video games about time travel

The 31 Best Games Involving Time Travel

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• Video games use time travel in varied ways, from rewinding gameplay to intricate space-time jumps.
• Time travel is a recurring theme across different genres, offering unique narrative and gameplay experiences.
• Despite the complexity of time travel concepts in games, players are drawn to the mind-bending adventures they offer.

In video games, time travel can be as simple as rewinding gameplay or as complex as hopping across space-time dimensions. Furthermore, the concept is not limited to a single genre and is often manipulated in a variety of ways. Undoubtedly, people have been fascinated with time travel for a long time, even if the actual technology seems destined to remain exclusive to fiction. While some projects use it as a simple mechanic for retrying an action, other time travel games travel deep down the theoretical wormhole.

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Regardless of the concepts that are toyed around with, there's no denying that there's a wealth of amazing video games that do a great job of capitalizing on the mind-bending nature of time travel, letting players enjoy some memorable video game experiences that they won't tire of anytime soon.

Updated on June 7th, 2024, by Ritwik Mitra: The idea of messing around with time travel is a tantalizing one as long as this concept is done justice. There are many games that use time travel as a mechanic, discuss it in great detail, or make it a core part of the experience that developers want players to enjoy. This is a slippery slope, especially since time travel complicates storytelling immensely, and can easily lead to plot holes. There are so many games that can fail to stick the landing or even get the plane going in this genre. So, when players get to enjoy a game that perfectly executes these concepts, it's easy to see why the title in question becomes even more memorable. A few more such titles have been added to this list in its latest update.

31 The Forgotten City

A time loop adventure that began as a skyrim mod, the forgotten city.

The game that started out as a Skyrim mod, it's amazing to see the major steps that The Forgotten City has taken in its development. After being hailed as one of the best mods ever released for Bethesda's magnum opus, fans were more than glad to find out that it would be released as a standalone adventure title that focuses on a time loop in Ancient Rome, changing the setting from a mysterious Dwemer ruin.

Suffice it to say that a lot of rewriting needed to happen for the script to make sense, and it was clear that the developers were passionate about making this game a reality. The Forgotten City launched to rave reviews and let players enjoy a compelling time loop adventure regardless of whether they played Skyrim or not, which says a lot about the game's quality writing and storytelling.

30 Steins;Gate 0

An alternate reality where rintaro strives to change kurisu's fate by changing the past, steins;gate 0.

Steins;Gate is one of the best visual novels in the business, featuring a mind-boggling story that starts out relatively simple before bringing some unique themes to the table. For a series to tackle PTSD and other mature themes in such a riveting manner makes it clear why both this game and its anime inspiration were such a joy to experience.

Steins;Gate 0 serves as another riveting chapter in the series, where Rintaro Okabe regains his love for science after being shown a glimpse of hope. Kurisu may be dead in his timeline, but he still partakes in some riveting research to ensure that her existence remains intact in other timelines. It's a visual novel that fans of the original will love for all the same reasons.

29 The Sexy Brutale

Save the lives of multiple people in this time loop adventure.

• Platforms : PlayStation 4, Xbox One, Nintendo Switch, PC, Amazon Luna
• Release Date : April 11, 2017
• Developer : Cavalier Game Studios, Tequila Works
• Genre : Adventure, Puzzle

Many games combine the excitment of time travel with a compelling murder mystery, since both concepts work in harmony to create a riveting mystery experience. Such is the case with The Sexy Brutale , where players must explore a mansion and save its members from death before things get too dire.

The puzzles in this game are very engaging, with the slow drip of the narrative making it a blast to experience from start to end. The Sexy Brutale may have a few more slow moments than most people would like, but all of that is forgiven because of a narrative that truly personifies the sexy part of the title.

28 The Legend Of Zelda: Tears Of The Kingdom

Zelda travels back in time to heal the master sword for link, the legend of zelda: tears of the kingdom.

Tears of the Kingdom had some big shoes to fill and took its sweet time to come out. This wait was worthwhile since players got to experience what many people consider a worthy sequel despite retreading familiar ground.

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The story is certainly improved by leaps and bounds, with Zelda's tale being a fascinating one. She decides to become a dragon and help the Master Sword repair for ten thousand years before Link can finally harness its power once again.

27 Twelve Minutes

A time loop adventure that is intriguing despite its missteps, twelve minutes.

The voice cast of Twelve Minutes was its biggest selling point, with James McAvoy, Daisy Ridley, and Willem Dafoe taking on the role of the three characters who play a central role in this narrative. The story focuses on a husband who is killed by a home intruder, only for time to rewind twelve minutes after these events have transpired.

The repetition and frustration caused by the time loop mechanic can make things somewhat irritating, but the central mystery at the heart of things ties events together in a neat way. That being said, this plot twist can also have a mixed reception from players.

26 Prince Of Persia: Warrior Within

The prince embarks on a journey after being punished for his use of the sands of time, prince of persia: warrior within.

After the success of Sands of Time , Ubisoft took the bold approach of making the sequel darker and more foreboding to appeal to a new audience. The results were pretty mixed, with some people hating the edgy nature of this title while others loved how metal this game was, with everything from the storyline to the characters reflecting this.

There's a lot of time travel involved in Warrior Within , and it's handled with great care. While backtracking can be a huge issue in this title, the rest of the experience is a rollercoaster ride that players just can't get enough of!

25 Steins;Gate

A mind-bending time travel adventure that explores trauma and ptsd in a nuanced manner, steins;gate elite.

Steins;Gate is an anime that many people consider to be one of the best sci-fi shows of all time. However, some people might not be aware that the show is an adaptation of a visual novel that uses time travel as its central mechanic. Players control the protagonist Rintaro Okabe, a self-proclaimed mad scientist, who discovers a way to send messages back in time via his phone.

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The game involves navigating various branching timelines and making decisions that affect the outcome of the story. The use of time travel creates a complex and engaging narrative that keeps players invested throughout the story, with its many alternate endings revolving around whether players choose to mess around with the fabric of time or not.

24 Final Fantasy 13-2

The search for lightning spans different time periods, final fantasy 13-2.

Final Fantasy 13-2 serves as an official successor to one of the most divisive Final Fantasy games of all time. The sequel promotes Noel and Serah as protagonists and follows them as they travel through different moments in time in search of Lightning, who disappeared after the events of the first game.

Players who liked Final Fantasy 13 will likely have a great time with its sequel, especially if they wished the original game had more open areas and exploration. However, the story is pretty confusing, and even die-hard fans of Square Enix's franchise may find it hard to follow along with the plot.

23 Singularity

Time manipulation plays a central role in this underrated fps, singularity.

Singularity is a first-person shooter built around time manipulation. The game is set on an island in Russia called Katorga-12 where experiments with a substance called E99 have gone wrong, causing time anomalies and mutations.

Players use a device called the Time Manipulation Device (TMD) to navigate the island and manipulate time in various ways, such as aging or reversing objects and enemies. Singularity 's use of time manipulation creates unique and creative gameplay opportunities, making the FPS stand out from other entries in the genre.

22 Shadow Of Memories

A time loop adventure where players prevent the protagonist's death by traveling back in time, shadow of memories.

Shadow of Memories is a unique adventure game where players are tasked with preventing their murder by traveling back to the past. The protagonist, Eike, explores different time periods and makes several critical decisions that send ripples across the fabric of time and affect the outcome of the story.

A post-apocalyptic setting adds a certain uniqueness to a game. These titles left an everlasting impression on gamers.

The use of time travel in Shadow of Memories creates a sense of mystery and suspense, as players try to unravel the events leading up to Eike's death. It's easily the most underrated game on this list that fans should check out.

21 TimeShift

An overlooked fps that lets players mess around with time.

TimeShift is an FPS where players control a soldier who is equipped with a suit that allows them to mess around with the fabric of time. The game involves navigating through various environments and using time itself to solve puzzles and defeat enemies.

This innovative use of time manipulation in TimeShift adds a layer of strategy and creativity to the gameplay . It's a shame that many people don't talk about this title since TimeShift had many great things going for it despite also having its share of faults.

20 Outer Wilds

One of the best implementations of a time loop seen in a video game, outer wilds.

Outer Wilds is a pretty unique game that has been criminally overlooked by many fans. The game deals with a time loop where the Sun turns into a supernova in 22 minutes, prompting players to explore the world and figure out its secrets piece by piece.

The time loop mechanic of Outer Wilds makes every batch of exploration a joy to go through. Fans of great sci-fi narratives will have a great time piecing together the mystery of this game.

19 The Legend Of Zelda: Majora's Mask

Time resets when the moon crashes into the earth every three days, the legend of zelda: majora's mask.

Majora's Mask builds upon the amazing engine of Ocarina of Time which was just a legendary title in its own right. It placed Link in a darker world where the moon would crash into the Earth and end all life in three days .

This set up a perpetual cycle where players had to slowly get through the game while keeping this three-day limit in mind. It made for a great time, with Majora's Mask being a fan favorite of many despite the game being in the shadow of its predecessor.

18 Prince Of Persia: The Two Thrones

The prince finds the dagger of time once again, and the vizier returns after a time reversal, prince of persia: the two thrones.

The Sands of Time trilogy is where many fans think the Prince of Persia series peaked. The first game was a masterclass, with Warrior Within improving upon the combat system extensively despite the tone becoming a bit too mature and edgy for its good.

The Two Thrones serves as a perfect middle ground between the approach Ubisoft took for the past two games in the series. The great combat innovations were kept intact while the overall vibe of the game was more in line with The Sands of Time . Of course, as is the case with most games in the series, The Two Thrones also lets players mess around with time for their benefit throughout this journey.

17 Day Of The Tentacle

A classic lucasarts point-and-click game that dabbles in time travel quite a bit, day of the tentacle.

Day of the Tentacle is a beloved point-and-click adventure game that many fans still hold in high regard to this day. The remaster of this game ensures that players can enjoy what made this game special without being deterred by its old visuals.

For fans of traveling to the past or the future, these following time travel-themed anime shows are some of the best to watch.

Day of the Tentacle prioritizes time travel quite a bit, interacting with environments across different time periods. It makes for an innovative premise with the puzzle-solving using this mechanic heavily as well.

16 Deathloop

A time loop that resets whenever colt fails to kill all eight visionaries by midnight.

Deathloop is another gem from Arkane Studios, combining their expertise in developing immersive sims with the concept of a time loop. Players need to kill eight targets in a row in the one-time loop to essentially finish the game.

This is easier said than done, and players need to come to grips with the mechanics of the game over multiple loops before attempting this herculean feat. It's a great gameplay loop, with the addition of Julianna making each journey through the loop a blast in its own right.

15 Back To The Future: The Game

A fun addition to the popular movie series with its own set of time-traveling shenanigans, back to the future: the game.

Back to the Future is one of the most iconic movie franchises of all time that focuses on time travel. However, most people aren't aware of the Back to the Future game released by Telltale that allows for a new chapter in this celebrated franchise.

Taking on the episodic format that was present in their adventure games, Back to the Future: The Game is a worthy addition to this celebrated franchise. The shenanigans that Morty and Doc Brown get up to throughout this title are quite entertaining and make for a fun adventure title.

A Revolutionary Indie Game Where Rewinding Time Is Critical To Solving Puzzles

Braid is one of the most innovative and entertaining indie titles of all time. The game's haunting story and excellent puzzle-solving mechanics make for an unforgettable experience that most people won't be forgetting anytime soon.

Rewinding time to figure out solutions to puzzles serves as the initial draw of the game, but it's the story that hooks players over time. Players who want to believe that they're the good guy in any video game will be in for a rude awakening when they check out Braid .

13 Dishonored 2

The stilton manor level turns the concept of time into an ingenious gameplay mechanic, dishonored 2.

Arkane Studios has constantly been at the forefront of delivering spectacular immersive sim experiences. Dishonored 2 is no exception to this golden rule, with some people considering it to be superior to the critically acclaimed first game.

The level where players need to roam around Stilton Manor is easily one of the best parts of the entire game. This is mainly due to the innovative time travel mechanics present in this level that allow players to shift from the past to the present at a moment's notice.

12 EarthBound

Time travel plays a central role at both the start and end of the game.

The SNES was home to some of the most iconic games of all time. One such game was EarthBound , which has carved its way into the hearts of several gamers due to its amazing charm and imaginative gameplay.

The JRPG genre is relatively newcomer friendly. But these titles stand out as the most easily accessible.

The game starts with a time traveler from the future who warns Ness about an impending apocalypse. Finally, near the end of the game, the party travels back in time so that they can fight the antagonist — Giygas — where he's at his most vulnerable.

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Best Time Travel Games 2023

Who doesn't like a bit of time travel? We've created the ultimate list of the best time travel games to play right now. Find your next game here!

While time travel is traditionally featured in works of science fiction, nowadays, you can find elements of this mysterious phenomenon in just about every genre of gaming. 

It’s typically depicted in one of two ways: a plot device where characters must go back in time to prevent something from happening, or a game mechanic in which players manipulate time to overcome challenges.

In this list, we’ll showcase  the top time travel games to enjoy in 2024 , such as games about traveling through time and the finest time travel games for computer.

We’ll be updating this list in the future with new titles, so make sure to check back and let us know if we missed any of your favorite games involving time travel!

Related: Best Space Games 2023 Best Story-Driven Games 2023 Best Point and Click Adventure Games 2023

Table of Contents Show

Platforms: Windows, PS5

A common trend in more recent games is characters getting stuck in perpetual time loops and having to figure out a way to escape.

One of the more recent titles to explore this trope is Deathloop , an immersive sim shooter about a talented hitman who finds himself trapped in time on a party island with rival assassins.

To end the loop, you’ll have to eliminate the eight targets responsible for your serious case of déjà vu while also navigating the island’s numerous threats.

It’s a clever approach to open-ended gameplay that builds upon previous Arkane games such as Dishonored and only benefits from looking like an acid trip from the ‘70s.

The Forgotten City

Platforms: Windows, PS4, PS5, Xbox One, Xbox Series X/S, Nintendo Switch

Initially conceived as a Skyrim mod , The Forgotten City would eventually become a standalone game spearheaded by lead developer and writer Nick Pearce.

Set during an alternate version of the Roman Empire, it sees you exploring a city subjected to the Golden Rule: a religious mandate where any sinful action causes the entire population to turn into permanent gold statues.

While inspecting the rule’s origins and which transgressions it applies to, you’re advised someone in the city intends to violate it, urging you to travel back in time to prevent them.

It’s an interesting take on time travel that also explores the existential relationship between humanity and its laws, namely what is truly considered right or wrong.

Platform: PS5

Returnal is a PlayStation-exclusive third-person shooter about an astronaut who lands on an alien planet searching for a mysterious signal when she suddenly finds herself trapped in a time loop.

This is a great justification for the game’s roguelike design, which sees the protagonist resurrected after each death as she traverses the planet’s foreign environments and battles a host of extraterrestrial foes.

The further you progress, the stranger and more unsettling Selene’s visions become as she finds herself increasingly entangled in an ever-changing world.

If you manage to make it to the end and break the loop, you’ll be faced with some startling revelations about the main character and the planet that make for great sci-fi storytelling.

Platforms: Windows, PS5, Xbox Series X/S

Although time travel generally involves going forward or backward in history, you can extend this further to account for multiple realities or planes of existence.

With this mindset, one could argue that the horror game The Medium uses time travel as a game mechanic, with the main character able to travel between the spirit world and the living world.

In a practical sense, this allows you to make changes in either world that affects the other, such as unlocking doors to progress, obtaining a key item to solve a puzzle, or warding off hostile enemies.

The story follows psychic Marianne as she’s mysteriously summoned to an abandoned hotel where she’ll have to use her powers to unravel its history and help free the spirits trapped within its grounds.

Reminiscence

Platform: Windows

Reminiscence is a story-driven, psychological horror game that has you warping, jumping, and rewinding time and space in order to save your family.

In it, you play as a man living in a world that’s about to collapse into anarchy who suddenly discovers their wife and kids have mysteriously disappeared.

While searching your home for clues, you stumble upon a watch that lets you travel between two eras: the post-apocalyptic present, and 1950s American suburbia.

By switching back and forth between both realities, you’re able to alter the state of certain objects to solve puzzles and advance the story.

Inspired by sci-fi classics like Back to the Future, No Time sees you stealing a suspiciously familiar time machine vehicle from a secret facility before setting off on a time-traveling adventure.

Unlike many games in the genre which center on heavily scripted missions, the game functions as a time travel simulator with both story and sandbox elements.

As a result, you’re free to explore any date throughout history from 0-2030 AD while making sure not to destroy the current timeline by interfering as little as possible and avoiding your younger self.

The game also features a day/night cycle, various job minigames and side quests, crafting, and a combat system for dealing with pesky Time Agents. 

Outer Wilds

Platforms: Windows, PS4, Xbox One, Nintendo Switch

If you’re looking for an engaging and immersive time travel game about space exploration , look no further than Outer Wilds .

You take on the role of the newest recruit for Outer Wilds Ventures, a fledgling space program looking to expand its knowledge of the galaxy and its ancestors’ mysterious disappearance.

The narrative addresses various sci-fi clichés such as black holes, antimatter, and of course time travel, with your character confined in an everlasting 22-minute time loop.

This is complemented by a densely packed open world consisting of hand-crafted, explorable planets with interesting backstories and distinct hazards that can be tricky to navigate.

Twelve Minutes

Platforms: Windows, Xbox One, Xbox Series X/S

Twelve Minutes is an interactive thriller about a man having a romantic dinner with his wife when a mysterious man claiming to be a police detective shows up on his doorstep.

Things quickly escalate and eventually the man is killed, only to find himself transported to the beginning of the evening with his previous memories intact.

Confused and desperate, he sets out to break the time loop by searching the apartment for clues and interviewing each person involved.

While some of the game’s different endings get into weird, taboo territory, there are interesting puzzles and narrative threads to tug at that make the journey worthwhile, though we suggest following a guide.

Platforms: Windows, Mac

In the stealth puzzle adventure game Timelie , every second matters and can bring you one step closer to freedom or death.

The game has you taking on the role of a young woman with a special gift that lets her control the flow of time as if it were a media player, rewinding and fast-forwarding to gain new insights. 

Harnessing this power allows her to manipulate obstacles in her path and avoid detection from robot patrols preventing her from leaving.

The story is quite compelling and the time travel mechanics are explored in some truly fascinating ways that become more complex the further you go.

The Gardens Between

Platforms: Windows, PS4, Xbox One, Nintendo Switch, Linux, Mac, iOS

The Gardens Between is an indie puzzle game created by The Voxel Agents that has you manipulating time 20 abstract, narrative-driven levels.

The game is unique in that you don’t control the main characters directly but rather move them backward and forwards through time while altering the state of different objects to progress.

Each level reveals more about the relationship between the two main characters, Arian and Frendt, chronicling the evolution of their friendship leading up to a life-changing event.

While it’s a short-lived experience, clocking in around 2.5 hours, The Gardens Between tells a compelling story and explores time travel mechanics in some fun and interesting ways.

Timespinner

Platforms: Windows, PS4, Xbox One, Nintendo Switch, Linux, Mac

Inspired by ‘90s action-platformers, Timespinner is a story-driven Metroidvania about a magical timekeeper named Lunais who seeks out revenge after her family is murdered by an evil empire.

Her quest for justice brings her to a mysterious and hostile world where she’ll have no choice but to wield her time manipulation power to defend herself and rewrite history.

The game has you exploring beautiful, atmospheric pixel art environments while switching between the past and present as you defeat enemies and acquire new powers.

Mastering Lunais’ time-manipulating abilities open up new possibilities for combat, which is further complemented by familiars that can be trained to fight on your side.

Life Is Strange

Platforms: Windows, PS4, Xbox One, Nintendo Switch, Linux, Mac, iOS, Android

A standout adventure title from Dontnod Studios and published by Square Enix, Life is Strange follows 18-year old aspiring photographer Max Caulfield as she comes to terms with her newfound powers.

