20 PlayStation Games You Must Play Before You Die

20 years and four main consoles - which titles are the most essential?

As we're on the cusp of VR technology changing the face of gaming forever, there's a lot of talk about when it comes to both Sony and the PlayStation 4. After all, we've definitely hit the ceiling on graphical fidelity, and as high-end PCs continue to run circles around both the PS4 and Xbox One, you have to ask yourself just much further down the standard home console path we can go. So... let's not. Instead, switch gears and look in the rear-view mirror. Sony have continually changed the face of gaming from day one, birthing the original PlayStation back in 1995, making the most impressive leap in gaming history between that and the PS2 in 2001, and getting a little too big for their boots in pricing the PS3 at $600 in 2007, thereby giving the edge to the Xbox 360 for that generation. Come the dawn of the PS4 they were playing to win, firing out the gate with the most powerful hardware on the market - so much so it's managed to garner them 35 million units sold by the close of 2015. All that said though, 20 years and four main consoles produces a hell of a lot of games, but for various sorts of reasons, which are the most essential?

20. Onimusha 3: Demon Siege

Third-person hack n' slash tended to only go the way of Devil May Cry and God of War once those franchises took hold, but before then we had Capcom's take; a brutal and stylistic reimagining of Feudal Japan interspersed with demons and undead overlords. Oh, and Leon's Jean Reno. The veteran actor accompanied series mainstay Samanosuke as they tore through hordes of flesh-chewing monsters blade-first, resulting in a twin-protagonist tale that took you everywhere from Japan to the heart of France.
Gaming Editor
Gaming Editor

WhatCulture's Head of Gaming.