1. Resident Evil 2 (N64) because it was my first experience with survival horror and one of my core childhood memories
2. Resident Evil (2002 Gamecube remake) because it's how I experienced the original and it was good and scary
3. Resident Evil 4 because I have fond memories of playing Mercenaries mode with a friend late into the night

-RE4 obviously

-Probably Vllage, which I haven't played, and the first half of 7

-Code Veronica because it was such an impenetrable scary mess as a kid but it had such singular vibes. Beware the bandersnatch

I treat the three eras of Resident Evil as their own separate entities, but if I had to pick one from each

Classic Era: RE2 (1998). REmake is a great game and probably the pinnacle of classic survival horror in many ways but the story and characters really let it down for me. RE1/Remake is like some straight-to-video Italian zombie flick while RE2 is an 80s James Cameron movie

Middle Era: Resident Evil 4. The first of the action oriented Resident Evils. Self-aware, campy and most crucially of all it was still an uncompromised single-player game

Modern Era: I'd like to give it to RE7 since it was a solid, original entry that revitalised the franchise after the huge stinker that was RE6, but the RE2 remake is a better put together game overall even if half of what makes it good was just recycled from the 1998 original

Resident Evil 7

i got into the habit of playing remake claire A as a comfort game after work every day. just starting a new save every day and playing it until i had to stop. zen gaming. got me through some stressful times

1. RE2 (1998) - hard to beat. great in every aspect. having 2 scenarios that affect each other is sooo good that i want more games doing that. extra modes are quite challenging and fun to play.
2. REmake (2002 GC) - perfect in almost every way. I'm very sad that there were no more games in that style since for me it's probably the perfect survival horror experience. I still like the original but the remake improved almost every single aspect of it.
3. RE3 (1999) - it has a bunch of problems but is probably the funnier one to play. making up challenges to finish the game gives it an arcade-like feeling. nemesis keeps being scary even when i have every place he can appear memorized

honorable mention to outbreak. i only played it in single player mode but i'm sure it would probably enter the list if i had the chance to play multiplayer. between it and REmake were two very good ways of moving the franchise forward and keeping the formula interesting. sadly, they went the action route so we got okay-ish games (4 is great although it still ranks way below the classics for me) instead of hypotetical masterpieces.