It might feel wrong to call their last proper sit down at a couch/desk singeplayer experience a "classic", but its older than Half-Life one was when it came out.

That makes me feel old and I wasn't even around for HL1. How's your back feeling, millennials?

writing headlines like that should earn a nice lengthy face tazing.

Here i was imagining "valve classic" was somehow a wildly popular game ive never heard of

My only issue has always been that I cannot throw more money at the ape. So I buy the game for gaming-adjacent friends and almost always ~~ruin their lives~~ convert them

And at those prices I’ve bought it at least twice

Not that it should be expected to dish out free content and never charge for DLC. Not every game has the kind of profit margin Stardew Valley has.

Probably only surpassed by Minecraft, although that is of course no longer an indie game today

To be fair, portal 2 was also built when valve valued quality over profit.

In game time isn't everyone's metric for a good game. Some of my favorite games only have a few hours of content, but those few hours are really good.

I've watched some let's plays of Starcraft Valley, and I'm glad I did because I probably wouldn't like it, and if I had to give it a rating, it would be pretty mediocre.

I think it being so positively rated is that there are a ton of casual gamers that this type of game really appeals to, not that it has a lot to do.

Can't agree with this. I got dozens of hours out of Portal 2, simply from replaying it so many times (which is an amazing feat in of itself because I never finish games).

Meanwhile I was bored of Stardew Valley after two hours of wandering around and not being able to find anything to do. From what I've gathered, the game expects you to figure out how play it on your own. I'm in my late 30s and I have bills to pay. I don't have the time nor the patience for a game like that anymore.

Edit: Point I forgot to make is that I feel like for a game to be considered the highest rated among them all, it should have universal appeal. But that's just my 2¢.

Stardew lost 100% of it's appeal to me once I learned that the events just repeat year after year and there are no consequences for doing nothing. I really want to get into the cozy vibe gaming space but I just can't seem to do it.

It's one of my favorite games of all time, but I don't think Portal 2's basic formula would be culturally relevant if it was reused today. The quippy writing is very 2010s-coded (à la Guardians of the Galaxy), the gameplay is a bit too simple to be re-used as is in 2025, and the sweet&short linear storyline of Portal 2 would ironically be lacking ambition for a successor to Portal 2.

Like all truly Great pieces of classic media, Portal 2 is a product of a skilled and truly passionate team getting together at the perfect time with the right idea, and reaching its public at a culturally relevant time.

The Portal universe still has stories to tell, and there are still test chambers to solve, so I obviously wouldn't complain if Portal 3 came out, but I understand why Valve wouldn't want to make a barely decent game in the shadow of Portal 2.

I had to settle for Lego Dimensions. Better than nothing. And GLaDOS arguing with HAL 9000 was pretty epic.

Deadlock doesn't look bad