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The 15 Most Influential Video Games of the 2020s

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Ignacio Weil

Gaming - September 24th 2026, 20:30 GMT+2

15. The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom (2023)

Nintendo gave players a physics engine, a pile of loose parts, and apparently no concern whatsoever for what horrifying machinery they might invent. Ultrahand and Fuse transformed *Tears of the Kingdom* from another great open-world adventure into a giant experiment in player creativity, where bridges, tanks, flying machines, and deeply irresponsible Korok transportation were equally valid solutions. Its biggest achievement was making complex systemic interactions feel approachable, raising the bar for games that claim to offer genuine freedom. | © Nintendo

14. Genshin Impact (2020)

Calling *Genshin Impact* a successful mobile game dramatically undersells what happened here. HoYoverse combined a console-sized open world with gacha characters, regular expansions, cross-platform play, and the kind of production values mobile players were rarely getting at the time, then watched the formula become a global money machine. Its success helped accelerate investment in ambitious free-to-play action RPGs and demonstrated that mobile, PC, and console audiences could comfortably inhabit the same ongoing game. Plenty of developers have spent the decade trying to capture even a fraction of that lightning. | © HoYoverse

Half Life Alyx — 13. Half-Life: Alyx (2020)

VR had plenty of impressive experiments before *Half-Life: Alyx*, but Valve was among the first major studios to treat the medium like it deserved a full-scale blockbuster. Every mundane interaction—from rummaging through shelves to physically reloading a weapon—was designed around being present in the space rather than translating traditional controls into a headset. Its obsessive polish established a benchmark VR developers are still chasing, while its launch produced a major spike in Steam-connected headsets. Six years later, it remains the game people point to when asking what high-budget virtual reality can actually accomplish. | © Valve

12. Street Fighter 6 (2023)

Getting demolished online by somebody who has been playing *Street Fighter* since arcade cabinets accepted actual coins is not traditionally a gentle introduction to fighting games. *Street Fighter 6* attacked that problem from several angles: Modern Controls simplified execution, World Tour provided a full single-player playground, and the Battle Hub made online competition feel less clinical. Crucially, none of those additions gutted the competitive game underneath. Capcom offered other fighting franchises a useful lesson in accessibility: lower the entrance barrier without lowering the ceiling. | © Capcom

Cropped Kingdom Come Deliverance II — 11. Kingdom Come: Deliverance II (2025)

No dragons, magic swords, or chosen-one prophecy were needed to make *Kingdom Come: Deliverance II* feel enormous. Warhorse Studios doubled down on historical role-playing, building its medieval world around social status, reputation, clothing, crime, combat training, and the uncomfortable reality that Henry cannot simply murder half a village without someone noticing. Its success strengthened the case for ambitious RPGs that trust players with slower systems and meaningful limitations, proving historical authenticity can support deep gameplay instead of functioning as expensive scenery. | © Warhorse Studios

10. Hades (2020)

Dying in *Hades* rarely feels like the game stamping “FAILED” across your evening. Zagreus returns home, characters react to what happened, relationships advance, new dialogue appears, and another piece of the story clicks into place before the next escape attempt begins. Supergiant effectively fused roguelike repetition with narrative progression so thoroughly that the structure became an inspiration of its own. The resulting wave of games borrowing its hubs, character relationships, run-based storytelling, and tightly curated upgrades shows how quickly a clever solution can become genre vocabulary. | © Supergiant Games

Animal Crossing New Horizons — 9. Animal Crossing: New Horizons (2020)

An island full of talking animals accidentally became one of the decade’s most important social spaces. During lockdowns, *Animal Crossing: New Horizons* hosted birthday parties, dates, weddings, talk shows, political campaigning, and countless visits between people who could not meet anywhere else. That timing cannot be recreated, but its cultural footprint helped push cozy gaming from a comfortable niche toward a much larger audience. Decorating a house and arguing over turnip prices suddenly looked just as socially powerful as shooting strangers online. | © Nintendo EPD

8. Helldivers 2 (2024)

Most live-service games give players a roadmap; *Helldivers 2* gave them a war and quietly put a human Dungeon Master behind it. Arrowhead’s Galactic War allowed millions of missions to feed into shared campaigns while developers adjusted events, enemy movements, and Major Orders in response to what the community actually did. Suddenly, a disastrous battle on one planet could become a meme, a rallying cry, and eventually part of the game’s history. It offered a far livelier model for ongoing games than simply rotating shops and season passes. | © Arrowhead Game Studios

