Rock, Paper, Shotgun has published a list they are billing as The 50 Best RPG on PC…which is kind of a questionable claim.

Creating this list involved a great deal of debate and disagreement, primarily over what we mean by the term RPG. A game in which you play a role. In Doom do we not play the role of a space marine? In Football Manager are we not one with the fictional football manager who represents us in the game’s world?

For our purposes, as with all of our Best Of features, the scope of the genre is considered to be broad rather than narrow. Character development is important, as is a world with interactive qualities other than things to kill. Inventory management of some form is preferred, as is a setting that establishes a solid sense of place in which to play the role you develop and inhabit.

You can find the full list here. I don’t know how Dark Souls managed to grab the #1 spot, but it did:

If it’s not the most punishing RPG ever made, then what is it? Among other things, the Souls games are an intimidatingly assured re-invention of dungeon crawling and, in fact, the entire concept of dungeons in RPGs. Everything from enemy placement to the twisted lay of the land contributes to the challenge of the game, and to the lore that is stitched into the fabric of the world. The combat system is exemplary, combining inch-perfect animations, timings and agonising tension to make every encounter memorable. Stats are almost invisibly woven into the build of your character, whose abilities and proficiencies are recognisable at a glance, and whose behaviours you’ll adopt and modify as you go, creating and fussing at the role you’re playing without the need for dialogue or morality meters. There are details as well as broad strokes, for those who choose to pick at them, and those details are devilishly satisfying.

It’s a mark of the game’s quality that completing a single playthrough feels like a great achievement but that there are people who continue to play, time after time, and continue to learn. Dark Souls teaches you how to play as you travel through its horrors and mysteries, but it also teaches you how to read games, making you alert to the fact that every texture and scrap of flavour text can contain clues. Those clues might save your life, point you toward a diversion or shortcut, or they might help you to understand that there’s meaning and history in every part of the world. You just have to look closely. Pay attention and you’ll find the choices no character points out, and discover consequences whose warning signs you were keen to overlook, an optimist in a dying world.

If I read this correctly, the argument seems to be that Dark Souls is the best RPG precisely because the RPG elements thereof are hidden from view and are discernible primarily via effect rather than via player intervention therein? Essentially, it’s the best RPG because it tries hard not to seem like an RPG?

Do I read that correctly?

Meh…at least one Ultima title cracks the Top 5 (Ultima 7, in particular). And does anyone else find it amusing that they used Ultima 5’s map for their header image (seen above), but didn’t include Utima 5 anywhere on the list proper?