few times and was adequately amused on both occasions
I ended up beating all three Syphon Filter games released for psx thanks to my local video rental store, but we only ever owned the second one and it's the one I remember the most of. The final boss had a specific gimmick that took me a long time to figure out as we didn't have internet.
According to an ordered Top 25 I once made, it's The Elder Scrolls II: Daggerfall, and I entirely agree.
It's such a gorgeous, endless world to get lost in, in a way that future Elder Scrolls games never quite managed again, though Skyrim came close. You can pick a direction, travel that way, set yourself up with a whole life in a random town out of thousands, get to know the layout, work for a local business, etc etc, and then one day randomly decide to leave. Not only will that tiny town be waiting for you when you return, and remember what you did, but if you go far enough away, you won't even have legal records anymore, and can be a new person entirely as far as society is concerned.
I've always found the right to be forgotten as the most enticing part of the fantasy roleplay experience. The idea that you mean everything to one tiny corner of the world then you move and because there's no internet you basically vanished into nothingness. I guess on a wider level it's a sign of a simpler place? And that's a nice thing to experience for a little while.
Daggerfall was (and is) an amazing game. It was the first PC game I purchased on release. On the box, back when PC games came in impressive large cardboard boxes, it said "Welcome to your new obsession" and it was so true. In typical Bethesda tradition, it was a buggy mess, but it was the largest and most engrossing game I have ever played. I found that many of the games issues, in addition to terrible CD loading time, went away if you could somehow store it all on an HDD. This was problematic since the game itself was nearly as large as the largest currently available consumer drive (game was roughly 428MB I believe and the largest drive was 540MB). I saved up and bought a new HDD just to house Daggerfall, It also prompted me to create my second ever "no CD" fix so that I could leave the disc in its case. I think I played Daggerfall nearly exclusively for an entire year before I got tired of it.
Probably Samba De Amigo with those damned maracas. I played the hell out of it and did my damnedest to convince my high school friends it was the bees knees.
I was so good at it -- like king of Carnivale good -- and all they did was laugh at me.
Their loss. They went nowhere.
Haha, I haven't thought about that game in years. I played a lot of it on the Dreamcast. Bought 2 sets of maracas too, but they were so flaky. The originals were unobtainium at the time so there were loads of knock-offs around that barely worked.
:D I had the knock-offs and the point at which they worked at low, medium and high was so so touchy. I'm surprised I had the perseverance to get as good as I did with it.
According to my Steam stats, it's Dorf Romantik. Technically Fallout 4 is in the 11th slot, but I know for a fact I've got like 4x gameplay than what Steam lists over on my Xbox.
Dorf Romantik is a cute little laid-back puzzle game about matching features in a hexagonal tile grid to earn points and more tiles. You get missions to complete such as "build so many X chained to this tile", where X is trees or water tiles or railroad tracks or houses or fields last I checked.
It's a lovely, sedate little game that I would play more of if they'd bother to release it on macOS. It's the same people who made Star Bird for Kurzgesagt.
First thing that comes to mind is Ape Escape. I haven't played it in a long time, I remember the controls being a little jank, and I never beat it. But it was a unique concept, and I'd consider giving it another shot. Reaches 11th place for nostalgia.
According to My Steam Playtime, I guess that would be Among Us. But if we take into account the probably thousands, of hours I've put in to Heroes of the Storm as my true #1 playtime game, then I guess it'd be GTA 4?
Off the top of my head, favorite games in no particular order:
Earthbound
Megaman 2
Tetris Attack
Team Fortress 2
Starfox 64
Super Mario 64
Final Fantasy VII
Mole Mania
Kirby’s Dream Course
The Legend of Zelda: Link’s Awakening
I also like The Binding of Isaac
I put your list in the correct order and Mole Mania came in 11th.
I've played seven of the eleven in the last six months. Incidentally I threw Kirby's Dream Course on my Steam Deck last week thinking "no way this lives up to the nostalgia," but it did. What a dumb, fun, unforgiving game.
Considering all the '90s on the list, I'm surprised to not see Mario RPG on there, though.
Honestly I could swap Mole Mania with Super Mario RPG. I agree it’s a great game and probably has more weight/influence in my head now that I think about it.
