The PlayStation 4 sits comfortably atop the throne as one of the last generation’s best consoles. It’s the bestselling platform of the lot, with its early success being pinned mostly to its solid exclusive titles and aggressively timed DLC deals in the face of the competition. As of 2022, the PS4 has shipped more than 117 million units worldwide.
Things have evened out in recent years when it comes to exclusives, but throughout the generation, Sony’s wedge of a machine has built up a healthy catalog of games across every conceivable genre.
Its successor, the PlayStation 5, is backward-compatible with nearly every PS4 game, meaning you’ll likely find yourself coming back to games from the previous generation on your new machine.
Either way, here is our definitive list of the best PS4 games.
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Kicking off our list is the cat game everyone is talking about. That’s right, in Stray, you play as a feline tasked with escaping a desolate, cyberpunk city, while freeing a group of trapped robots in the process. While this game is a cat lover’s dream, it’s great for all players, partially because it’s so approachable. The main focus in Stray isn’t to stump you, but rather, to take you on a memorable journey, with light action, platforming, and puzzles sprinkled throughout. Its art is gorgeous, the music is fantastic, and its story will probably make you cry.
The Dark Souls formula got a healthy dose of speed and horror when Bloodborne released in 2015, and FromSoftware has managed to make things even more extreme in Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice. Set in Sengoku-era Japan rather than a wholly original world, the game is nonetheless filled with magic and monsters ready to kill you at a moment’s notice. No enemy is too weak to deserve your attention, and many are formidable in one-on-one fights. The real meat of Sekiro, however, are the boss fights. They play out like choreographed dances, requiring you to learn a boss’s every move before you’re ready to go in for the kill. With the Posture system becoming more important in most fights than a standard health bar, you need to stay aggressive, but getting greedy will result in a swift death.
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