If you only buy one game with your console, buy this one.

Ghost of Yotei is Sucker Punch's follow-up to Ghost of Tsushima, and it does the hardest thing a sequel can do: it walks away from the character everyone loved and wins you over anyway. Jin Sakai is gone. In his place is Atsu — a mercenary in 1603 Ezo, hunting the six people who slaughtered her family sixteen years earlier. It's a revenge story, and it doesn't pretend revenge is noble.

The setting is the first thing that hits you. Northern Japan under snow, volcanic plains, ash forests, Mount Yotei looming over everything like a witness. Tsushima was beautiful in a golden, painterly way. Yotei is beautiful in a colder, harsher, more dangerous way, and the PS5 renders it with a level of atmospheric detail — wind through grass, breath in cold air, blood in snow — that turns Photo Mode into a genuine time sink. PlayStation Blog's community awards handed it Best Graphical Showcase and Best Art Direction, and it isn't close.

What you actually do all day

• Fight, and lose sometimes. Combat is stance-based and lethal in both directions. Three or four clean hits end most enemies. Three or four clean hits also end you. It rewards reading an opponent, not mashing.
• Follow rumours, not waypoints. The game leans on overheard information and environmental cues instead of a marker-spam map. You go where the wind and the whispers send you.
• Hunt the Yotei Six. The main structure is six named targets, each with their own thread. You can pursue them in your own order, which makes the campaign feel authored by you rather than at you.
• Sit still. There are quiet, deliberately empty moments — camps, shamisen, hot springs — that exist just to let the world breathe. They're some of the best bits.

The PS5-specific bit

Haptics carry an enormous amount of information here. A parried strike, a bowstring at full draw, and hooves on frozen ground all feel materially different through the DualSense, and the adaptive triggers put real resistance behind the bow. It also swept PS Blog's Use of DualSense and Accessibility categories — the latter deserves calling out, because the visual-assist and alternate-input options make it one of the most playable big-budget games on the platform. On top of that, Ghost of Yotei: Legends, the free co-op multiplayer mode, arrived in March 2026, so a disc bought today gets meaningfully more content than one bought at launch.

Who should skip it

If open-world fatigue is real for you, or you want something you can finish in a weekend, this isn't the entry point. It's a 40–60 hour commitment and it doesn't rush.

Every so often a game wins Game of the Year and half the internet says "wait, the platformer?" Then they play it.

Astro Bot took Game of the Year at The Game Awards 2024, and it earned it by being the most purely, relentlessly joyful thing on the console. You are a small robot. You are rebuilding a crashed spaceship shaped like a PS5. You do this by bouncing across roughly 80 levels spread over six galaxies, rescuing hundreds of stranded bots.

That's the whole pitch. It sounds slight. It is not slight.

Why it's actually on this list

Because Astro Bot is the only game that uses the DualSense controller as a design material rather than a gimmick. This is the game you hand someone who has never touched a PS5, because within ninety seconds they will look up and say "what was that?"

• Walking on sand, glass, metal grating and snow all produce distinctly different textures through the haptics — you can feel the surface change under your thumbs.
• The adaptive triggers are used for tension, compression, and resistance in specific powerups — a spring-loaded launch feels genuinely spring-loaded.
• The controller's speaker, gyro, and even the microphone get pulled into puzzles, and it never feels like a tech demo showing off.

The second reason it's here is density. Almost every level introduces a mechanic, uses it three or four brilliant ways, and then retires it before it gets old. There is essentially zero filler across the whole runtime — a discipline that most 60-hour open worlds cannot claim.

The PlayStation history lesson

Scattered through the game are 150+ bots cosplaying as characters from PlayStation's back catalogue — Kratos, Aloy, Nathan Drake, Jin Sakai, plus deep cuts from the PS1 and PS2 eras that will absolutely ambush anyone who grew up in an Indian gaming café. It's a genuinely moving victory lap for thirty years of the brand, and it lands hardest if you've been around for some of it.

Who should skip it

If you exclusively want grim, mature, story-driven experiences and cartoon robots are a hard no — fine. But you'd be wrong, and this is the one recommendation on the list I'd actually argue with you about.

This is the one where the price has moved the most — and where the value has therefore become slightly absurd.

God of War Ragnarok closes out the Norse saga that 2018's God of War opened. Fimbulwinter has arrived, prophecy says the world ends, and Kratos is trying to do the one thing he has never managed in his entire mythological career: change the ending. Atreus is older, angrier, and asking questions his father doesn't want to answer, and the game is really about that — a man who has spent two mythologies killing gods trying to raise a son who won't become him.

It is, by a distance, the most emotionally complete story on this list.

What makes it hold up in 2026

• Scale. You travel across all nine realms. Vanaheim, Svartalfheim and Alfheim are enormous, layered spaces with genuinely surprising optional content — some of the side quests here are better written than most games' main campaigns.
• Combat depth. The Leviathan Axe, Blades of Chaos and a late-game third weapon each have full skill trees, and enemy variety is dramatically wider than the 2018 game. On higher difficulties it becomes a legitimate action game, not a cinematic one.
• The single-shot camera. There is no cut in the entire game. Not one. Cutscene flows into combat flows into traversal without a single hard break, and the PS5's load speed is what makes that seamlessness possible without hidden "squeeze through the crack" corridors everywhere.
• Valhalla, free. The standalone roguelite DLC released in late 2023 at zero cost — a full extra mode, and a genuinely beautiful epilogue to Kratos's arc. It's the best free DLC any first-party PlayStation game has shipped.