Kirby’s Dream Course did really well with the “Kirby swallows an enemy and gets its powers” application to golf. Turning into ice to slide across a water trap or turning into a UFO to fly across gaps is incredibly fun. Plus the conveyor belt sound effect is still in my head.
My Steam hours are a pretty poor gauge of how much I really liked a game, and most of my gaming is on other platforms anyway, so I can't do the easy thing. I considered taking the task seriously, going through games on every platform I could think of, selecting the ones where my reaction is an immediate "ooh, I like that game" and then painstakingly sorting them... But I didn't do that for the survey, that was an in-the-moment call, so I decided I'd do the same here.
And then I landed on The Secret of Monkey Island, which is a classic that everybody knows (I wish I'd found the time for it when it was featured in CGA!) so I want to talk about something else.
I want to talk about DATA WING.
DATA WING is a 2D arcade racer for Android and iOS; the device you're probably reading this on will run it just fine. You play as the (well, a) titular DATA WING: a tiny digital construct delivering inter-process communications in a computer system. The story is the real reason to play, so I won't spoil more.
It's an hour or two of play time delivered in b(i|y)te-size racing levels with a killer vaporwave aesthetic. Its creator, Dan Vogt, was very intentional about its design; the learn-by-doing curve in the first few levels is just about perfect.
And it's free, and really free, with no ads or gotchas. You can play it now, for nothing, and you should.
There are so many good games out there, you guys.
Steam hours in general are a rather poor gauge, your Monkey Island example is apropos. Ron Gilbert has always maintained that a game shouldn't be longer than 8 to 10 hours. That would automatically disqualify any of the Monkey Island games from being anyone's 11th favourite here.
One game I've certainly considered memorable enough would be Journey, which is three, maybe four hours if you stretch it.
I also run into the question of games prior to games being tracked in Steam. Warcraft 3 or Diablo 2 certainly weren't tracked at the time. Perhaps a save game from Final Fantasy X lingering on some memory card could tell me generally how long I've played the game on the console.. wouldn't tell me how much emulator hours I might have.
I've certainly played too many games to definitively state an 11th place, so like @ToteRose says it's probably best to consider the spirit of the question instead.
That’s an interesting question. I think for me, it’s probably Skyrim. I would consider Oblivion to be a top 5 for me. I don’t know if it’s a better or worse game than Skyrim, but it was the first open world RPG I ever played and holds a special place in my heart. I do go back and play both games usually at least once a year for a dozen hours or so.
With Skyrim, I was obsessed with it when it first came out, but over time, it just seemed shallower than Oblivion in terms of RPG systems, even if it was deeper or more grand in other areas. The guild quests aren’t quite as good, the minor quests aren’t as humorous or interesting (though many of the major quests are still compelling) and while the game world is fantastic, I also miss the forests of Cyrodil each time I boot up Skyrim.
It’s a game that’s good enough, that I still enjoy, and that undoubtedly had a lasting impression on me and gave me probably a thousand hours of enjoyment, but I wouldn’t put it in my top 10 with the likes of Oblivions, World of Warcraft, Horizon: Zero Dawn, FTL, and some of my other faves.
I’m not sure if it would be literally my “11th” favorite game if I made a list, as I’m sure I could find 11 other games I like more, but I think it fulfills the spirit of the question for me. I love the game, it’s good, and I still play it 15 years later, but it doesn’t have the same sauce or impact on me that my true top 10 would.
I don't think looking at Steam charts makes sense necessarily, it's dominated by multiplayer games that eat a lot of time, but sometimes were played because friends played them or they were more addictive than good.
I needed to give it a bit of thought, but after a while the game that popped up as not necessarily top 11, but as a game that was very memorable, unique and gave me good memories and yet there's zero chance it's in top 10, is Borderlands 1.
I loved the atmosphere. Lonely space western with a combination of sillines, brutality and a feeling of genuinely being at the frontier, with scarce resources, crazy people, monsters and no help coming - despite all the ludonarrative dissonance stemming from how the actual game worked. The controls felt consolishly sluggish and the gunplay sucked, but the idea of an infinite number of guns was cool when seen for the first time, and the rare guns system was tuned so that finding a unique weapon really gave you something extra that lasted for quite some time.
