Metal Gear Solid 5: The Phantom Pain finally launches on September 1st, but the number in its title is misleading - The Phantom Pain will actually be the twentieth game in the increasingly sprawling and convoluted Metal Gear universe. If you're just tuning in, it can be difficult to sort through nearly 30 years of tactical espionage action, walking nuclear missile-equipped battle tanks, and hours upon hours of expertly directed cut-scenes - and of course, not all Metal Gears are created equal.

While Metal Gear will forever be series creator Hideo Kojima's brainchild (and the series ), it's also much bigger than one man, spiraling out into countless spin-offs and side entries, each one forming a piece of a much larger story. Some of them are far more important to the overall canon - or simply more fun - than the others, though, so I've taken it upon myself to look back over Metal Gear's entire legacy and rank every single game that made it to the West. If you're looking to catch up on the best Metal Gear games before The Phantom Pain hits or simply want to know the best place to start your descent into Outer Heaven, look no further.

While not technically a separate release in the US or Europe (it was only released as a stand-alone disc and as an arcade cabinet in Japan) Metal Gear Online deserves special recognition for its multiplayer ambitions. Taking the core gameplay ideas from Metal Gear Solid 4 and expanding them to take advantage of its online nature, MGO may not have been the best multiplayer game ever, but it was not short of ideas.

MGO brings all the weapons, stealthy moves, and cardboard boxes over from MGS4, but it also makes use of the Sons of the Patriots network of nanomachines to tie everything together. You won't just be able to see where your teammates are - you can even keep track of your enemies by hacking into their nanomachines. Sadly, Konami shut the servers off back in 2012 and effectively patched the game out of existence, though some dedicated fans have found a way to , even if it's practically on life-support.

There are ways to convert popular console franchises to mobile devices without sacrificing what makes those games so special, but everything about Metal Gear Solid Touch screams ‘soulless cash grab’. Loosely following the plot of MGS4, Touch takes the series' trademark open-ended stealth action and converts it into a bland, uninspired shooting gallery. Enemy soldiers appear on each stage, and you swipe your finger on the screen to aim and tap to fire. Occasionally you have to zoom in to shoot a distant enemy or switch to your rocket launcher to take out a lumbering Gekko. That's about it.

Everything about MGS Touch feels cheap - characters and environments look like they've been poorly Photoshopped out of MGS4, enemies fall down in three jarring frames of animation when shot, and the gameplay is far too basic to be engaging. Unless you're so desperate that you absolutely have to have a Metal Gear fix available at all times, it's best to pretend MGS Touch doesn't exist.

Snake's Revenge isn't low on this list because it's a bad game. As a follow-up to the NES version of Metal Gear, it's actually surprisingly decent, providing more of the same stealth gameplay with an all new story. It even has a few interesting gameplay twists of its own, as you can actually interrogate enemy commanders for information by hitting them with a canister of truth gas.

But Snake's Revenge isn't really a Metal Gear game. It was made specifically for North America and Europe because of the popularity of the first game, and series creator Hideo Kojima had no knowledge that the game was even being worked on until well into its development. Kojima began work on a true sequel, Metal Gear 2: Solid Snake, which released exclusively in Japan six months after Snake's Revenge. Kojima's game went on to become series canon, while Snake's Revenge became apocrypha - an interesting curiosity, but nothing more.

If you follow a franchise long enough, you're bound to see strange spin-offs into completely new genres. While we haven't had a Metal Gear Soccer game (yet), Konami converted the classic stealth series into a turn-based strategy/collectable card game called Metal Gear Acid for the launch of PSP. The most surprising thing? Despite its flaws, it actually works.

Acid takes the sneaking, shooting, and cardboard-box wearing action found in the core titles, and puts them all into the most bizarre board game you've ever played. Actions and items are relegated to cards that you can earn while you play, and Metal Gear Acid is as much about building your deck for each level as it is about figuring out the opportune moment to play your cards. Its pacing isn't for everyone, its story isn't canon, and many of its biggest issues end up getting fixed in the sequel, but Metal Gear Acid is still an interesting experiment.

