The original Portal game does a good job of this. The first several puzzles are essentially tutorials that still manage to feel fun and interesting.

There's a lot of videos and articles like this one discussing how Stage 1-1 of Super Mario Bros for the NES is a cleverly designed tutorial for the core game mechanics.

Is this where we bring up the old Mega Man X Sequelitis video again? Chances are the best tutorial is the one you don't even realize is a tutorial. There was also a trend that I first noticed around the time of Gears of War where the tutorial would not only be built into the story so that you wouldn't feel like it was chore, but they'd also give you the opportunity to just skip it.

For all the faults Nintendo embody, they know how to make tutorials, especially with the Mario series. You may think "there are no tutorials in Mario" but that's part of it. Nintendo's design formula for making stages for Mario games consist of "introduction, escalation, complication." First they throw a new mechanic at you, maybe the stage has rotating cylinders you need to stay on top of to progress, and not fall down. Then they up the difficulty a bit, adding more factors to the gameplay like introducing enemies that you have to dodge simultaneously. Then finally they turn the new concept up to 11 towards the end, by making you have to juggle both the new mechanics and some other modifiers, perhaps having to fight a boss at the same time, or perhaps requiring some more advanced platforming maneuvers to progress. That way a stage can be a tutorial, and you don't even realize it.

Outer Wilds has a very elegant diagetic tutorial in the form of a museum and, well, a training ground, whole game is really a multi layered tutorial with scaling level of complexity.

Technically I don't think there's a tutorial level per say as much as there is a tutorial set of levels, but Baba Is You.

The game starts off with only the controls on how to move and teaches you about how you can change the rules of the level to beat it if it isn't possible normally, without explaining anything. Just from you exploring and testing different things. The only other time you'll ever see any other form of level hint is maybe in the level names or if you end up in a position where you have to undo or restart the level from breaking the " [ object ] is you " rule in some way.

Breath of the Wild. It's integrated so smoothly you don't even realise it's a tutorial. It seemlessly transforms into regular gameplay.

I want to shout out Left 4 Dead's game instructor for smoothly teaching new players the game even while they're playing with others. Get more ammo here. Use adrenaline to do stuff faster. Give Nick your pills. Rescue is coming - defend yourself! Then, once you've played enough, the help messages gradually become less frequent.

I'll also shout it out for being my favourite implementation of HUD markers in any game. The icon pulses into view close to your crosshair, then flies over to the thing it's pointing at. If it goes off-screen, the marker returns next to your crosshair, with an arrow indicating which direction to look in to see it again. A lot of other games have marker icons just suddenly appear at the spot and they crawl along the edge of the screen if the item is off-screen. The way L4D does it really draws my eyes.

The best tutorials are ones that are fun to play both on your first time and subsequent playthroughs

Something like portal, hollow knight or hades

The one that sticks out in my mind is the original BioShock. Spoilers if you haven't played it.

Kind of tangential but I've always found the start of fallout 3 (the iconic scene where you exit the vault) to be a lesson in game design. Here's a completely open world but I can guarantee in ten minutes you'll be at the entrance of megaton. No direct prompting, just subtle framing and environmental clues.

Super Mario Bros.

The first level literally is designed to progressively teach you everything you need to know how to play the game and it doesn't even have a single line of text to do it.

Although I do have to say it is a bit funny that Dark Souls' tutorial is just some messages on the ground and the first one tells you how to move. But you have to move over to it to read it in the first place.

Dark Souls since it doesn‘t stop you in your tracks much. I dislike tutorials that stop you and make you read walls of text or force you to input/click exactly what it wants you to.

I can tell you what the worst tutorial is.

It's Monster Hunter World.

Blood Dragon. Best tutorial ever

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pNW1Ob3EczQ

Dead cells, there are people out there with hours of gameplay that haven't completed the tutorial.

cyberpunk was nice. It had both an optional that really specifically laid things out and then in addition the first gig more casually does it. I seem to recall harry potter being so integrated that I can't remember it. I find a lot of games just sorta give popups that you can say stop to and then it basically just starts simple so you can learn the stuff without it seeming much like a tutorial. skyrim is sorta annoying in that its unskippable and you can't do a save before locking in a race that is after it like you could with oblivioun. So they went a bit backwards. Elden rings was completely skippable but it was also just pants. The tutorial is crazy easy compared to most games and does not prepare you at all for the brutal real game. Baldurs gate was unskippable but its pretty fast and did not really feel aweful to redo as its much like any quest in the game.

The first level of MegaMan x and good springs in fallout: New Vegas are really good examples of how to convey info to the player about how the game works and what you can do without pulling you out of the game itself into a separate tutorial

The legacy console editions of Minecraft have always done a good job in my opinion as a tutorial. It's hard to skip it (or at least was for me) and it really walks you through the basics. Then you have the choice of learning more or just... going out and playing minecraft

absolutely not Warframe.

Them's Fightin' Herds has one of the best tutorials in the fighting game genre, but on top of that it also has a story mode cleverly designed to act as a second tutorial. Enemies and bosses are designed you on specific concepts like anti-airing or getting past zoning. It even has platforming segments to get you used to fighting game movement.

Sadly, the published pulled the plug so chapter 1 is all we'll ever get. But that chapter 1 is still better than any other fighting game singleplayer.

A Dance of Fire and Ice is the best one. You get how the game works within the main menu itself, songs can have their own tutorials for specific patterns later on the song but are fully skippable.

Rhythm Doctor also has really good tutorials, a fully skippable tutorial that tells you anything newly introduced in the upcoming track

Tribes: Vengeance's campaign story is basically one giant tutorial (and a great one at that) on how you move and play in multiplayer.

Too bad that the game didn't take off at all back then, now there's just small communities that get together once in a while :l

Driver for ps1. I'm not sure though if I'm sarcastic.

Plants vs Zombies