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The 25 Best PC Games to Play Right Now - IGN - 1. Elden Ring
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You'd think after so many games there'd be no room for a new one to swoop in and innovate, but Legends of Runeterra continues to be brilliant. Robin talks a lot about its new stuff, but part of what keeps me coming back is just how wonderful the foundation it is built upon is.
It's just a shame that it seems like Runeterra's curse is that it will continue to be criminally overlooked by so many players. Fraser: Spaceships? Space locomotives? Now we're talking. Sunless Skies makes you brave the dangers of space while inside a train full of troubled crewmates, usually starving and being driven round the bend. Part trading sim, RPG and exploration romp, it's all weird, and elevated by the best videogame writing around.
The great game has also been made better, recently, thanks to the far-ranging Sovereign Edition update, throwing new characters, trains and stories into the already dense mix. Dave: It's zen trucking. Slowly churning through the mud with some tunes as your only company for miles. Super chill. Until you roll your rig down the side of a mountain, of course.
Morgan: Snowrunner is the mud trucking sim of my dreams. It's Death Stranding without all the drama and ghost babies: just you, your truck, and the stack of pipes that need to get to the top of this mountain.
Snowrunner is no tranquil driving sim. Every job is a battle against nature itself and your weapons are wheels, winches, and will. In the year since launch, Snowrunner has only gotten bigger and better with quality DLC and a vibrant modding community. Evan: Replicating the weapon set, map philosophy, and beautiful rhythm of Counter-Strike is some sort of scientific cloning accomplishment.
Valorant is its own game, though, one with meaningful technical advancements it'll give you 90 fps on a graphing calculator, practically and magical character abilities that let you and your opponent make counter-punches with utility as you compete for precious positioning.
Phil: I recently dipped back in with some pals after about a year away, and, oh boy, Valorant is a punishing game to return to. But after a couple of demoralising losses, our third match—a nail biting win—was one of the most exciting multiplayer experiences I've had this year. Nat: Homeworld's tragic space opera is timeless, but its original release is a little less so. Thankfully, the Remastered Collection is still a fantastic way to experience a truly singular, unique spacefaring RTS—with a healthy modding scene that lets you recreate fleet battles from Star Trek to Mass Effect.
Fraser: There's no other RTS with this much style and grace. Homeworld is a spaceship ballet and epic tragedy that I never thought would be replicated—how could it be?
Homeworld 3 is coming, but will it live up to the impossibly lofty expectations set by its predecessors? Spin-off Deserts of Kharak certainly got close, but there's magic in those first two games that sets them apart.
We'll see. Wes: I've returned to Vermintide this year and especially appreciate how each character plays so differently. My first time through I stuck to up-close-and-personal dwarf Bardin Goreksson, but lately I've played as battle mage Sienna, standing back and flamethrowing legions of low-level ratlings. The equipment system still kinda feels like fluff, but I love that each character has three classes that play differently, and styles of weapons that add even more granularity.
This is the co-op game to beat, even three years in. Steven: Caves of Qud is a near-perfect middle ground between the daunting complexity of classic roguelikes and the mind-boggling simulation of Dwarf Fortress. It's also the weirdest RPG I've ever played. Sentient beanstalks, tinker bears, space-time paradoxes, fungal infections—it's almost impossible to describe Qud in a way that makes sense.
Each time you start a new game, an entire world complete with its own cultures and history is generated for you to uncover. And within that space, you can play as anything from a desert nomad to a cybernetically enhanced half-man-half-tank.
Just play it. Wes: I've still barely just dipped my toe in Caves of Quid during Early Access, but it really was staggering; it feels like someone took on the mad idea of cramming RPG-style writing into the open-ended structure of NetHack, and actually pulled it off.
Along with Disco Elysium, I think Caves of Qud is a modern reminder that good enough writing can make any game utterly captivating. Harry: What else is left to say about Skyrim? Nothing, really. A decade on The Elder Scrolls V is a fixture in the PC gaming consciousness despite looking janky and dated, even with a choice selection of mods.
Skyrim slips down the Top again this year, but don't expect it to be forgotten anytime soon. Speaking of, The Forgotten City, based on a Skyrim mod has just come out, so it remains to be seen if it makes next year's list. Jody: In my current playthrough I have my own museum, a chainsword, and fabulous hair. The music's replaced by dark ambient and Nordic folk-metal, there are gallows and gibbets everywhere, and I have to periodically wash off blood and travel dirt.
I'm accompanied by two characters from Vermintide, a blue khajiit, and the Skyrim Grandma. The Special Edition means Skyrim handles ridiculous mod loads without instability, and I can alt-tab as much as I want without it crashing. It's better than ever.
I'll be tired of Skyrim when I'm tired of life. Mollie: Skyrim is one of those games that's been there for me through a ton of high and low points in my life. Will I ever branch out and play anything other than a stealthy archer? Hell no, but I will spend hours exploring the same old dinky caves and loading up my house with an unnecessary number of stolen books. Mollie: I've played my fair share of fighting games over the years, but few have kept me coming back in the way Tekken 7 does.
Every hit, block and sidestep feels so intensely satisfying to me. Couple that with a banging soundtrack, cinematic ultimate moves and a heart-pounding dramatic slow-mo cam, and every match feels like a full-blown theatrical performance.
Though I still lament the lack of Christie Monteiro in the game, the roster is solid. Tekken 7 is easily the best 3D fighter out there right now, and my favourite fighting game in recent memory.
Also Yoshimitsu is an alien, I guess? Euro Truck Sim can take a breather. This son of a gun's packing Texas and Idaho, on the way to pick up Wyoming. You ever drive through through 'em? Vast, empty spaces. Buttes and scrub. Flimsy barbwire between state, federal, and private land. A couple mountain ranges in the western halves, Idaho panhandle too. Feeling that small centers a person.
