This list is a creation of mine that grew organically out of a lifelong passion for video games. Long I have believe that they're not just entertainment, but a uniquely special and critical art form; the games that I call "required reading" are the ones that prove it. In some cases these are known classics; in others they failed to achieve the popularity they deserved or were overlooked entirely. I add and remove games from time to time, and would be happy to hear your suggestions.

Thanks to Mobygames.com for the box art.

Alice
American McGee's towering, unappreciated masterpiece of character-driven narrative went totally misunderstood by gamers and outsiders alike. People shortsightedly saw Alice as a twitch title, a 3rd person platformer with odd visuals, heavy on moodiness and lacking in depth. But the jumping puzzle-based play and lavish Quake 3 powered graphics were just a gilded and occasionally frustrating proscenium framing the game's true strengths.

Alice is a patchwork nightmare that illuminates in glitteringly rich strokes the precarious constitution of sanity and the secret shape of guilt. Like some of the great novels, it is a story about regret, estrangement and loss; with the added layer of interactivity allowing the player to experience these emotions as no reader can. Set entirely in the catatonic mind of the former Wonderland explorer, now teenaged and institutionalized, Alice guides us through the deepest corners of a sexually maturing girl's imaginings. Hers is a mind consumed by misery and doubt, by natural hormones and unnatural self-hatred, where impish companions of the past manifest in adolescence as horrifying allegories of guilt and loss. Alice's old friends have reinvented themselves within her mind, using memories and traumas as grist from which their identities spring. From a deeply disturbed Cheshire Cat to a terrifying clockwork Jabberwock, they are now ghoulish, dementia-fueled metaphors for everything Alice has ever done wrong, everything she hates most about herself and everything that drove her to madness. Read "And if You Go Chasing Rabbits," my meandering, pedantic essay on Alice

Anachronox
A sad story indeed, the voice and value of this console-inspired RPG from ION Storm was lost in the press turmoil that so harried the beleaguered company's spectacular implosion. Anachronox is a pitiable interactive parallel to The Magnificent Ambersons: it suffered endless delays and budget overruns, lost in development limbo, despised by executives who consistently failed to understand its significance. Eventually the publisher literally forced ION Storm to release the game as it was, regardless of its condition or state of completion. The result was a mangled, unfinished treasure, as beautiful and as useless as a lawnmowered Picasso.

The gloriously tragicomic Anachronox is the ultimate depressive clown, inducing at turns laugh-out-loud hilarity and then, moments later, throat-crushing ennui; conjuring love and hatred, fear and laughter from thin, inarguably cliched sci-fi paradigms. In the far future a dark force threatens to destroy all life. Its wicked aim is hidden from all save a self-exiled private investigator so haunted by the failures of his past that his very will to take action is crippled. Yet he and an equally unlikely band of ineffectual goofballs are all that stands between a world they frankly despise and the force that seeks to destroy it. Your party carries on despite an almost universal desire to give up, and does so in the face of shame and guilt that only those who play through the entire, massive experience can fully appreciate. Anachronox is so well-written and so potently acted that it can - and often does - dissolve laughter into tears in a single stroke.

Blaster Master
Platformers of any kind, no matther how unique, have trouble standing out in such a highly-populated category. Sunsoft's Blaster Master was an early flirtation with platforming inside an open world, where - to a certain degree - you had the freedom to go where you chose at your own will. This is one of those games that exists on the Required Reading lists of many, but it belongs there... a game without emotion (the story is absurd to the point of caricature), but nonetheless full of passion and unforgettable in its own right.

The game created a potent attachment to S.O.P.H.I.A., the artificially-intelligent robo-tank which protected you through many a sewery wasteland of irradiated monsters and underground horrors. With each upgrade, S.O.P.H.I.A. became more powerful, and you became more dependent upon her. Yet without exception, in each stage, you had to leave her behind, to fight the radioactive monstrosities on foot... weak and vulnerable. Blaster Master is a game I never finished, despite many hundreds of heroic attempts. For some years during my youth it was a bit of an obsession, and one only recently reawakened given its availability on certain classic gaming sites, and through the miracle of emulation. Like so many games on this list, however, Blaster Master had disappointing sequels, and the Japanese developer's decision to roll it in with an insipid anime style and storyline did the original no good. Ultimately it's a game that fell off the radar, beloved of those who played it but unknown by millions.