The first game developed by the (allegedly) recently dissolved Kojima Productions, Metal Gear Solid Portable Ops marks the very first time a canonical entry has appeared on a handheld… kind of. Set six years after the events of Snake Eater, Portable Ops follows the exploits of Big Boss and his attempts to build the beginnings of a soldier's paradise. Since Kojima was only a producer on Portable Ops, though, its importance to the overall storyline is debatable.

Portable Ops does, however, introduce the neat ability to find and recruit soldiers in the field - an idea expanded on by Peace Walker and more fully fleshed out in The Phantom Pain. The controls aren't great (curse the PSP's lack of a second analog stick), but it does a decent job of taking the modern 3D Metal Gear style and making it playable on the go. Just be careful: if you want the story, get Portable Ops, as PO Plus is a stand-alone expansion that rips out the story entirely.

The original Metal Gear may not have aged as gracefully as some classic games, but many of the ideas found in Solid Snake's first outing still show up, even in recent entries. Metal Gear introduces the cardboard box, iconic characters like Solid Snake, Grey Fox, and Big Boss, and the stealth gameplay that would become the series' hallmark. Ironically, this was a design necessity at the time thanks to the limitations of the Japanese MSX2 computer. While both the MSX2 and Nintendo Entertainment System versions are similar in how they play, the MSX2 is officially considered canon, thanks to the host of changes made to the NES version without Kojima's consent.

In order to fit Metal Gear on the inferior NES hardware, Metal Gear was forced to undergo a graphical downgrade - but the changes don't stop there. Plot points were removed, a new intro sequence and additional story elements were added, and the difficulty was greatly increased. Heck, the titular Metal Gear doesn't even show up in the NES version, instead sending Snake into a boss fight against a giant supercomputer. Much of the gameplay remains exactly the same despite these changes, but the MSX2 version is without a doubt the superior entry.

Ground Zeroes is the cold open to a much larger game, a glorified demo sold at a premium as a way to tide die-hard Metal Gear fans over until The Phantom Pain finally launches this year. It's like taking the Tanker chapter from Metal Gear Solid 2 and breaking it out into its own separate release - only worse, because the single story mission offered in Ground Zeroes will only take about an hour to finish. The Side Ops try to add a little more substance, but there's no denying that Ground Zeroes is extremely light on content.

What Ground Zeroes does best, though, is show off the graphical potential of the Fox Engine and the evolution of the series' stealth gameplay - and the gameplay is great. Streamlining many of Metal Gear's more obtuse systems, Ground Zeroes is more accessible to new players while still offering a surprising amount of depth and strategic options. Ultimately, Ground Zeroes currently exists as pure, unfiltered potential of what open-world stealth can look like, and we won't know how successful this experiment really is until The Phantom Pain closes the book on Metal Gear Solid 5 in September.

VR Missions isn't quite a ‘full game’, as there's no campaign or story to speak of, but that doesn't mean it's short on content. Instead, think of VR Missions as a stand-alone expansion to one of the greatest stealth games of all time, taking its core concepts and devising a wide array of sneaking time trials and puzzles to go with them.

Featuring over 300 bite-sized stages, VR Missions runs the gamut, from weapon-based challenges to pure stealth gauntlets. VR Missions isn't afraid to explore the weird side of Metal Gear Solid either, letting you solve murder mysteries, take on Godzilla-sized genome soldiers, or even play as the coolest cyborg ninja ever. If Metal Gear Solid is the main course, then VR Missions is one hell of a dessert.

Metal Gear Acid 2 takes the unique card-battling board game introduced in the first game, and makes everything better. The controls are more refined, turns are faster-paced, and your turn no longer ends when you open doors - a huge improvement from the first game. There are also way more cards to collect, with over 500 this time around, each one representing a different weapon, item, or moment from the storied franchise.

The additions don't stop there, though. An arena mode lets you fight against iconic bosses like Liquid Snake with Acid's unique turn-based system, allowing you to earn points outside of the story to buy new cards. Improved tutorials and guides explain and inform you of Acid's various systems, and are available for perusal at any moment. And the game even comes with a bizarre cardboard contraption called the Solid Eye, which lets you play in 3D for literally no other reason than because it looks cool.