Kanye West lives in Wyoming. A recent multiplayer update means you can drive by Kayne's yard with a friend. Nothing eases the weight of a heavy load, on the truck and the soul, like a convoy. Steady breath, eyes ahead. We'll get to where we're going. Andy K: ATS is great. But my heart belongs to Euro Truck Simulator 2. The larger map has a lot more variety, from the mountains of Norway to the vineyards of France, making for much more exciting road trips.
Fraser: Cities: Skylines continues its reign, with few urban city builders appearing to steal its crown. It remains undefeated in part because of the dearth of competition, but the many DLC additions and huge list of mods have ensured that even after five years it still has plenty to offer would-be mayors. There's even an expansion exclusively dedicated to parks.
And it turns out that flooding cities with poo doesn't get old. Sorry, citizens! Phil: The city building genre has had something of a resurgence thanks to games like Frostpunk and Anno offering up a different take on the basic formula. But if you want the best game to actually build a city in, here it is.
Katie: I don't think I'll ever get tired of creating vast intertwined city-scapes, ever more intricate intersections, and long-ass roundabouts… so many roundabouts they permeate my dreams. Help, I'm traffic managing in my sleep. After the on-rails nonsense of the intro, it pretty much sets you free to be the ultimate spy in an amazing sandbox.
Rich: Simply one of the best games ever made, a unique take on open world design, and absolutely rammed with things to do. This feels like the game Metal Gear Solid was always building towards: ignore the nonsense about it being unfinished, and enjoy the finest game Kojima Productions ever made. Phil: It's let down slightly by a handful of missions that force you to fight the Parasite Unit—tedious battles that ignore almost all of the established rules of the game. The rest of the time, though, MGS 5 drops you onto the map with a handful of gadgets and lets you figure things out for yourself.
One of the most satisfying stealth sandboxes you can play. Dave: Was having an absolute blast with MGS5's open world; it felt solid, real, and deliciously brutal.
But as soon as it got fully into the bloated, ridiculous exposition it immediately pulled me out of the game world and that has meant I can't face going back ever again. Fraser: Few management games have made me feel like such a monster, but that's what happens when you become a fascist to save a few lives and they freeze to death anyway.
The cold and desperation makes you cold and desperate. Frostpunk is a challenging apocalyptic city builder with plenty of engaging systems, but it's the high stakes and brutal consequences of your decisions that makes it special. And thanks to the DLC, you can also see what life was like just before the big freeze.
Spoiler: it was miserable. Chris: I remember getting absolutely furious when my city was running well, I was keeping everyone warm and fed, and I had enough resources to survive, but my citizens were still miserable because they'd heard some rumor that tanked their morale.
It seemed so unfair that I'd done everything right but people still hated me. But then it's a society simulator, isn't it? No matter what you do, you can't make everyone happy, and a portion of any society is going to be filled with people who simply won't use logic or listen to reason.
A relevant lesson! Evan: Is Arma a tedious and complicated sim, or a peerless sandbox-playground for unscripted military antics?
Years into its lifespan, the franchise's contradiction is potent: onboarding someone into the game means handing them a list of mods they 'absolutely' need to get started and a longer list of unusual keybinds double tap left Alt to freely swivel your neck independently of your weapon, duh.
But at the end of that not-so-basic training awaits a serious and often silly game about riding in a helicopter with a dozen of your closest Discord friends, one of whom crashes that helicopter into a tree after failing to correctly engage the auto-hover. Nat: Remember the first time you took a sledgehammer to a house in Red Faction Guerrilla?
Teardown is that, but pushed to its best extreme. A destruction sandbox where breakable buildings aren't just a backdrop to mediocre gunfights, but instead used to prop up an incredible set of heist puzzles. But oh, that smashing! Teardown may be voxelated, but everything breaks as you'd expect. Wood buckles under pressure. Plaster cracks to reveal underlying brickwork. Fire spreads as volumetric smoke billows through hallways, and a remarkably efficient approach to ray-tracing makes sure it all looks perfectly tactile.
In most levels, you're free to explore and destroy the map as you see fit. You'll have a set number of items to rob briefcases, safes, cars , and once you snag one, the timer starts. Carve an optimal route through the map, grab the goods, and make it out before the cops arrive. Simple, but nerve-wrackingly brilliant.
Beyond that, though, Teardown's exploding mod scene has turned the voxel playground into a brand new Garry's Mod. There's a workshop packed to the brim with new maps to smash up, and a wealth of toys ranging from GMod-style physics guns to miniguns akimbo. Teardown's puzzles are decent fun, but I'll be smashing my way through fan-made maps for a long time yet. A supernatural mystery, Unavowed throws you into an ancient society of magical problem solvers after a possession ruined your life.
It's got big party-based RPG vibes, evoking BioWare games especially, complete with special origin stories and a branching plot that goes to some surprising places. But this is still firmly a 2D point-and-click, where most of your time will be spent solving mysteries and puzzles.
And what excellent mysteries and puzzles they are, forcing you to use both magic and your investigative chops to solve. What lingers, though, are the charming characters and Unavowed's vision of New York—a place simultaneously familiar and utterly alien. Robin: Unavowed feels like a treatise on how the classic style of 2D adventure game can still feel relevant in the modern games industry.
Dave: We finally made it, ma! As the finest long-term RPG on any platform, I'd argue it's a bit too far down the list, but there are still many who foolishly see it as some sort of glorified spreadsheet. Football is obviously central to the game, which does put people off. But FM is a mix of a sporting version of The Sims, marshalling and developing your little computer people to kick a ball about better than other little computer people, and a heart-wrenching RPG about success, failure, heroism, the fragility of youth, lost potential, and the inevitable decay of our own corporeal forms.
Fraser: Finally! I've been trying to get CoH2 in here for years. The RTS sequel is perhaps a controversial choice, and is certainly more divisive than its predecessor, but the first game has had its time in the sun and on this list.
