Curated playlist

Video games with gender-selectable protagonists

Final Fantasy Legend IIA smashed goddess statue scatters 77 magical stones across linked worlds in Final Fantasy Legend II.
Silent Hill: Book of MemoriesIn Silent Hill: Book of Memories, a book appears on your birthday and you start rewriting your life.
Fallout 3Fallout 3 is a 2008 action role-playing game from Bethesda Game Studios, and it begins with a 19-year-old leaving the shelter where they grew up. Vault 101 is a high-tech fallout shelter, built for survivors of a nuclear war fought 200…
The Elder Scrolls V: SkyrimA modder made Falskaar for Skyrim as a job application to Bethesda. Bungie hired him instead.
Fallout (video game)Fallout, the 1997 role-playing game from Interplay Productions, opens with a narrator voiced by the actor Ron Perlman. In 2026 he recalled that the job paid "40 dollars and a sandwich." It is a modest origin for a game that players and…
Fallout: New VegasFallout: New Vegas, a 2010 action role-playing game from Obsidian Entertainment, was built on a schedule that journalists called remarkably short for a major release. Publisher Bethesda Softworks allowed the studio 18 months. The game…
Assassin's Creed OdysseyAssassin's Creed Odyssey, a 2018 action role-playing game from Ubisoft Quebec, begins its family tragedy on the slopes of Mount Taygetos. A Spartan elder is about to throw an infant off the mountain. The Pythia has declared that the child,…
Dragon Age: OriginsDragon Age: Origins got its title before it had any dragons. A random name generator produced the name first.
Stardew ValleyStardew Valley had sold more than 50 million copies by February 2026, and one person made it. That person is Eric Barone, who works under the name ConcernedApe. After college he could not find a job in the games industry and ended up…
Fallout 4Fallout 4 begins on the 23rd of October 2077, the day the nuclear bombs fall. The 2015 action role-playing game comes from Bethesda Game Studios, and it is the fourth main entry in the Fallout series. Earlier games in the series start long…
Persona 3Persona 3 asks its player to press a gun-shaped device against their own head and fire. The device is called an Evoker, and the shot summons a Persona, a physical form of the shooter's psyche. Atlus developed this role-playing game, which…
Destiny 2Destiny 2 is a shooter made by Bungie, and in June 2026 it receives what is billed as its final update, called Monument of Triumph. That update ends active development. The servers will stay on, though. Bungie confirmed that the game will…
For HonorIn the sword-fighting game For Honor, you block duels by guarding left, right, or top.
Elden RingGeorge R. R. Martin wrote Elden Ring's backstory, not its in-game story. Some critics found his role unclear.
Baldur's Gate 3Wizards of the Coast first turned down Larian Studios' bid to make Baldur's Gate 3 in 2014.
Dragon's DogmaCapcom executives doubted Dragon's Dogma, the first open-world game ever proposed for a Capcom title.
Pokémon Scarlet and VioletPokémon Scarlet and Violet are role-playing games from the studio Game Freak, built for the Nintendo Switch and released on the 18th of November 2022. The story starts at a school. Players enroll at Naranja Academy in Scarlet or Uva…
The Outer WorldsThe Outer Worlds is a 2019 action role-playing game from Obsidian Entertainment, and it begins with a history that never happened. In the game's timeline, U.S. President William McKinley was never assassinated in 1901. Theodore Roosevelt…
Cyberpunk 2077Cyberpunk 2077 broke a record within hours of its midnight GMT launch on the 10th of December 2020. More than one million people played it at once on Steam, and one million viewers watched live on Twitch. Together, the figures doubled the…
Call of Duty: Black Ops Cold WarCall of Duty: Black Ops Cold War, released in 2020, carried a production budget of more than 700 million US dollars. That is an enormous sum for a game that started out as something else entirely. It was not supposed to belong to the Black…
Genshin ImpactGenshin Impact, a 2020 action role-playing game from the Chinese studio miHoYo, caused an uproar before anyone could play it. At the ChinaJoy convention in 2019, fans of The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild gave the Sony booth the…
Helldivers 2Helldivers 2 begins with a fall. Players drop onto hostile planets inside a metal pod called a Hellpod, launched from a starship known as a Super Destroyer. Once on the ground, they call down bombardments by tapping out sequences of…
The Final Fantasy LegendThe Final Fantasy Legend's last boss can die to one chainsaw hit. A Game Boy weapon with instant death does it.
Assassin's Creed ValhallaAssassin's Creed Valhalla nearly had a female-only Viking hero. Senior Ubisoft executives disagreed with the team.
Starfield (video game)Starfield is a 2023 action role-playing game from Bethesda Game Studios, and it lets the player land on more than 1,000 planets. That scale raises a few questions. Why did a studio tied to Skyrim and Fallout 4 turn its attention to space?…
BloodborneIn the game Bloodborne, the miracle cure that heals almost any ailment slowly turns people into beasts.
Pokémon X and YPokémon X and Pokémon Y, released for the Nintendo 3DS in 2013, sold more than four million copies worldwide in one weekend. That made them the fastest-selling games the handheld had ever seen. Game Freak developed the pair, and The…
Hogwarts LegacyOn the 7th of February 2023, Hogwarts Legacy reached a peak of 1.28 million people watching it at once on Twitch. That was the first day of early access, and it made the game the most-watched single-player title the platform had hosted.…