Castlevania
The very first survival horror game is in my opinion the best. This is the nativity of one of the most enduring and beloved series in gaming. I do wonder if Konami realized, when it released Castlevania, that the series would quickly become a legend. The franchise continues even today, adored by a younger generation, many of whom know nothing at all about the great and storied geneaology of this, one of the most enduring interactive tales ever released.

Castlevania begins the story of the Belmonts, a cursed family with a dark fate: to be locked into endless war with the ultimate nocturnal terrors, the things that bump in the night and lurk under the bed. These are the minions of Count Dracula, who has sworn to destroy the Belmonts even as they have sworn to destroy him. It is an action game, full of jumping and whipping and ducking and dodging - a foundation for the more intense narratives of later installments. This is Simon Belmont's very first confrontation with Dracula, in a grim ruin of a castle wherein all the nightmares of classic horror movies lurk. One would be unsurprised to meet Peter Cushing or Christopher Lee around any corner. Indeed, the endgame credits grant homage to those who played Simon's enemies in film. Though the days of the NES were rife with scrolling platformers, this one is much more than head and shoulders above the rest. A sequel laden with roleplaying elements and many innovative design concepts laid the foundation for Castlevania's narrative thread and is as important to the series as the original.

Dungeon Keeper 2
As game scholars such as myself squawk endlessly about the importance of the emotional experience, about richly melodramatic games awash in romance and tragedy and drama, It's easy to forget that laughter is a powerful emotional manipulator as well. Comedy just doesn't get the respect that drama does, while any media theorist will happily admit that good comedy is far harder to produce than good drama. And few games rattle the funnybone like Bullfrog's Dungeon Keeper 2.

Heroes enter dungeons and smite the evil there, everyone knows that. But what about that evil? Does it have to deal with the headaches of payroll, facilities and creature resources? With inefficient construction and rebellious interns, with slavering demons demanding raises and lazy trolls that eat everything in sight but refuse to work? It turns out that Evil has quite enough on its hands without the pesky heroes, thank you very much. In this game you must wage a constant battle with all the managerial woes and your side's crushing incompetence if Good is to be forever brought to heel. Lots of twisted humor kept the game light, while excellently tuned level design made it one of the more replayable games of its genre - indeed, some have referred to Dungeon Keeper 2 as the perfect real time strategy. Possibly due to bitter memories of the ambitious but flawed original, Dungeon Keeper 2 undersold and, alas, the series appears to have died with this version.

Lunar: the Silver Star
I thought long and hard about the decision to list Lunar here, instead of the more obvious (and equally good) Phantasy Star. But though Sega's epic opera about Evil's living form is without doubt a classic, Lunar brings an emotional depth that few other console RPGs - even the revered Phantasy Star - can approach. The original Sega CD is difficult to locate. American publisher Working Designs released an updated version for the PlayStation (shown here). Gameplay, however, changed considerably; so curious readers should be advised that Lunar: Silver Star Story (the PS update) may not reflect the thematic turpulence of the original.

Armed with wide-eyed dreams of adventure, youthfully misguided notions of heroism and a very unusual relationship with his foster sister, teenage Alex begins a journey that enumerates all the glories of friendship and courage, but also the twin horrors of madness and lust for power. As this protagonist matures from moonbeam-addled dreamer into wise young man, we see in his story the true and often hideous price of growing up. Maturation is a path walked by us all, and its twists often leave us deeply damaged. This is a long and involved RPG, not to be entered lightly, but despite occasional flaws it is well worth the effort to play. As with Blaster Master above, thanks to emulation it's possible to play the original western translation of Lunar, and even years after its release its fan club remains adoring. This game is a reflection on the loss of innocence that is part and parcel of aging, and a cautionary tale for anyone who wishes to be someone they are not.

Max Payne 2
Remedy Entertainment's Max Payne series is an ambitious attempt to cinemize gaming in a way that's never really been tried before. Game noir in every sense of the phrase, this series combines action and story so elegantly that it's often difficult to tell where the narrative stops and the play begins. The future of the series is in doubt, given surprisingly mediocre sales of this astoundingly important game. A wide selection of highly misguided players do not revere this installment to the degree that it so heartily deserves.