There are plenty of reasons to recommend the sequel, too, especially if you're tired of the Western Front. One of the main reasons I've been fighting for the swap is the fantastic Ardennes Assault expansion, which features a dynamic turn-based campaign—something Relic is taking even further in the upcoming Company of Heroes 3. Dave: Still think the original is better, but that's probably because I got proper obsessed with the Commando units from the Opposing Fronts expandalone.
Cars are cool and hot and Horizon 4 knows it. Play it as a racing simulation or turn on all the assists and play it like Lego Racer. Or just deck out a van with a Dragonball Z livery and drive it off cliff sides, capturing the poetic footage as it tumbles.
Nat: Forza lets me tear down my own backyard in the big daft Halo jeep, which makes it the best racing game ever made as far as I'm concerned. Fraser: I drove around digital Edinburgh with a friend and pointed out all the places I'd thrown up when I was at university. Perfect game. Jacob: With a decent racing wheel, this game makes you feel like you're the world rally champion and F1 drivers champion all at the same time.
James: A game that bends the rules of space also exists outside of time. Portal 2 is still one of the funniest games ever made. Even if the portal puzzles get easier to parse with every run, I'm always finding new routes and accidentally developing speedrun strats, buoyed by good humor, great performances, and excellent tunes throughout. If you've yet to play the co-op campaign, do it now.
Spec out incredibly complex solutions to simple problems, together. Harry: If you like jokes, games, and puzzles, Portal 2 is essential. It's not a looker by today's standards, of course, but it doesn't need to be.
Cleverness, invention, and laughs win over graphics any day. Plus, it'll probably run nicely on your Steam Deck. It's outrageous that Portal 2 has puzzles that make you feel so smart while you're solving them and monologues so funny they make you cackle the whole time you're doing it.
True galaxy brain stuff. Phil: Ubisoft's trade-focused city builder has grown into something remarkable. Over a handful of DLC seasons it's doubled down on the satisfaction of seeing a territory grow by adding a handful of new regions with specific quirks to overcome. In Africa, you'll create canal systems to irrigate the land.
In the Arctic, you'll build airships to circumnavigate imposing glaciers. And back in Europe, you'll expand your docks into a global hub supporting your ever-expanding trade empire. The sheer joy of turning these disparate regions into a fully-autonomous machine of growth and profit is hard to beat, at least until you move to the next tier of technology, and balk at the exponential effort required to get it up and running. A return to form for the series. Nat: Tony Hawk might've introduced me to skateboarding, but Session understands why I've come to love it.
There are no time limits and no high scores: just you, your board, and an urban sandbox to destroy. Session manages to make the simple act of rolling around on your skateboard feel incredible. Controls can be tweaked to be as easy or tough as possible, and it's rare that a game can make the humble ollie feel satisfying. Challenges that'd be trivial in THPS become hour-long battles as you try to nail a nollie heelflip into a lipslide off the sidewalk. Admittedly, Session is still extremely work-in-progress.
Character models are a bit jank, animations bug out, and the physics are often hilariously broken. But each new update brings a new way to express your skating style, whether it's the introduction of freestyle primo and casper tricks, or a new city block featuring iconic skate spots.
James: Normally, I'd hold back on recommending an early access game, but Session's impressive growth and momentum easily make up for the jank. We've already had a total physics overhaul and an animation overhaul is on the way. New trick systems and levels show up every couple months, and with new publisher Nacon on board, we might see Session pick up even more speed on the way to 1.
Harry: Don't be put off by Loop Hero's impenetrable-seeming aesthetic; It's one of the most accessible games I've played in Its nostalgic style belies an absorbing adventure that's wonderfully simple to start, but brutal to master. You decide the difficulty of your nameless knight's journey by adding monster tiles for more gear and resources, or helpful boons, colouring in the blackness with often surprising results.
Take your resources or try for one more loop? For much of I've struggled to choose. Evan: As you said, it's steeped in nostalgia, starting with that CRT "curved screen" filter you can enable in the main menu. And yet it's so different from many of the outwardly nostalgia-based games we see.
Loop Hero isn't a recreation of an old style of game like Stardew Valley. Instead it resurrects the spiritual aspects from the late '80s VGA era, the subtler sense of mystery found in some games from that era. It's most fun if you avoid Googling your way to victory with wikis. Instead, try engaging in the kinds of school lunchroom rumors with a friend who's also playing it, trading stories about how you can summon harpies into the map by building a mountain, or the ridiculous thing you have to do to get a secret boss to spawn.
Fraser: I started playing Loop Hero because I thought it would be a distillation of RPG adventures that took only a wee while to play through. Morgan: Paradise Killer takes the most classically compelling premise in literary history there's been a murder, you have to solve it and places it in one of the strangest, most interesting videogame worlds I've ever explored.
Piecing together timelines and motives while interrogating characters named Doctor Doom Jazz or Lydia Day Break never gets old. It's a visual novel for people that don't think they'd be into visual novels. A true sleeper hit. Andy K: What makes it really special for me is its openness. This is a detective game where you can find evidence in any order and construct your case at your own pace. The order you find these clues in—and the conclusions you draw from them—can totally reshape your perception of the crime and who did it, including pinning the crime on an innocent person and having to live with your shoddy detective work.
Fraser: Chivalry 2 lets you chop off someone's limbs, pick them up, and then use them to beat someone else to death—all while you're screaming, they're screaming, everyone just won't stop screaming. They're really screams of joy, though, because this multiplayer medieval combat romp is just so damn fun.
Tyler: It's great. I love the balance of serious sword combat and silliness, where swing selection and mouse technique are being carefully considered just a few feet away from players who are smashing the 'yell' key repeatedly and chucking objects into the fray like Philadelphia sports fans. In places, Chiv 2 really delivers on the full medieval warfare experience it promises. Climbing up a ladder and over the edge of a rampart is always thrilling. I can't wait for the horse update.