Max has a supernatural ability that lets her move backward or forwards through time to alter the state of objects and their effect on the people around her.

Its applications vary depending on the scenario, allowing Max to mend relationships with her friends and family, solve bigger mysteries, and get revenge against the occasional bully.

Even if the gameplay aspect falls flat at times, the way time travel is introduced and incorporated into the structure of the story makes up for it.

Quantum Break

Platforms: Windows, Xbox One

Quantum Break is a cinematic action game from Remedy Games, best known for titles like Control and Alan Wake, and Max Payne.

In it, you take on the role of Jack Joyce, a man on a mission to prevent his timeline from ending by harnessing an array of unique time-based powers.

The story doubles as a live-action television series with certain events explained in further detail, which can require a bit more of a commitment than your average game.

With that said, Quantum Break is one of the best-looking time travel games in terms of graphical fidelity, boasting cool mind-bending camera tricks and special effects that still look great in 2024.

Platforms: Windows, PS4, Xbox One, Nintendo Switch, Mac

Superhot  sets itself apart from more traditional  FPS games  by introducing one clever mechanic: time only moves forward when you do.

This grants the player ample time to assess threats and determine the best course of action before setting it in motion with stylish shootouts and melee showdowns.

To ensure combat is always readable, the game employs a minimalist art style that does a great job at conveying info: enemies are always red, environments are white, and weapons are black.

While it’s best enjoyed in VR with full immersion, you’ll still have a lot of fun playing with a gamepad controller or just mouse and keyboard. 

Titanfall 2

Platforms: Windows, PS4, Xbox One

The follow-up to Respawn’s criminally underrated  first-person shooter  features refined gunplay and fluid movement with a touch of time travel.

During Titanfall 2 ’s campaign, your character obtains a special wrist-mounted device that lets them swap back and forth between the past and present.  

This is helpful for exploring deteriorating buildings, avoiding clusters of foes, and solving nature-based challenges as pilot Jack Cooper.

Combine this with exciting parkour-based platforming and an arsenal of satisfyingly powerful weaponry and it’s easy to see why Titanfall fans want to see the series return.

BioShock Infinite

Time travel in the BioShock series is presented as a plot device in which certain characters, namely Elizabeth and the Lutece twins, can create dimensional time-alternating portals called Tears.

To that point, the game’s take on parallel universes and how they affect the overarching story can be boiled down to a single quote: “There’s always a lighthouse, there’s always a man, there’s always a city.”

BioShock Infinite sees you venturing into a floating steampunk city called Columbia where citizens still cling to violent religious and racist beliefs.

In order to make sense of the series’ extensive timeline, consider playing through the first two games in the series or watching a recap video before starting Infinite. 

Platforms: Windows, PS4, PS5, Xbox One, Xbox Series X/S, Nintendo Switch, Linux, Mac

Our final recommendation is Braid , a beloved indie puzzle platformer that comes from the mind of The Witness designer Jonathan Blow.

In it, you take on the role of a man named Tim as he attempts to rescue a princess from an evil monster using time manipulation.

If that description didn’t make it obvious enough, the game’s story is meant to critique popular trends in modern video games but also features some excellent time travel puzzles.

Levels cover everything from rewinding and fast-forwarding time, altering the state of certain objects, using your character’s movement to determine the flow of time, and much more we don’t wish to spoil.

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Samuel is GamingScan's editor-in-chief. He describes himself as a dedicated gamer and programmer. He enjoys helping others discover the joys of gaming. Samuel closely follows the latest trends in the gaming industry in order to keep the visitors in the flow.

Best time travel games

Here's our list of the best time travel games with more timeloops and grandfather paradoxes than you can shake a stick at.

Looking for the best time travel games? These 10 entries mark the highlights of a genre that has been going strong for decades – promising the awe of hurtling forward in time, manipulating the present, or changing what’s happened in the past. Haven’t we all wanted to do that at some point?

Is time travel possible? Well, time travel is a pretty recognizable concept by now and has been around for as long as there have been people, whether in Hindu mythology or Japanese fairy tales. The idea of time travel in pop science fiction was widely popularized by H.G. Wells, who wrote the 1895 novel The Time Machine, as well as other stories that saw protagonists propelled into different eras.

While many modern games utilize some kind of repeating loop, like Hades or Loop Hero, the best time travel games take this a step further – allowing the player to distort time for their own ends, or forcing them to adapt to imprisonment within it.

These games don’t just use time travel as a story hook, but an integral part of how the game works – which is what helps them stand out among the bog-standard shooters, puzzle games, and platformers out there. 

So, if you loved watching the likes of Groundhog Day or Russian Doll , then these are the games for you. Who knows, maybe one of these titles will end up on our (or even your) space video games that should be movies or TV shows list. While you’re at it, make sure to check out our guide to the best time travel movies too, or if you’re after more games then these upcoming space games will interest you. 

10. Deathloop

• Release date: September 14, 2021
• Platform: PlayStation 5, PC, Xbox Series X/S

Possibly the best PS5 exclusive to have released on the console at the time (though it has since released on Xbox too), Deathloop is a thrilling time-travel first-person shooter (FPS) romp from the developers behind Dishonored.

You play as Colt, an assassin, who is on a mission to eliminate eight ultra-powerful individuals. These gifted beings are exploiting a time loop machine on a subarctic island to live the same day over and over, essentially becoming immortal and being able to do whatever they desire every night without consequence.

You must take out all eight to stop the loop from restarting – using what you learn across multiple loops to navigate the island and complete your mission in one perfect run. With slick gunplay, a gripping story, and a fascinating sci-fi premise, we don’t recommend you sleep on this one.

9. Twelve Minutes

• Release date: August 19, 2021
• Platform: Xbox One, PlayStation 4, Nintendo Switch, PC

It’s a fun, curious mystery game, with plenty of satisfaction to be had from toying with the objects and locations in your compact apartment to see how it’ll affect the outcome.

A curious time loop game, mostly in the star talent brought in to voice its trio of main characters: Daisy Ridley (Star Wars: Rise of Skywalker), James McAvoy (X-Men: First Class, Trance), and Willem Dafoe (Spider-Man, The Lighthouse).

The action takes place in a small, one-bedroom apartment, where McAvoy’s protagonist comes home to find a number of surprises waiting for him – one of which is an armed assailant claiming to be a police officer pounding on their door. When you’re knocked unconscious, you begin the time loop again and have to figure out what’s really going on in order to escape the loop for good.

8. Titanfall 2

• Release date: October 28, 2016
• Platform: Xbox One, PlayStation 4, PC

The sequel to Respawn’s futuristic mecha-combat FPS is a thrilling ride. It has a single-player campaign that pivots effortlessly between fascinating game mechanics, never feeling a need to dwell too long on each one.

The time travel mission, ‘Effect and Cause,’ is a real standout. It allows you to shift between the past and present mid-air as you run, shoot, and platform your way across an expansive military facility. Paired with Respawn’s excellent gunplay, this acclaimed shooter offers far more imagination than the average Call of Duty game.

The brisk campaign has plenty of other thrills to recommend it, but its seamless utilization of time travel as an integral game mechanic – even while limited to a single level – makes it well worth inclusion in this list.

7. Outer Wilds

• Release date: May 28, 2019
• Platform: Xbox One, PlayStation 4/5, Nintendo Switch, PC

Another time loop game, you say? Outer Wilds is a standout indie game, so much so that it’s made our best space games list. It sees you scour a solar system to unpack its mysteries, over a series of 22-minute time loops that reset your progress just as the nearest sun explodes into a supernova. Phew.

As with Deathloop, you’ll have to do more than simply map out the game – needing to learn when certain events occur, or which actions are available in the orbits of the solar system’s planetary bodies. Starting out as a student project, Outer Wilds has gone on to be one of the best indie games in recent years, with a heady mix of environmental exploration, galactic mystery, and survival sim all in one.

6. The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time

• Release date: November 21, 1998
• Platform: Nintendo 64, GameCube, Wii, Wii U, Nintendo Switch

The best game of all time? It’s hard to argue with this assessment for The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time (OoT), a landmark 3D action-adventure game that launched on the Nintendo 64 in 1998. In it, the young hero Link finds a magical ocarina which is able to change the weather, transport him across distant lands, and even propel him through time to a post-apocalyptic world.

It’s not a one-way trip, thankfully, and much of the puzzle work in OoT is in traveling back and forth between time periods, using what you learn and obtain to progress in each setting. As ever, you’re fighting a great evil, battling monsters, gathering weapons and tools for your journey, and figuring out troublesome dungeons – but time travel is what elevates Ocarina of Time into a game of truly mythical proportions.

It's an oldie, but a goodie. You can find the game through Nintendo Switch Online, or on Nintendo DS systems.

5. Quantum Break

• Release date: April 5, 2016
• Platform: Xbox One, PC

Back in 2016 when Quantum Break released, it was the best-selling game published by Microsoft on the Xbox One. While it soon ceded that title to Sea of Thieves (who needs time travel when you have sea shanties?) it’s still a landmark game, and a fascinating experiment in interactive storytelling.

The main conceit of Quantum Break is its mix of gameplay with an interactive TV show that breaks up the story’s five acts, allowing you to make key decisions that affect the narrative for the rest of the game.

Originally conceived as a sequel to Alan Wake, before pivoting into a new IP, Quantum Break is set in a world where a failed time travel experiment allows you to halt, freeze, accelerate, and generally manipulate time around you – inevitably used to ramp up combat as you take on hordes of soldiers and try to fix a fracture in time itself. Time ‘stutters’ can also freeze objects in your environment, creating obstacles or platforms that help and hinder your progress along the way.

4. Life is Strange

• Release date: January 20, 2015
• Platform: Xbox One, PlayStation 4, Nintendo Switch, PC, Android

While more recent Life is Strange games play around with the powers of empathy, or telekinesis, the original game is what started the franchise off with such aplomb – following the fortunes of a young girl who is able to rewind time.

Maxine ‘Max’ Caulfield discovers her time-manipulation ability when a classmate faces an unexpected danger – managing to undo the day’s events and keep them alive. As ever, time travel has unintended consequences, and while Max can aid or even save various people in her life, she finds the outcome isn’t always for the best in the long term. 

With a strikingly impressionistic art style, branching narratives, surprisingly high stakes for a high school story, and a good helping of teen angst, this episodic adventure is well worth a try.

3. Wanderer

• Release date: January 27, 2022
• Platform: PlayStation VR, SteamVR, Oculus

If you’re looking for a time-travel VR game, you’ve come to the right place. Wanderer is a first-person puzzle adventure that has you traveling back through time to prevent an apocalyptic present.

With a talking watch on your wrist, and the ability to jump to different places and periods, Wanderer lives up to its name, seeing you jettison across centuries of history and even to the moon. In each case, action is found in localized puzzles (escape rooms, essentially), some of which take imaginative back-and-forth travel to get the right objects for the right situation. 

You’ll get around 10 hours of play out of this one, along with some brain-bending puzzles that make the most of the VR medium (along with one of the best VR headsets )

• Release date: August 6, 2008
• Platform: Xbox 360, PlayStation 3, Switch, PC, Mac, Linux

Few games play so successfully with time as Braid, a 2008 indie platformer initially launched on Xbox 360 to great acclaim. The developer went on to create The Witness with the profits from this game.

You play Tim, who is trying to find and rescue a princess from some unspecified monster. So far, so Mario. However, things aren’t quite so simple as running and jumping on Goombas: Braid utilizes a number of different time-based mechanics, from a simple rewind (helpful after jumping and missing a ledge) to whole levels that move forward in time as you move right and backward as you move left.

It’s a mind-melting game in many ways, and you may find the story elusive at first, it being gradually pieced together by jigsaw pieces you collect throughout your journey – and blown open by its subversive conclusion. But a recurring theme is the idea of wanting to redo or undo the past, and you won’t find a game that needles this idea as effectively or imaginatively as Braid.

1. The Legend of Zelda: Majora's Mask

• Release date: April 27, 2000
• Platform: Nintendo 64, GameCube, Wii, Wii U, Nintendo Switch, Nintendo DS

How could we list the best time travel games without Majora’s Mask? This follow-up to Ocarina of Time takes place in the same land of Hyrule as its predecessor just two months later, even re-using many in-game assets. The key difference is that an unhinged-looking moon going to crash into the Earth, obliterating everything – and you find yourself reliving the same three days over and over in an attempt to prevent the cataclysmic event from happening.

Those three days come to around an hour of actual gameplay time, meaning you play through a loop quite swiftly, but the real magic of Majora’s Mask is in how it expands on the time-warping magic of OoT. Here you’ll use the ocarina to jump back to the start of the loop, slow down the passage of time, or jump forward to a later day, navigating time like a puzzle dungeon in need of solving.

Earning widespread acclaim, Majora’s Mask has been rereleased several times throughout the years. For modern gamers, you can find the game through Nintendo Switch Online, or on Nintendo DS systems.

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Henry St Leger is a news writer, commissioning editor and all-round geek for the worlds of technology and entertainment. He has years of experience in gadget reviews, has been interviewed live on both BBC World News and Channel News Asia, and will talk endlessly about Neon Genesis Evangelion to anyone who will listen. Bylines include TechRadar, Edge, Space.com, Digital Camera World, and Little White Lies.

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10 Best Time Travel Games, Ranked

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Using time travel in any media is rough. Most of the time, the act of traveling through time does nothing but make things confusing and/or remove all sense of urgency or consequence from any narrative. But, out of everything, time travel tends to work best in video games, primarily because it's a fun mechanic to use.

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And no, we don't mean games where you can change the in-game "time" for secrets  like the Animal Crossing games;  we're talking about IPs where time manipulation is a core part of the game and/or story. Think of classics like Legacy of Kain or modern takes like Titanfall 2's Effect and Cause mission . Here are 10 time travel games you have to play.

10 Blinx: The Time Sweeper

First up is a real oddball game: Blinx: The Time Sweeper. Blinx came out in 2002 and is an action platform much in the same way a lot of the games from that age were. But, rather than just focusing on jumping, you can mess around with time in a variety of ways, thanks to Blinx being a Time Sweeper with a magical vacuum called the TS-1000.

They're honestly all pretty stereotypical time-based abilities such as freezing time, slowing it down, speeding it up, or "recording" a moment in time. So, it’s not the best game, but if you want something that’s heavily focused on messing around with time, Blinx might work for you.

9 Life is Strange

The standout game from Dontnod Studios and published by Square Enix, Life is Strange was pretty huge for a while, thanks to its well-received LGBTQ+ representation, unique hipster atmosphere, and creative method of storytelling. In it, Max Caulfield, an 18-year old with a real eye for photography, suddenly discovers she has a time travel ability, and a mysterious plot starts to unravel from there.

RELATED: Outer Wilds And The Best Games That Use Time Loops

Your goal in this game is to just experience Max's story, rewinding time to solve scenario’s in the best way possible. Sometimes it’s something more serious like fixing Chloe and Max’s relationship and other times it's using your supernatural abilities to enjoy  some oddly beautiful mundane moments . Life is Strange is incredibly neat and very time travel-focused, but in terms of gameplay, it falls short compared to almost everything else on this list.

Then there's Braid  -- a game from the mind of Jonathan Blow who is known in the industry as a bit of a genius as he was also behind The Witness. Braid is a 2D puzzle-platformer, but that's far too simple a label for what Braid actually manages to accomplish.

In this game, you’ll be treated to a wide variety of puzzles -- all of which are designed to manipulate time in some way, as well as challenge your current preconceptions about video game puzzles. It might look simplistic at first, but Braid has so many different ways of messing with time in inventive ways.

7 Zero Time Dilemma

The Zero Escape series is an incredibly interesting set of games. There’s the first game Nine Hours, Nine Persons, Nine Doors , then Virtue’s Last Reward, and now: Zero Time Dilemma. In these games, you'll be puzzle-solving, picking who lives or who dies, and attempting to solve a mind-bogglingly complex mystery. But, where does time-travel come in?

Well, there are a variety of endings depending on who you pick to perish since the story goes on without them afterward. But, canonically, all of these alternate endings are canon as the in-game codex refers to them as alternate timelines. And, in Virtue’s Last Reward, there are even certain characters who are able to mess with time more directly, so it's an integral part of the series.

6 Quantum Break

Quantum Break  comes from Remedy Studios who are most known for creating Control , Alan Wake , and all the Max Payne games before that. In it, you control Jack Joyce, a man out to stop the end of time ( which technically already passed ) with the time-based powers he was granted. It's a game that also doubles as a tv show which is pretty creative but is also a huge turnoff for some people.

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And, because Quantum Break leans so heavily into the mechanics of time travel, many players found the plot absurdly confusing. That said, the graphical fidelity, gameplay loop, and design of Quantum Break are all very well done, and the game itself is a blast to play.

We were going to put Timeshift on here, but quite frankly, Superhot does a better job as a time-manipulation shooter than Timeshift does. And it does so with arguably fewer mechanics overall. The stylistic game is centered around players solving combat “puzzles” where time only moves when you do.

The game first came out in 2016, but the movement in it was something people desperately wanted to see adapted for VR-play, so the developers (Superhot Team) managed to pull that off by the end of the year and even made a sequel not long after called Superhot: Mind, Control, Delete. Whether you play Superhot with mouse + keyboard, controller, or a VR headset, you're guaranteed to have a blast.

4 Prince Of Persia: The Sands of Time

Other than Blinx, Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time is the other game that immediately comes to mind when time travel is mentioned. In it, you take control of the Prince as he runs through India trying to reverse his own horrible mistake of releasing the Sands of Time that warped both the people and landscape.

To do this, the Prince must use a variety of time-changing abilities, such as reversing time, freezing it for a single opponent, or stopping time altogether for everything but himself. These mechanics, paired with the immensely satisfying platforming and the relatively complex combat, create a game so iconic, that it sort of represents the time-manipulation genre of video games.

3 Timesplitters 2

Timesplitters 2 is a beloved classic that everyone remembers fondly. In fact, there was a fake teased remake for the second game not too long ago that caused such backlash from the fanbase THQ Nordic had to come out and apologize. Timesplitters 2 was the multiplayer shooter that fans of the N64 Goldeneye had been waiting 5 years for.

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It had fantastic multiplayer maps, 50+ unlockable characters, a level editor, a hilarious campaign, and so much more. But, what about the time travel aspects? Well, that's the whole concept for the game, since you play as a Space Marine named Cortez who travels through time collecting "time crystals" to stop an alien race called the Timesplitters from destroying humanity.

2 Legend of Zelda: Ocarina Of Time, Oracle of Ages, Seasons, & Majora's Mask

How could we talk about time travel without mentioning the Legend of Zelda games? The series just recently had its 35th anniversary, after all, and the "Zelda Timeline" is something any video game fan knows about. In particular, there are four that really focus on time-travel, those being Ocarina of Time, Majora’s Mask, Oracle of Seasons, and Oracle of Ages. All four of these games handle the concept of time-travel in a different way.

Ocarina of Time basically has two time periods you hop back and forth from with Young Link and Adult Link. Majora’s Mask takes place over the same period of 3 days, experienced over and over as Link learns to “master” the time loop. Oracle of Seasons and Oracle of Ages might seem like two versions of the same game, like Pokemon Red and Blue, but there are actually a variety of big gameplay differences. All four of these games handle time-travel in inventive ways without overcomplicating the plot or gameplay itself.

1 Chrono Trigger

Chrono Trigger is probably one of the most enjoyable time-hopping stories of all time simply because the dev team at Square put an immeasurable amount of work into it without taking the game itself too seriously. This 90s masterpiece is focused on the story of Chrono as he gathers party members (like a giant robot or a frog knight) from different time periods to save the entire world.

It's an RPG that still holds up insanely well thanks to the incredible character designs from Dragon Ball Z's Akira Toriyama, as well as the inventive combat system. There's just so much to love about Chrono Trigger, and we haven't even mentioned its sequel Chrono Cross either.

