Return of the Obra Dinn 
The best detective game I've ever played. Looks beautiful, sounds beautiful, written beautifully, plays beautifully. Magnificent.
Silent Hill
Replay, and it was every bit as good as it always is. Special mention goes to the soundtrack and sound design in general. I wouldn't listen to it by itself, but it might be the most fitting soundtrack to any game.
UFO: Enemy Unknown/X-COM: UFO defense
One of the best, not much else to say.
Silent Hill 4 
Quality entry in the series. I'd rank it on par with 3, but lower than the first two. Still hits a great balance between story, combat, puzzles and horror, but map repeats drag it down, and from what I've read, the good ending sounds like it's much more annoying to get than in the previous games. I just watched it on Youtube.
Silent Storm
I didn't actually finish this one, but I've finished it before, and I got most of the way though. Four stars might be too generous. There's a window, from the start of the game until roughly halfway through, where it's the best squad tictacs game ever made. Eventually the Panzerkleins come into play and put a stop to the fun, but even before that, the skill system drags it steadily down. Long story short: in the vanilla game, the progression is utterly broken, and if you use the so-called skill overhaul mod, like I did this time though, it's also broken but in a different way. The SS engine never got the game it deserved.
Seven: The Days Long Gone
The most fun I've had with awesome-button silent takedowns, superpowered stealth action, quest markers, detective vision, minimaps, and collectathon areas since forever. If you feel like playing a game of this type but don't know which one to choose, make it this one.
West of Loathing 
+ 1/2
Short but sweet comedy RPG with strong adventure game elements. The JRPG-style combat is actually not bad for what is on the face of it a parody game, and there's quite a few locations and questlines you can only find by paying attention. Terrific music, as well.
Thaumistry: In Charm's Way
Neat text adventure by Bob Bates. Puzzle difficulty is just right, and you can mess around with the parser a whole bunch. Fairly short and unambitious, but a fun game. Would serve as a good introduction to the genre.
Trinity +1/2
The polar opposite of Thaumistry, in that it's a very ambitious game with some spectacular highs, but also a lot of bullshit. The writing is excellent, and the final area is a masterful adventure game sequence, but a lot of the puzzles are extremely aggravating. Imagine a puzzle that relies on a timer, where you only have a few moves to solve it, and you don't know which items you need to in order to solve it, or if it's even solvable without solving something else first, and you don't know which items you need to be carrying in your limited inventory, and where failing to get it right results in a walking dead scenario. A lot of the puzzles are like that. To those design conventions I say good riddance. The good bits make up for it, however.
Broken Lines
Cool phase-based tictacs, but too light on strategy and resource management, and too gamey in a nuXCOM sort of way. A very tight and solid experience nonetheless, and I actually liked it better than Frozen Synapse, which I tried afterwards and found a bit too puzzle-like for my taste.
Outlaws +1/2
Played most of the way through in the spring, dropped it, and picked it up again a few months ago. Relies exclusively on hitscan, which makes it extremely unpredictable. I still couldn't tell you how to play this effectively, because there's no rhyme or reason to enemy accuracy. Sometimes they'll kill you in a split second, other times they won't fire a shot. Very good cutscenes, music, and general fluff, however, and the level design and weapon selection are not bad.
Quake
Quality shooter, but not quite as good as its reputation IMO. Levels were good overall, but I don't feel that any of them stood out very much. Too many fat dudes with chainsaws and grenade launchers. Visually, I've often seen it described as gothic, but there's another word I'd use ahead of that, which is beige. The most fun I had was hunting for secret areas, which are very good overall, although some of them are complete bullshit and can only be found through sheer luck (or walking around the map hitting every inch of wall there is). I also enjoyed the secret levels.
Voidspire Tactics 
A moderate disappointment after what I'd heard about it. Cool exploration motivated by environmental interaction (freezing water to walk across it, etc.), but there's not enough of it. The combat was alright, but hamstrung by the skill system, which in my experience encouraged direct damage and direct damage only, with more exciting stuff like status effects completely neutered either by exorbitant casting times or by Sawyerization (blindness giving -10% to hit, that sort of thing).
Some stuff that I dropped within a couple of hours:
- Tales of Maj'Eral. I don't get roguelikes.
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Faster Than Light. No particular reason for dropping this, I actually had fun playing it. I just lost interest.
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Legends of Amberland. Baby's first blobber. Simplistic combat and simplistic dungeons connected by a simplistic overworld. Meh.
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Mysteries of the Sith. Started it last year, dropped it, tried to pick it up again this year, still haven't finished it. Massive decline coming from Jedi Knight. The consensus seems to be that it's worse than JK but still good, but I don't think so.
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Hammer & Sickle. Too Russian.
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KotC 2. Even though it's French and produced in the UK, this is also much too Russian.
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Wizards & Warriors. The combat is pretty bad, and the forest mazes are obnoxious as hell, but even so, I feel that I should enjoy this game. I've tried to get into it several times several times, but it just doesn't work.
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Bard's Tale 4. This barely even qualifies for this list, since I don't think I got more than about an hour into it. Everything about this game is extremely off-putting.
- Weeaboo JRPG. I had this for the original Xbawks and never finished it. Now I did, probably should've spent that time better.
. Definitely had it's shortcomings, mainly the gameplay aspect took a real nosedive once the exploration aspect was done. But the start of the game was super strong and fun to play through. Fingers crossed for a sequel.