Evan: It's the closest thing to a toxicity-proof competitive game I've played. The slapstick dark comedy of severed limbs and fish-as-weapons is part of it—that stuff makes Chivalry 2 feel lighthearted—but I also think that, unlike the serious, methodical, 5v5 formats in games like CS:GO, you sort of accept that a fray of dozens of people swinging their variously-long metal dicks around is going to be a messy affair.
Balance isn't the point. It's the calamity and fun of facing down three knights in an "unfair" fight and somehow walking away, and then laughing it off when a ballista pegs your body against the castle wall. More competitive multiplayer games could learn from that. Wes: GTA Online's heists are still some of the most intricate co-op gaming you can do today.
Rockstar's online infrastructure is terrible, though. Unfortunately, so will all the hackers and griefers that tried to ruin our fun. Phil: GTA Online tends to get all the attention these days, but there's a quality campaign here too—huge in scope, albeit saddled with some of Rockstar's most cynical writing to-date. The mod scene is wild , too. Steven: It's still wild to me that Genshin Impact basically came out of nowhere and rocked the gaming world. Player housing, new territories, and a bunch of new characters—it's crazy how good this free game is.
Morgan: Technically free, yea. Its gacha money making tactics were overbearing enough to turn me off, and I'm the lucky type that's not compelled to keep spending money. Steven: I mean, it doesn't gate your progress in any way. You only have to spend the money if you want to, and there's no banners or pop-ups pestering you either.
Mollie: I get you Morgan, gacha games can be off-putting with their monetisation. But I view Genshin Impact like a monthly MMO subscription—a little bit of money each month for some currency or extra goodies is no more than what I'd pay to play Final Fantasy I hadn't actually played Genshin for a few months when we made this list, but I recently got back into it with the release of 2. Just like Steven said, I can't believe this is a game that you can technically play free of charge.
Teyvat is a gorgeous world, with each region bringing its own unique flavour and culture. Combat is seriously satisfying, too—combining the different elemental abilities of characters and firing off all manner of reactions never stops being fun. Sure it's a little grindy sometimes, but what live service game isn't these days? James: I bounced off Prey a couple of times, but once I accepted that you're always on the back foot it clicked. This is Resident Evil in space, but you choose what kind of key you want to unlock the next door with: hacking, secret vent pathways, or turning into a banana and sliding through a tiny hole in the wall.
Jody: Prey's space station being a contiguous space, one you explore inside and out so thoroughly it's ridiculous, makes it the System Shock 3 of my dreams. You can hop into space, jetting around in zero-gravity to find alternate routes. There's so much detail, so much to learn. You can shoot a NERF crossbow through a window to hit a computer screen to read an email in a locked room.
Why isn't this higher? Phil: It's no Dishonored 2, but I really have to praise the craft Arkane put into creating Prey's space station—a seamlessly connected environment full of secrets to unlock.
It's just a shame the combat outstays its welcome. For years it's been evolving and spitting out experiments, beckoning me back time and time again to slaughter hordes of monsters and obsess over loot and builds. The main progression system is the pinnacle of ARPG character building, and one that's kept me tinkering away for the better part of a decade. I suspect only the in-development sequel will be able to tear me away.
Wes: I don't want to start a debate about game difficulty, but overcoming Sekiro's challenge was a thrill I haven't gotten from an action game since God Hand.
It demands you play on its terms. The moment you parry a boss's final hit and counter with a deathblow you'll realize you've felt dead inside for years.
Morgan: Come on James, Chivalry 2 is right over there. Sekiro is hands-down my favorite From game yet. By reining in its combat options and focusing on a single weapon, they ended up with combat so good that Star Wars copied it. Fraser: Yes, it's more Assassin's Creed, with a vast open world filled with stuff to climb, people to murder and crap to collect.
While much is unchanged, I still found myself spending something like hours playing. As a Scot I hate to say it, but England is a pretty nice place to explore. It's a stunning open world, and one jam-packed with some of the series' most charismatic denizens, not least of which is Eivor, a terse but charming protagonist whose growls and sighs speak volumes. She's my favourite assassin, even over the superb Kassandra. Sarah: I absolutely adored Eivor, and her horse who I named Horace.
We both spent far too much time exploring England to compare places I've visited with their in-game counterparts. Steven: I'm such a big fan of this new direction Assassin's Creed has taken—even if it sometimes still feels a little too big for its own good. Shifting to become an RPG with a branching narrative is just such a fun way to intimately explore a romanticized version of different historical periods, and Valhalla makes some really strong improvements in the narrative department, especially in the complex relationship between Eivor and her brother.
Phil: Gonna be honest: I'm still too burned out from completing Odyssey—which, to be clear, I loved—to even consider starting this yet. Nat: For a long time, Black Mesa was a joke. An over-ambitious attempt to completely remake Half-Life from the ground up as a standalone mod. But lo and behold, it's finally finished—and bloody hell, if it isn't a stunning thing.
Black Mesa deftly reimagines Valve's debut, trimming the more tedious parts of Half-Life while remaking Xen Half-Life's notoriously flawed final chapters from the ground up. I wouldn't say it replaces the seminal shooter outright, but it's a damn fine way to experience it from a brand new angle. Wes: A factory building game so perfectly named I defy anyone to talk about it without using the word "satisfying. My first 'factory' was a messy series of conveyor belts on a forest floor that was ugly and inefficient, so I tore it down and rebuilt.
And again. My multiplayer crew is now building towering skyscraper factories linked by automated sky trains. Some people lose a year building castles in Minecraft; I lost one building iron rods in Satisfactory, and I don't regret a second of it. Phil: Build rockets and send them into space. Or, just as likely, fail to send them into space because of a disastrous flaw with your design. Kerbal Space Program takes all of the complicated maths needed to successfully hurl functional machines out of a planet's atmosphere and presents them in a way that celebrates creativity, expression and fun.