It's got the noir elements down: cop that's lost his family and now has nothing more to lose; epic storms hammering a grubby city we can only hope is a dark reflection of the real world; betrayals, lies and recursive mystery; not to mention about ten million bullets. In this game Max finds love - sort of - with Mona Sax, an assassin for hire who, despite their conflicting careers, is possibly the only woman who can ever truly relate to him. She easily finds compassion for this broken cop with a nearly compulsive desire to kill. And yet there is a darkness about Mona that is never fully explained; it slides smoothly in with the darkness of the story. Characters from the original reappear in different guises and often fill very different roles, but it is Max that we play for, Max whom we pity. The true theme of this game is a question. Forget Humpty; can all the king's horses and all the king's men truly put a man's shattered soul together again? Read my Max Payne 2 review

Planescape Torment
This brilliant, misunderstood RPG from Black Isle Studios - which also developed Required Reading runnerup Fallout 2 - was overlooked by players who had long since developed certain expectations about fantasy roleplaying. Such expectations were particularly intense within the Dungeons & Dragons license, under the auspices of which Torment was developed. The game's bizarre setting, Dickensian characters and deeply cerebral pacing didn't match the Goblins & Goldpieces style of play anticipated by gamers who assume that fantasy was invented in 1979. This prevented the game from taking its rightful place as an enduring classic. Game scholars deserving of far more respect than myself consistently rank it among the very best RPGs ever, and rightly so.

Far from the Tolkienesque fantasy fare typically evoked by the D&D license, Torment invites you instead to visit the labyrinthine city of Sigil, the confluence of all things. Sigil is the hub that connects every reality of the metaverse, and sports assorted points of entry and egress to the infinite planes of existence. Denizens of the various worlds meet and greet in relative peace while inside the city; demons and angels live side by side thanks to the strict and respected neutrality of this peculiar crossroads. In Torment, the city is a living allegory for the protagonist. Amnesia-stricken and literally unable to die - despite often heroic attempts - The Nameless One is doomed to seek his identity again and again in a quest that leads from mysterious Sigil, across the metaverse and to the very gates of Hell.

Shadow of the Colossus
The words that describe this staggering achievement from SCEA are more commonly heard in conjunction with the Grand Canyon: awesome, epic, breathtaking, magnificent. No one who has been touched by this game can come away unchanged, for its power to transform is stronger by far and more inexorable than even the most resistant of wills.

People in love are not noted for their wisdom. Indeed, they're widely known for the extraordinarily stupid things they do. And yet, how far would you go for someone you love?

A young man bears the corpse of his lover to a forbidden country and lays her body on a stone slab in a temple. An ancient power here can return a loved one to life - or so he has been led to believe. But that power will only trade the girl's life for the lives of sixteen Colossi: towering, majestic creatures living in the land beyond. Killing in games is nothing new. But to murder these august beasts is different, for they are regal, beautiful, stately... and rarely aggressive. The crushing emptiness of the landscape, the lonely introspection forced upon you by your quest, demands that you consider, however briefly, whether or not what you are doing is right. This game is about recognizing a crucial human weakness: our ability to blindly do harm for the sake of loved ones, without pause for consideration of the consequences. For those who are willing to allow themselves to care, Shadow of the Colossus proves that games are art. Finally and unequivocally, it proves it. Read my Shadow of the Colossus review

S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Shadow of Chernobyl
A lot of people hated STALKER, a courageous Ukrainian open-world shooter that doubtless bit off more than it could chew and finally shipped as a broken but unforgettable masterpiece. Indeed, it takes great patience to get past its bugs and incoherence to discover the eerie world, the powerfully bleak atmosphere, that the game represents. Only eastern Europeans could make a game like this, because only that culture could make the experience seem as real as it does in STALKER.

You are one of hundreds of heavily armed mercenaries and treasure hunters who prowl The Zone - the poisoned realm left behind in the wake of the Chernobyl disaster. Artifacts of great value lie within The Zone, as do dangers so frightening they drive men mad. Only the bravest dare risk the treacherous landscape to collect them. It is the new Wild West, with monsters and radiation taking the place of Indians and Cholera. Few games can terrify the way STALKER does, and none have ever so powerfully evoked the feel of a place. The loneliness and despair of The Zone are what drives you to continue the relentless quest for riches, glory... your own identity. Based loosely on the Strugatsky brothers' novel Roadside Picnic, a book that Russian film icon Andrei Tarkovsky made into a mesmerizing movie called Stalker in 1979, this game skirts the line between entertainment and literature, and makes you feel part of a place like few things ever can. Read my S.T.A.L.K.E.R. review