Machina on 18 December 2023
I'm pretty sure I'll be the only one saying this: The Surge. The Souslike that made me first appreciate the genre and decide to give Dark Souls a second chance (and from there fell in love with the series). Without The Surge I probably never would have bothered playing what turned out to be some of my favourite games of all time.
Close runner-up: Horizon Zero Dawn. Really cool setting, pretty open world, decent story, and some neat enemy concepts & solid combat. Downsides are it gets a bit unnecessarily Ubisoft checklist-y and almost all of the characters are... meh.
Half of the games in the OP I bought but couldn't get into and soon stopped playing (Hollow Knight, Super Mario Odyssey, PUBG, and Nier Automata).