There's still nothing quite like Kerbal. Dave: The rescue missions Kerbal's 'career mode' spits up are some of the greatest space-based experiences you can have on a PC. Forget Elite: Dangerous, forget Homeworld, forget the Outer Wilds, when you've got Kerbward Woodward stranded, orbiting a distant planet with vast amounts of precious 'science' accumulated from a daring mission to Duna you've just got to figure out a way to get him home safe.
Especially because it's your fault for him being stuck way out there because you forgot to add a few solar extra solar cells back in the lab. From creating the rescue craft, intercepting the stranded craft, and finally getting everyone home safe… there are few more satisfying feelings in PC gaming. Evan: Depth, literally and figuratively. Creator Derek Yu calls it "spiky", a label that describes many of the things you can impale yourself upon as well as the emotional highs and lows that its teeming, subterranean lunar universe produces in players.
A great spectator game, Spelunky 2's streaming and YouTube community is another dimension of experimentation and unbelievable feats. Family gatherings, drunken parties, or lunchtime in the office—it does it all. Morgan: Party Pack 7 is a particular banger, too. Champ'd up did the impossible task of surpassing the best ever Jackbox game before it: Tee KO. Jackbox is a great way to get the party started or serve as a fun, accessible time when you're not quite ready for the night to end.
I can't even begin to count how many in-jokes between me and my pals have been born as a result of Jackbox. Rich: A triumphant reimagining of Capcom's already-excellent series that looks gorgeous and delivers some of the best co-op times you'll ever have.
Incredible combat with huge depth, spectacular monsters and environments, and there's so much of it. You never want this game to end, and it feels like it never does. Wes: expansion Iceborne adds an endgame zone you can spend months in and a vastly streamlined gathering hub for multiplayer. It's everything I didn't know I needed in the base game.
Mollie: Monster Hunter: World has been winding down for a while, with the final content update releasing in October last year and the release of Rise on the Nintendo Switch not too long ago. I'm basically waiting for that to hit PC now, but Monster Hunter: World will still remain an excellent game. It really nailed the balance between the series' traditionally tough gameplay while being super friendly to newcomers.
Also, the hunting horn absolutely whips. Doot bro for life. Chris: One of the few blockbuster games built from the ground up for VR, and certainly the best and most beautiful. Whatever Valve did under the hood with the game's locomotion, it's easily the most comfortable VR game, one that I could play for hours at a time without feeling the nausea or headaches VR usually gives me after about 40 minutes.
Plus, it cleverly rewrote some Half-Life lore that's been in the books for a decade, priming us for whatever comes next. Dave: Easily the best VR game ever made. It's also one of the finest Half-Life games too, and damn, is it ever creepy. Stalking through broken down infested zones of City 17 to avoid the zombies, or bursting out into the streets for a firefight with the Combine, Alyx is an absolute must for Half-Life fans.
And, oh my god, those liquid physics. I could spend hours just shaking vodka bottles. Rachel: First released back in February , Devotion was available on Steam for only six days before it was hit with its infamous review-bombing controversy. Determined to re-release the game, Red Candle put it back up for sale this year, letting players finally experience its superb suburban horror. Sharing many similarities to Konami's claustrophobic house in PT, Devotion is a story about a family living in a small s apartment in Taiwan, each member having their own personal demons dragged out into the house's stark fluorescent lighting.
Everything kicks off after the daughter contracts a mysterious illness, which causes the desperate father to tumble into a spiral of paranoia and misplaced spiritualism. What's great about Devotion is that there are no literal monsters, the game is more interested in how the troubled headspaces of a family can seep into the physical space of a home.
It's not often we get to see the exploration of a person's religious faith and seeing how Red Candle has used that to create an insidious story of family tragedy is like no other horror game I've played. It's a horror tale that actually cares about its characters, and together with artful sequences and spine-chilling moments, it's truly one of the best horror stories of all time.
A game that was well worth the wait. James: Resident Evil Village is so much more than the tall vampire woman. I mean, Lady Dimitrescu certainly makes a lasting impression, but she's just one chapter of this excellent cosmic horror anthology. This is Resident Evil doing its best A24 horror impression, moving from a frozen village overrun with lycans, through a classic game of cat and mouse in a lavish castle, and later arriving at color-drained industrial body horror—something like Hellraiser meets Saw.
Village goes from goofy action to the scariest setpieces in the series' history, embracing everything I identify with Resident Evil: locked doors, ridiculous keys, and goofy characters. This is Resident Evil at its most self aware, at its scariest, and its most surprising. Alan: The latest Resident Evil has some great stand-out moments, with a giddy number of villains and game genres checked off as you explore its chilling environs.
The highlight for me was hiding beneath a bed bereft of weapons while an oversized nightmare wailed horribly while searching for our hero. It's got to be one of its most chilling moments it has to offer—I don't think I've completed a level so quickly in my life.
Jacob: Resident Evil Village isn't afraid to hand you a big gun and lots of ammo. Sure, there are moments that make you want to throw your mouse in the bin and never come back to your PC, but most of the time it's an extremely well-paced and entertaining gore flick. Mollie: I have a lot of love for The Sims 4. It had a rocky launch and issues that still persist years later, but it's the first game I boot up whenever I get that creative itch.
The build mode is genuinely fantastic, and I feel like Maxis is finally getting the hang of making consistently excellent expansion packs. The gameplay is still a little vapid compared to earlier entries, but it's a hell of a lot better than it used to be. The biggest bummer, and the reason for its steep drop this year, is how high the financial barrier to entry has become. The base game is painfully barren, with simple additions like seasons and pets essentially locked behind paywalls.
You could buy a lot of games in the Top for the same price as a complete Sims 4 collection, and that makes it harder to recommend. Totally agree with Mollie, that financial barrier is bullshit and it drags down The Sims' placement on our list. Fraser: Now I can capture sims and imprison them in a glass cell as a vampire.
The Sims 4 has really changed the way I kidnap my neighbours. Jorge: Hades is a gorgeous and stylish hack-and-slash roguelike featuring some of the best writing, voice acting, and music around. As Zagreus, the Prince of the Underworld, you try to escape to the land of the living to meet your mother.