The true, canonical sequel to Metal Gear is better than the first game in almost every way, and it makes the unofficial Snake's Revenge look primitive by comparison. The music is better, the animations are more fluid, and the story is deeper and more complex - which makes it all the more surprising that the game wouldn't officially leave its native Japan for nearly 16 years. Thankfully, the Western release of Metal Gear Solid 3: Subsistence finally gave us a chance to experience this lost chapter in the series' history.

Metal Gear 2 didn't just improve the enemy AI or give Snake a radar and the ability to crawl into tight spots; it's also the first entry that forces the player to break the fourth wall and scan their instruction manual for tap codes and other clues to find new codec frequencies. If not for some unfortunate backtracking, Metal Gear 2 would be the perfect 2D entry in the series.

Metal Gear Solid: The Twin Snakes is the glorious result of the unlikeliest of partnerships. Helmed by Eternal Darkness developer Silicon Knights, produced by Hideo Kojima and Shigeru Miyamoto, and featuring new cutscenes by Japanese action flick director Ryuhei Kitamura, The Twin Snakes takes the classic Metal Gear Solid experience and completely overhauls it for the GameCube, featuring updated graphics and controls found in Metal Gear Solid 2, as well as a re-translated and re-recorded script.

So if Twin Snakes is such an improvement over the original, why does it end up ranking lower? Well, for one, the changes to the gameplay actually make Metal Gear Solid way easier, as the level design and boss encounters weren't originally meant to be tackled with first-person shooting, tranquilizer darts, or by hanging from ledges. Plus, Twin Snakes' cut-scenes are perhaps a bit too over-the-top, as and performs other feats of anime ridiculousness. Twin Snakes is still one hell of a trip, even if some of the magic gets lost in the transition.

Metal Gear Solid 2 ended on a bizarre cliffhanger, raising far more questions than it actually answered, and when Kojima wanted to end the trilogy with a detour to the 1960s, fans begged for proper closure to the story that began in Metal Gear Solid. And boy, did Kojima deliver, tying up every single loose thread of Metal Gear's labyrinthine narrative - almost to a fault.

Metal Gear Solid 4 is layered with brilliant systems. Snake's OctoCamo lets him blend seamlessly into his environment like a chameleon. Rebel factions are constantly at war with PMCs, and both sides can be played against each other, allowing Snake to sneak past undetected. Extra guns can be snagged and converted into Drebin points, allowing you to buy new gear and weapon upgrades. But it's all in service to the countless 30-minute-or-longer cut-scenes the game funnels you into. MGS4 offers a satisfyingly outrageous conclusion to one of the most convoluted franchises ever - if only the gameplay had more room to breathe.

Revengeance better than MGS4? Yup. While the Metal Gear series constantly waffles between melodrama and goofiness, Revengeance is pure fan-service, taking Metal Gear's themes and slicing them all up into tiny pieces. It even turns the series' most reviled character into an unstoppable badass. It follows the events of MGS4, as Raiden investigates the fallout caused by the sudden implosion of corporate militarization. His hyper-violent journey leads him right to the doorstep of Senator Anderson, a cyborg who delivers the .

In Revengeance stealth is secondary, a way to thin the field a bit before you inevitably get spotted. But, honestly, who needs to sneak around when you have a sword capable of severing limbs like a hot knife cuts through butter? With a strategic series of cuts, you can remove arms or legs to cripple your foes, or simply rend them in half to reveal their juicy, life-replenishing innards. Don't question it - just go along for the highly entertaining, ridiculously satisfying ride.

It doesn't matter that the Game Boy Color version of Metal Gear Solid (known as Ghost Babel in Japan) isn't canon, taking place on an alternate timeline seven years after the events of the original Metal Gear. It doesn't matter that the Game Boy Color isn't that much more powerful than the NES and sports as many buttons. Somehow, Metal Gear Solid on the Game Boy Color manages to blend the retro stylings of the MSX2 entries with the modern improvements made by the classic PlayStation entry, culminating in the greatest 2D Metal Gear game ever made.