Some parts of the game were boring or too repetitive, and of course the ending sucked, the story was not nearly as good as the setting, and like I said, the gunplay and controls - those are the reasons for never reaching top 10. But still, the art design was often really good, soundtrack was excellent, some of the places were cool as hell and the atmosphere and novelty were great, so was playing it with a friend.
Sadly the sequels, despite undoubtedly improving on some things, mostly threw out what I liked about the original: the lonely desolate space western atmosphere. And while they improved on the gunplay, it was still quite poor compared to most shooters with a small set of fully handmade guns, and the loot system was retuned so that rare weapons lasted shorter.
Oh, come on!
I could sort Steam by playtime, let's see... Starbound?? Perhaps, but this is a poor list, as the top includes such "videogames" as... OVR Advanced Settings (#1)... Tabletop Simulator... RAD Closed Beta... VRChat... Maybe playtime isn't a very good indicator of quality anyway?
In the other thread I claimed I could easily choose 20 favorite games. If all of that counts as my #1 game, then what if I check position #30? Can of Wormholes, pretty good actually. Very representative of the kind of semi-obscure game that, without being my favorite, I rather liked (100%ed) and is really well designed too.
What if I check #11 on GOG? My GOG catalogue has much more consistent quality (and videogame-ness). Here the result is Pyre, which feels a lot more right. It's sandwiched between Death's Door and Hob, both of which would also be good candidates.
There's also my internal categorization system on Steam. For all that I've recently argued on Tildes against the utility of 5 star ratings, I hypocritically keep my own 5 tier ranking for every game I play, which isn't biased against shorter games. Assuming 5 stars accounts for all of the "20 favorites", what if I pick something I assigned 4 stars to? There are many, but A Highland Song feels right. Or maybe Haste.
Steam says H1Z1, apparently, though it looks like it’s been renamed since I played it. Right next to that though is Rimworld, which really tracks. As much as I want to love it, I’ve never made it past mid-game. Maybe I should give it another shot!
If I had to guess what my eleventh favorite game is without looking at playtime, I’d say Creeper World III. It was a lot of fun, and I’d play it again, but it’s not top ten.
X-Men for Genesis. I love it dearly but it's got a little wonkiness that keeps it out of the top ten but still close.
Banger of a game. This and the Power Rangers game were a breath of fresh air when it felt like every other game was a single player platformer that was borderline impossible for an 8 year old. Who wants to die 50 times on the first two levels of Jungle Book and Jurassic Park when you and your neighbor can kick some ass together?
According to a particular list I made a while ago, I put Mega Man Battle Network 3 Blue at 11th! There are some problems with it and MMBN getting like six entries across the GBA lifespan (twelve, really! fuck!) - dumb fetch quest padding, boss refights etc. But I love so much about MMBN's aesthetic and narratives about cyberterrorism in an optimistic series for kids. These games felt like you'd never hit the bottom of 'em; the story was solid in 3, but the insane amount of post-game content runs you another whole length of the game itself, and that's before you dig into PvP. 6's multiplayer is much better, but I adore 3's postgame too much.
Risk of Rain is my 11th by playtime on steam, just after Noita at 10.
Getting a steam deck last year has completely changed my gaming habits tbh..
RoR or RoR2? Genuine question, not trying to be pedantic! I ask because I adore RoR2 and have all the DLC but I've never tried the og. I'm curious to know if it's worth a try while I wait for the next DLC update. It's absolutely my favorite roguelike next to Slay the Spire.
(Or are they both roguelites because there are unlockables that persist between runs? I still get the term mixed up...)
The original! I am the opposite and haven't tried the sequel, but maybe I'll give that a jam this weekend :)
If you do give it a try, let me know what you think and how it compares to the first for you. I hope you love it!
Thanks, I will let you know!!
I don't think I could really put together a proper "top ten" to identify the exact 11th, but I assume the spirit of the question is more about those games you really enjoyed, even if they weren't exactly life-changing experiences.
For me, I'd probably go with a lot of the PS3/DS-era Sonic games. Most of them are pretty fun, and they occupy that nice space of "I had a great time with these" without necessarily being all-time favorites. In particular, I'd highlight Sonic Colours on DS and Sonic Generations, since those are probably the ones I spent the most time with.