Meanwhile, your father, Hades, is doing everything in his power to keep you from her. While the combat for Hades is challenging, fun, and easy to wrap your head around, you'll spend a lot of your time chit-chatting with the denizens of the underworld, building relationships, and learning more about yourself and your dysfunctional even for Greek gods family. Hades is a game where you tell yourself, "Ok, this is the last run, then I'm going to bed," and before you know it, you're up at 4 am for the third night in a row and calling in sick from work.
Fraser: One of my favourite tactics games of all time, BattleTech is an exciting romp through a galaxy full of intrigue, ambitious nobles and giant mechs. There's a good campaign tying all the fights together, but brawling with steel monstrosities is what keeps the grin on my face.
You can build your mech dream team—axe-wielding behemoths with jetpacks, gargantuan mobile weapon platforms, precious wee scouts—and then fling them into tricky battles where you have to worry about heat, terrain and limbs getting blown off.
To the victor goes the scrap. Nat: BattleTech understands that the best mech fiction fundamentally treats mechs as terrible things. The story has an air of beautiful tragedy, feudal states clashing and backstabbing each other over a handful of stars in the arse end of the galaxy.
It's a tone that bleeds into every mission, making your clutch plays feel all the more desperate, every hard-fought victory all the sweeter. It's just so much more accessible, without sacrificing any of the crazy high-level teamplay, and its emphasis on skilful solo play makes for ridiculously exciting moments where a single player can swing the game in their favor. It's also fun being a part of a cinematic universe with Legends of Runeterra and Teamfight Tactics.
Rich: I still play Counter-Strike on a weekly basis and, even when the likes of Siege or Valorant have tempted me away for a time, I always come back.
Where the competition is full of gadgets and powers and classes, CS: GO's absolute purity and dedication to a core that works so well it remains irresistible. And while I've heard some awful stuff on team chat, I've also made a lot of good buddies over the years: when you have a little 'crew' that's on regularly, this game goes to another level.
Evan: It's the most popular FPS in the world, an almost decade-old giant that stands on the shoulder of arguably the most successful mod of all time sorry, DOTA. It's one of my most-played games ever. But in , it's aging. Is it really the shooter I'd recommend to someone first right now? No way. Recent experiments like adding a battle royale mode have only revealed the greying tech that CS:GO sits upon.
But as a veteran Source mapper, I have endless respect for the way it's kept the torch of community map-making lit all these years. Source may be dated, but Counter-Strike's mappers are doing incredible things with it. Mollie: I don't even know how to put into words what Nier: Automata is and why it's so special, but I wish I could wipe my brain and experience it again for the first time.
A flawless soundtrack, satisfying combat and heart-wrenching story permeates every second of this game. It hasn't always run the best on PC, but a brand-new fix makes this the perfect time to dive in. Steven: I finally beat Automata for the first time this year and damn, I'm so glad I did. There's just nothing like it. And while I'd love for us to also make room for Nier: Replicant, its prequel, on this list, I'd encourage anyone who loved Automata to go back and play it.
It's arguably even more emotionally compromising. Fraser: I wish there were more endings so I'd have an excuse to play Nier: Automata all over again. Wes: The original Nier had such great characters and quirky diversions it turns into a text adventure for a bit at one point that it was worth playing despite some really mundane combat.
Automata fixed that problem and feels like it fully explores the ideas Yoko Taro didn't have the time or budget to explore in his previous games. It's a game we'll still be talking about in 20 years. Rachel: Although it's fallen a little on our list, Return of the Obra Dinn is still one of the best detective games on PC.
Apart from Paradise Killer, another fantastic detective game that you will have passed to get here, no other game makes you work harder for answers and celebrates your victories like Obra Dinn does.
The ghostly tale it spins of the disappearance of a single ship and its crew will chill you to the bone. It still gives me the heebie-jeebies. Phil: Possibly the most perfectly paced puzzle game around. As you explore, you'll naturally stumble into hints that can recontextualise your thinking and send you down a rabbit hole of new revelations. Chris: It does the best possible combination of things. It makes you look around and think "There is no way in hell I'll ever be able to solve this" and then a little while later leaves you saying "I've solved this and I'm a genius.
Rich: I could honestly argue for this being number one, it's simply stunning. Play it! Rachel: There have been some amazing story-led games released in the last year, which means that our old friend Kentucky Route Zero has dropped a considerable amount. Its highway adventure is still the most evocative and aetherial story on this list, full of magical-realist tales of rural America and its struggles.
I'll never forget listening to a chorus of ghostly voices inside a mineshaft belonging to those who had lost their lives in a rockslide. It's both haunting and beautiful. Nat: I didn't follow KRZ along its ten-year journey, instead playing the whole thing with my partner across a few nights last winter. A powerful, sombre, singular thing, and one of the two games to ever leave me in tears at my keyboard. Fraser: I've been waiting a long time for a historical 4X game that can give Civilization a run for its money, and here it is.
Mohawk Games has taken all the best parts of the venerable series, but focused on antiquity rather than all of human history. Every turn represents a year, which allows Old World to take a more intimate approach, exploring characters instead of just empires.
There are plenty of innovations, like an Order system that teaches you to prioritise what actions you want to take that turn, but it's definitely the Crusader Kings-style characters and abundance of narrative events that feel like the most important addition. Leaders age and die, get married, have children, plot against rivals, and you've got a whole court of people to worry about. It's Civ reimagined as a life sim and RPG. Evan: As you said, the lineage system adds a layer of passive storytelling that I didn't know I wanted in a 4X.
Very interested to see how the next Civ responds to Old World. Jody: There's an argument that the real defining feature of RPGs is the areas between fights where you just talk to people, and Planescape's Sigil—a city on the inner surface of a ring with magic doors that connects it to multiple dimensions—is one of the best.