Despite its small stature, Metal Gear Solid on the Game Boy Color packs in a deep, mature storyline (while still being rated 'E', no less), following Snake as he battles a separatist force in Central Africa and listens to (or reads, in this case) reams of codec dialog. It's still amazing what the developers were able to pack into such a small cartridge, how nothing was sacrificed to make a seemingly simple-looking game with all the complexity of its bigger console brothers. Don't write it off just because it's on a Game Boy - this Metal Gear is one of the best.

Hideo Kojima is a master manipulator, and no game proves this more than Metal Gear Solid 2. In the run up to its release, he teased videos showcasing series hero Solid Snake front and center - then pulled the rug out from everyone by replacing him with the inexperienced Raiden for the game's second half. Highly contentious at the time, the dust has settled since its release, and Sons of Liberty is finally appreciated for what it is: one of the first and finest post-modern video games.

As a sequel to one the most highly regarded action games of all time, Kojima was aware of the expectations heaped upon MGS2, and played on them perfectly. The jump from PlayStation to PS2 allowed Kojima to deliver an absurd attention to detail, as well as some of the best graphics of the era (only a year into the PS2's lifespan, too!). But he also used it as an opportunity to reflect on the nature of sequels, effectively reusing the same story beats from Metal Gear Solid and flipping them upside down. By the end of Sons of Liberty, it's hard to separate reality from fiction - which means it's working exactly as Kojima intended.

Some people complain that Metal Gear games have way too many cutscenes and not enough gameplay, and for some entries it's a valid concern (see: Metal Gear Solid 4). But Peace Walker takes those complaints and jettisons them into the ocean, making this portable title one of the biggest, most expansive Metal Gear outings yet.

Taking place a few years after Portable Ops, Peace Walker sees Big Boss continuing to build his mercenary army - only this time, you'll have a full-on outpost called Mother Base to grow. Big Boss undertakes a wide variety of missions set during the backdrop of the Nicaraguan Revolution of the 1970s, recruiting new soldiers, researching gear upgrades, and even developing a Metal Gear of his own. The sweeping story is still here, but between building out Mother Base and fighting actual monsters from Monster Hunter, there's enough gameplay to fill up a dozen Metal Gear titles. The HD release greatly improves the controls and adds online multiplayer, making it the definitive version of the game. If not for its lackluster boss fights and some unfortunate resource grinding, Peace Walker would be the number one game in the series - it's that good.

The original PlayStation hit Metal Gear Solid is still one of the best, as almost every single one of its sequels and spin-offs ends up living in the shadow of this classic. Its story deals in a heady mix of nuclear proliferation, illegal cloning, double-crosses, and paranormal activity, and it moves at a rapid-fire pace for the duration of its 10-hour campaign. It was a revelation at the time, wearing its Hollywood aspirations on its sleeve while never forgetting that it's still a video game at heart.

Few games can boast the sheer amount of amazing twists in Metal Gear Solid. The mysterious death of the DARPA Chief; finding Meryl's Codec frequency on the back of the game's actual CD case; the fourth wall-breaking battle against Psycho Mantis; Snake's capture and escape from prison; and so many more that I could fill this entire slide and still not have enough space to gush about everything cool that happens. Even with its rudimentary 3D graphics, Metal Gear Solid remains a masterpiece, second only to...

The Metal Gear series' hard left turn into the Cold War era remains its best, taking everything fans love about the series' narrative and gameplay and executing on them to near-perfection. Its story is the tightest and most thrilling of the bunch, using a pastiche of 1960s spy movies to tell the origin of just about every single narrative thread in the series. Plus, the story just feels so much more human than the rest, dropping a convoluted web of nanomachines and artificial intelligence to focus on Naked Snake and his subsequent fall from grace as he discovers the truth behind the betrayal of his mentor and friend, The Boss.

The jungles of Russia change up Metal Gear's stealth gameplay for the better, forcing Snake to utilize a wide variety of camouflage to tip-toe through Snake Eater's various locales without getting spotted. But it's not enough just to sneak - Snake has to survive, foraging for food among the flora and fauna of the untamed wilds and tending to wounds he receives on the battlefield. It's hard to top a classic such as Metal Gear Solid, but Snake Eater manages to surpass its predecessors with dozens of memorable moments of its own and gameplay that has yet to be matched - and if you're new to the series, .