The PS5-specific bit

The DualSense work on the Leviathan Axe alone is worth the entry fee — the throw, the tug on recall, and the icy thunk of impact are all distinct haptic events. The PS5 version also runs at a locked 60fps in Performance mode with dramatically faster realm transitions than the PS4 build. And unlike a lot of 2022 titles, it has aged extremely well visually; it still looks like a current-generation game.

Who should skip it

If you haven't played the 2018 God of War, you'll still follow it — there's a recap — but you'll lose a lot of the emotional payoff. Play that first if you can; it's cheap and on PS5 via backward compatibility.

If Ghost of Yotei is the game you play to feel something, Spider-Man 2 is the game you play because moving through it is the single most enjoyable act of traversal in modern gaming.

Insomniac roughly doubled the map — Queens and Brooklyn are now open alongside Manhattan — and added Web Wings, which turn the wind tunnels between boroughs into something closer to flight. You will not fast travel. You will genuinely choose to swing across the entire city because doing it is better than skipping it, and that's the highest compliment you can pay an open world.

The story splits across Peter Parker and Miles Morales, with Kraven the Hunter tearing through New York and the symbiote steadily corrupting Peter into something meaner. Venom is handled with real restraint and lands hard when it arrives. Miles gets the better character arc of the two — his half of the campaign, dealing with grief and his own identity, is the emotional core of the game.

The PS5-specific bit — and it's the whole point

This game is the clearest demonstration of what the PS5's SSD architecture actually buys you:

• Instant character switching. In the open world you can swap between Peter and Miles across the entire city with essentially no load. The game streams a completely different part of New York, mid-swing, without a hitch.
• Portal chase sequences. There's a set piece involving rifts that hurls you between wildly different environments at speed. On any previous console, that sequence would be an elevator ride or a cutscene. Here it's playable.
• Zero-friction restarts. Die in a mission and you're back in under a couple of seconds. It changes how willing you are to take risks in combat.

It also received a substantial New Game Plus update after launch, adding replay features, extra suits and a Mission Replay option — so a disc bought today is a fuller package than the one that shipped in October 2023.

Who should skip it

The main story is shorter than the rest of this list — comfortably finishable in 20 hours if you go direct. If you measure value strictly in hours, God of War Ragnarok gives you more. If you measure it in grins per hour, nothing on the console competes.

The premise is still one of the best in the medium. It's a thousand years from now. Civilisation has collapsed and been replaced by tribes with bows and spears — and the animals are machines. Enormous, territorial, terrifyingly well-designed robot dinosaurs roam a world that has reclaimed our ruins.

You are Aloy, an outcast raised outside her tribe, and the actual question the game is asking is: how did this happen, and why does nobody remember? The answer, delivered in fragments across the campaign, is genuinely one of the best-executed mysteries in gaming. The moment it finally clicks is a legitimate hair-on-the-neck experience.

Why the Remastered version matters

This isn't a resolution bump. Nixxes and Guerrilla rebuilt the game inside the Horizon Forbidden West engine, which means:

• Over 10 hours of conversations re-animated with modern facial capture — the original's stiff dialogue scenes were its weakest element, and they're now transformed.
• New lighting, weather, foliage and terrain systems ported forward from Forbidden West. The world genuinely looks like a 2024 game, not a 2017 one.
• DualSense support added — haptics on the bow draw, adaptive trigger tension, and the controller speaker used for machine audio.
• The Frozen Wilds expansion is included in the box. That's another 10–15 hours of some of the toughest, best-designed content in the series.

Why it's the smartest first buy

Combat here is tactical in a way most open worlds aren't. You scan a machine, identify its components and elemental weaknesses, set traps, then take out a specific part with a specific arrow type. Bringing down a Thunderjaw properly the first time is one of the great feelings on the platform. And because it's the start of the series, it sets you up for Forbidden West and Burning Shores after — a hundred-hour runway, entered at the cheapest possible point.

Who should skip it

If you played it on PS4 and remember it well, the remaster is a beauty pass, not a new game. Worth it for the Frozen Wilds bundling and the rebuilt cutscenes, but manage expectations.

Joel and Ellie's journey across a collapsed America is the game that convinced a generation — and an entire industry — that this medium could carry a story that sits alongside prestige television. The HBO adaptation brought millions of new people to it, and this is where the original lives.

Part I is a full ground-up remake, not an upscale. New character models, rebuilt environments, completely reworked lighting, modernised AI behaviour, and a genuinely industry-leading accessibility suite — including full audio descriptions for cutscenes and haptic feedback that renders speech through the controller. The DualSense work is exceptional: the difference between a revolver and a hunting rifle is something you feel in your palms, and the scarcity of ammunition lands harder because of it.

It's the shortest game on this page and the one most likely to stay with you afterwards. If you've watched the show and never played it, you're missing the version where you are the one making the walk.