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The 10 best time travel games that’ll twist your mind

Fiddle with timelines by jumping backward and forward in these titles.

If you’ve ever sat down for a short gaming session, only to check your watch and discover 7 hours have passed, you’ll understand what time travel in gaming feels like. Either that or you’ve been through an alien abduction. Playing with the concept of time has been a favorite of sci-fi writers in all forms for as long as anyone can remember. It taps into something that makes us human and presents us with questions that we struggle to find answers to.

Is it possible to see into the future? Is deja vu a form of time travel? Can we travel faster than light? Is time malleable? Can days be repeated? What if you could rewind time? These are some of the concepts that the best time travel games place before us to explore and contemplate. Sometimes we get lost in the spaces they create, time becoming irrelevant as it passes around us. And that’s what this article is about: shining a spotlight on the most enjoyable time travels gamers can experience. So let’s dive in — there’s no time to waste!

What are the best games featuring time travel?

Our list of the best time travel games features titles that bring their own unique twists to timeless ideas, consequences and conundrums. Whether you're into solving mind-bending puzzles, changing the course of history, or just experiencing wild twists, these games have something to offer. If you’ve even the slightest interest in sci-fi games, you’ll be doing yourself a favor by checking out the games highlighted here.

Back to the Future: The Game

It'd be a crime against time travel games if we didn't kick off with  Back to the Future: The Game . Set after the events of the iconic film trilogy, this episodic adventure takes fans deep down nostalgia lane.

Playing as Marty McFly, you’ll team up with Doc Brown once more to fix rips in the space-time continuum. But this game is way more than simple fan service, with new twists on the franchise written by the films’ co-creator Bob Gale. You’ll be jumping between different eras of Hill Valley throughout, solving puzzles and interacting with familiar characters from fresh perspectives.

And, as is core to  Telltale Games , you’ll get to make big decisions on the way that’ll shape the story.

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The Messenger

The Messenger proves that looks can be deceiving, starting out as what appears to be a pretty straightforward ninja-based retro action platformer . But this game has a smart twist up its sleeve, resulting in one of the coolest time loops in games you can experience.

Initially, you’ll journey through a gorgeous yet dangerous world in an 8-bit aesthetic. However, as you improve and gain new skills, the game transforms into a 16-bit future, taking you back through environments transformed by ruin, setting up the second half of your adventure and presenting even greater challenges. If you’re a fan of classic platformers and have an itch to play one with a unique gameplay mechanic, this is the title for you.

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With a title like Deathloop , you know you’re in for quite an experience. You’ll play as Colt, an assassin trapped in a bizarre time loop on the luxurious island of Blackreef. Every day resets at midnight, forcing you to relive the same events over and over, unless you can break the cycle trapping you there. In order to escape the island, you’ll need to locate and eliminate eight targets — known as the ‘Visionaries’ — before the day is up.

And as if that wasn’t challenging enough, your targets know you’re coming for them and just happen to be heavily guarded. Experiment with different approaches, learn enemy patterns across loops, and strategically manipulate the environment to take down your targets. Each new day offers an opportunity to gather intel, acquire powerful weapons and abilities, and inch closer to unraveling the mysteries behind the loop and Colt's predicament.

Deathloop presents one of the most engaging time loops in games, and it’s also one of the  best FPS titles available to play as part of your Game Pass subscription.

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Outer Wilds

Outer Wilds is consistently held up as one of the most intriguing space exploration games ever made, and is among the best time travel games around too. Playing as an astronaut, part of your role in the space program is to explore a miniature solar system containing big secrets. And there's a catch: the entire system is trapped in a 22-minute time loop that always ends with the sun going supernova.

Zipping around in your rickety spaceship, piecing together clues left by a vanished alien race, you might stumble upon a hidden ruin, strange writings, or eerie shifts on a sand-engulfed planet. And remember to pay attention, as each loop adds another piece to the puzzle you’re trying to solve: the source of this time loop — and potentially, how to end it.

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Steins;Gate

Steins;Gate is a legendary visual novel game , regarded as delivering perhaps the greatest time travel story of the genre. Stepping into the lab coat of Okabe Rintaro, an eccentric self-proclaimed mad scientist, you stumble upon a way to send messages into the past. And as you might expect, experimenting with this method triggers a series of unforeseen consequences.

Seemingly innocuous alterations to the past result in shockingly unpredictable changes to the present. And as the narrative slowly unravels, you’ll be caught up in a web of conspiracy, paranoia, and the heart-wrenching ethical dilemmas of manipulating time.

There are multiple endings to discover, all based on your own choices, and a cast of relatable characters to meet on your numerous journeys through this absorbing sci-fi story.

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Prince of Persia: Warrior Within

In this classic Prince of Persia tale, you’ll take the role of the titular character who finds themselves hunted by the Dahaka, the embodiment of fate. Traveling to the Island of Time, you’ll need to find a way to escape your seemingly inevitable demise.

Your journey will take you to the decaying ruins of a once-glorious empire. By manipulating time, you’ll move between a pristine past and this decaying present, solve time-shifting puzzles, engage in brutal combat and discover what price there is to pay for cheating death.

One of the darker installments to the  Prince of Persia franchise , Warrior Within is a challenging, time-bending platformer that holds up to this day.

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Ghost Trick: Phantom Detective

Ghost Trick: Phantom Detective is a bit of a hidden gem, but one you should definitely search out. You play as Sissel, a ghost who's lost his memories following their death. There are just hours until sunrise, which will see your soul pass over to the other side. So, with time running out, you’ll need to discover who Sissel was and solve the mystery surrounding their murder.

The game’s plot is engaging enough, but it’s in the core gameplay mechanic where Phantom Detective really shines. You see, Sissel can't directly impact the world of the living. Instead, he possesses and manipulates everyday objects, performing quirky ‘Ghost Tricks’ to influence people's actions. And there’s an ingenious component of time travel woven in too, as you can jump back four minutes before a person's death, using your ghostly powers to alter events.

Each scenario becomes an intricate puzzle, where you set up a chain of events in the present, rewinding time to execute your plans. The characters are quirky and memorable, and the story is surprisingly poignant. Ghost Trick is an absolute must-play for fans of creative  detective games with challenging puzzle elements.

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Quantum Break

Remedy Entertainment loves to experiment with narrative and gameplay, with Quantum Break being one of their most ambitious projects — and arguably their most underrated release. You play as Jack Joyce, an agent who gains time manipulation powers after a science experiment gone awry. Featuring tight third-person combat, you’ll get to unleash your new-found abilities to freeze enemies, dodge attacks by rewinding time, and create devastating blasts to finish off attackers.

Quantum Break also includes interesting ‘junction’ points, where the game pauses for a live-action episode, which dynamically change based on your in-game decisions. This part of the game proved to be divisive. Fans loved the uniqueness, while detractors focused on the fact that this element seemed more like a TV show than game.

Whatever your view Quantum Break is a bold, experimental take on interactive storytelling, and its seamless integration of time travel mechanics into both gameplay and narrative is undeniable.

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Life Is Strange

Life is Strange captured the hearts of many with its emotionally impactful story and captivating rewind mechanic. You take on the role of Max Caulfield, a photography student who discovers they can rewind time at will. This power becomes her tool to navigate the complexities of teenage life, from social drama to a looming supernatural threat. Now if that doesn’t scream best time travel in games, we don’t know what does.

While Life is Strange doesn't lean into complicated time travel theories, it effectively uses the concept to explore the themes of choice and consequence. Max can rewind short durations of time, trying different approaches in conversations, and experimenting to solve puzzles. The game reminds the player that even small changes can lead to significant ramifications, both good and bad, wrapped up in a story that beautifully captures the bittersweet tinge of nostalgia.

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Chrono Trigger

It wouldn't be a proper time travel list without Chrono Trigger , the legendary JRPG that arguably perfected the concept in gaming. If you’re the type of person who enjoys playing games that have gone down in the history of the medium, this is one title you absolutely must dive into.

The game tells the tale of a chance encounter that throws a cast of lovable characters from various eras into an epic adventure to save the world across time itself. From prehistoric caves to a post-apocalyptic future, players journey through time, uncovering secrets and facing off against legendary villains. The title’s combat system isn't just satisfying, it arguably introduced the concept of time loops in games too.

Chrono Trigger boasts multiple endings, encouraging repeated playthroughs, and its tight gameplay, charming characters, and phenomenal soundtrack will keep you coming back for me. Not just one of the greatest  JRPG titles of all time, it’s undoubtedly one of the best games full stop.

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It might not feel like it’s taken long to get through our list of the best time travel games, but you’ve actually been on this page for 5 hours! Of course you haven’t, that’d be ridiculous. But no matter how many titles we included, you probably think there’s one left out that should’ve made the cut. If that’s the case, let everyone know in the comments below.

About Author

John’s favorite games tend to be indies, with a preference for slow-paced cozy titles, city builders and sims. He loves seeing small dev teams get recognition for passion projects. He hates toxic fandom.

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While books and movies have seen great success with time travel stories, video games are no exception to this storytelling phenomenon. Over the years, developers have found ways to enhance the gameplay and stories of their games through the warping of the space-time continuum. These time-traveling stories are told through numerous styles of games including visual novels, RPGs, and puzzle platformers.

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Where some games use time travel as a plot device or central focus of the story, other games use time travel as a gimmick for changing up the gameplay and giving players a chance to control the outcome of puzzles and battles. The best time travel games use these two ideas in tandem, weaving intricate storylines through time and letting players control those loops in order to reach one or multiple endings.

10 Travel With Link In The Legend Of Zelda: Ocarina Of Time

Though time travel is a common theme in the Legend of Zelda series, Ocarina of Time introduced players to the mechanic through an incredible story that would cement it as one of the best games of all time. Players traveled back and forth through time, taking Link from child to adult and back again in order to solve puzzles, wield weapons, and complete areas.

Ocarina of Time was the first Zelda game to be done in 3D and introduced a handful of mechanics, like the targeting system, that would become staples in the series. The puzzles, dungeons, characters, and story all come together for a phenomenal game experience.

9 Try To Save Lives In Steins;Gate

Steins;Gate is an anime visual novel, so it doesn't have a ton of actual gameplay. The player mostly reads through the story events and makes the occasional choice based on which characters they want to interact with and what they want to say, but these choices can affect the outcome of the story and lead to several endings.

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The story follows Rintaro Okabe and his friends as they accidentally create a time machine and stumble onto a worldwide conspiracy led by a secret organization. The art is beautiful, and the story is deep and emotional. The game was popular enough that an anime adaptation was created .

8 Game Meets TV Show In Quantum Break

The Xbox One console exclusive from Remedy Entertainment, Quantum Break attempted something very different: they incorporated a TV show into the game itself. Players would play a section of the game for a few hours and then watch an "episode" of the Quantum Break show which continued the story from the end of gameplay into the next section.

The gameplay itself gave players time-altering abilities like shields , warping, and pausing time in bubbles. The third-person action game had a well-told story and featured a number of well-known actors, including Shawn Ashmore, Aiden Gillen, and Lance Reddick.

7 Life Is Strange, And So Are The Choices

Life is Strange has launched a series of episodic graphic adventure games since the original landed in the hands of gamers in 2015. The game is a third-person narrative puzzle-solving game where players can interact with objects and characters, making conversation choices that will effect the outcome of the story.

Players control Max and her "rewind" ability, which allows them to go back and alter the course of events. This included choices made in the game and conversations so that players could branch out and choose the path that they found most beneficial.

6 One Of The Best Indie Games Ever, Braid

Braid raised the bar for Indie games. The highly innovative and entertaining 2D platformer not only delivered interesting and intelligent puzzles, but it also had an engaging story that hooks the player until the final credits roll.

Players control time in each level as a means to solve puzzles, rewinding and fast-forwarding in order to re-establish platforms, unlock doors, or defeat enemies. The game features six worlds, each with its own time-based mechanic, which meant that players would need to rethink their time-changing strategies to solve new puzzles, keeping the gameplay fresh.

5 Join Doc And Marty In Back To The Future: The Game

Marty McFly and Doc Brown made the leap from the big screen to video games in this Telltale Games series. Instead of retelling the events of the Back to the Future movies, the game offers an all-new adventure for players and fans of the franchise to dive into.

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Much like the other Telltale games, Back to the Future: The Game has players exploring environments and interacting with objects and characters in order to make decisions that will lead them down an interesting narrative. Christopher Lloyd returned as Doc Brown, but Marty McFly was voiced by another actor, as Michal J. Fox was unable to provide voice content.

4 Pick Your Hero In Dishonored 2

A sequel to its first game, Dishonored 2 gave fans even more great gameplay and deep storytelling. The players are immersed in the fantastical steampunk world of Dishonored as either Corvo or Emily, and use supernatural powers to attempt to reclaim the throne lost at the start of the game.

In the Stilton Manor level, players are given a device letting them view the level through a piece of glass, allowing them to travel back three years in the past. Players can warp back and forth between times instantly, allowing them to escape or strategically attack enemies and solve puzzles. Players can also slow and freeze time through the character's powers, should they choose to use them.

3 Time Traveling Mech Pilots In Titanfall 2

Titanfall 2 slipped through the cracks at launch, as it was sandwiched between the new releases of Call of Duty and Battlefield. It was mainly picked up by fans of the first game, but would later get more recognition after the success of Apex: Legends . What players realized is that the single-player story campaign of Titanfall 2 was a great FPS adventure where, in certain levels, players operated a time-travel device in order to shift between times.

This allowed the player to encounter enemies in a firefight, warp to a new time, change their position to behind the group, then warp back and blast away. Some platforming elements also needed the aid of time travel, warping between times to land on platforms and get across spanning chasms.

2 Prince Of Persia: The Sands Of Time Rebooted The Franchise

Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time served as a reboot for the franchise once Ubisoft took it over . Players take control of The Prince and, after acquiring the Dagger of Time, use it to manipulate time in order to solve puzzles and defeat enemies.

RELATED: 10 Best Point & Click Adventure Games (That Aren't Telltale Games)

The Prince can reverse time, meaning players that messed up a platforming jump can try again without dying, slow down time to take a moment to think, or stop it completely. Combining these powers into the hack-and-slash combat proved fun and unique. There was also a sequel, The Warrior Within , that continued the Prince's story, keeping the same time-altering gameplay.

1 An Oldschool RPG For The Ages, Chrono Trigger

Chrono Trigger entered the fray on the SNES in 1995 and introduced gamers to a new franchise that would see several sequels and spinoffs down the years. It was revolutionary for its time, offering up multiple endings, side-quests that gave more depth to its side characters, and a real-time battle system.

Players traveled through time via portals and a time machine from the game's present-day to its past where past actions affect future events. Depending on how the players get to the final boss battle, they would get one of twelve different endings, as they make their decisions to try and stop a global catastrophe.

• The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time

5 video games that changed time travel forever

The ultimate power fantasy.

The multiverse is all the rage right now, at least if Marvel has anything to say about it. It’s a way for storytellers to explore alternate outcomes and identities , all without the bothersome causality of time travel.

But the potentially enormous impact of seemingly small details — or missteps — on the timeline is precisely what makes the very best time-travel stories so rewarding. That’s especially true in video games, where it’s vital to commit to the bit in order to be successful. The superlative games of this sci-fi subgenre are those in which you’re constantly contending with the consequences of your actions. It’s the ultimate interactive fantasy — you can save lives, right old wrongs, and maybe even prevent what seems to be an inevitable calamity.

These five titles have had an outsize influence on the medium’s depiction of chronological hijinks through both their stories and gameplay mechanics. If you’re looking for a crash course in video game time travel, look no further.

THE RULES OF TIME TRAVEL is an Inverse special issue exploring the evolution of science fiction's most imaginative sub-genre. From Marty McFly to Avengers: Endgame .

5. Life Is Strange

Chloe drives while having an intense conversation with Max in Life is Strange .

In most video games, movies, and TV shows, time travel is a complex blessing to be wielded with care — but it’s almost always a tool of awesome power. However, in Life Is Strange , Max’s ability to rewind time quickly becomes a curse. After the aspiring photographer saves her estranged former bestie Chloe from certain death, the repercussions of those actions ripple and reverberate in wildly unpredictable ways.

Throughout all five episodes of Square Enix and Dontnod Entertainment’s choice-driven narrative adventure, Max comes to realize that her cool little party trick is not only breaking her mind — it’s also the instigating factor behind an otherworldly storm that’s going to destroy her hometown and everyone in it.

Life Is Strange may have inspired a few too many “sad in the Pacific Northwest” copycat games, but the way in which it uses this familiar trope to immerse players in the bond between Chloe and Max is truly unforgettable.

4. 13 Sentinels: Aegis Rim

Three girls enjoy ice cream after school in 13 Sentinels: Aegis Rim.

This watercolored visual novel punctuated with real-time strategy interludes is an exercise in sci-fi maximalism. It tosses every trope and plot twist you could possibly imagine at the wall — Angsty teens piloting mechs! World War II! Magical girls! Off-brand Terminator cyborgs! Convenient amnesia! Yet, miraculously, it all somehow works.

With 13 protagonists and all sorts of timey-wimey hijinks, there’s no way you’re going to be able to keep the story straight without some serious flow charting. But it doesn’t matter. For the most part, 13 Sentinels doesn’t tell a story in a linear fashion but instead invites you to explore its sprawling web of cause and effect however you choose. The result is trippy, kaleidoscopic, and exhilarating.

Originally released on PS4 back in 2020, 13 Sentinels is now available on Nintendo Switch , and the chill, dialogue-heavy gameplay loop makes it an ideal handheld experience. This is the perfect game to stay up far too late with — and inspire some kooky dreams once you’ve put it aside for the night.

3. 428 Shibuya Scramble

428: Shibuya Scramble is a wonderfully absurd and deeply complex take on the time-travel formula.

Spike Chunsoft’s underappreciated gem first debuted on the Nintendo Wii all the way back in 2008. This hilarious, genre-blending visual novel sees five protagonists — a scientist, a journalist, a gang member, a detective, and an amnesiac — simultaneously caught up in a looming terrorist event in Tokyo’s Shibuya neighborhood.

428 ’s story is told with a blend of live-action videos and still photos. The crew took more than 120,000 images for the game, all while outrunning or outwitting the local police, since they did not have permission to film.

While most games centered on time travel focus on big leaps between dramatically different eras, 428 focuses solely on the events of a single day, broken up into 10 hour-long chunks. Often, your aim is to get the characters’ paths to cross at the right time — but with 87 possible endings, there are a whole lot of ways that things can go hilariously wrong. You’ll spend a lot of time backtracking — 10 minutes here, an hour there — but the scenarios unfold so differently depending on your choices that the core gameplay never gets too repetitive.

428 was far enough ahead of its time that it still feels fresh even today, yet its influences can be seen in the off-kilter humor and rich sense of place found in the Yakuza games, as well as the character-swapping mechanics of 13 Sentinels .

2. The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time

Link awakens seven years older.

The first 3D entry in Nintendo’s venerable action-RPG series, 1998’s Ocarina of Time is the Paddington 2 of video games, with an eye-popping average critic’s score of 99 on review aggregator Metacritic .

It all plays out fairly Sword in the Stone -ish, as Zelda games tend to do. After exploring a few dungeons and beating some baddies, young Link pulls the Master Sword from its resting place in the Temple of Time in the hopes of defeating the nefarious Ganondorf. But he’s blinded by a flash of light (and evil cackles) and falls unconscious, awakening moments later in the company of a sage who tells him he’s aged seven years.

Eventually, you’ll be able to travel between both versions of the world at will, using knowledge, skills, and items acquired in each era to prevent the downfall of Hyrule.

Ocarina is one of those rare games that made a home for itself in the hearts of millions of players around the world. With clues trickling out that the sequel to Breath of the Wild will incorporate some kind of time-travel element , it’s clear that influence is alive and well today, nearly a quarter-century later.

