Here are 11 of our favourite game covers ever

Nowadays, covers don't really matter as much as they used to, since very few people decide which game to buy in physical stores. But once upon a time, they could be crucial, so we've gathered some of our favourites, and we'd love for you to share yours in the comments section!

Ico

Ico was a very special gaming experience and also represented a rather daring genre experiment for the team behind it. It was a bizarre new setting with a bizarre new gameplay loop, and it came from a couple of minds that most people didn't really know at the time. But just because of this captivating, beautiful, and well-choreographed cover, many were immediately drawn to it, which is not surprising when you look at it today.

Grand Theft Auto: Vice City

One could easily argue that GTA covers look confusingly similar, and that is also correct, but especially here with Vice City, the pastiche itself, the mocking, loving satirical treatment of a very specific time period and zeitgeist, is made so endlessly clear. The font, character placements, mosaic design... this is where it all really comes together.

Epic Mickey

Regardless of whether the game could carry it or not, Epic Mickey, with Warren Spector at the helm, was a landmark event in gaming history, and therefore deserved a daring cover. And that's what it got. Much of the cover is empty - white. It's a clever use of dead space to create a frame, and I still think about the game on the shelves down there in the shop.

The Evil Within 2

The game wasn't nearly as good as this cover suggested, but in parts of its visual profile, The Evil Within 2 was actually incredibly well put together. This white, milky texture made its appearance in several sequences, forming the backbone of some pretty cool horror sequences. Here, the white and red fonts are a good match.

Metal Gear Solid 3: Snake Eater

Yoji Shinkawa is a legendary artist who has delivered a sea of striking, gorgeous covers for the Metal Gear series over the decades. Metal Gear Solid 3: Snake Eater could therefore be replaced by several others, but the series began to change things up a bit here and there, including with the next game, Guns of the Patriots, much to the chagrin of many.

Black

Sometimes simple covers are all it takes to grab attention, and Black's absolutely daring cover, which is just this cool font surrounded by a sea of cartridges, was really enough to make you pick up the game in the shop. Completely unaffected by the actual quality of the game, this was a gamble that paid off.

BioShock: The Collection

Whereas the original BioShock placed the mythical Big Daddy on the cover, this re-release understood that this is not why we all loved visiting Rapture or Columbia. No, it was the cities themselves, these exciting, deep locations that captivated us and defined the series. BioShock is in every way about the place you are in, and this cover understood that.

No Man's Sky

No Man's Sky was a disappointment for many when it was released, and there was even a large group who were dissatisfied with the game's actual technical execution, despite its otherwise strong aesthetic profile. The cover tells us that here is a lonely explorer in the infinite universe, surrounded by colours and caricatured flora and fauna, in an almost 80s-inspired, inexhaustible world space. It looks good, even though it took years for the game to match it.

Resident Evil 4

Although Resident Evil 4 in many ways toned down the horror in favour of a slightly more caricatured, tongue-in-cheek black humour at times, this cover is iconic. Again, it is an excellent blend of emptiness and striking contrasts that sets the scene for Leon's hair-raising adventure.

XCOM 2

It didn't have much to do with the game, since the actual aliens in Firaxis' strategy game could easily be replaced with any other enemy, but this cover ended up standing out with its eerie "many-small-images-form-a-silhouette" cover (I coined this term myself). It looks great.

Resistance 3

Both the original Resistance: Fall of Man and Resistance 3 really managed to grab your attention when you first saw the cover, and the latter in particular chose to downplay the actual plot and content in favour of something more enigmatic. We knew that it was about freeing the Earth from an alien threat at this point, and instead we could see that when two types of colours contrast in this way, magic happens.

The Last of Us: Part II

Neil Druckmann has previously stated that The Last of Us was a story about love, while The Last of Us: Part II is a story about hate, and this is certainly evident in a cover that presents us with the entire driving force behind the game's narrative: Ellie's hate. The circular, hateful relationship between people who continually take revenge on each other, a cycle that never stops, that is never satisfied. Naughty Dog is skilled at character modelling, you have to give them that, and here they use that strength right at the forefront of the image. Good idea.