It's hard to hone in on the essence of stealth. Many stealth games focus on slow, methodical movement and punish you for slipping up, but others give you the opportunity to react before your cover's blown, or abandon the idea of caution altogether. Which of these truly defines stealth?

We believe the truth is somewhere in the foggy middle. The common denominator that links these games is knowing how, when, and where to stay hidden, but the specifics are not explicit. At the same time, good stealth games also give you little guidance and happily kick you into the fray to let you figure things out for yourself. The true measure of a stealth game, then, is freedom: the freedom to explore what stealth means, while giving you a place to plot, learn, and screw up for yourself. With that standard set, we've smoked out the 15 best stealth games of all time to show you what this shadowy genre is made of. Don't look away though, or they might escape.

The original Sly Cooper did something few mascot games ever manage - it was a genuinely great genre game, with a cast of universally loveable characters. Sly 2 is basically Sly+, with a raft of improvements and expansions on the stealth formula. But with all the same anthropomorphic heroes. Good.

The stealth is so tight and feature packed, and laid the foundations for the stick-to-the-city free-running of inFamous. Sly’s sneaking is more traditional, while support characters like Bentley and Murray mix it up with more gadget-heavy / combat-heavy stealth, respectively. The result is a well rounded sneaking game with a charming cast and absolutely loads of stuff to do. And it isn’t all dark and gritty like most…

Stealth Inc is the suspiciously bright passageway where stealth mechanics and mini-games meet. In a series of time trials, you - a sphere-headed clone with giant glowing eyes - must solve all the puzzles in a given room before the aggressive machines inside spot and kill you. You're unarmed and will die the instant they hone in on your position, so all you have are your wits and shadows to keep you alive. And it works remarkably well.

Gleefully tossing aside the gritty environment, gadgetry, and slow movement common to most stealth games, Stealth Inc goes for something more colorful and frantic, where you're encouraged to speed through the level as fast as you can without getting killed. Yet the stealth mechanics are absolutely essential for the game to function, and the controls for movement are incredibly tight, so it's no one's fault but your own if you stumble into a puddle of light and get vaporized. It's the ultimate test of a very different kind of stealth, where speed is favored over caution.

Second Sight, Free Radical’s unjustly forgotten original leaves you painfully vulnerable from the start. Controlling the sickly John Vattic, you wake up wearing nothing but hospital scrubs with no clue where you are, how you got there, or much about who you even are. The amnesiac patient may not be the most original protagonist, but he’s certainly one that immediately makes you want to hide until you know what the hell is going on. What makes Vattic’s stealthy hunt for safety so pleasurable is that he can control people and objects with his brain.

Like a cross between Solid Snake and a particularly wan Ben Kenobi, the most fun you have as Vattic is figuring out which of your freaky psychic abilities is best suited to getting you out of a jam. Does it make sense to possess a guard and shoot all the others? Use an astral projection to scout ahead and determine the best path around them? Vattic’s arsenal of skills, coupled with a story jumping in time, proved Free Radical can make more than just an excellent shooter.

When Rocksteady rebranded Batman’s sneak punching as ‘Predator Mode’, it wasn’t screwing about. Arkham City's approach to combative hide-and-seek is one of total domination, of giving you the tools and the information to concoct emergent, creative, horrifyingly powerful divide-and-conquer strategies on the fly. Rather than concerning you with claustrophobic creep-and-dodge work over your immediate vicinity, Arkham’s approach is to give you vantage and control over the whole arena: its every gantry and walkway, its every intricate path, route, and flow of activity.

Except when it’s not. It balances that sense of dominion, with an immediate fragility should things go wrong. Lose your concentration, slip up, fail to spot something important, and you’ll be panicked and flapping away in fright in an instant. That’s the dichotomy that makes Arkham’s stealth so good. It’s about cleverly making you look unstoppable, while knowing that you’re anything but. In short, it’s about being Batman.

