No one has enough time to play every interesting video game that comes out in a given year. If, like me, you have been gaming for over 30 years, it means you have missed a lot of video games in your lifetime. That’s just the way it is: we have a limited amount 𒆙of time that we can allocate to our favorite hobby, so we have to pic🐻k carefully what we want to play.

What about the other games, the ones we never get to experience? It’s still fun to keep up to date with the trends and with the history of this part of pop culture. Just by hanging out on the internet or by talking to friends, you might pick up info on the popular games that come out. For example, I have never played Final Fantasy VII in my life, but I heard so much about it t♛hat I feel like I♐ did. Sephiroth, the end of Aeris; I’ve heard about it.

Some games, however, have a plot that’s a bit dense. When a title offers 100 hours of gameplay, it’s impossible to keep up with every story beat and characters of every blockbust🗹er game. This article attempts to help you, the gamer with limited time or budget, by condensing the longer stories of the medium into short, easily digestible snippets. These will hopefully get you up-to-date with numerous classics, as well a🤡s the best games to come out in recent years. If this saves you a few hundred hours, great! If these synopses make you want to pick up an interesting game you might have missed, even better.

30 Grand Theft Auto 4 – Sounds Like: Steal Cars And Attacks People For A Chance To Hang Out With A Bowling Fanatic! 🔴

Is Actually: Niko is an immigrant who arrives in Liberty City to meet with his cousinꦓ, and if time permits, get vengeance on a man who betrayed his unit in a war many years ago.

Along the way, he becomes a cab driver, but also a hitman.

When he keeps doing his jobs in broad daylight, the government becomes aware of his activities because duh, and he is forced to coopera𓆉te with them. All of this will teach him the powerfu🐲l lesson that you can’t just go around taking lives without things becoming personal, one way or the other.

29 ♛♈ Fallout 4 – Sounds Like: A Person Who Survived A Nuclear Apocalypse Must Now Survive Desolate Wastelands!

Is Actually: A survivor of a nuclear war sees their spouse being eliminated before their eye, before being sent back to their cryogenic bed to sleep it off for half a cℱentury. When they awaken, they start looking for their son, and to make matters worse, people are now being replaced by androids. This is of course really scary for non-robotic folks. Three factions 🔴of weirdos fight for the survivor’s allegiance, hoping they will help them stop the madness. Obviously, this is when you learn that SPOILERS! Your son was behind said madness this whole time.

28 ᩚᩚᩚᩚᩚᩚ⁤⁤⁤⁤ᩚ⁤⁤⁤⁤ᩚ⁤⁤⁤⁤ᩚ𒀱ᩚᩚᩚ Borderlands 2 – Sounds Like: Four Adventurers Must Find A Hidden Treasure!

Is Actually: A group of Vault Hunters get betrayed by their employer, a man called Handsome Jack. Jack is the leader of Hyperion, a company which controls an entire planet. The Vault Hꦇunters thus seek revenge on Jack, only to discover that the man has so many enemies that they must basically take a number just to get to him. Obviously, Jack is also looking to awaken an ancient evil being called The Warrior, which is really just a big genocidal dragon. It would be really beneficial to the planet if you, the player, could stop this from happening.

27 🏅 Half-Life – S🎐ounds Like: A Silent Hero Saves The Day!

Is Actually: Gordon Freeman has a job whi𒆙ch consists of placing strange material into gigantic machines which bombard it with radiation, and ch♔ecking to see if anything happens.

One day, something weird does happen, which somehow surprises Gordon tremendously.

With no other choice (because most maintenance employees have been ended in the incident), he picks up a crowbar and starts cleaning his laboratory from the aliens that have appeare🍎d. Because he does such a good job, he is then asked☂ to do the same thing again, but in another dimension.

26 Final Fantasy X – Sounds Like: A Young Man Is The༺ Only One Who Can Save His World!

Is Actually: Tidus is really good at Blitzball, which is kinda like water-polo, but for people who can hold their breath really well. One day, his town is destroyed, but he awakens somewhere which might be the future? Anyway, Tidus uses his mad not-water-polo skills to impreꦐss people and build a party and set things right. When it seems like the only way to defeat the evil behind his ordeal is to sacrifice the girl he has a crush on, he starts digging for a different solution, and le𝔍arns that he’s been actually living in a dream this whole time. I think.

25 Horizon Zero Dawn – Sounds Like: A Bow And Arrow Expert Fights Mac♚hines To Reclaim Earth! 🌜

Is Actually: Humans mesꦰsed up badly and Earth’s life has been devoured by robots which used it as fuel. A doctor came up with a plan to basically wait until the robots are done eating everything, so they would then shut down, and Earth could be terraformed into something livable again. Problem? THAT part of the project was left to, you guessed it, more robots. That worked about as well as you expect it, so a thousand years in the future, the surviving humans live in tribes while more machines roam the place.

24 Zelda: Breath Of the Wild – A Zombie Hero Comes Back To Stop A 100-Year Fight Between A Princess And A S꧃pirit!

Is Actually: 10,000 years ago, Hylians were able to defeat an evil spirit named Ganon with the help of gigantic machines and an army of smaller robots. Then, people gotඣ afraid of the technology which saved them, so they buried it deep in the dirt, which was probably a bad idea. When Ganon came back, the Hylians hastily dug up the machines, but Ganon took them, and Link was badly hurt in ꩵthe encounter. Because it was the Hylians’ only idea, they decided to wait 100 years until Link was healed up, and then try the exact same plan again.

23 🌠 Metal Gear Solid – Sounds Like: A Clone Is Sent To Capture His Other Clone Because Th🧸ey Hate The Government!

Is Actually: An organization named FOXHOUND threatens to use a gigantic nuclear robot against the West. The country sends Solid Snake to stop the robot and gather up info, but it turns out that everyone Snake tries to interrogate dies of a heart attack. SURPRISE: You were the cause of the heart attacks all along, since you carried🔯 a lethal virus on you. SECOND SURPRISE: Your twin brother is behind it all. THIRD SURPRISE: The government knew all about it, and really just wanted you to unknowingly ended the bad guys. FINAL SURPRISE: They don’t really want you to come back.

22 Metroid Prime – Sounds Like: A Bounty Hunter Fights Villainous Miners On An🐽 Aband🔜oned Planet!

Is Actually: Samus Aran once again fights the Space Pirates, this time following them to the planet of Tallon IV. There, shꦆe discovers that they are mining for a powerful substance called Phazon, which corrupts everything it touches.

The pirates think that’s actually a pretty cool side effect!

The pirates are no match for Samus, but when she finally encounters the gigantic, Phazon-mutated Metroid, it is so powerful that it absorbs her armor, and uses it to create an evil clon🅺e called Dark Samus. This is somehow considered a victory, and the game ends.

21 Halo:🥂 Combat Evolved – S🉐ounds Like: You Are A Marine! Eliminate Some Aliens!

Is Actually: Master Chief, a member of a race o🦋f super soldiers, travels to an invading alien species’ homeworld to finish them once and for all. Once there, he realizes that, oops, the whole planet is a weapon. The aliens plan to use it to get rid of a parasite. Their idea is to take out the parasite’s food source, thus ending it. The problem is that the parasite feeds on any living being in the galaxy. Even though his own friend gets brainwashed, thus proving the aliens right, Master Chief decides to stop the aliens’ plan anyway because a barren galaxy is a bit dull.