1. Chrono Trigger

The heroes of Chrono Trigger .

No game engages with the concept of time travel in a more satisfying and meaningful way than Chrono Trigger . And it’s one of few games that appropriately appreciate the appeal of a completely badass time machine. The Epoch, which you acquire during a jaunt to the ruined future of 2300 AD, is one of the coolest vehicles ever to grace a game console.

Time travel in Chrono Trigger is far more than a one-time gimmick or cutscene; it’s deeply woven into fundamental elements of the experience. Even while exploring the humdrum homes of NPCs, you’re encouraged to tinker around with the effects of your actions in the past on the future. (For instance, you could open those treasure chests in Porre Village circa 600 A.D at the earliest opportunity. But you’ll get a much bigger bang for your buck if you waggle your magic pendant in front of them and come back 400 years later.)

In addition to opening up more than a dozen different endings, Chrono Trigger uses its central gimmick to tell affecting stories about each of its playable characters. The adventure opens with Marle stumbling face-first into a kinda-sorta grandmother paradox situation, Lucca’s able to save her mother from a life-changing accident, and Robo’s able to transform a wasteland into a verdant forest — but only after spending a few centuries tilling the soil. Chrono Trigger ’s story and world are very simple by modern standards, but the game’s depth and timelessness stem from the rich intricacy with which time travel is integrated into both.

• Video Games

10 Time Traveling Video Games to Explore Past and Future

Want to visit the past or explore the future? These ten games featuring time travel will take you on adventures to another dimension -- leave the present behind!

Humankind has long desired to return to the past and change mistakes, or look into the future to see our destiny. It's a topic that popular culture likes to play with, and has been a regular trope in video games since the 1980s. One of the first games I played on the Commodore 64 was called Battle Through Time , a sideways-scrolling, time-hopping shooter with a lax attitude to music copyright licensing.

Fortunately, as enjoyable as the game was, the scene has evolved considerably in the past 35 years or so. If you're fed up with the present, the following ten games all rely on time travel as a key aspect of gameplay.

1. Steins;Gate (2009)

A visual novel video game that is also the sequel to 2008's Chaos;Head (both part of the Science Adventure series), Steins;Gate has a heavy time travel gameplay element. Embracing the concept of cause and effect, the player (who assumes the role of Rintar? Okabe) must travel back and forth in time, changing events in the past to influence the future.

Since this is a visual novel, your job is to direct the main characters into making choices. The game presents several non-linear plotlines, each with their own branches. This will ensure each game takes a different path. Steins;Gate is available on Windows, PS3, PSP, Android, and iOS.

Buy: Steins;Gate on Steam ($34.99) | PS3 ($19.99) | Android (Free to Start) | iOS ($24.99)

2. No Time to Explain (2011)

A fun game that totally runs with the idea of time travel and paradox effects, this one takes its name from the popular fictional trope. (Namely, the one that papers over cracks in plots with a quick piece of dismissive dialogue!)

Another game that blends the platform puzzler genre with an adventure format, No Time to Explain is fast, frenetic fun. Just try not to think about it too much, because those paradoxes will probably send your head into a spin!

Originally released in 2011, No Time to Explain was issued on Windows, macOS, and Linux ( via Steam ). The remastered version added releases for Xbox One and PlayStation 4.

Buy: No Time to Explain on Steam | Xbox One | PS4 ($14.99)

3. The Silent Age (2015)

A compelling, atmospheric side-scrolling adventure puzzler, The Silent Age embraces the idea of time travel as a key game mechanic. Switching back and forth through two time-zones -- as easily as you would jump in another game -- is necessary as part of the puzzle solving process . It's an idea that really works, too.

Following its popular mobile release on iOS and Android, The Silent Age has been updated for Windows and macOS. We'd recommend you take a look if you're a fan of time travel. Personally, I've been stuck on this game for months, so if you have any tips, feel free to share them below!

Buy: The Silent Age on Steam ($9.99) | Android (Free to Start) | iOS (Free to Start, $4.99 for Episode 2)

4. Life Is Strange (2015)

Ever wanted to rewind time and do everything differently? This is the premise behind Life Is Strange , an episodic video graphic novel with an interactive aspect. Each decision you make as photography student Max Caulfield has ramifications -- it's therefore important to make the right choices. Failure will see the town where Max lives destroyed in an oncoming storm. Solving puzzles is a key feature of success in this award-winning game.

Even better, the first episode is available free on all platforms. You'll find it on Windows, macOS, and Linux, where you don't even need a mouse to play it . It's also on PlayStation 3 and 4, plus Xbox 360 and Xbox One. Life Is Strange has an impending sequel, Life Is Strange 2 , in development. In addition, a prequel, Before the Storm , was released in August 2017.

Buy: Life Is Strange on Steam ($19.99 for all 5 episodes) | PS3 | PS4 ($19.99 complete edition) | Xbox One ($19.99 complete edition) | Xbox 360 ($4.99 each for episodes 2-5)

5. Chrono Trigger (1995)

Combining RPG gameplay with time travel, Chrono Trigger takes place in a huge world, where the player can visit seven time periods. Although the in-game world isn't Earth, it features a prehistoric age with dinosaurs, plus a medieval zone with knights and monsters. There's also a post-apocalyptic future era.

With multiple endings, plot-related side quests, and character development (rare in a game from the 1990s), Chrono Trigger is often found in lists of the best video games of all time .

Although originally released on the SNES and PlayStation in 1995, Chrono Trigger was subsequently ported to the Nintendo DS, iOS, and Android from 2009.

Buy: Chrono Trigger for DS from Amazon | Wii/Wii U Virtual Console | PS3/Vita ($9.99) | Android ($9.99) | iOS ($9.99)

6. Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time (2003)

Perhaps one of the most famous games of all time -- and responsible for a movie of the same name -- this game features a magical, time-manipulating dagger. After being tricked into breaking the Sands of Time hourglass, the main character (the Prince) must use the Dagger of Time to restore the hourglass by defeating the monsters it has unleashed. This is done by rewinding moments of the game to undo mistakes, as well as using the dagger to freeze and kill enemies.

Often cited as the title that revived the Prince of Persia brand, The Sands of Time was released on Game Boy Advance, PlayStation 2, GameCube, Xbox, Windows, and PlayStation 3.

Buy: Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time on Steam ($9.99) | PS3 ($14.99)

7. Spider-Man: Edge of Time (2011)

A super hero game crossed with time travel? Yes! Spider-Man: Edge of Time features original Spider-Man Peter Parker, along with Miguel O'Hara, the Spider-Man of 2099. Edge of Time is a sequel to the 2010 game Spider-Man: Shattered Dimensions and features a cause-and-effect mechanism.

In short, events in the earlier time period can impact the later one. But there's more to it than that: you can also expect to see popular Spider-Man villains and perform some time-zone hopping!

Released on Nintendo DS, 3DS, Wii, PlayStation 3, and Xbox 360, digital copies of the game are no longer available due licensing issues. However, it should be possible to pick up a physical copy from your favorite online game store .

8. Radiant Historia (2010)

Another Nintendo-based RPG, Radiant Historia takes place in the war-torn, plague-ridden continent of Vainquer. Here, you guide the main character, Stocke, in solving puzzles and expanding the inventory. Most intriguing, however, is the use of the White Chronicle, a book that guides time travel along parallel timelines. For instance, challenges in timeline A can typically be solved by collecting items from timelines B and C.

Originally released for the Nintendo DS in 2010, Radiant Historia has an upcoming expanded remaster planned to arrive on Nintendo 3DS in spring 2018. It's called Radiant Historia: Perfect Chronology . If you can wait to play this version, do so -- many remastered games are worth playing again !

Unfortunately, no other platforms have yet been graced with Radiant Historia .

9. Braid (2008)

A puzzle-platform video game, Braid gives the player the ability to undo mistakes, rewinding time in a similar manner to Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time . You reach each in-game world from main character Tim's home, and each has its own time manipulation property. For instance, in one world, the direction the character moves in will change the flow of time (left/right, back/forth). In other worlds, objects may be immune to manipulation, or you can slow them down.

Puzzles and platform action take on a whole new dimension in this small-but-awesome indie game .

Braid was initially released for Xbox 360, followed by versions for Windows, macOS, PlayStation 3, and Linux.

Buy: Braid on Steam ($14.99) | Xbox 360 ($9.99) PS3 ($14.99)

10. Doctor Who: The Eternity Clock (2012)

No list of time traveling adventures can be complete without mention of Doctor Who , the long-running British TV show . Over the years, the show has had many video game spin-offs, but the one that relies on time travel the most is The Eternity Clock . This is essentially a side scrolling platform adventure game, taking place in different connected eras. It features Daleks, Cybermen, and other popular monsters from the series.

Featuring the voices of Matt Smith and Alex Kingston as the Doctor (#11) and River Song, The Eternity Clock was released on Windows, PS3 and PS Vita. Though initially criticized for its tricky controls, difficulty level, some bugs and lack of save points, subsequent updates have patched these issues. While it's generally considered that the PC version is superior to the PS3 release, this is no longer widely available.

Buy: Doctor Who: The Eternity Clock on PS3 ($9.99) | PS Vita ($9.99)

How Will You Travel Through Time?

We love time travel at MakeUseOf, as you can probably tell from this selection of games. But what do you think?

Have you played any of these time-travel games? Are there any others that you would like to share? Tell us in the comments!

Image Credit: hayatikayhan/ Depositphotos

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10 best time loop games, according to metacritic.

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Solo Leveling: Arise - Sung Jinwoo Build (Best Stats, Weapons, & Artifacts)

Ff7 rebirth helped me rediscover a passion i ignored for nearly a decade, rumored nintendo direct could be one of the best yet, leaker teases.

Time loops have been especially popular lately. This trope usually involves characters reliving the same events over and over again. For some reason, that device has really been resonating with people recently. It has appeared in a lot of video games, like last year's Deathloop .

RELATED: 10 Games To Play If You Like Deathloop

There are plenty of examples of the trope out there, likely inspired by the famous film Groundhog Day . Games that feature time loops extensively in the overall narrative or gameplay have been rated on Metacritic , giving players plenty of options that utilize these elements incredibly well.

Gnosia (2019) - 82

Gnosia is a delightful little visual novel available on Nintendo Switch . The player takes on the role of an astronaut on a drifting spaceship. The player must find the Gnosia, who is a shape-shifting alien hidden amongst the crew. It mixes the social deduction and visual novel genres, as any member can be a Gnosia.

This is where the time loop aspect comes into play. Different characters can be the Gnosia on different playthroughs. Even the player can be a Gnosia, which twists the format around greatly. The player must see several different events on different playthroughs to get the real ending.

The Sexy Brutale (2017) - 83

The Sexy Brutale lives up to its title. It takes place during a never-ending masquerade ball that loops every twelve hours. In that time, all of the participants are murdered, fulfilling the brutal part of the title. The player must investigate the manor and stop the murders from happening.

The game is well regarded for its writing and puzzles, though some fans do think the game is too easy. Learning about all the other guests at the party is very satisfying, and it rewards that kind of exploration. The game is available on all previous generations.

Loop Hero (2021)  - 84

Loop Hero is a great endless RPG released last year. Due to its looping nature, it can technically be played forever, even though it does have a narrative with an ending. However, this game is a roguelike, so it can endlessly vary with different setups. The time loop setting is a pretty popular setup for roguelikes, as it happens.

RELATED: 15 Cool Time Loop Movies, Ranked (According to IMDb)

The real game is anything but common, though. The world generates randomly as the player explores it, and the player will encounter enemies that give them cards that generate more land, as well as equipment and items. The real appeal and challenge come from placing environment cards strategically to maximize enemies and loot and summon boss fights.

Returnal (2021) - 86

Returnal , a PlayStation 5 title, fancied itself as "the first Triple-A roguelike." It had big production values and is absolutely jaw-dropping visually. It also pulled the best beats from other Roguelites to give it a solid gameplay loop.

In Returnal , the player character Selene crashes down on a hostile alien world. Every time she dies, she is resurrected back into her crashed ship. This repetition of events is essential to the game's structure but also helps hide goodies. It rewards exploration of the world and the small gradual steps to breaking the loop.

Outer Wilds (2019) - 86

Outer Wilds is perhaps a game where it is better to know nothing about it. Even knowing that the game includes some kind of time loop ruins its once-in-a-lifetime charm. This space exploration game's scope and scale are quite impressive.

Plenty of games take place on planets, but this one gives players an entire solar system to explore, and it encourages them to explore it at their leisure. For about twenty-two minutes, that is, when the sun explodes, and everything resets. This opening forces the player to immediately despise the loop and want to fix it.

Steins;Gate (2009) - 87

Steins;Gate is often thought of as an anime, but it was originally a game. It is one of the most excellent visual novel games  and was fairly light in gameplay. What it was not light on was a mind-boggling science fiction story. Steins;Gate is about time travel of all kinds, not just loops.

The game explores many different types of time travel, and the loop comes up more than a few times. Certain characters find themselves stuck in loops, or they may be in a loop and not realize it. Regarding characters, that is where the game really shines. The lead, Okabe, comes off as a real eccentric and has an equally bizarre supporting cast he surrounds himself with.

Deathloop (2021) - 88

Deathloop was one of the most publicized games of last year. It had been hyped up in trailers for years before its release to glowing praise. It ended up nominated for game of the year above several other great time loop games. It really set itself apart with its combination of style and puzzle gameplay.

RELATED: Best Puzzles In The Game Deathloop, Ranked

The game is not developer Arkane's first work in the Immersive-Sim genre, and it shows. The game's world is densely populated with plenty of interactable items. The player must assassinate several targets on the island of Blackreef, and they must do it in one loop's time. Mastering that perfect run is the core appeal of Deathloop 's gameplay.

The Forgotten City (2021) - 90

The Forgotten City is distinct from many other games for actually originating as a mod. The game began as a mod for The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim in 2015, but positive reception led to a full version being made. That full version released in 2021 with new features and endings. In this game, the player explores a Roman city that is destined to fall apart.

While appearing a lot like the western RPGs from which it came, the game is more similar to classic adventure games. The player must explore a vast world and speak to NPCs to learn about the city. The way that the game thematically blends natural laws with governmental law is breathtaking. The game received tons of praise for its non-linear structure and intense moral dilemmas.

Undertale (2015) - 93

Undertale is an extremely popular and beloved game, but it could be played until satisfaction without the player ever realizing there is a time loop in it. The fantastical world filled with monsters does not seem like the place for such a sci-fi plot device. It is not the monsters who bring the time loop, but rather the human player.

Within the game's lore, it is said that humans have a quality called DETERMINATION that allows them to save the game. In most games, saving is not an in-universe phenomenon, but it is in Undertale . The player's attempts to reload the game and even start new games are canon events. Few characters in the game are aware of this, and they make it known on the game's darker routes.

The Legend of Zelda: Majora's Mask (2000) - 95

The Legend of Zelda: Majora's Mask was not the first game to integrate a time loop, but it has become the blueprint for many a developer. This sequel to the legendary Ocarina of Time was made under a time crunch, which inspired its limited scale. Link finds himself in a land with a central town that will be destroyed in three days by the Moon unless he rewinds time three days at the eleventh hour each time. The way characters react and move on each of the three days is outstanding.

The first day is always business as usual, but on the second and third, anxious dread begins to sit in, and players see the villagers react in different ways. The game expects the player to take notes on every NPC to see how they react at certain times and certain days, and a large part of the game's many side-quests utilizes this knowledge. While its loop can often be frustrating during the series' more typical dungeon crawling, it made for a world that is unforgettable, extremely human, and extremely disturbing.

NEXT: 9 Ways Majora's Mask Is The Best Zelda Game

15 Items In Your House That Could Be Worth A Ton Of Money

Posted: June 11, 2024 | Last updated: June 11, 2024

By now, you’ve probably heard about the 1943 penny, valued at nearly $282,000, that might be in your possession. In light of this, we believe it’s time to organize your closet and look between your couch cushions for some unexpectedly valuable objects you may not even know you own! Check some of these listed items out!!

Vintage Comic Books

That dusty stack of comic books in the attic might be more than childhood memories. First editions or comics featuring the debut of iconic characters can sell for thousands. For example, a copy of Action Comics No. 1, which introduced Superman, once sold for over $3 million.

Retro Video Games

Remember those old video games you used to play for hours? Some of those cartridges and consoles are now collectors’ items. An unopened copy of Super Mario Bros. recently fetched an impressive $660,000 at auction. Vintage games and consoles can have a high market value depending on their condition and whether they are in a box.

Antique Furniture

Grandma’s old dresser or that vintage chair in the corner could be worth a pretty penny. Auction houses make a lot of money for certain types of antique furniture, especially those made by famous makers. Look for unique features like intricate carvings or original hardware.

Classic Vinyl Records

If you've got a collection of vinyl records gathering dust, it's time to look closer. The first pressings of iconic albums by legendary artists like The Beatles or Elvis Presley hold very high-value today. A rare Beatles album once sold for $790,000. Watch out for more uncommon records, such as those created and withdrawn.

Those coins you found in a forgotten drawer might be worth more than their face value. Rare and antique coins are precious, particularly in good condition. Since pre-1920, sixpences have been composed of 92.5% silver, and collectors are interested in everything related to Queen Victoria’s Jubilee or anything from before 1920

Vintage Jewelry

Inherited jewelry can be more than just sentimental pieces. You can make some good money by selling vintage and antique jewelry. Moreover, if they feature unique designs or rare gemstones, you might not realize you are missing out on thousands of dollars. A piece of Victorian or Art Deco jewelry might be worth a small fortune.

Look through your bookshelves for first editions or signed copies. You might not have the $2 million original copy of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland hidden away in your bookshelf. Still, you might have some vintage classics, kid’s books, or valuable college textbooks.

Collecting and studying stamps can be a lucrative hobby. Prices for hundreds of rare stamps, ranging from tens to thousands of dollars, can be found only on eBay. See if you have any wins when you remove your old stamp collection

Vintage Clothing

Fashion pieces from your parents’ era are in great demand these days due to the comeback of retro, mid-century, and vintage styles. Many will pay thousands for a vintage Chanel dress or a pair of rare Levi’s jeans

Antique Instruments

It’s incredible how valuable old musical instruments can be, especially if they’re still playable. It is often possible to find vintage guitars, violins, and pianos made by famous makers for considerable money. Now you know it is possible to sell a Stradivarius violin for millions of dollars.

Mid-Century Modern Decor

Admired for its intimate and sentimental feel, Mid-Century Modern Decors are returning as a stylish addition to homes. While old pieces of lamps or furniture may not be of much value, some records are! If you've got a George Nelson clock or an Eames lying around, you could be sitting on a small fortune.

Vintage Advertising Signs

Before we had pop-up advertisements telling us what to buy, tin signs posted at pubs, restaurants, and petrol stations were a common way for businesses to advertise. And some of these indications can bring in a good chunk of change today. It’s possible that one of these signs ended up in a garage somewhere after a member of your family-owned or worked at a pub. Watch out because that sign for an aluminum drink could end up being your next auto insurance bill.

Vintage Posters

If an old movie poster is in good condition and rare, it can be expensive—a poster from the 1931 film Frankenstein sold for over $300,000. Check your attic—you might just find a hidden gem.

Classic Cars

That old car sitting in your garage might be worth a fortune. Some of these classic cars, especially those in good condition or with a unique history, could be worth more than you know. A 1962 Ferrari 250 GTO recently sold for $48 million.

Antique Watches

Before discarding any old watches or timepieces, you may have to wait to find out their approximate value. Limited editions or ones with unique features are highly sought-after collector’s items.

The post 15 Items In Your House That Could Be Worth A Ton Of Money appeared first on Housely .

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• Best of the Year

The 50 best video games of 2023

2023’s best games embraced chaos, creativity, and a willingness to be weird

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For the first year in recent memory, scale did not necessitate tradition, and scope did not preclude getting weird. In 2023, nothing was sacred in video games, and so they felt more vibrant than ever.

