Here are the 10's best video games

With maximum gothic, impenetrable darkness and a merciless difficulty, the Japanese game studio From Software completed the Dark Souls series of ideas with the follow-up hardcore masterpiece Bloodborne.

The result is a nightmarish experience bordering on the sadomasochistic, but the reward if you manage to master the seemingly impossible surpasses all other gaming experiences of the decade. A modern classic.

Soon, seven years after the release, The last of us remains the best relationship portrayal made in the gaming world. Complex, wounding and deeply human - the story of Joel and Ellie's journey through a dying United States holds levels that until then have been reserved for literature and the film world.

Just when you could establish that the golden age of the Japanese role-playing games was over, this wild plunge came in both the human psyche and Tokyo's teenage existence.

Persona 5 is equally a Japanese high school simulator, an absurdist anime adventure and a feel-good story about overcoming mental illness. Unforgettable and incomparable.

Mass Effect's rich, well-written story branches out into an almost incalculable variety of options and intricacies, where you as a player form a personal space bag that spans three games and more than 100 (!) Hours.

But it's in the second part of the trilogy that everything falls into place: the characters, the game world and the story are world-class, making Mass Effect 2 the unparalleled scifi adventure of the decade.

The most lovable game design of the decade holds an abyss of content and complexity once you begin to climb into the game world's buzzing, underground insect kingdom. Hollow Knight is the best indie game I have experienced, and much rests in their combination of the game classics Metroid and Castlevania's game world and combat system respectively.

The so-called "metroid vania" genre exploded during the 10s, but no one did it with greater finesse, heart and depth than Team Cherry. Hollow Knight is an original and loving craft that trumps the game giants' mastodont productions many times over.

The Office star Stephen Merchant stands for perhaps the 10th best comedy performance in the role of the mildly panicked and deeply incompetent AI Wheatley in Portal 2.

The story of the Aperture Science Enrichment Center, a test lab where everything has gone terribly wrong, is in itself a modern classic. The two-player mode, where you and a friend try to solve the game's innovative puzzle room, is also the best coop experience of the decade.

The Polish fantasy novels about the monster hunter Geralt of Rivia are in the Game of Thrones class, and will soon become a lavish Netflix television series (which unfortunately looks like this). But it is the play series, based on the books, that led to The Witchers' international breakthrough.

The third part is by far the best, and everything you need to be introduced to Andrzej Sapkowski's barren and unforgettable fantasy world. Good and evil are becoming increasingly difficult to distinguish the further into the story you come, and a happy ending is far from one of the best fantasy games ever made.

Archive X meets the board game Risk in my personal strategy favorite for the 10's. The earth is invaded by a superior, extraterrestrial race, and as the commander of Xcom, it becomes the player's job to try to unite the world's countries in a coordinated defense.

The board game-like arrangement has a strategic depth that is extremely engaging, and the ability to develop your soldiers at the level of detail makes each loss feel deeply personal.

The Danish indie studio Playdead stood for a sparsely produced production during the 10s. But their two games over the last decade, on the other hand, are so good that they are impossible to choose from. Limbo and Inside are melancholy gems, closely related in tone and expression but at the same time unique in their gaming experience.

If you've missed the indie wave of the last decade, these two are the best place to start.

Sometimes there are big things in the simple. In a decade where the big action producers went against huge, open worlds and hundreds of hours of content, Crystal Dynamics chose the opposite. Tomb Raider is a short and well-polished adventure that trumps all other action games from the last decade. Every minute is tightly staged, the story is well-written and the sense of matinee adventure is all-encompassing.

But above all, Lara Croft's comeback in the gaming world was the best-performing re-birth of an action hero during the 10s. Crystal Dynamics laid aside the six-symbol concept and paved the way for a significantly more human and multifaceted heroine.