7. Cyberpunk 2077 (2020)

Influence does not always come from getting everything right. *Cyberpunk 2077* launched as one of gaming’s biggest cautionary tales, exposing the risks of impossible expectations, technical instability, and releasing an enormous AAA project before it was ready. Then CD Projekt Red spent years rewriting that reputation through patches, major systems overhauls, current-gen improvements, and *Phantom Liberty*. The result made it equally famous as a comeback story, changing conversations around unfinished releases, post-launch support, and just how long a studio can spend trying to win back player trust. | © CD Projekt Red

Clair Obscur Expedition 33 — 6. Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 (2025)

For years, turn-based combat was occasionally treated as the thing RPGs eventually grew out of, like braces or an embarrassing haircut. *Clair Obscur: Expedition 33* helped demolish that notion. Sandfall Interactive combined traditional turns with real-time dodges, parries, aiming, and timed attacks, then wrapped it all in the presentation of a much larger production. Built by a relatively small core team, its breakout success became an unusually visible example of how focused studios can deliver lavish RPGs without following the usual AAA development blueprint. | © Sandfall Interactive

5. Wordle (2021)

Five letters, six guesses, one puzzle per day. That deliberately tiny package became almost impossible to ignore once timelines filled with mysterious grids of green, yellow, and gray squares. *Wordle* understood something much of modern gaming had forgotten: refusing to let people play endlessly can actually make them return more reliably. Its frictionless browser design and spoiler-free sharing turned a solitary word puzzle into a global daily ritual, inspiring a flood of imitators and helping make bite-sized social puzzles feel like appointment gaming again. | © Josh Wardle / The New York Times Games

ELDEN RING — 4. Elden Ring (2022)

Open-world games had spent years teaching players to stare at maps covered in icons, so *Elden Ring* did something almost rebellious: it expected them to look at the world instead. FromSoftware scattered castles, caves, bosses, entire underground regions, and bizarre encounters across the Lands Between with comparatively little direction, allowing curiosity to become the navigation system. Its colossal mainstream success also destroyed the idea that difficult, cryptic games needed to remain niche. After *Elden Ring*, trusting players to miss content no longer seemed like commercial madness. | © FromSoftware

3. Vampire Survivors (2022)

Visually, *Vampire Survivors* initially resembled something accidentally left running on an old laptop. Mechanically, it was lethal. Luca Galante stripped action gameplay down to movement, automatic attacks, escalating upgrades, and increasingly absurd floods of enemies, creating a loop so efficient that an entire “survivors-like” subgenre rapidly formed around it. Copycats, variations, and genre hybrids appeared everywhere from mobile stores to major franchises. Not bad for a cheap indie game that proved one excellent feedback loop can matter more than a warehouse full of expensive assets. | © poncle

2. Balatro (2024)

Poker hands were apparently only waiting for a mysterious Canadian developer to add multiplying Jokers and turn them into digital narcotics. *Balatro* takes rules almost everyone recognizes, bends them until probability starts screaming, and builds an extraordinarily deep roguelike around chasing increasingly ridiculous scoring combinations. LocalThunk’s solo-developed hit became a reminder of how far a single mechanical idea can travel when it is readable, endlessly remixable, and satisfying within seconds. Its runaway success also gave experimental indie design one of the decade’s most persuasive business cases. | © LocalThunk

Baldurs Gate 3 — 1. Baldur’s Gate 3 (2023)

A CRPG full of dice rolls, turn-based battles, branching quests, and enough dialogue to frighten a localization department somehow became a mainstream phenomenon. *Baldur’s Gate 3* made player choice feel unusually tangible because its systems constantly collide: characters remember decisions, quests mutate, ridiculous plans sometimes work, and entire chunks of content can disappear because the player did something reckless three hours earlier. The industry debate over whether Larian had “raised the standard” said plenty by itself. RPG audiences had seen what extreme reactivity could look like, and expectations changed immediately. | © Larian Studios

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The 2020s have already produced games that changed far more than sales charts and review scores. Some rewrote the rules for entire genres, others turned unlikely ideas into industry-wide obsessions, and a few became cultural events that escaped gaming altogether. From massive open worlds to indie breakthroughs, these are the 15 video games that have had the biggest influence on how we play, design, and talk about games this decade.

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The 2020s have already produced games that changed far more than sales charts and review scores. Some rewrote the rules for entire genres, others turned unlikely ideas into industry-wide obsessions, and a few became cultural events that escaped gaming altogether. From massive open worlds to indie breakthroughs, these are the 15 video games that have had the biggest influence on how we play, design, and talk about games this decade.