Sure, some of the more “focused” games threw us for a pleasant loop: Dredge begins as a lonely fishing sim before transforming into something otherworldly, and Humanity morphed from a pensive art project into an all-out war. Dave the Diver , similarly, is not so much about being a diver as it is about running a sushi restaurant, or hunting for alien artifacts, or conversing with said aliens, or — you get the point. Whether you booted up your Steam Deck for a cross-country flight or hid your Switch off screen during that boring Zoom meeting, the game you returned to was rarely the one you left behind.

This amorphousness (I’m begging our copy editor to let this one slide, because what other “word” could adequately summarize the video games of 2023?) wasn’t consigned to the newcomers, though. Larian Studios, fresh off two years of early-access development and riding the reputation it had garnered from Divinity: Original Sin 2 , saw fit to release a role-playing game in which you can kill off nearly every main character the moment you meet them. Remedy Entertainment — let’s be honest, this group has always been strange — made a sequel that’s equal parts horrifying, hilarious, fun, and fabulous. And Nintendo? Well, Nintendo had another banner year. That’s no surprise. The real surprise? It finally let go, and let players toy with the digital molecules of its most revered series. More on this below.

As the year comes to a close, it’s intoxicating to see developers of all sizes, in every genre, with every tier of budget, mining the depths of interactive design, branching this way and that as they follow their respective veins of gold. They’re nowhere near the bottom of that particular expanse, of course — and that’s a heartening thought. —Mike Mahardy

How the Polygon top 50 list works

Over the past few weeks, the Polygon staff voted, championed, debated, and ultimately threw up its hands and marveled at the list of mammoths, curiosities, puzzle boxes, and black holes that is our top 50 games of 2023. Any video games that were released in 2023, received substantial updates in 2023, or achieved renewed cultural relevance in 2023 were eligible for this list. Last year, the cutoff for consideration was Nov. 30. (You’ll notice a certain Firaxis Games joint fairly high up our list.) This year, the cutoff was the same. Should we be thoroughly enamored with Warhammer 40,000: Rogue Trader or Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora , we’ll make sure they’re considered for next year’s top 50.

50. Mr. Sun’s Hatbox

Developer: Kenny Sun

Where to play: Nintendo Switch and Windows PC

Mr. Sun’s Hatbox is about a hat delivery person (or maybe it’s just a blob with legs?) that takes their job way too seriously. At the beginning of the game, a customer’s package gets stolen and whisked away to a nearby towering castle. Despite the client’s apathy toward a single missing hat, the delivery company, named Amazin, proceeds to set up an entire subterranean paramilitary operation beneath the poor customer’s home.

As its premise suggests, this pixelated 2D roguelite leans into the absurd. Part Metal Gear Solid 5 , part Spelunky , you undertake missions where you blast away enemies and kidnap them for your own operation, all while slapstick action unfolds. While on a mission, anything from a desk lamp to daggers is fair game for a weapon. In between fights, you expand your base, where you manage a staff of brainwashed blob-people. It’s fast, frenetic fun, and especially enjoyable to share with friends in co-op. —Ana Diaz

49. Lies of P

Developer: Neowiz Games

Where to play: Mac, PlayStation 4, PlayStation 5, Windows PC, Xbox One, and Xbox Series X

Yes, Lies of P is a Dark Souls mixed with Pinocchio, and that’s a questionable elevator pitch from the outset.

In the years leading up to Lies of P , “Pinocchiosouls” was more of a running joke than anything — this profane idea that you can take any world and slap some Dark Souls into it to get people mildly interested. But once you’re in the game, eliminating bosses left and right with your sweet parry moves, you’ll quickly find yourself entirely unbothered by how strange Lies of P initially seemed. And you’ll start telling your partner things like “I have to go back to Geppetto to upgrade my puppet body” like it’s a perfectly normal task to assign yourself on a Tuesday afternoon.

It’s very rare for a Soulslike to ever feel like anything more than a knockoff — even when they’re decent fun, like The Surge . But the best compliment I can give Lies of P is that it feels like the genuine article, a FromSoftware game developed in an alternate dimension and somehow released in this one by mistake. But it wasn’t a mistake or luck that made Lies of P , and it wasn’t FromSoftware, either; it was a talented group of developers at Neowiz Games and Round8 Studio that took a tired genre, paired it with a bizarre IP, and knocked it out of the park. —Ryan Gilliam

Developer: Awaceb

Where to play: PlayStation 4, PlayStation 5, and Windows PC

Tchia is an open-world adventure game set in a fictional version of island nation New Caledonia — inspired by Awaceb’s co-founder’s childhood in the country.

Everything is filtered through the titular main character Tchia’s eyes, eyes with a special power that allows her to transform into any animals or objects in her environment. Birds, dolphins, a camera, or rocks… It’s all an option for Tchia.

The game, while clearly inspired by The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild , ends up standing on its own because of the innovative shapeshifting mechanics. Tchia isn’t as technically polished as a Nintendo title with hundreds of developers; Awaceb has a team of roughly a dozen. Still, it’s hard to innovate in such a ubiquitous genre, yet Awaceb has managed to do just that with Tchia , making it one of the best games so far this year. —Nicole Carpenter

47. Blasphemous 2

Developer: The Game Kitchen

Where to play: Nintendo Switch, PlayStation 4, PlayStation 5, Windows PC, Xbox One, and Xbox Series X

Long gone are the days when the Metroidvania genre languished untouched for years on end. But despite an influx of entries in recent years, few have exhibited as much mastery as Blasphemous 2 . Building off of the strong roots of the first game, Blasphemous 2 continues to use Spanish Catholicism as a narrative and aesthetic touchpoint, telling a twisted religious tale that’s about as far from proselytizing as you can get.

After the success of the first game, the developers have focused on refining the combat, adding multiple weapons and bizarre, hidden customization options that allow you to take command of how your character rips this world to shreds. The last time I played a 2D Metroidvania with this much polish and charm, it was Hollow Knight . Blasphemous 2 might not reach those same heights, but it comes damn close. —Russ Frushtick

46. Party Animals

Developer: Recreate Games

Where to play: Windows PC and Xbox Series X

I do not know how Recreate Games managed to render some of the cutest animals I’ve ever seen. I also do not know how Recreate made me completely OK with picking up these cute animals and flinging them into black holes, poison clouds, or freezing tundras. The second the match starts in Party Animals , all those cute fluffy corgis, rabbits, kitties, and ducks become my enemies. I will beat them with a bat until they can’t wake up anymore, and I won’t think twice about it. Party Animals may have made me a monster? I don’t know.

The Gang Beasts -esque wiggly physics mixed with the cute characters makes for a perfect party game of fluffy fighting. — Julia Lee

45. The Talos Principle 2

Developer: Croteam

Where to play: PlayStation 5, Windows PC, and Xbox Series X

Like its predecessor, The Talos Principle 2 tackles grand science fiction ideas, particularly about what it means to be human — a theme thoroughly explored in this installment of the series set in a post-human society of AI-powered robots that are carrying on human culture and civilization. Also like its predecessor, The Talos Principle 2 is replete with philosophical commentary and references to famous artists and thinkers. My favorite is a riff on Werner Herzog’s famous quote about birds: “The enormity of their flat brain. The enormity of their stupidity is just overwhelming.”

But if you’re like me, you’re playing the game because you’re an absolute freak for light refraction, gravity, and geospatial puzzles. There are so many puzzles in this game — there’s even a puzzle metagame, spread across the game’s gorgeous map — and they’re each excellent, teaching you new concepts before refracting them and forcing you to think differently. —Nicole Clark

44. Fading Afternoon

Developer: yeo

Where to play: Windows PC

Video games demand an account for your time. Some video games track the minutes and hours you’ve spent on screen. Others impose strict limits on how long you play, or how much you can do. But all video games constantly ask: How will you spend your time? Seiji Maruyama doesn’t know how much time he has left. Fresh out of prison, he’s not a young man anymore, but he doesn’t want the streets to know. So he returns to his life as a yakuza heavy, hoping to make his mark again.

Fading Afternoon ends when Seiji’s time runs out. Based on the choices you make, the consequences of which are initially obfuscated, this could be five minutes after the game begins, or it could be five hours. He has a bad cough and a pack of cigarettes, each a metaphor for the ticking clock inside of him. You could go to work, brawling on the streets. Or you can simply pass the time: Listen to a jazz band. Play video poker. Buy a home. Fall in love. You have the time, until you don’t. —Joshua Rivera

43. Suika Game

Developer: Aladdin X

Where to play: Nintendo Switch

I thank VTubers every day for many things, but I will kiss the feet of the anime avatars that introduced me to Suika Game . The engrossing 2048 -meets- Tetris -with-physics fruit drop game has become my go-to whenever I need to kill some time. Note that I am talking about the official Nintendo Switch version, not all of the horrific ad-plagued knockoffs that have flooded the App Store.

The thing that makes Suika so special, in addition to its cutesy gameplay, is its quality as a social game. The same way we sit around and talk about our NYT Connections , we sit around and talk about our fruitless (ha) attempts at getting double watermelons or breaking the 3,000 point threshold. It’s also a great game to watch: Nothing is funnier than seeing somebody’s Suika run go downhill in 30 seconds flat. (There’s a reason why the game has taken the streaming world by storm.) — JL

42. League of Legends Season 13

Developer: Riot Games

Where to play: Mac and Windows PC

League of Legends ’ 13th season is one of the game’s most balanced yet. Almost every champion has felt viable throughout the year — no small feat for a game with over 140 playable characters — and it’s led to great fun and variety on the solo queue ladder and in professional play, where an exciting Worlds just wrapped up.

But there’s another reason League had an outstanding 2023: Arena, a new game mode introduced during the game’s summer event . Arena is a 2v2v2v2 battle mode with fast-paced chaos, using League ’s roster of champions in a more approachable and containable setting (and with less rage-inducing teammates). The mode was removed after the conclusion of the summer event, but is reportedly returning soon. It can’t possibly come soon enough; I know how I’ll be spending a good chunk of my winter. —Pete Volk

41. Goodbye Volcano High

Developer: KO_OP

Goodbye Volcano High is a visual novel with rhythm game elements, and it takes place at the precipice of the end of the world. It’s centered on a group of teenage dinosaurs entering their senior year of high school, a perfect balance between high school dramatics and the grim future of Earth, as a meteor rockets toward the planet. Though the rhythm game elements can feel a bit finicky — and don’t seem to matter much, in terms of progressing the game — Goodbye Volcano High ’s music only adds to the dimensional, raw experience created by worker-owned studio KO_OP.

It’s rare to find a game that takes the teenage experience seriously, but Goodbye Volcano High does just that. It’s a time in your life where you feel so, so much. You can see that earnestness in the teenage experience where everything is a big, huge issue — sometimes to the point of cringe — tied up in that big, global issue of the meteor that’s looking to destroy everything. —N. Carpenter

40. World of Warcraft Classic

Developer: Blizzard Entertainment

Something very, very interesting started to happen in the retro version of WoW this year. While Blizzard has been content to march one half of the game’s community forward through its history of expansions, it’s started to come up with creative ways to keep the other half — the half that wants to stay in the game as it was at launch — engaged.

The first of these was Hardcore, a brilliant permadeath mode that instantly made this aging game both more dangerous and more social, resurrecting the spirit of its 2004 servers. The second, just launched, is the wild Season of Discovery , which remixes and restructures the original WoW experience — interpolating staggered level caps, shuffling class roles — in ways that might just change MMO design forever. WoW Classic is quietly, and paradoxically, where Blizzard is doing its most forward-thinking work right now. —Oli Welsh

39. Fire Emblem Engage

Developer: Intelligent Systems

Fire Emblem Engage was designed for a very specific kind of sicko: one not particularly interested in the origin stories of a horde of teenagers, or the politics of a bourgeoise academy, or what kind of tea a teacher prefers, but instead one obsessed with the endless minutiae of combat stats, weapon loadouts, and team composition. I know this because I am one such sicko.

If you’ve read any of my reviews or essays on Polygon , then you know I prefer strategy games that can get out of their own way. More precisely, I love when strategy developers can put their pens down, throw their hands up, and admit that the stories unfolding in the player’s head will almost always be more powerful than anything they could write. Fire Emblem Engage is one of the foremost proponents of this idea. It hurls an excess of characters, weapons, battle scenarios, and stat-boosting abilities at you, leaving the door open for you to observe character interactions on the battlefield and create the resulting fanfiction in your head. Its actual script is a quagmire of nonsensical JRPG tropes, and each cutscene is more skippable than the next. But if you’re looking for an excellent turn-based tactics game that gets out of the player’s way, you can do a whole lot worse than Fire Emblem Engage . —M. Mahardy

38. Pizza Tower

Developer: Tour De Pizza

Pizza Tower is a perfect object, and fully committed to its vision. You play as Peppino Spaghetti, a chef who must race up the pizza tower in order to defeat the existential threat posed by Pizzaface, an enormous floating pizza that also happens to be sentient. Super normal stuff. To get there, you platform through a series of levels, picking up speed as you zoom through enemies and obstacles. It’s easy to get into a flow state.

Pizza Tower also beautifully captures the essence of the Wario Land series. The game is delightful to look at, with an irreverent art style that’s referential to late-’90s and early-2000s cartoons, and absurd enemies and animations. Levels are also chock-full of secret rooms, passageways, and treasures, making it hard to put down and fun to replay. —N. Clark

37. Subpar Pool

Developer: grapefrukt games

Where to play: Android, iOS, Nintendo Switch, and Windows PC

You can play this delightful physics puzzler — best described as dynamic minigolf on a pool table — on Switch or Steam if you want, but it’s most at home on your phone. It’s an absolutely ideal mobile game: a reasonably priced paid app with no ads, in-app purchases, or subscription, playable in a spare three minutes. Pocket adorable, smiling pool balls on tables adorned with conveyor belts, portals, and moving pockets, while challenging yourself with a host of mix-and-match rulesets (balls that crack, split, or home in on you, a locked starting position, more balls, no guideline for bounces, etc.). Mobile gamers of taste will recognize the work of grapefrukt, aka Martin Jonasson, Swedish developer of such elegant classics as Holedown , Twofold Inc. , and Rymdkapsel . —OW

36. Amnesia: The Bunker

Where to play: PlayStation 4, PlayStation 5, Windows PC, Xbox One, and Xbox Series X

If only one developer could be said to have a master’s grasp on interactive horror, I’d have to tip my hat to Frictional Games. The Amnesia series has always been a thrill ride of terrifying chases and the quiet, a little too quiet, moments that build up tension between. Amnesia: The Bunker is no different. In fact, it’s one of Frictional’s best.

Set in a seemingly abandoned bunker that’s been sealed by explosions during World War I, your simple yet difficult task is to find an exit. This being a horror game, though, you also have to collect fuel for the bunker’s generator — a veritable beating heart — and scrutinize maps on safe room walls, before venturing into the titular structure’s labyrinthine bowels. Oh, also! There’s a monster hunting you. And it can ambush you from wall vents. And it’s attracted to even the slightest bit of sound. And whether you’re juicing your hand-cranked flashlight, triggering long-forgotten tripwires, or just opening a heavy door into yet another concrete-encased corridor, you’re going to have to make noise at some point. The Bunker is as potent in its terror as any horror video game out there. —M. Mahardy

35. Lil Gator Game

Developer: MegaWobble

In an unprecedented year for game releases, I understand why you’re surprised to see Lil Gator Game this high up on our list. But imagine how surprised I was to find myself, in a moment of introspection, realizing that it was one of my own favorite games in 2023. At the risk of diminishing its accomplishments, I’m going to make a comparison that should cut to the quick for interested parties: This is the most A Short Hike -alike that I’ve discovered yet, and I’ve been chasing that singular high for years. So if you have a lazy weekend afternoon and want to spend it playing — not gaming, but playing, in the joyous, unstructured sense of a day in the park — I can’t recommend this li’l game enough. —Chris Grant

34. Starfield

Developer: Bethesda Game Studios

Starfield had so much to prove, it’s easy to lose sight of what it accomplished: top-tier world-building, a fantastically customizable ship builder, and Bethesda’s most engaging combat to date. Galaxy-spanning faction quests give you plenty to do, but it’s the side quests that really make you feel like the captain in something Star Trek adjacent: generation ships and superhero hideouts and colonies of clones. There’s good sci-fi here for those willing to make the journey.

It’s true that the game oversold the idea of a galaxy with over 1,000 planets , a number that pales in comparison to the game’s most obvious competitor, No Man’s Sky . It’s a shame this became so much of the focus thanks to Bethesda’s marketing, because that same focus obscured the absolutely fascinating new game plus mode at the game’s heart. Consider this: No Man’s Sky is the game that realizes the universe’s infinite number of planets, while Starfield realizes the universe’s infinite number of possibilities. —Clayton Ashley

33. System Shock

Developer: Nightdive Studios

In a year of several stellar remakes and immersive sims, it wouldn’t have been surprising if System Shock showed its age of nearly 30 years. At least, it would have been understandable if the changes needed to update the game would leave it nigh unrecognizable. That’s why Nightdive Studios’ accomplish is so impressive: It updated the 1994 classic with a slick coat of modern paint while also preserving what made the game so thrilling in the first place.

The element where that’s most evident is in the game’s look, which captures all of the original System Shock ’s garish cyberpunk neons and frightening enemies in a style that appears like a modern high-fidelity game at a distance, but subtly transforms into retro pixel bitmaps on closer inspection. In much the same way, the gameplay feels surprisingly modern at a distance, but on closer inspection, you start to see how this proto-immersive sim is actually what inspired so much modern game design. You have to rely on your own curiosity, caution, and cunning to navigate the halls of Citadel Station and upgrade your hacker into a cybernetic death machine. It’s a game that expects a lot from the player (and a little save scumming), but the experience is just as rewarding as it was in 1994. —CA

32. Star Wars Jedi: Survivor

Developer: Respawn Entertainment

Is Star Wars Jedi: Survivor an Empire Strikes Back level of sequel? Well, no , but it manages to get extraordinarily close to being one of the best follow-ups in the entire Star Wars franchise.

The game improves upon Star Wars Jedi: Fallen Order in every conceivable way, with a more entertaining, action-oriented start and a ton of aerial movements and lightsaber stances that make you feel even more like a seasoned Jedi Knight. Quality-of-life improvements like fast travel make the game less frustrating to play, while the new locales packed with hidden collectibles and upgrades make exploration more rewarding.

But what makes Jedi: Survivor truly special isn’t this crude matter, but its luminous heart. You feel it in the memorable characters you meet on your galactic journey, be it the people you help or the friendships you forge and reconcile with. It’s in the classic, crowded cantina where you actually want to go check in with the barkeep. It’s in the tactile, reverent way you craft your lightsaber. And it’s in the kinetic set-pieces that remind you of the serials Star Wars was originally inspired by . At its best, you really can feel the Force around you. —CA

31. Connections

Developer: The New York Times

Where to play: Android, browser, and iOS

After the acquisition of viral hit Wordle , The New York Times’ Crossword ecosystem leveled up to full-fledged attention competitor — NYT is a media company with a gaming platform. And its staff of puzzle writers and editors are not stooping to mind-numbing mobile content to keep the expansion going. Connections , its latest title to pair well with morning coffee, is one of the year’s best games.