Spiritfarer. An absolute banger of a side-scrolling, platforming, “town” (ship) manager, farming sim, social sim, extrrrrrrrrrrrrrrravanganza!!! Could be a Nintendo game. It just doesn’t make the list because my top 10 is already populated with Animal Crossing for the GCN, but Spiritfarer is something else entirely. The combination of gameplay mechanics is just so unique in its implementation. The characters are all endearing and memorable in their own way. The story and dialogues are so masterfully written. The music is touching. The hand-drawn art is a feast for the eyes. It’s also a game that can be 100%ed, which I really appreciated, so much so, in fact, that I played through it twice. I also bought it on sale for dirt cheap. My final note on this masterpiece is that when I rolled the credits, I cried for like 15 minutes. Never happened to me with any game before that. Real tear jerker. Highly recommended. I hope they make a sequel someday or a NS2E.
What the hey, I'll try to come up with a list of my top 11 games if I can do it without too much trouble.
t-1. Tears of the Kingdom
t-1. Breath of the Wild (Frankly, these seem like two parts of the same game)
3. Valheim
4. Super Smash Bros. Melee
5. Deus Ex
6. Mario 3
7. Wind Waker
8. Super Mario World
9. Skyrim
10. Super Metroid
11. Civ 5
And then some honorable mentions in no particular order (or I guess the order I'm able to remember them in):
Spelunky
Hollow Knight
NHL 95
Mario RPG
Advance Wars
Unreal Tournament (1999)
Celeste
Oblivion
It's tough ranking games, since it's all based on nostalgia and hazy memories and feelings, but Civ 5 in the 11th position sounds about right to me. If we're going on play time, it's actually near the top, since I used to be play it while I worked. Do some work, play a turn in Civ 5, work while all the other civilizations were taking their turns, etc. But I've had great fun with the game even forgetting that convenient situation I used to have. I used to use Giant Multiplayer Robot to play asynchronous games with friends and randoms, and played plenty against the PC, too. I was super proud of my first top-level victory (Deity level, I think?) after many, many attempted matches. It was a science victory by just one or two turns if I remember right.
I gave the sequel lots of time to win me over but it never did. I tried Civ 7 for about an hour but it just didn't click. Not that fun. Neither has scratched the "one more turn" itch for me since Civ 5. Unfortunately I don't see myself going back to it just because I feel like I've done pretty much everything there is to do with it. But it holds a nice place in my gaming heart. Hopefully Civ 8 will be just as fun?
I'll go with Super Hexagon. I do t really rate my top games like this, but this one feels really good, but without enough staying power to not be edged out by other games. I have been playing it for years. I just now doubled my high score in Hexagoner. Hexagons are the bestagons!
Edit: also has a killer soundtrack!
My 11th most played game according to Steam play time is Battlefield Bad Company 2. And yeah, that kind of works. I really enjoyed it back in the day but it definitely wouldn't be in my top 10. But also it probably wouldn't be that close to my top 10 either.
My game that I have played the 12th most, but will almost certainly pass BF:BC2, is Warhammer 40000: Gladius - Relics of War. It's a lazy 4X that hits the 40k spot for me. I enjoy it and it's a comfort game for me. If I can't decide what to play, then I'll spin up another Necron run. It's not in my top 10, but I guess it's kind of close.
Unrelated but my 10th spot is the original CoD:MW2, which also would not be in my actual top 10, but I only mention it because Steam apparently thinks I last played it January 1st, 1970.
Using that Steam Playtime technique, my 11th is 7 Days to Die. I don't really feel like I ever played it that much. It might be one of those games I left running in the background days at a time, back when I was living a place where utilities were included in rent. I don't know that I ever played that game in multiplayer. My time was spent wandering around, exploring, building things, and occasionally shooting zombies.
A little lower on my list gets into games like GTAV, and various Borderlands. Those games in general don't feel like a bad answer in spirit, popular single player or coop shooter games from 10-15 years ago. Certainly not my all time favorites or what I tend to prefer now, but games I enjoyed and appreciated.