There's a guy who's been on fire so long everyone's used to it and he's become a local bar's mascot, a zombie called The Post whose body is used as a billboard, a hivemind of several thousand psychic rats, and a part-demon thief voiced by Sheena Easton. The combat isn't great, but there's not much of it and way more multidimensional weirdos worth meeting. Steven: I'd recommend Planescape as a kind of dessert to anyone who played and loved Disco Elysium.
They share so much DNA in their approach to character development and world building, and the agency they give to express yourself not just through dice rolls during combat. I only played Planescape a few years ago, but some of its quests have wormed their way into my head—like a trip to a museum that collects every possible sensation a person could experience.
One of the greatest adventures in games, set in a world realised with outstanding imagination, mingled with a deliberately vague and surprising multiplayer element that will still be delighting you on your fifth playthrough. James: Dark Souls is challenging, yeah, but like a good coach. Take a breather, kid. Stretch out. Check yourself. Sleep on it. Come back when you're feeling better. Just don't give up. Tim: A mere four years into its life on PC, I did not expect to see Destiny 2 climbing this chart on the back of its storytelling.
Once rightly derided for hiding its rich lore in grimoire cards and armour flavour text, over the last year Destiny 2 has quietly reinvented how to create ongoing narrative in a live service game. Using a combination of choreographed NPC conversations and the occasional cutscene, a soapy plot develops from week to week, complete with twists, heel turns, and Saturday morning cartoon cliffhangers.
We've seen major characters killed off, big bads come and go or have they? Or in other words, Bungie has actually found a model that delivers on the game's original promise all those E3s ago. And it's working: keeps players interested in what's happening rather than just grinding for god roll weapons. It also helps that the mix of matchmade activities, exotic quests and hidden missions has been refined to the point that the variance in quality from season to season is way less wild than it used to be.
And if you'd rather not pay at all, there's still an incredibly robust game here to play entirely for free, including endgame content such as the Vault of Glass raid. The only reason Destiny 2 isn't even higher here is that the PVP side of the game has been neglected to the point of abandonment. Phil: As a Destiny player, I spend a lot of time complaining about Destiny. But even I will admit that the game is in a good position at the moment.
After the disappointing Season of the Hunt, which launched alongside Beyond Light, subsequent seasons have been a triumph—helped along by a handful of showcase activities, from Presage to the returning Vault of Glass. As always, though, the promise of Destiny remains what it could be.
Next year, alongside The Witch Queen expansion, we get weapon crafting and a guaranteed schedule for raids and dungeons.
It all sounds great, but the devil is in the details, and Destiny does have a habit of moving two steps back for every one forward. Robin: I think this is quietly the most exciting co-op shooter in years. Its use of procedural generation is nothing short of remarkable, churning out fresh, fascinating, and frequently beautiful levels every session.
And working together to conquer those levels, using its arsenal of tools to build, dig, and demolish your way to success, is fantastically satisfying.
So many co-op games are just about being as efficient and deadly as possible, but Deep Rock feels like some kind of wonderful group project in the way it forces you to combine your creative powers and problem-solve as a team. One of its cleverest mechanics is the way it uses light. Managing light—through throwable flares and the scout class' flare gun—is a vital part of your strategy, which feels truly unique.
Being the guy who makes sure everyone can see has become my favourite role in the game. James: Cruelty Squad is a monstrous immersive sim, a game held together with duck tape and bad vibes. As a gig economy assassin killing men that pose a threat to a higher order of immortal CEO gods in a hypersaturated mess of jagged polygons and screaming textures, it's difficult to not feel bad.
But using my guts to grapple up to a sniper nest above the Cancer Megamall? This is a shit jawbreaker with a dense pleasure chemical core. Cruelty Squad isn't cruel. It's just honest. Morgan: It's an incredible premise with an equally mind-bending art style. Nothing about Cruelty Squad easily slots into other videogames don't even get me started on how you reload. Even its menus have to be studied like fine art before you can parse which button means "play. Jacob: You might be wondering why Hunt: Showdown has only now made its way into our Top , many years after it first launched.
The reason being this PvEvP shooter has only gone from strength to strength in , incorporating steady updates, improvements, and, finally, an immeasurably entertaining new map. Fundamentally, though, Hunt: Showdown is and always has been a wildly tactical shooter that captures a turn of the century shootout like no other.
Seriously, you'll be ducking behind boxes and barrels with bullets whizzing over head and lobbing dynamite into shacks in no time. It also rewards good teamwork and strategy, so if you've got a couple friends to play with that's absolutely the best way to experience the game.
The idea of basing a competitive shooter around realistic 18th century guns is absurd for so many reasons, but Crytek pulled it off spectacularly. Because you must restore health and armor with close-range attacks, moving in and out of scrimmages becomes the foundation of winning strategies. A double jump, a double dash, and a hook that pulls you toward its living target all allow you to establish your distance, as do environments sprinkled with walls, hills, tunnels, platforms, and monkey bars — all meant to be used for cover and escape, but also your own amusement.
Regardless of whether you elect to play the game, simply creating a world in Dwarf Fortress is an experience not to be missed if you own a gaming PC. Dwarf Fortress is completely free. Donations, naturally, are quite welcome. As a reward, you may be gifted with a handmade drawing.
Get it here: Bay 12 Games Steam. One of the many benefits of PC gaming is the ability to get under the hood and tinker with the games that you already own. The Elder Scrolls 5: Skyrim serves as an excellent introduction to game modding, thanks to its integration with the Steam Workshop. For those who want to dig a little deeper, The Elder Scrolls 3: Morrowind provides a much more hands-on modding experience.
The sequel to the original Elite , a PC game that dates all the way back to , Elite: Dangerous and its Horizons expansion are a borderline spiritual spacefaring experience.