Connections offers you a grid of 16 words and a mission: Detect the common threads between four different sets of words without embarrassing yourself. The grouping logic ranges from simple (“animals”) to silly (“synonyms for farting”) to sneaky (“countries when the letter ‘A’ is added”). Gruff game show watchers who claim the puzzle is just a clone of BBC’s long-running Only Connect miss the personality within; Connections writer Wyna Liu brings a tremendous wit to each day’s puzzle, constructing thematic grids and throwing synonym curveballs. And like with Wordle , there’s a sense of accomplishment when you land all four sets — there’s no better start to a day than gloating to friends and family about how you completely nailed Connections . —Matt Patches

30. Hi-Fi Rush

Developer: Tango Gameworks

In Hi-Fi Rush , you play as Chai, a guy who must escape the factory of a villainous corporation. In a workplace accident, Chai’s iPod gets punched into his chest, making him sensitive to sound and staying on beat. What follows is a joyful action-rhythm game where you explore, climb, and fight to the beat of the music.

The game is a remarkably inviting take on a genre not exactly known for being accessible. But Hi-Fi Rush does away with hardcore precision in exchange for gameplay that always subtly nudges you back toward keeping in time. Failing to attack on a drum stroke doesn’t mean failing a fight; you just don’t get a combo multiplier. And the musical score never gets jarring as a punishment; punchy notes always play in time with the rhythm, even if you hit a button at the wrong time. The result is a game that evokes the thrill of feeling like you’re acing it and getting into a flow, no matter your skill level. —N. Clark

29. Monster Hunter Now

Developer: Niantic

Where to play: Android and iOS

While Niantic’s post- Pokémon Go track record hasn’t been the most consistent, Monster Hunter Now shows the company at its best, with a refined combat system, simple matchmaking, great monster variety, and extensive character upgrades. Granted, those upgrades are part of a monetization setup that gets a little heavy-handed, but if you’re patient, there’s plenty of game here for free. And unlike in some of Niantic’s other games, the real-world elements don’t feel tacked on, with a design that blends almost perfectly with the company’s map tech, allowing you to feel like you’re tracking monsters as you get outside and walk around. It all makes for a big step forward in fusing Niantic’s real-world tech approach with combat and exploration mechanics that can stand up on their own. —Matt Leone

28. Diablo 4

With Diablo 4 , Blizzard Entertainment set out to marry the frenetic action of Diablo 3, the deep RPG systems of Diablo 2, and the dark tone of the original game. It was an ambitious promise, to be sure, but four years and a whole pandemic after the studio announced the long-awaited sequel at BlizzCon 2019, it’s here, and it’s fantastic.

But Diablo 4 ’s marriage of tone, action, and role-playing isn’t what makes it so good. In addition to all of those other things, Diablo 4 is the best launch we’ve seen for a new “living game” in recent memory.

With the likes of Destiny , Anthem , and even Diablo 3 , it was clear from the start that there were some nuggets of potential. But being a fan meant slogging through mountains of frustration just to taste a morsel of what you’d hope those games would become. Playing these games early on was a kind of gamble.

Diablo 4 , however, is unlike any of those projects, because its systems were deep and nuanced from the start, enough to spend hundreds of hours growing your character. And there is already loads of content to support that kind of time investment. —RG

27. Hitman World of Assassination: Freelancer mode

Developer: IO Interactive

Hitman World of Assassination ’s Freelancer mode , which debuted in January and puts a roguelike twist on Agent 47’s globe-trotting murder-for-hire missions, isn’t for the faint of heart. It demands constant improvisation, to a degree that can challenge even veteran Hitman players. Repeated failures can make it feel more frustrating than fun.

But as every fan of roguelikes knows, these high-stakes experiences have the capacity to deliver a sense of exhilaration like nothing else. Pulling off multiple daring kills, hiding the evidence (or going out with a bang), and trying to make it out alive with all the gear you brought into the mission — it’s tense and thrilling, every time.

Every move you make could be your last one; all it takes to ruin a flawless run is a single ill-considered plan, just one seemingly minor slip-up. With the abyss of failure forever yawning beneath 47, playing Hitman Freelancer can feel like tiptoeing along the top of a barbed-wire fence. The exultation of safely making it to the final exfiltration point, having defeated a crime syndicate after completing a lengthy series of dangerous missions, is a high I’ll keep chasing again and again. —Samit Sarkar

Developer: Visai Games

I don’t love to cook. For me, it’s more a necessity than anything else. So it’s not often that a piece of media — or anything, really — leaves me with the feeling that I need to make something, to spend time in the kitchen reveling in the tedium of chopping and the sizzle of onions frying.

Venba elicited that urge, reminding me that food is not just something to keep me alive, but something to be cherished. Venba is a cooking game that focuses on an immigrant family that’s moved from India to Canada. Food transcends the story by way of simple cooking minigames as I move through the chapters of main character Venba’s life — moments that switch between painful and heartwarming. Venba packs as much heart in its one-hour playtime as games 30 times its size. —N. Carpenter

25. Viewfinder

Developer: Sad Owl Studios

Where to play: PlayStation 5 and Windows PC

At the heart of Viewfinder is a magic trick that never gets old: You take a photo of the environment and paste that perspective into the game world to create a bridge or reveal a needed trinket. The experience of seeing reality distorted by your hands so easily is nearly on the level of thinking with Portals for the first time. You’ll ponder a solution for minutes, sure it’s impossible and that the developers must have made a mistake, before you’re struck by a eureka moment like a lightning bolt.

The game’s lesson on perspective extends to its narrative, which, much like the photos you use to manipulate the world, contains multitudes. Though it’s told in fairly typical video game-y audio monologues that you uncover from the game’s trippy environments, the journey is powerful and topical. Just as differing perspectives can allow for unique solutions, they can also obscure truths that lead us to deny the reality that’s right in front of us. —CA

24. Humanity

Developer: tha

Humanity looks like a modern art project, recalls memories of early PlayStation oddity, and comes (in part) from the team behind game of the future Rez Infinite . But its most impressive feat is the way it gradually shifts genres, starting as a classic puzzle game, then taking on tower defense and shoot-’em-up traits as it evolves into an all-out war. Think Braveheart , with a shiba inu general leading a troop of faceless, brainless low-polygon figures against a group of angry, lightsaber-wielding, even lower-polygon foes. It’s the kind of design subtlety that stays in its lane yet builds on you, and before you realize it, ends very differently than it began. Much like humanity itself? — ML

23. Paranormasight: The Seven Mysteries of Honjo

Developer: Square Enix

Square Enix has plenty of mega-franchises to fill its time (and its coffers). This year, we have new entries for Octopath Traveler and Final Fantasy, along with new Dragon Quest and Kingdom Hearts games in the not-so-distant future. Dayenu !

And yet, the publisher can’t help itself from bombarding us with surprising, interesting, sometimes great, often good-enough experiments. In 2022, we got an English-language remake of lost gem Live A Live , the surprisingly enjoyable tactical RPG DioField Chronicle , a bonkers Final Fantasy spinoff featuring the musical stylings of Limp Bizkit, and a pair of oddball card games lathered in lore from gaming’s best weirdo. This year, we have the Avengers of rhythm games, Theatrhythm Final Bar Line , and Paranormasight: The Seven Mysteries of Honjo , an excellent riff on the visual novel penned by a beloved storyteller — whose best series has never appeared in the U.S.

What should you know about Paranormasight before you play? Well, ideally nothing. Why else would I be eating up my word count?

But if you insist: It’s a mystery — and a horror mystery at that. You travel to 1980s Japan, specifically the Tokyo neighborhood of Honjo, located not so far from the modern Tokyo Skytree. It’s hard to imagine that modern landmark ever towering alongside these streets, which are filled with shadows and lethal curses.

If you have even a passing interest in urban legends, spooky folklore, cults, and deadly rituals, or you’ve enjoyed series like Zero Escape and Danganronpa, Paranormasight is an easy recommendation. And if you just enjoy a good yarn and have access to basically any screen and $15, then you’re a perfect mark too. It runs as well on console and PC as it does on iOS and Android, so don’t fret about where you play, just do so and soon! Before Square Enix stops investing in all these oddities. —Chris Plante

22. Marvel’s Midnight Suns

Developer: Firaxis Games

[ Ed. note: Marvel’s Midnight Suns was released in 2022, but it just barely missed the cutoff for our best video games of 2022 list , so it’s eligible for our 2023 awards.]

I know what you’re thinking: Another licensed Marvel game? Come on, right? But hear me out. I played Marvel’s Avengers , too, and this isn’t that. It might seem like it’s going to be at first, because Midnight Suns makes the grave error of introducing Iron Man and Doctor Strange as its tutorial characters, and these two might just be the most irritating characters in the entire video game. (I have beaten the game, so I am allowed to make this call.) You must press on and give Midnight Suns time to win you over. Because it has so, so much more to offer than it may appear in its first few hours.

Picture the romance and humor of Fire Emblem: Three Houses , combined with the high-stakes tactical battles of XCOM 2 — that’s what Midnight Suns becomes in its mid-game and endgame. It’s a card-based strategy game, and each hero has their own customizable deck. I started off favoring Captain Marvel, Magik, and Blade, simply because their moves and hilarious dialogue kept me entertained, but I soon realized that every single character has something exciting or unexpected to bring to the battlefront. Over 100 hours later, I’ve leveled up every single character and played all the main story missions and an unknowable number of optional missions, and I’m still not sick of this combat… or the kooky cast of characters that grows all the time (shoutout to the Deadpool DLC ).

No matter how sick of Marvel you might be, give Midnight Suns the chance to win you over with its clever combat. And once you’ve gotten hooked, you might find yourself sticking around to chuckle at Wolverine attending Blade’s book club (yes, that’s a storyline in this game). It’s worth your time, and you can take that from me, a person who — again — spent over 100 hours on it. —Maddy Myers

21. Honkai: Star Rail

Developer: Hoyoverse

Where to play: Android, iOS, PlayStation 5, and Windows PC

I have been a... pretty die-hard Genshin Impact player since launch. I’ve rolled for every character, grinded out all of said characters, 100%-ed the exploration, completed every quest — did all the stuff that would burn anyone out. Honkai: Star Rail is Hoyoverse’s answer to the Genshin Impact burnout.

The slower-paced turn-based combat, the ability to auto-battle (if your teams are strong enough), and the smaller maps make it the perfect daily game for me to funnel my interest into without feeling exhausted. The characters are fun, flashy, and easy to latch onto. Should I main the sneaky but elegant Kafka, who uses damage-over-time skills to whittle her opponents away? Or should I use the brooding Blade, who unleashes huge attacks at the cost of his HP? Ah, I guess I’ll let my wallet decide — it is a gacha game, after all. — JL

20. Chants of Sennaar

Developer: Rundisc

Where to play: Nintendo Switch, PlayStation 4, Windows PC, and Xbox One

In Chants of Sennaar you climb up a kind of Tower of Babel, and your job is to decipher the distinct language each group of people speaks, eventually aiming to translate fluidly from one language to another. You do so by matching pictographic symbols — the characters for each language — to images of the nouns, actions, and concepts in a large dictionary-style book.

It sounds complicated, but it’s wonderfully fun because the mechanics are so simple. You explore the isometric world — which is rendered in a gorgeous cel-shaded style — witnessing interactions between cultures and attempting to puzzle out the meaning of their written words. The game parcels out words for you to assign meaning to in little packets, to avoid overwhelming you. By the end, you’ll have translated numerous languages, and scaled your way to the top of the tower. Perhaps you’ll even change the tower itself. —N. Clark

19. Metroid Prime Remastered

Developer: Retro Studios

Few games from 2002 hold up as well as Metroid Prime , and the remastered version of the game — which was surprise-dropped during February’s Nintendo Direct — proves that Samus Aran’s first-person adventure is still worth experiencing, whether it’s for the first time or (in my case) the fourth.

Retro Studios’ take on one of sci-fi’s most famous intergalactic bounty hunters controversially took her out of the 2D puzzle-platformer realm that made her famous (although Metroid Fusion also came out in 2002 — a gift for the 2D Metroid purists — which may also be why Fusion joined Nintendo Switch Online’s catalog shortly after Prime Remastered was released). By placing the player inside Samus’ helmet, Metroid Prime recontextualized the bounty hunter’s relationship with the hostile planets around her.

As we donned Samus’ suit and explored strange planets, aggressive alien lifeforms could now get right in our faces, forcing us to dodge, strafe, and roll (in morph ball form, naturally) using all three dimensions. No longer would we sit back and watch as Samus dipped her toe into a pool of lava; in first-person, as molten fire spread over our visor, we’d really feel the pressure to find that Varia Suit upgrade. And perhaps most importantly, from behind Samus’ visor, we gained the ability to scan our enemies and environment, collecting and translating logs from the long-dead Chozo aliens who once inhabited these now-hostile places.

The world of Prime is harsh and unrelenting. (Save points will, at times, be quite far from one another.) But it’s worth buckling down and pushing through the pain points to discover this world’s secrets. —M. Myers

18. Shadow Gambit: The Cursed Crew

Developer: Mimimi Games

Shadow Gambit: The Cursed Crew may very well be the most bittersweet entry on this list. It is, for my money, one of the best games to be released in 2023. It is also the swan song of Mimimi Games, one of the most underappreciated studios making games throughout the last decade. Mimimi announced its planned closure only two weeks after releasing its final game. This makes The Cursed Crew its swan song. It is also the team’s magnum opus.

Set in a tropical world of zombie pirates, religious fanatics, and talking ships, The Cursed Crew sees you traveling freely across an archipelago as you revive your undead crew, deploy them on dioramic worlds constituting some of the finest level design in video games to date, and dispatching enemies with a mixture of tactical stealth and supernatural abilities. Taken at a distance, this mixture is undeniably niche. But seen up close, The Cursed Crew is as potent a creation as we’ve seen since 2016’s Shadow Tactics: Blades of the Shogun or 2020’s Desperados 3 , which respectively established and cemented the studio’s brilliant design chops. I’ll miss Mimimi — but I can’t imagine a better farewell. — M. Mahardy

Developer: Black Salt Games

Dredge is a Lovecraftian horror experience masquerading as a simple fishing game.

The open ocean is filled with terrible creatures that can and will damage or destroy your boat. And each of the major islands you visit comes with its own evil sea beasts that must be dealt with if you want to progress the story or fish peacefully. Dredge ultimately tells a dark parable about loss, and how obsession can own you if you aren’t careful.

But what makes Dread so special — and one of the best games of 2023 — is that under its foreboding story and twisted environments is a fishing game that grows more complex with every outing, centered around an upgrade system that feels amazing to progress through. As the dangers around you grow, so too does your ship’s capabilities. And by adventuring into battles — metaphorical and otherwise — with the seas’ most dastardly critters, you’ll always come out on the other side with some upgrades that allow you to catch even better fish and build an even bigger boat.

By the time you’ve spent 10 or so hours with Dredge , you’ll feel like a commercial fisherman who just happened upon something bigger and more foreboding than they could have imagined — and that, perhaps, you’ve stared deep into some kind of black abyss, only to escape forever changed. —RG

16. Final Fantasy 16

Where to play: PlayStation 5

Final Fantasy 16 kicks ass. The newest mainline entry in the long, winding series takes you on a lavish, unadulterated Game of Thrones -esque adventure. You play as a broody Clive Rosfield, a young man whose life’s work is to protect his little brother, Joshua. The story begins when Clive’s life takes a turn for the worse and he vows to destroy the monster who ruined his and his family’s legacy.

Developed by Creative Business Unit III, Square Enix’s internal team behind the MMORPG Final Fantasy 14 , 16 leans into patchwork territories of fantasy genre fare. There is palace intrigue, a whole lot of sex, and endless war between nations. But the developers then sprinkle in Final Fantasy elements like mother crystals, dazzling kaiju fights between summons (known as Eikons in this iteration), and of course, Chocobos.

The quality of the story in this long and linear character-driven RPG waxes and wanes, but the action combat is among the best I’ve ever played. The gameplay grips you from the very beginning as Clive smoothly dashes, parries, and swings his giant sword and varied magic with a dazzling amount of style. The gameplay didn’t just help me stick with the game, but instead allowed my excitement to bubble over every time I took on a new mission. —Ana Diaz

15. Cyberpunk 2077: Phantom Liberty

Developer: CD Projekt Red

Like the best DLC, Phantom Liberty does as much to expand on the base game as it does to reframe it. Alongside the sweeping Patch 2.0 , which revamped Cyberpunk 2077 ’s role-playing progression systems , improved its enemy AI, and course-corrected a litany of other details, Phantom Liberty also adds a whole new district to the dystopian world of Night City, complete with its own spy-thriller storyline.

The resulting Cyberpunk 2077 is not an entirely different beast than the one that was released in 2020, but it is a more evolved one. It delivers on the promise of building a hacker-samurai in a neon-infused open world replete with futuristic heists, daunting choices, and striking characters. Phantom Liberty and Patch 2.0 may not completely erase the memory of CD Projekt’s initial botched release , but they come pretty damn close. Three years after we first set foot in V’s shoes, Cyberpunk 2077 has finally justified the hype. —M. Mahardy

14. Dead Space

Developer: Motive Studio

With The Last of Us on HBO and Resident Evil 4 back in the conversation, it’s already a banner year for survival horror. Motive Studio’s Dead Space remake is no exception. Following in the footsteps of Capcom’s aforementioned title, the original Dead Space brought the third-person-action focus of Resident Evil 4 ’s formula to a deteriorating ship in outer space. In the vein of Event Horizon , Sunshine , and Alien , Dead Space was a paragon for sci-fi horror in a confined and claustrophobic setting. Its remake has brought that same vision to gorgeous new life, bringing quality-of-life changes and underappreciated updates (it has made several previously useless weapons into viable tools in protagonist Isaac Clarke’s arsenal), making it hard to imagine ever going back to Visceral Games’ phenomenal original. —M. Mahardy

13. Octopath Traveler 2

Developers: Square Enix, Acquire

Where to play: Nintendo Switch, PlayStation 4, PlayStation 5, and Windows PC

The first Octopath Traveler was one of those games that was as enjoyable to play as it was painful: enjoyable because so much of it kicked ass, but painful because so much of it dragged the positive aspects down. In other words, it stood on the precipice of excellence, but couldn’t quite cross the line.

Octopath Traveler 2 leaps across that boundary. In place of the original game’s repetitive level design, monotonous narrative structure, and sometimes awkward characterization, the sequel demonstrates an expert ability to challenge your expectations at every turn. Yes, your general goal is still to recruit eight playable characters (hence the name) and follow each of their separate plot threads to their respective conclusions, participating in turn-based battles and side quests along the way. But said plots vary greatly from character to character, and if you so choose, you can see a handful of characters through several major plot points before recruiting the whole gang. Octopath Traveler 2 finely toes the line between that comfort food-esque repetition of the best JRPGs, and the subversive nature of great genre storytelling . —M. Mahardy

12. Dave the Diver

Developer: Mintrocket

You could describe Dave the Diver as a fishing game and a restaurant management simulator, and that’d be correct. But that would also be underselling the game, and understating things quite a lot .

Diving into the mysterious Blue Hole, Dave spends the first two quarters of his day swimming deeper into the colorful abyss, discovering both sea life and a story that’s equally absurd and earnest. When you’re not picking up sea urchins or spearfishing sharks, Dave is assisting the rest of Dave the Diver ’s cast of characters — his sushi business partners, a community of seafolk, an anime-obsessed weapons expert, and a pair of dolphins. At night, Dave slings sushi and pours drinks at the restaurant, frantically running back and forth between clearing dishes, delivering sushi, and refilling the freshly ground wasabi. Between all that, Dave’s harvesting rice and vegetables on a farm, curating a hatchery, racing seahorses with mermaids, and taking down a suspicious group masquerading as environmental activists. Somehow, there’s even a well-done rhythm video game — starring one of those anime idols that the arms dealer loves — that makes perfect sense.

It really shouldn’t work ; I can’t imagine another game where all these disparate ideas coalesce so seamlessly. But Dave the Diver would feel less complete without any one of them. It makes for such a compelling loop, and a consistent advancement of the game’s story, that I kept finding myself in that “one more day” mindset, eager to jump back into the ocean for one more go. —N. Carpenter

11. Resident Evil 4 Remake

Developer: Capcom

Where to play: PlayStation 4, PlayStation 5, Windows PC, and Xbox Series X

It turns out, Capcom is good at remaking games.