Really though, some of my all-time favorites aren't ones I played on Steam, so my real answer is probably a bit higher on the list. I think the one that feels the most accurate is Audiosurf. It's the only music game I ever really liked. I played it all the time back like 20 years ago up through about a decade ago. I especially enjoyed the Mono modes. Having something engaging but not distracting, in a meditative way, really helped me enjoy the music. My fall off when I stopped playing it corresponds with when I stopped really enjoying music much either, despite intermittent attempts to try listening to it more again. It's been 8 years since I last played it.
Going roughly from memory, I'd have to say The World Ends With You on the DS-Lite was my 10th favorite game. Doesn't quite crack the top of the list, but is definitely a game that left a lasting impression for its world building/melding with early 00s Tokyo and really fun "layered" systems that worked together in really delightful ways. It's one of the hardest games to "explain" if you didn't experience it and I'm not sure it would even play the same way today without the DS stylus but it was an awesome and memorable - if not quite top ten - experience.
X4 Foundations
It's a great sandbox style space sim that keeps getting better. I try and come back to it every few years to check out what has changed and I always really enjoy my time with that game.
I couldn't come up with a good methodology for picking an 11th game, but I looked back on the last time I had to pick a top 10 and I realized that one game didn't make the cut that probably should have. Super Metroid for the SNES. That game could reasonably be the best game ever made for the SNES and it truly started the Metroidvanie genre in my mind (obviously further cemented by Castlevania: SOTN). The game had amazing atmosphere, controlled perfectly, and had a nearly perfect difficulty curve that challenged the player, but never to the point of frustration. I am not sure Nintendo has made a finer video game.
Going for 11th was a fun thing to do! Thank you for the question.
I must go with Golden Sun, 1 and 2. I absolutely loved them as a child and I replayed GS1 last year and had a ton of fun. It is kinda easy at times, the hard part is just knowing where to go, but the story and combat are really fun.
I don't have a definitive favorites list, but in the spirit of a game I like but don't love, I'm gonna say Samurai GUNN 2.
It's a fast-paced & movement-heavy platform-fighter with a lot of juicy mechanics clearly created with a healthy dose of 'rule of cool' (one hit kills, deflecting bullets, playing dead, 'bunting', movement tech, character-specific abilities, and more). It also has a really evocative art style that contributed a lot to that Epic Gun-Slinging Samurai Showdown feel, further reinforced with music by Doseone, who has a robust track record of working on generally awesome stuff. I have a lot of fond memories playing this game w/ friends and we were all pretty saddened when the game's development seemingly stopped, never coming out of early access.
~3 years later, in Janurary of 2026, the game "re-launched" with a new engine and other quality of life things, which was/is awesome! But with this also came with the news that the singleplayer adventure mode that was halfway-implemented was being cut and many characters were being temporarily removed to be reworked (with most still not back as of writing). Furthermore, the in-game comic disappeared, with it's future being uncertain afaik. In general, the game appears to have a renewed focus on competitive multiplayer, evidenced by the new eSports-ish UI, which has left it feeling kind of sauce-less compared to its earlier days, I think.
My perception is that these are passionate indie developers, so I'm sure they have sound reasons for why they're doing this, it's just a little disappointing. The game is still really fun, I just don't feel as compelled to go back to it as I used to.
Nox is the one that comes to my mind.
It is an unusual RPG game where you can play one of three characters where each of them goes to the same final objective through different ways sometimes going through the same place under different conditions/in different times. This makes for great replay due to different playstyle of the characters and seeing the state of the game world/specific place in different time and conditions. I can't rember if the characters actually meet or not...
This game is pretty unique in the playstyle, isn't exactly easy but not hard. Different take on RPG.
I'd say it's not my eleventh, it's much lower, but it is easy for me to pick this one for this thread.
My top 10, and likely top 20, is full of very well known games, this is why I went deeper.
Interesting challenge, and I ended up with Stardew Valley as my top 10 is basically made up of nostalgia memories of Civilization, Doom, Serious Sam, Super Mario 64, Metal Gear Solid, Baldur's Gate etc. But Stardew Valley is the only new game in recent years that really hooked me. Played it daily for hours when it came out and felt like such a breath of fresh air in game releases. A true well polished passion project is such a rare thing now. Simple gameplay, addictive gameplay loop, as challenging and relaxing as you want it to be.