When people ask what my favourite video game of all time is and I tell them, they inevitably wrinkle their nose and say: "What, the one with all the sailing?" To many, that's all The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker is: a 20-year-old GameCube release in which toon Link endlessly sails the vast sea on his trusty talking boat. In 2013, when the game was re-released on Wii U a decade after its debut, Nintendo took the criticisms on board (the talking boat) and added a "swift sail", allowing players to bypass hours of sluggish seafaring. The seafaring was the point. It has now been two decades since the original Wind Waker was released in Europe in May 2003 and it's time that landlubber critics accepted they were wrong.

It is a narrative standard in role-playing adventure games: the hero is pitted against a Big Evil, who has a strategic or chaotic hunger to destroy the world we know. From Shinra's greedy harvesting of the planet's resources in Final Fantasy VII Remake to Ganondorf's quest for power and destruction across more than 30 years of Legend of Zelda games, the stakes are always astronomically high. But what really makes these fictional realms worth saving? Role-playing games need to offer more than a sequence of linked events toward a monumental finale. A world is made of people, not just objectives.

You can never go home again. It's an adage that comes to mind with Final Fantasy VII Remake, an ambitious revisiting of one of the most beloved titles in video game history. The original Final Fantasy VII was the complete package, that rare confluence where a well-crafted world, excellent storytelling and top-notch game mechanics crystallized into a gem of a game. We can speculate about all the reasons why it took nearly a quarter of a century before Square Enix decided to take a stab at remaking Final Fantasy VII. One reason likely involves the desire to make the next big thing and put the company's resources into that.

In our early 20s, we could spend whole days immersed in epic role-playing video games, sacrificing months to the demands of the latest Final Fantasy or Dragon Quest adventure. But, in our 30s and 40s, we're lucky to catch 10 minutes of Fortnite here and there. However, now that many of us are finding we have time on our hands, it could be the opportunity we need to attempt some of the more chronologically demanding narrative video game masterpieces of the last decade. Here are 15 that should see you through the next six months – and beyond. Ubisoft's tale of vengeance-seeking mercenaries battling through the chaos of the Peloponnesian war gives us a vast reproduction of ancient Greece, almost Homeric in its depth and detail.

Last year's Prey was a creepy shooter and role-playing game set on a spaceship riddled with black, shimmering aliens. The so-called'immersive sim' was praised for its science fiction story, which let you shape the main character and the fate of the hostile research station. The gameplay, though, was seen by many as a retread of BioShock, System Shock and other genre classics. Despite its wild Neuromod abilities, which let you become an expert hacker, fighter or shape-shifting alien, the rebooted Prey failed to catch the public's attention. The title is far from finished, though.

There's a big reason why the PlayStation 4 is the best-selling console: It has a smattering of games that you can't play anywhere else. Think: blockbusters like Uncharted 4: A Thief's End, Horizon: Zero Dawn and Bloodborne. But even if Indiana Jones simulators and massive open worlds where you hunt down robo-dinosaurs aren't your thing, there are still plenty of exclusives to pick from. Whether it's the best baseball video game franchise, a choose-your-own-adventure horror or an engrossing social simulator/JRPG hybrid, there's a lot to play on Sony's latest console. And then there are games from massive third-party publishers like Activision and Ubisoft, along with quirky indie offerings to round out the selection.

For years now, some of the best, wildest, most moving or revealing stories we've been telling ourselves have come not from books, movies or TV, but from video games. So we're running an occasional series, Reading The Game, in which we take a look at some of these games from a literary perspective. They march and they argue. They taunt their human slaves and, when they pass close enough, I can hear them talking about me -- Talion, called Gravewalker, murdered Captain of Gondor brought back to life by magic and the influence of my mostly-invisible elf/wraith buddy, Celebrimbor, who is a ghost that lives in my head. I am bored out of my elf-inhabited mind.

The review embargo for Horizon Zero Dawn has lifted, and I will invite you to read my own full take on the game, along with many, many others who are praising it as pretty excellent. I gave it a 9/10, though it's getting scores even higher than that from a few major outlets, and it current sits at an enviable 88 Metascore. It's a big win for Sony, who already had a big win in 2017 with Nioh, and shows that Nintendo isn't the only company that can produce a large stable of must-have exclusives these days. It's a must-play for PS4 players, even those that may have gotten sick of open world games. In fact, this is what I view as Horizon Zero Dawn's greatest strength.

Of all the ways Horizon: Zero Dawn could have begun, we certainly weren't expecting a Lion King tribute. This is, after all, a far-future, post-apocalyptic adventure set in a brutal world populated by monstrous robots – hardly Disney material. But sure enough, the game opens with Aloy, the flame-haired warrior who has become a fixture of Sony's PlayStation 4 marketing, as a baby, carried on the back of her mentor, Rost. When he reaches the edge of a cliff, he holds the child aloft to the Goddess, screaming her name into the abyss. He doesn't then break into The Circle of Life, but it's clear Aloy isn't just any old futuristic warrior.