The original Resident Evil remake all but set the bar for the format in 2002, with sleeker controls, more nuanced graphical details, and whole new areas to explore in the iconic Spencer Mansion. The Resident Evil 2 remake changed the entire perspective of its source material without sacrificing the focus on horror and survival. Resident Evil 3 ’s remake, as forgettable as it was, still brought the design conceits of the original game, warts and all, to a modern audience. And now we have Resident Evil 4 — a nd what a remake it is.

In this reimagined version of the 2005 action-survival-horror game, Capcom has managed to erase many of the blemishes on one of the most beloved games in the series, if not all time. The remake is full of new flourishes and extra details in each of its three sprawling areas, making it less of a remake and more of a dramatic reinterpretation. It has also managed to add even more survival elements to the original’s action-centric combat, without sacrificing the camp and cheese that have made it such an enduring presence throughout the years. A lesser game would have shrunk in the face of such intimidating source material , but the Resident Evil 4 remake achieved the balancing act in spades. —M. Mahardy

10. Armored Core 6: Fires of Rubicon

Developer: FromSoftware

Nothing else feels like Armored Core.

The giant robot you pilot heaves with the weight of a six-story building but flies into the sky as nimble as a hummingbird. You can skate along the ground, rocket into the air, and change directions in the blink of an eye. You are agile, resilient, deadly .

With your hands tightly gripping the controller, you can unload four different weapons at once, weapons you’ve picked out of an armory that could rival a small nation. You target, aim, and fire while moving faster than a fighter jet, dodging streams of missiles, arcs of gunfire, bazookas, and flames.

There have been many, many games in the franchise , but none have reached the heights of Armored Core 6: Fires of Rubicon. The levels have never had such ruined beauty, the enemies have never been as satisfying to fight, and the characters have never been more endearing. An ingenious new game plus mode packs the game’s story with surprises while you continue to build out your arsenal.

Perhaps the decades-long wait for a new Armored Core game is part of the reason , because the lessons FromSoftware learned creating and popularizing Dark Souls are evident here. Bosses now put you through dastardly skill checks in classic Soulsian fashion . Many of them tower over the landscape, making you, the pilot of a giant robot , feel small. These set-piece fights are some of the most thrilling moments you could play in a game this year. They certainly have some of the most memorable lines .

But Armored Core 6 doesn’t just get badass one-liners stuck in your head; its gameplay lingers, too. When you watch videos of it in motion, it simply makes you want to play it, to feel that movement, that motion, for yourself.

This isn’t just because the series’ energetic action is unique, but because you decide exactly how your robot feels: how quickly its missiles get a lock, how fast its generator recharges, how far you boost when you swing your laser sword. Swapping components around as you scrutinize competing weight and power requirements is an engaging puzzle all its own. You become intimately familiar with a screen-filling spreadsheet of stats because all of those numbers add up to something that feels real. Tactile. Earned .

Because nothing else feels like Armored Core. —CA

Developer: Don’t Nod

Boulderers, or rock climbers who don’t use safety gear but also don’t ascend very high, have a word for the routes they climb: problems. The idea is that, since you’re never that far from flat ground, completing your route is more a game of mind over matter. You don’t “finish” a problem. You “solve” it. Like a puzzle.

When it comes to rock climbing, Jusant just gets it in a way few other games — if any — have.

To be clear, Don’t Nod’s Jusant isn’t technically about bouldering. (A climbing game where you’re never more than 12 feet off the ground would have precisely zero stakes.) But it’s an apt conduit for the spirit of bouldering, in that every route you traverse is a problem to solve. By alternating triggers to dictate which hand goes on which handhold, you navigate these problems. Environmental hazards and a pesky stamina wheel make things progressively trickier. You’re always clear on your heading. (It’s up.) Figuring out how to get there is another matter.

Even in games that prominently feature it, climbing is often functional, at best — whether it’s Link refusing to acknowledge handholds are a thing or Nathan Drake snapping to ledges with a level of magnetism only thought possible at CERN.

Jusant is the first and only game I’ve played that gets it — that sees the inherent grace in the sport and portrays it on the screen, not as a means of getting somewhere, but as the reason to go there in the first place. —Ari Notis

8. Marvel’s Spider-Man 2

Developer: Insomniac Games

Marvel’s Spider-Man 2 builds on the successes of the first game, both narratively and in its immensely satisfying gameplay. The game’s story takes a familiar Spider-Man narrative — that of friends turned foes — and adds new twists, building out compelling villains (and demanding ones ) in the process. The game also sheds its predecessor’s odious Spider-Cop bits in favor of establishing a deeper connection between the Spider-Mans and their city , giving the game room to breathe while further immersing you in its heroes’ worlds and struggles.

And then there’s the gameplay. For my money, there are few experiences more enjoyable in gaming than swinging around New York City with Spider-Man. It was fun in the early 2000s, and it’s still fun now. And with a bigger map to explore (and wings to fly, if you so choose to use them), there’s basically no limit to the fun you can get up to. The deployment of two protagonists is seamless — Peter and Miles play differently, bringing their own stories and desires to the table — and switching between them is effortless. It’s also the rare open-world game that doesn’t feel bloated with missions and side quests, instead leaving you wanting more Spider adventures. — PV

7. Street Fighter 6

After getting knocked down — by a self-inflicted punch, no less — with the feeble Street Fighter 5 , Capcom has hit the gym and returned stronger than before with Street Fighter 6 . We rightfully called its latest Street Fighter the “ultimate fighting game toolbox” in Polygon’s review; from a robust single-player mode to solid online modes to a cast of memorable new and returning World Warriors, Street Fighter 6 is Capcom at its most confident.

For newcomers and the lapsed Street Fighter fan wary of jumping into online play, Capcom delivered World Tour mode, a robust, single-player, RPG-lite beat-’em-up in the vein of Sega’s Yakuza games. In World Tour, players hit the streets of Metro City where, hilariously, everyone in town not only knows how to fight, but relishes impromptu fisticuffs with strangers. It’s a matter of local pride.

The streets of Metro City are part training grounds, part beginning of a silly, epic worldwide adventure where you learn the basics of Street Fighter 6 . Untethered from any serious game narrative canon, Street Fighter 6 lets players of all skill levels and stripes have fun in World Tour mode.

Street Fighter 6 ’s approachability extends to its innovative new control scheme, an addition called Modern Controls. While the six-button layout from the very first Street Fighter is still available, after multiple attempts at giving players a simplified control scheme, Capcom’s finally cracked it. Modern Controls are not only comparatively easy to grasp — they’re pretty viable competitively.

But it’s the finely honed one-on-one fighting mechanics, governed by a streamlined set of meters and flashy new moves, that give Street Fighter 6 its longevity. Thanks to a well-populated social space called the Battle Hub, and a rock-solid online infrastructure, there’s a robust community of other Street Fighter fans to battle against on a daily basis. Add a compelling new roster of characters led by classics like Ryu, Zangief, and Chun-Li, and dazzling newcomers Marisa, Manon, and Kimberly, and it’s clear why Street Fighter 6 is one of the best games of 2023, regardless of genre. —Michael McWhertor

Developer: Geometric Interactive

I think I’m still trying to wrap my head around Cocoon . On the surface, the game appears to have a relatively simple premise: You play as a buglike creature that picks up and places glowing orbs to solve puzzles. However, this is where Cocoon hides its brilliant twist. Each orb functions like a world unto itself, which you can explore, or from which you can extract a new power for your bug. As you collect orbs, you thread together puzzles that will have you weaving in and out of realms in a truly mind-bending experience.

Created by Geometric Interactive, a studio founded by developers who previously worked on Limbo and Inside , Cocoon ’s brain teasers unfold in a dark sci-fi world. The game goes light on a story that combines biological and mechanical philosophies alike. As you make your way through, you’ll hear the hum of engines and the moist squishy sounds of unknown creatures’ moving flesh.

Cocoon has one-off puzzles that are downright brilliant, but what makes it truly great is the sum of its parts. The pacing of each section feeds smoothly from one challenge to the next. Like the best puzzle games, Cocoon presents instances where an earlier brain teaser might serve as an unsaid tutorial that teaches you a step for a later, more complicated puzzle. Cocoon presents challenges, but it’s also just a joy to play. It is one of the most memorable puzzle games I’ve ever played. —AD

5. Pikmin 4

Developers: Nintendo EPD, Eighting

Pikmin 4 is like the perfect amalgamation of Pikmin games. There are fun mini-dungeon caverns, but they’re not filled with terrible bomb traps. There’s new types of Pikmin, but not at the cost of getting rid of the old ones. And there’s a dog now, and he helps corral the Pikmin and make operations run even more efficiently.

The entirety of the game is a whimsical joy to play. Even as I completed every Dandori Challenge (which actually got pretty damn hard!) and collected every item, it never became a drag or a grind. It actually might be impossible to be angry while playing this game. Hearing the little Pikmin hum as they carry a huge peach (that they call a “mock bottom”) across the map is enough to melt anyone’s heart. In fact, I was pretty sad when the game ended. I could command these little guys and my puppy friend to collect things forever.

All told, the game is beautiful, and, thanks to its quasi real-world setting, it makes me see my own world differently — there’s something special to be found everywhere, even in the tiniest corners. Maybe all my little trinkets go missing because a little guy needs it to return home. He can have it.

Even if you’ve never played a Pikmin game before, this game is good , and it’s the perfect place to start. (And then you can play all the rest of them, which have been conveniently ported to the Switch!) — JL

4. Super Mario Bros. Wonder

Developer: Nintendo EPD

When you activate Super Mario. Bros. Wonder ’s delightful whimsy — via the aptly named Wonder Flower — the game becomes more than a 2D platformer. Super Mario Bros. Wonder is a musical, a quiz show, a race, or a hidden object game. Pipes become inchworms, Piranha Plants burst into song, and Yoshi becomes a goddamn dragon. Wonder is the first side-scrolling 2D platformer in the Super Mario Bros. line since New Super Mario Bros. U in 2012, and it’s both a faithful rendition of the classic format and a complete reinvention of the series’ irresistible formula.

Each and every level in Super Mario Bros. Wonder finds some new way to delight and surprise. It’s constantly introducing new ideas, enemies, and wrinkles, only to pull back on them just when it’s on the verge of becoming rote. Like everything else in the Flower Kingdom, a few enemies shift and change in bizarre ways when the Wonder Flower is activated, like Hoppo, the bouncy, round hippo equivalent that grows in size to create chaos in one of Super Mario Bros. Wonder ’s many mesmerizing levels.

All of this weirdness, combined with Nintendo’s platforming expertise, makes Super Mario Bros. Wonder an entrancing romp alone, with friends, or with strangers online. This is the freshest Mario has felt in decades, and it bodes well for the iconic plumber’s 2D future. —N. Carpenter

3. Alan Wake 2

Developer: Remedy Entertainment

There’s a body in the forest with a hole in its chest. The forest, like the body, is also missing its heart, and a woman must find both. In each, there are pages. This is a story, broken into pieces, we learn. One that ended badly before. One that will likely end badly again. Will you still put it together?

Alan Wake 2 is full of words but few are in order. It is set in places of confused geography, full of people who don’t quite belong, in rooms that might be different each time you enter them. Alan Wake 2 is wrong, and you must make it right, if you can.

Remedy Entertainment’s assured masterpiece is less about stories and more about dreams — the way they can slip from frightening to absurd at a moment’s notice, about how we can get lost in them, learning from our experiences or succumbing to insecurities. How video games can mimic their shape, or lack thereof.

It is about repetition, and the way we find meaning in stories and people and places by returning to them over and over, wondering if we changed or they did.

In Alan Wake 2 , everyone’s story is happening at once, branching out in endless directions, and we might not know the genre until it’s too late. It’s a hypertext mystery, an ergodic game that molds itself to an audience raised online, though few computers are in sight. It’s a game for a world suspended in an endless second act — forever wars, live services, franchises, infinite scrolls — endlessly searching for a conclusion. —JR

2. Baldur’s Gate 3

Developer: Larian Studios

Baldur’s Gate 3 hit at the perfect moment. Despite the handful of truly great computer role-playing games that have been released since the early 2000s (Larian Studios itself made waves with its Divinity: Original Sin series in 2014 and 2017), the genre has largely remained a modern niche. But times have changed: Dungeons & Dragons has undergone something of a renaissance, thanks to actual-play series like Critical Role and Dimension 20. What’s more, Larian had two years of player feedback with which to build its new masterpiece. That masterpiece launched in August, and it garnered the kind of attention that catapults a game from niche interests to widespread acclaim.

Old CRPG fans finally came home, the Mass Effect generation has discovered a new kind of RPG to sink its teeth into, and D&D fans have found an exceptional digital version of their beloved tabletop game to play alone or with their party in co-op.

Like a good DM, Baldur’s Gate 3 teases out story beats that feel personal to you, cleverly luring you into experiences that seem like they wouldn’t make sense in anyone else’s campaign. Every act delivers quiet, memorable character moments and anxiety-inducing battles. All of these situations feel organic, allowing Baldur’s Gate 3 to replicate, perhaps as closely as a video game can, Dungeons & Dragons’ best feature: the intoxicating sense that anything could happen at any moment.

The best games this year told their stories in interesting ways, be it ignoring your superpowers to bike through your old neighborhood in Queens, a musical number, or fractured memories hidden in a puddle. But Baldur’s Gate 3 takes experimental storytelling to another level. Every choice and every new direction is a simple success, fail, or crit away. One roll of the dice after another can take you all the way from a crashed Nautiloid to the city of Baldur’s Gate itself.

In a year filled with beautiful stories and powerful moments, it’s the spinning whir of Baldur’s Gate 3 ’s d20 that defined video game storytelling in 2023. —RG

1. The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom

Princess Zelda is missing. Ganondorf has returned, somehow, and he’s really hot. So an age-old hero in a green tunic has to step in. We all know the beats — how could you possibly make that into anything new?

Tears of the Kingdom definitely didn’t seem like it was poised to make that happen: a sequel to one of the most popular Zelda games ever made, originally conceived as DLC, and built on the same map. Yet, it is something else entirely. It’s not just that Breath of the Wild was a rough draft for Tears of the Kingdom — it’s that the entire Zelda series was a collection of stepping stones that led in winding, influential pathways to this wacky, wonderful, and thoroughly new world of Hyrule.

I mean, Ultrahand alone. Just absolutely slathering pieces of wood in what amounts to magical Gorilla Glue and watching in wonder as the game’s physics engine roars to life in response. I went into Tears of the Kingdom thinking I wouldn’t build much — I’d just follow the story and get through it; I left feeling like a genius engineer, building all manner of bizarre contraptions ( but mostly long bridges ) to sail through skies and trundle over mountaintops.

I still catch my breath remembering that first time diving deep into the darkness of the Depths — the amazement I felt upon discovering a whole other world underneath the one I knew, filled with skeleton horses and gloom-splattered Bokoblins.

And I remember when I realized where Princess Zelda really was… and then, many hours later, learning where she really was.

I never wanted to stop playing Tears of the Kingdom . I did stop, eventually — the year of 2023 in video games has spoiled us all with hearty meals and sweet desserts — but I never stopped thinking about it. Every now and then, I picked my Switch back up to seek out another Lightroot, or solve another shrine’s puzzle, until there were none left. And then I’d just wander, collecting ingredients, talking to Great Fairies, imagining the next adventure.

Tears of the Kingdom feels like someone holding my hands very close as they lean in to whisper, with eyes twinkling, “Can I tell you something?” The ride was wild; I laughed, I cried. And I can’t wait for the next time, when it’s completely different. — M. Myers

Polygon’s Best of the Year 2023

• The 50 best movies of 2023
• The 50 best TV shows of 2023
• The best sci-fi and fantasy books of 2023
• The best anime of 2023
• The best tabletop RPGs we played in 2023
• The best board games we played in 2023
• The best Blu-rays and 4K UHD releases of 2023
• The best new tabletop RPG books of 2023
• The best video game books of 2023
• The best comics of 2023
• What the Polygon staff bought and loved in 2023
• The best documentaries of 2023
• 10 great indie games you might have missed in 2023
• The 10 best action scenes of 2023
• The best TV episodes of 2023
• The 5 best concert movies of 2023
• Best horror movies of 2023, ranked by scariness
• The best video essays of 2023
• The 10 best Netflix originals of 2023

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33 Fun Telling-Time Games and Activities

Time flies when you’re having fun!

Learning to tell time is an important early math lesson since it’s a real-world skill that’s used every day by everyone. Learning about minutes and hours can become tedious fast, so you’ll want to have a lot of creative and hands-on ways to bring it to life for kids. Regardless of whether you get crafty with a paper watch or active with musical clocks, we think your students will be sure to have a good time learning all things time. There are, of course, old standbys on our list too like books and worksheets. Kids can even get in some extra practice with a free online game or two. Check out our personal favorite telling-time games to try with the kiddos in your life.

Hands-On Activities for Telling Time

Online Telling-Time Games

1. Make a paper clock

One of the trickier aspects of telling time is understanding how the number 1 also means 5 minutes, the number 2 means 10 minutes, and so on. This paper clock activity helps students make that connection. (Pro tip: Use paper plates to make this craft even easier.)

Get tutorial:  How to Make a Clock to Teach Time  

2. Color the spaces to learn the hours

Another important concept kids need to grasp is how the spaces between the numbers work on an analog clock. These coloring games are a simple way to teach kids about telling time, but it helps drive the point home. Grab the free printable at the link.

Learn more:  Teaching Kids to Tell Time Past the Hour  

3. Put a puzzle together

Use these telling-time puzzle games to demonstrate different ways of showing the same time. We especially love this version .

Learn more:  How To Teach Telling Time in Second Grade

4. Wear paper watches

First, print and cut out the free printable paper watches available at the link below. Draw hands on each clock face and record what time each student’s watch reads on a master record sheet. Have kids decorate their watch bands, then fasten them on their wrists and add the clock faces. Give each student a record sheet, then let them go around the room and ask each of their classmates, “What time is it?” They look at their classmate’s watch and record the time. Check their results against your master.

Get tutorial: Paper Watch Craft for Kids

5. Make a clock with linking math cubes

This telling-time game helps kids understand time both as a circular analog clock and a time line moving forward. Gather your math cubes and visit the link to see how it works.

Learn more: Telling Time Is Easy Peasy

6. Make a rock clock

Part art lesson, part math, and part science, this is the ultimate time-telling activity. First, get outside to collect the sticks and rocks. Second, have kids paint their rocks with acrylic paint. Finally, have them set their “clocks” to different times.

Get tutorial: Teach Kids How To Tell Time

7. Take it outside with a Hula-Hoop clock

Pull out the sidewalk chalk and head outside for some time-telling practice. Hula-Hoops make perfect analog clocks, but if you don’t have any, you can still let kids play fun time-telling games by simply drawing circles instead.

Learn more:  Hula-Hoop and Chalk Clocks

8. Set the time with play dough

Create time-telling activity mats by printing a page similar to the one shown here and then placing it in a plastic sleeve or laminating it. Finally, challenge your students to roll out play dough to create the hands of the clock and “set” it to the designated time.

Learn more:  Telling Time—Clock Play Dough Mats

9. Dance around for musical clocks

If your students love games like musical chairs, you can make it an educational time-telling activity. Start by printing out our  free blank clock sheets . Pass them out and have each student draw a time on their clock, then leave it on their desk. Give each student a recording sheet (included with the clock printable), then have them grab a pencil and get ready to move! Start the music and let kids dance around from desk to desk. Stop the music and instruct them to record the name and time on the clock of the desk in front of them. Start the music again and keep on going!

10. Turn a paper plate into a clock

We love how simple this project is to re-create since all you really need are some paper plates, markers, and a metal fastener. The numbers on the outer edge help your students make the connection between the minute hand and the spoken or digital time.