At the core of this game is a realistic simulation of all billion star systems in the Milky Way galaxy. The secret is the so-called Stellar Forge, a procedural system that developer Frontier Developments used to realistically simulate the formation of our galaxy. Using the best available astronomical data, the studio sort of threw all of creation into a digital rock tumbler and then continued to polish what fell out as an MMO. A recent effort to put new Fleet Carriers in every corner of the galaxy has contributed to a massive uptick in players, including all-time high player counts on Steam.
Get it here: Frontier Steam. It warrants new words. Imagine someone using tracing paper to re-create a favorite painting, adding their own flourishes and revisions. Once again, you begin in a cave full of spiders, skeletons, bats, and golden idols that egg you on to set to set off their lethal traps. Except now, things are ever so different. Yellow lizards roll across the room like that big ball chasing Indy, and agitated moles cut through the ground like the graboids in Tremors.
Your muscle memory is weaponized against you —Chris Plante. Listen: When the original version of Fortnite launched, I hated it. There were zombies in it.
You collected characters in the form of trading cards, and unlocked abilities from a skill tree. There was so much mindless clicking in the original version that my wrist would hurt after every each session. That original mode, called Save the World, is still in the game. It even has a small, but devoted, ongoing fan base. Fortnite is arguably the biggest game in the world thanks to Battle Royale. Get it here: Epic Games Store. The original Half-Life tells the story of the MIT-educated theoretical physicist Gordon Freeman and a transdimensional rift that may someday kill us all.
As far as PC shooters go, Half-Life represents an inflection point for the entire genre, threading a nearly uninterrupted narrative through a seamless and carefully paced action spectacle. While the gameplay itself more than holds up, the look and feel of the original leaves something to be desired.
Thankfully, the team at Crowbar Collective — themselves a bunch of modders — have created Black Mesa. Whether you want to play the classic version or the updated Black Mesa is up to you, but every PC enthusiast should at least try one or the other at least once.
Get Half-Life here: Steam. Get Black Mesa here: Steam. Half-Life: Alyx gave VR something it desperately needed: a brand-new entry into a huge series, long-awaited by fans, and designed specifically for VR.
If you want to know what happens next in the story of Half-Life, you have to buy or borrow a VR headset and play through one of the most polished games ever released for virtual reality. Get Half-Life: Alyx here: Steam. Kentucky Route Zero is one of the most fascinating narrative experiments in all of video games. The brainchild of the small team of artists at Cardboard Computer, it uses magical realism to tell a bizarre tale set in rural America.
The game, which began as a Kickstarter campaign, has been released episodically over the past seven years. Cardboard Computer has also released a series of experiences it calls interludes , which are freely available online. The game offers a less traditional leveling-up system, in which players need to use items to increase their affinity with a particular stat.
If you want to increase your blocking stat, then you will have to block attacks, or even punches from friends, in order to increase the efficiency of your shield blocking. Players can also increase their health and stamina stats using food items or potions. I mostly spent time cooking and foraging for food, not interested in engaging in combat unless absolutely necessary.
If anything, Valheim managed to scratch the itch for me that titles like Harvest Moon or Stardew Valley could otherwise no longer reach. While my friends fought packs of wolves and found krakens swimming between vast expanses of ocean, I practiced animal husbandry and farming.
Oceans and rivers look lovely, while even the dreariest of environments somehow stand out. Particle effects bloom and blossom in snowy locales, with dense fog sometimes permeating endless meadows of yellowing grass. It made me stop and appreciate the environmental design and procedurally generated scenery. This approach also allows for those even with fairly low-end machines to run the game. Outside of the world actively fighting back against your intrusion and destruction, you can see the environment begin to change due to your work.
This is in itself a depiction of colonialism and environmental degradation as you pillage a continent unknown to you for valuable materials to move elsewhere and do the exact same thing over and over again, until there is nothing left.
Before Minecraft was the cultural force it is today, it was a survival game. Minecraft drops players on a procedurally generated map eight times larger than the surface of the Earth. Get it here: Microsoft Mojang Amazon. Why this is happening, and what the player must do to set things right, make up one of the most intriguing mysteries in all of gaming. Just like an old-fashioned murder story, Return of the Obra Dinn poses a complex mystery, layered with personalities, motives, secrets, and lies.
But it supercharges whodunit conventions by infusing misdirection into every nook and cranny of its intricate, gorgeous murder scenes. The story is set aboard an earlyth-century merchant ship that shows up in port five years after it was reported missing, presumed lost at sea.
The ship is bereft of human life. My job is to board the ship and figure out what happened. Skeletons, exploded cannons, and destroyed rigging all add up to As the player, you inhabit an insurance adjuster from the Age of Sail who gains limited control over time and space. The game demands attention to detail and cleverness on the part of the player to get to the bottom of what happened to each character, while delighting them at every turn with a story and design that gradually reveals itself with surprising bursts of sound and violence.
Supergiant Games expects the player to fail during most runs of Hades. This science fiction fantasy shooter blends third-person action and Vanquish -style acrobatics with tried-and-true MMO systems to create a vibrant community of players. Luckily, my Warframe gets me through the conflict, and I am aided by the benevolent Lotus. Confused at all the proper nouns? Most of it is pretty standard sci-fi stuff — an ancient empire crumbled, the factions of that empire are now at war, and I am a powerful card put into play.
What that effectively means is that I unlock a host of missions with variable objectives and I get to jump around and be a ninja. Movement is fast, fluid, and beautifully lethal. Melee attacks are accompanied with a satisfying sound effect and bright flash, along with a snappy animation. Get it here: Digital Extremes Steam. Years after its release, The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt still stands as a towering achievement in modern video game design. But where The Witcher 3 truly shines on PC is in providing a glorious spectacle for the eyes.
Among Us is as welcoming as it is ubiquitous. Meanwhile, the impostors attempt to kill everyone else on the ship, without exposing their own identities. Every task is simple to perform on a touchscreen or a computer. Even killing someone as the impostor is as easy as tapping one button. If you happen to stumble upon the body of a fellow crew member, alerting the rest of the crew takes just one button as well.
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