Is Riddick strictly a stealth game? Probably not. It’s a mix of sneaky-sneaky, stabby-stabby, and punchy-punchy. But that’s no bad thing - the way stealth and more brutal combat mix makes for a pleasing, bloody adventure. As the perpetually on-the-run Riddick, it’s your job to escape Butcher… look, it’s all in the game name. You do so by fighting your way out of the cells, then getting into the vent system, and eventually off the planet.

It’s the executions that really make this game, combined with the savage first-person combat when things inevitably require a bit of brute force. Oh, and those fancy night-vision specs that Riddick uses are a neat way of avoiding the trap many stealth games fall into, where you end up staring at the screen for hours because everything's so damn dark.

The best games take complex concepts and make performing them feel effortless, and Gunpoint's low-fi take on the stealth genre is one of the best. Don't be fooled by its simplicity, though - its pixelated graphics and sidescrolling gameplay belie one of the smartest, funniest stealth puzzle games ever made.

Armed with a special hacking device called the Crosslink, a pair of hydraulic 'hypertrousers,' your fists and your own wits, you must infiltrate each of Gunpoint's expertly crafted levels without being detected. Your special pants let you blast up the side of buildings, attach to ceilings, and launch into guards to provide a few swift punches to their face. And your Crosslink allows you to hack into nearly anything (like light switches and security cameras) and rewire them to open doors or activate enemy weapons. It's one thing to completely ghost a level - it's another entirely to reprogram everything inside the level and manipulate the guards to solve it for you. Gunpoint may not offer as many weapons, camo patterns, or other fun stealth gadgets as other games on this list, but its simplicity proves that less is indeed more.

While similar in many ways to the Hitman games that came before, Blood Money improves on an already strong stealth system with a setup that rewards perfectly silent missions, and makes life a whole lot harder when you don't pull it off.

While the goal of any stealth game is to get from whatever window you crawled through to a certain goal without being seen, the threat of discovery usually ends when you finish the mission. Not so in Blood Money, where 47's notoriety rises every time he's spotted by a guard or security camera, and that notoriety makes him more recognizable to enemies in the missions that follow. You have to be on the ball at all times, and Blood Money gives you all the tools to make that happen, from elaborate costumes to new mechanics that make it much easier to dispose of a body or knock out the lights to a whole building. Everything in Blood Money has a place and a use, and the only limit on how well they work is your own skill.

Good stealth games give you a wide variety of tools and options to help you out of a jam if you get spotted; great ones encourage you to never want to go loud in the first place. While later entries in the Splinter Cell franchise have embraced 24-style action to go along with more traditional stealthy maneuvers, no other game in the series comes close to the purity of Chaos Theory's stealth playground.

Armed with a wide variety of gadgets and a trusty combat knife, you have everything you need to infiltrate a variety of multilayered environments undetected. You'll need them, too, because enemies react organically to your every move, spotting your handiwork well after you've moved on. To combat that, each level in Chaos Theory is filled with pipes to climb, hidden passageways, and multiple pathways to explore, providing you with a level of freedom few stealth games can match. And that's just the single-player - Chaos Theory also includes a brilliant competitive multiplayer mode (Spies vs. Mercs), as well as cooperative levels that require perfect synchronization.

Adding Deus Ex: Human Revolution to list of best stealth games can be a sticky issue, given that it forces players to go guns blazing into boss fights, even if they've otherwise been quieter than a church mouse augmented with hover technology. But while those forced battles are an unfortunate fact that can't be undone, Human Revolution's interpretation of stealth in every other instance is so strong that the good outweighs the bad.

While the game lets you customize the way you approach every challenge, protagonist Adam Jensen shows off the best of his abilities in stealth mode. Sneaking up behind guards and finishing them with a takedown puts his strength to better use than a gunfight, and can clear a room without a shot being fired. The cover system works well, letting you move seamlessly between hiding places. And where the brilliant Deus Ex inadvertently makes stealth easier with oblivious AI, Human Revolution has enemies that quickly spot you if you make mistakes. That means no dodging between cover while a guard is looking right at you, as it should be.

Sure, Dishonored does let you bust down the door of a mansion and use your powers to creatively murder every guard and unfortunate maidservant in sight... but there's something more elegant about sneaking through the one open window, snuffing out a single target, and sliding back out again without anyone realizing you were there.