Get tutorial:  Make a Paper Plate Clock

11. Shake up a carton of clocks

This awesome time-telling game also gives kids some practice at creating bar graphs. First, paste analog clock faces showing various times into the bottoms of an empty egg carton, and add a marble or other small toy. Kids shake up the carton, look to see what time the marble landed on, and graph their results.

Get tutorial:  Time Activities for First Grade

12. Add a hook to the hour hand

This time-telling trick will help your students remember that as the hour and minute hands move around, the hour still belongs to the number behind. Clever!

Learn more:  Teaching Kids To Tell Time Past the Hour

13. Write the room with I Spy Time

Post  paper analog clocks  with times filled in around the room. Students find each clock and record the time on their record sheet. For more of a challenge, write “What will the time be in ____ minutes?” underneath each clock. After students record the time showing, they calculate the future time too. Your students will have fun learning to tell time with these games.

14. Match up plastic eggs

Plastic eggs have so many uses in the classroom.  For time-telling practice, make them into games. Just draw analog clocks on one half and write times (in words or digital time) on the other, then have kids match them up.

Learn more:  Telling Time Match Up

15. Turn your classroom clock into a flower

Turn a classroom wall clock into a pretty flower that will help your students make better sense of what they are looking at. We especially love the cute way the stem reinforces which is the hour and which is the minute hand.

Get tutorial:  The Best Ideas for Kids

16. Chill out with frosty clocks

Turn a snowman face into an analog clock. Use these free printables for a variety of wintry time-telling activities.

Learn more:  Free Snowman Telling Time Activity

17. Calculate the duration of your favorite activities

Ready to tackle elapsed time? Have students use this  free printable worksheet  to record the time they spend on three different activities, at home or at school. Think: basketball practice, dance class, watching their favorite TV show, eating a banana—or doing their homework.

18. Compete to win Telling-Time Bingo

Bingo games are always a blast in the classroom, and there’s a variation you can play that’s focused on telling time. These analog clock bingo cards are customizable, so you can set them to match whatever time skills your students are working on, whether it’s hours, half hours, quarter hours, or to the minute.

Learn more:  Telling Time Bingo Cards Maker

19. Race to beat the Rush Hour clock

Use toy clocks and a die to see who can reach a goal time first. Start at 12:00 and choose the target time. Students roll the die and move their clocks ahead the specified number of minutes on each turn. Students love these time-telling games!

Learn more: Rush Hour Games

20. Don clock headbands

These clock headbands are fun to wear, and they’re also perfect for a game of “What Time Am I?” Kids ask each other questions to try to guess what time is showing on their forehead clock.

Learn more:  Time Activities for First Grade

21. Distinguish between a.m. and p.m.

This free printable is perfect for teaching the difference between a.m. and p.m. Students will relate to the activities on the worksheet and therefore connect the dots between what time of day they would typically do them.

Learn more:  Telling Time: AM and PM

22. Read books about telling time

Books are a great way to teach about so many different topics, and telling time is certainly no exception! Pick a few of your favorites and read them aloud during story time.

Buy it: Telling Time by Jules Older

23. Teach units of time with concentric circles

We love this activity since telling time is much more than just minute and hour hands on a clock. The visual representation of the smallest unit to the largest unit (and the different colors) will help students make sense of the various units of time.

Get tutorial:  Tell Time: Learning Units of Time With Concentric Circles (Printable)

Online Time Telling Games

24. Travel through time

ABCya has a lot of free online games for young kids that you can play even without a subscription. This fun time-travel game allows kids to choose whether they want to practice setting a digital or an analog clock. We especially love the time-traveling theme and the cute cartoon graphics that make this activity extra kid-friendly.

Learn more: Time Travel Game

25. Pick the right answer

This simple and free game doesn’t even require a sign-up to begin playing. We love that kids are given multiple choice options to select from when guessing the time displayed on the analog clock. Kids receive 10 points for every correct answer given and are deducted 10 points for incorrect ones. We think kids will have fun trying to beat their high scores!

Learn more: Telling Time

26. Tell time to the quarter hour

This site has a lot of different online time-telling activities across different difficulty levels. We are especially fond of the one that requires students to tell time to the quarter of an hour. Kids are presented with four different analog clock faces and asked to select which one displays the time at the bottom.

Learn more: Clockworks Practice

27. Recognize patterns

We love that this game combines learning time with pattern recognition. This website has additional time-telling games should the kids in your life master this one!

Learn more: Time Patterns

28. Personalize the learning experience

This free online game offers up a lot of room for personalization. You can select whether to identify time to the nearest hour, half hour, quarter of an hour, or even minute. You can also select a 12-hour or 24-hour clock. Depending on your child’s skill level, you can also select to play in timed or untimed modes. The adorable circus theme and bear ringmaster will keep any kid entertained!

Learn more: Telling the Time

29. Practice with elapsed time

Telling-time games that go beyond just identifying a time on a clock are some of our favorites for older kids. This one requires kids to identify the time on an analog clock and then decipher what time it will be in a certain number of hours.

Learn more: Time Teller

30. Compare digital and analog

This site begins by explaining the differences between digital and analog clocks as well as how to read each one. It then takes you through various exercises to test your understanding.

Learn more: Telling the Time: Digital and Analog

31. Make the mouse run up the clock

This is such a fun spin on identifying the time on a clock. We love the play on a classic nursery rhyme and the oh-so adorable mouse and cat graphics. Guess the right time on the cartoon grandfather clock and a cute mouse will run up it. But get it wrong and an angry cat will make itself known!

Learn more: Hickory, Dickory, Clock

32. Take a quiz

This video is advertised as being for English language learners, but it would work equally well for kids just learning to read clocks. Kids can just watch it or they can keep some scrap paper handy to record their answers.

33. Race to the correct time

What’s more fun than playing a game with friends? We love that multiple players can play against one another as their adorable giraffe avatars race to be the first one across the finish line.

Learn more: Giraffe Dash

How do you teach telling time? Come exchange ideas in the We Are Teachers HELPLINE group on Facebook.

Plus, check out creative ways to dress up your classroom clock .

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NCAA.com | June 10, 2024

2024 ncaa baseball bracket: men's college world series scores, schedule.

The 2024 DI men's baseball tournament began with regionals on May 31 and will conclude in Omaha, Nebraska from June 22-23/24. North Carolina, Virginia, Florida, NC State, Kentucky, Texas A&M, Tennessee and Florida State won their respective Super Regionals, advancing to the Men's College World Series. These eight teams will compete in Omaha from June 14-23/24. Tournament selections were made  on Monday, May 27.

CONFERENCE TOURNAMENTS: Every conference tournament winner and automatic bid

The 2023 Men's College World Series came to a close when LSU routed Florida 18-4 in the decisive game of the finals to win its seventh national championship.

The complete NCAA regional, Super Regional, 2024 Men's College World Series schedules and results are below. 

• Selection show: Monday, May 27 at Noon ET | ESPN2/ESPNU
• Regionals: Friday-Monday,   May 31-June 3
• Super Regionals: Friday-Monday, June 7-10
• First day of MCWS games:  Start   Friday, June 14
• MCWS finals:  Saturday-Monday, June 22-23/24

2024 NCAA DI baseball tournament bracket

👉  Click or tap here for the interactive 2024 bracket  

Printable MCWS bracket  | Regional brackets  | 64-team bracket

2024 Men's College World Series schedule 

➡️ See the full MCWS schedule release

• Game 1: North Carolina vs. Virginia, 2 p.m. | ESPN
• Game 2:  Tennessee vs. Florida State, 7 p.m. | ESPN
• Game 3: Kentucky vs. NC State, 2 p.m. | ESPN
• Game 4:  Texas A&M vs. Florida, 7 p.m. | ESPN
• Game 5: Loser of Game 1 vs. Loser of Game 2, 2 p.m. | ESPN
• Game 6:  Winner of Game 1 vs. Winner of Game 2, 7 p.m. | ESPN
• Game 7: Loser of Game 3 vs. Loser of Game 4, 2 p.m. | ESPN
• Game 8:  Winner of Game 3 vs. Winner of Game 4, 7 p.m. | ESPN
• Game 9: TBD vs. TBD, 2 p.m. | ESPN
• Game 10:  TBD vs. TBD, 7 p.m. | ESPN
• Game 11: TBD vs. TBD, 2 p.m. | ESPN
• Game 12:  TBD vs. TBD, 7 p.m. | ESPN
• Game 13 (if necessary): TBD vs. TBD, 2 p.m. | TBD
• Game 14 (if necessary):  TBD vs. TBD, 7 p.m. | TBD
• MCWS Final Game 1 : TBD vs. TBD, 7:30 p.m. | ESPN
• MCWS Final Game 2 : TBD vs. TBD, 2 p.m. | ABC
• MCWS Final Game 3 (if necessary) : TBD vs. TBD, 7 p.m. | ESPN

2024 DI baseball tournament super regionals schedule

Dates : Friday-Monday, June 7-10

All times in ET

Knoxville Super Regional

• Game 1: (1) Tennessee 11,  Evansville 6 
• Game 2: Evansville 10,  (1) Tennessee 8
• Game 3: (1) Tennessee 12, Evansville 1
• 🏆  Tennessee advances to the MCWS

Tallahassee Super Regional

• Game 1: (8) Florida State 24, UConn 4
• Game 2: (8) Florida State 10 , UConn 8 (12 innings)
• 🏆  Florida State advances to the MCWS

Charlottesville Super Regional

• Game 1: (12) Virginia 7 , Kansas State 4
• Game 2: (12) Virginia 10 , Kansas State 4
• 🏆 Virginia advances to the MCWS

Chapel Hill Super Regional

• Game 1: (4) North Carolina 8, West Virginia 6
• Game 2:   (4) North Carolina 2, West Virginia 1
• 🏆 North Carolina  advances to the MCWS

Lexington Super Regional

• Game 1: (2) Kentucky 10,  Oregon State 0
• Game 2: (2) Kentucky 3, Oregon State 2
• 🏆 Kentucky  advances to the MCWS

Athens Super Regional

• Game 1: (10) NC State 18 , (7) Georgia 1
• Game 2: (7) Georgia 11, (10) NC State 2
• Game 3: (10) NC State 8,  (7) Georgia 4
• 🏆 NC State  advances to the MCWS

Clemson Super Regional

• Game 1: Florida 10 , (6) Clemson 7
• Game 2: Florida 11,  (6) Clemson 10
• 🏆 Florida advances to the MCWS

Bryan-College Station Super Regional

• Game 1: (3) Texas A&M 10 , Oregon 6
• Game 2: (3) Texas A&M 15, Oregon 9
• 🏆 Texas A&M advances to the MCWS

2024 DI baseball tournament regionals schedule

Here are the regional schedules for Friday, May 31 through Monday, June 3:

Knoxville Regional

• Game 1: Indiana 10, Southern Miss 4
• Game 2:  Tennessee 9, Northern Kentucky 3
• Game 3: Southern Miss 6, Northern Kentucky 0
• Game 4:  Tennessee 12,  Indiana 6 
• Game 5:  Southern Miss 15,  Indiana 3  
• Game 6:  Tennessee 12,  Southern Miss 3

🏆 Tennessee advances

Lexington Regional

• Game 1 : Kentucky 10, Western Michigan 8 
• Game 2:  Illinois 4,  Indiana State 1
• Game 3:  Indiana State 6 , Western Michigan 4
• Game 4:  Kentucky 6,  Illinois 1
• Game 5:   Indiana State 13,  Illinois 2 
• Game 6:  Kentucky 5,  Indiana State 0

🏆 Kentucky advances

Bryan-College Station Regional

• Game 1:   Texas A&M 8, Grambling 0 
• Game 2:  Texas 12,  Louisiana 5
• Game 3:  Louisiana 12,  Grambling 5 
• Game 4:  Texas A&M 4, Texas 2
• Game 5 : Louisiana 10, Texas 2
• Game 6:   Texas A&M 9,  Louisiana 4

🏆 Texas A&M advances

Chapel Hill Regional

• Game 1: LSU 4, Wofford 3
• Game 2: North Carolina 11, LIU 8
• Game 3:  Wofford 5 , LIU 2
• Game 4:  North Carolina 6,  LSU 2
• Game 5:  LSU 13, Wofford 6 
• Game 6:  LSU 8, North Carolina 4
• Game 7:   North Carolina 4,  LSU 3  (10 inn)

🏆 North Carolina advances

Fayetteville Regional

• Game 1:  Arkansas 17, Southeast Missouri 9 
• Game 2:  Kansas State 19 , Louisiana Tech 4 
• Game 3:  Southeast Missouri 9, Louisiana Tech 3
• Game 4:  Kansas State 7, Arkansas 6
• Game 5: Southeast Missouri 6. Arkansas 3
• Game 6:   Kansas State 7,  Southeast Missouri 2

🏆 Kansas State advances

Clemson Regional

• Game 1: Coastal Carolina 13, Vanderbilt 3
• Game 2:  Clemson 4, High Point 3
• Game 3:  High Point 10 , Vanderbilt 9
• Game 4:  Clemson 4, Coastal Carolina 3
• Game 5:  Coastal Carolina 6, High Point 5
• Game 6:  Clemson 12,  Coastal Carolina 5

🏆 Clemson advances

Athens Regional

• Game 1: Georgia 8, Army 7
• Game 2:  UNC Willmington 9, Georgia Tech 0
• Game 3:  Georgia Tech 4 , Army 2
• Game 4:  Georgia 11,  UNC Wilmington 2
• Game 5: Georgia Tech 3, UNC Wilmington 1
• Game 6:  Georgia 8,  Georgia Tech 6  (10 Inn.)

🏆 Georgia advances

Tallahassee Regional

• Game 1: Florida State 7, Stetson 2
• Game 2:  UCF 8,  Alabama 7
• Game 3:  Stetson 4, Alabama  0
• Game 4:  Florida State 5, UCF 2
• Game 5:  UCF 5, Stetson 2 
• Game 6:  Florida State 12,  UCF 4

🏆 Florida State advances

Norman Regional

• Game 1: UConn 4, Duke 1
• Game 2:   Oklahoma 14, Oral Roberts 0 
• Game 3:  Duke 6,  Oral Roberts 2
• Game 4:  UConn 4, Oklahoma 1
• Game 5: Oklahoma 4, Duke 3
• Game 6:  Oklahoma 6, UConn 4
• Game 7:  UConn 7,  Oklahoma 1

🏆 UConn advances

Raleigh Regional

• Game 1:   South Carolina 8,  James Madison 7  
• Game 2:   NC State 9, Bryant 2 
• Game 3: James Madison 8 , Bryant 1
• Game 4:  NC State 6,  South Carolina 4
• Game 5:  James Madison 2,  South Carolina 0 
• Game 6:  NC State 5,  James Madison 3

🏆 NC State advances

Stillwater Regional

• Game 1:  Florida 5,  Nebraska 2 
• Game 2:  Oklahoma State 19, Niagra 7
• Game 3:  Nebraska 7,  Niagara 5
• Game 4:  Oklahoma State 7,  Florida 1
• Game 5 : Florida 17, Nebraska 11
• Game 6:  Florida 5, Oklahoma State 2
• Game 7:   Florida 4, Oklahoma State 2

🏆 Florida advances

Charlottesville Regional

• Game 1: Virginia 4, Penn 2
• Game 2:  Mississippi State 5, St. John’s 2 
• Game 3:   St. John's 10,  Penn 9
• Game 4:  Virginia 5,  Mississippi State 4
• Game 5:  Mississippi State 13, St. John's 5
• Game 6:   Virginia 9,  Mississippi State 2

🏆 Virginia advances

Tucson Regional

• Game 1: West Virginia 4,  DBU 1
• Game 2:  Grand Canyon 9,  Arizona 4
• Game 3:  DBU 7,  Arizona  0
• Game 4:  West Virginia 5, Grand Canyon 2
• Game 5 : Grand Canyon 12, DBU 10 
• Game 6:  West Virginia 10,  Grand Canyon 6

🏆 West Virginia advances

Santa Barbara Regional

• Game 1:  Oregon 5,  San Diego 4
• Game 2:  UC Santa Barbara 9, Fresno State 6
• Game 3:  San Diego 7,  Fresno State 5
• Game 4:   Oregon 2,  UC Santa Barbara 0
• Game 5 : UC Santa Barbara 4, San Diego 2
• Game 6:  Oregon 3,  UC Santa Barbara 0

🏆 Oregon advances

Corvallis Regional

• Game 1:  UC Irvine 13, Nicholls 12 
• Game 2:   Oregon State 10, Tulane 4 
• Game 3:  Tulane 3, Nicholls 0
• Game 4:  Oregon State 5, UC Irvine 3
• Game 5 : UC Irvine 17, Tulane 7
• Game 6 : Oregon State 11, UC Irvine 6

🏆 Oregon State advances

Greenville Regional

• Game 1: Evansville 4, East Carolina 1
• Game 2:  VCU 1,  Wake Forest 0 
• Game 3: East Carolina 7 , Wake Forest 6
• Game 4:  Evansville 17,  VCU 11
• Game 5: East Carolina 10, VCU 7
• Game 6:   East Carolina 19, Evansville 6
• Game 7: Evansville 6,  East Carolina 5

🏆 Evansville advances

Baseball  Championship: Future dates

MCWS HISTORY:  Winningest coaches  |  Most titles  |  Most appearances   |  Conferences most represented

Here is more on how the tournament works:

What is the difference between the Division I baseball tournament and the College World Series?

The NCAA Division I baseball tournament is a 64-team tournament that starts in May. After two rounds of play (which each consist of multiple games), there are just eight teams left. These eight teams then head to Omaha, Neb. for the College World Series. The CWS is the culmination of the DI tournament, where the teams compete in two brackets, with the winners of each meeting in the CWS finals, a best-of-three series to decide the NCAA champion.

When did the College World Series start?

The first-ever NCAA Division I baseball tournament was in 1947, and would barely be recognized as the same tournament nowadays. The 1947 tournament featured just eight teams, which were divided into two four-team, single-elimination brackets. The two winners — California and Yale — then met in a best-of-three final in Kalamazoo, Michigan. California would go undefeated through the inaugural CWS and beat Yale to capture the first title.

How are teams selected for the NCAA Division I baseball tournament?

Since 1954, the NCAA Division I baseball tournament field has been split into two qualifying groups: The automatic berths, and the at-large selections. Since 2014, that in a typical year split sees 31 conference champions receive automatic berths, and 33 teams receive at-large bids, decided by the NCAA Division I Baseball Committee. 

Men's College World Series champs since 1947

California defeated Yale in the first-ever Men's College World Series, the first of two played in Kalamazoo, Michigan. Texas put itself on the map as the first back-to-back champions in winning the only MCWS ever played in Wichita, Kansas in 1949. The following season Texas won its second championship, opening Rosenblatt Stadium in Omaha.

Here's a complete list of all the College World Series finals in the 73-year history of the event. Ole Miss won the 2022 Men's College World Series in two games over Oklahoma.

*Indicates undefeated teams in College World Series play.

• Here's how often each seed makes the Men's College World Series

Pairings and game times set for 77th Men's College World Series

The final curtain call on the Pac-12 — saying goodbye to the 'Conference of Champions'

• Championship Info
• Game Program

Men's College World Series

• 🗓️ 2024 schedule
• 🔮 Future dates
• 🤔 How the MCWS works
• 🏆 Programs with the most MCWS titles
• 💪 Coaches with the most MCWS wins
• ⚾ Every champion in tournament history

Everything you need to know about how the Men's College World Series works

Di baseball news.

• Teams with the most appearances in the Men's College World Series
• Here are the programs with the most Men's College World Series titles
• Every 2024 MCWS team's winning moment from super regionals
• Pairings and game times set for 77th MCWS

College baseball career home run leaders

Here are the baseball programs with the most Men's College World Series titles

The 7 longest home runs in MCWS history (that we know of)

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