The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim

   When this game came out, I didn't like almost anything about it. I didn't like the speed of fireballs, their radius, and so on, you got the idea. But after all these years, the game got a few expansions, lots of patches, and a ton of mods. Now they really have something. The vanilla game is a level experience, which means that the creatures go up in level with you. So you can pretty much tackle any problem from the start and it doesn't give you a true feeling of developing from a meek whelp to a force to be reckon with.
   For my Skyrim run I chose "Requiem" which gives you a de-leveled world and it really makes you feel small, especially in the beginning. With Requiem you have to really prepare for a lot of challenges and you need to accept that many things are outside the realm of possibility at least in the first ~10 levels. It can be pretty cool to take a character from hunting rabbits and running small errands to hunting werewolves and other terrifying monsters.
   For a game where there is so much melee combat, it's a shame that the melee combat is quite basic. The quests are generally pretty plain and involve combat, so don't expect much on this front, few tell an interesting story.