Dishonored's stealth is also made more enticing by the fact that many of your dark abilities are meant to benefit a sneaky playthrough. We're talking a teleport ability that lets you juke between spots of cover, a power that disintegrates your victims, or x-ray vision that helps you map out guard locations while you're crouched on the roof. Get good enough and you can make it through the entire game without a soul outside your immediate circle - a badge of honor for any sleuth.

It wouldn't feel right to talk about stealth without mentioning at least one ninja. Mark of the Ninja is a 2D, side-scrolling stealth game, which puts you in the role of a master ninja (duh) defending his clan - which has had no contact with the modern world for centuries - from gun-toting invaders. Stealth is all you have to level the playing field but, thankfully, zipping between shadows is so fluid and sharp that it's a pleasure to take the job on.

Every ability in your low-tech arsenal is designed make sleuthing simpler, from darts that shatter lights to a panther-like crawl that helps you scramble up walls and squeeze through tight spaces. Each action flows naturally into the next, making every stage feels like a graceful, silent dance that you start at the beginning of the level. Far from fearing discovery, Mark of the Ninja makes you feel like a powerful stalker, a sense that few games <(a href="http://www.gamesradar.com/assassins-creed-chronicles-china-review/" target="blank">try as they might) have been able to replicate.

Amnesia: The Dark Descent is a great stealth game because it makes you terrified of being caught. You don't have so much as a sharp stick to your name when it punts you into the heart of a dark, creepy castle and tells you to watch your step. With no means of defense and little way to tell random ambiance from the approach of a horrible monster, you're left utterly helpless.

Terror is your motivator here, because you're facing something that can utterly destroy you, and you never know where it's going to come from. Being discovered is horrible, not just inconvenient, and the tentative stealth play that follows doesn't have to be forced. It just comes naturally, and never having to see the monster is all the reward you need.

The Thief series might not seem particularly remarkable these days. Its defining qualities are all pretty common for the genre - a first-person view, hiding in shadows to stay concealed, throwing objects to distract guards, and poking your head around a corner to see where your enemies are. None of that sounds remarkable until you find out that Thief is responsible for inventing those familiar mechanics, and that its best chapter, Thief 2: The Metal Age, still uses them better than most games that have come since.

Wide-open levels offer creative freedom, and the many different things you need to consider when developing a plan (how loud this particular patch of floor will be, or if you should club the guard in your path or try to sneak around) create a deep, complex stealth experience where few limits are imposed on how you play. It's by no means simple, but when you finally execute the perfect plan, you feel every bit the master thief the game claims you to be.

The hero of a stealth game tends to stay one step ahead of their pursuers because they’re predictable and rooted in patrols. That's what makes Alien Isolation so different and unsettling: the central enemy moves of its own free will, so you never know exactly where it’s going to appear.

In resetting your expectations for how a stealth game is meant to go, Alien Isolation forces you to relearn the basics. Moving slowly and quietly makes you better able to hide when there’s something horrible in the room with you. Even letting your guard down enough to walk into an empty hall can be deadly, because it invites doom from above. Hiding and crafting the tools you need to survive is fraught with anxiety, and being spotted by the immortal and hungry Xenomorph, after completing an intricate set of tasks, becomes painfully common. But there's no greater feeling than managing to make it to the next save point. Were you ever happier to see a pay phone in your life?

Snake Eater is the quintessential Metal Gear game, tip-toeing perfectly between stealth and storytelling. It's equal parts silly and melodramatic, diving deep into Cold War hysteria as viewed through Hideo Kojima’s lens of paranormal activity and self-aware video game-isms. But Snake Eater isn't just the ideal Metal Gear game; it's the best stealth game, period.

Snake Eater expands into unprecedented freedom, whether you want to Rambo your way through or make it to the end without killing a soul. Beating the game without leaving behind a body count is totally viable, thanks to your tranquilizer gun and a wide variety of camouflage patterns that help you inch past guards even in broad daylight. Snake Eater is also host to one of the greatest boss battles of all time: a multi-screen, hours-long battle of attrition against the world's greatest sniper. If you can wrap your head around the controls, you'll find that Snake Eater's construction still remains the pinnacle of the genre.