Nothing and I mean nothing ever comes close to Return of the Obra Dinn when it comes to puzzles. All the info is provided and it's all on you to finish the game (or not). It's a really unique experience. Less action and more wracking your brains out.

One of the best I have ever played which falls into adventure, puzzle, RPG, strategy , and open world is probably star control 2, the urquan masters. It has an amazingly well crafted story, the music is great, and a bunch of different aspects to the game play. This still is one of my favorite games of all time

I will not give you titles because the list can be long and hardly I can find a total winner. The best games even made are the one shipped completed without pretending of expansions to fill it, or DLC, or micro translation, season pass, and shit like this. So we need to jump back to 5 or 10 years to find something. I'm still waiting a new generation game that I like and that can achieve this.

Openworld\sandbox: Minecraft.

It didn't invent things, but it made the most of it's raw components like proc. generation, crafting, impacting world by just placing a block, implementing basic algorythms into the game by redstone and modblock (?). And it bssically created the indie market.

Old role-playing: BG \ NWN (IDK what defines RPGs now)

Adapted tapletop systems, created an environment for your own modules, a big inspiration in this genre.

Sports: Unreal Tournament \ Quake 3 \ Counter Strike 1.6

That's when cybersports start to be known by masses and whole games begin to be made exclusively for it. Not ideal, but highly refined competitive games that made a huge impact on how games are made.

Action platform: Portal 2. It is polished to a mirror shine. I can't think of a higher "quality" game in the genre.

Baldur’s gate 2 for me.

Judging by how many hours I’ve logged, Civ 6

Witcher 3

Mazewars on Mac as an early multiplayer FPS.

Black Tiger in the arcades was an excellent fantasy platformer.

Another World on the Amiga was a fantastically immersive cinematic platformer.

Wipeout 2097 on PSX was a futuristic anti-grav racer with a 10/10 for music, SFX, gameplay, lore, theme and graphics. Just exceptional.

...

In the current day, gaming is all about FLOSS games such as Cube2:Sauerbraten(FPS), 0AD(RTS), The Dark Place(stealth Thief remke) and Shattered Pixel Dungeon(roguelike) which are free forever and community driven, providing a much richer gaming experience.

So, an interesting point of detail, is a game "gooder" when it perfectly executes its formula after countless iterations, like FF6 did, or is it better when it innovates in a new way, bringing together new ideas into a magical, if occasionally rough-around-the-edges, novel new approach that others start copying, as Doom did?

Also, are we looking at them from the perspective of their time, where Pac Man was once the pinnacle of gaming itself, or from a modern, more objective perspective, where Pac Man struggles to provide the same value as BotW does almost half a century later?