It may be surprising that a game from is still so pervasive eight years later, but when that game is Grand Theft Auto 5 , it makes a lot more sense. A story of deceit and betrayal, GTA 5 follows the exploits of three men as they make their way through the criminal world of Los Santos and join together for heists that rival those in the Michael Mann classic Heat.
It's bolstered by an immensely popular multiplayer mode, GTA Online, where you can band up with friends and orchestrate your own rise through the criminal ranks. The PC version has a slew of settings that let you tweak the finest details, and GTA 5's incredible modding community has concocted creations that absolutely can't be missed. See our Grand Theft Auto 5 review. As far as roguelikes go, Hades is among the best.
It nails the loop of jumping into the underworld and fighting your way out of Hell, providing players with an arsenal of unique weaponry and powers fit for a god and borrowed from many of the Gods and Goddesses of Olympus. However, it's the slower moments in which you visit the friends and family of protagonist Zagreus between runs that grab hold and keep you fighting for the truth. In most roguelikes, you care solely about making it further than your last run, but Hades does more: It blends action and story, striking a delicate balance of clawing your way toward the overworld and growing your relationships.
See our Hades review. At first glance, Inscryption looks like a mixture of tabletop card games with a healthy dose of deckbuilding thrown in for good measure as you risk your very life in a high-stakes game of survival. Throw in some roguelite progression, mystery, and a creepy art direction, and you've got the perfect mix for a game that hides more mesmerizing content beneath its surface.
Absolutely strange while it deals out its ideas, that weirdness makes Inscryption the type of game that'll live rent-free in your head long after you've played your last card. Kena: Bridge of Spirits is all charm, adventure, and satisfying action rolled up into a visually-sublime package.
Clearly influenced by games such as The Legend of Zelda, developer Ember Labs' stunning title still manages to stand on its own two feet with its satisfying puzzles, adorable Rot minions, and challenging combat. See our Kena: Bridge of Spirits review.
League of Legends is one of the most popular competitive games for a reason. From its strategic combat and mechanical depth to its colorful characters, it's hard not to get sucked into game after game of this MOBA. While there's a lot to learn, it's not as mechanically dense or difficult to master as Dota 2, providing a more welcoming experience to those wanting to get into the MOBA world.
See our League of Legends review. One of the most original indie games of the year, Loop Hero can't be defined by any single genre. A creatively clever mix of RPG staples, deck-building charm, and brutal strategy, Loop Hero merges all of these elements together to create a bold and fresh adventure that'll keep you occupied for hours on end. See our Loop Hero review. If soaring through the air and flying around the world is a dream of yours, there's no better game than Microsoft Flight Simulator.
You can fly out of almost any airport in the world, including smaller airports in quieter towns, and go literally anywhere on Earth--though landing may be difficult in places like the Grand Canyon and Mount Everest. Microsoft used satellite imagery to recreate the world in-game, and it's improving both the game and map all the time. If there was ever a reason to invest in a flight stick or yoke system , it's Microsoft Flight Simulator. See our Microsoft Flight Simulator review.
Minecraft is a global phenomenon for a reason. Its crafting, base building, and survival-lite mechanics are unmatched, providing both an engaging and accessible experience to people of all ages and walks of life. Crafting huge castles, cozy homes, or monuments to your favorite video game character is a joyful time, while venturing toward the Nether is a tense experience that you're not sure you'll return from.
Whether you're building up a huge tower or exploring the depths of the perilous mines, Minecraft remains an exciting time that can be enjoyed with friends or by yourself.
Just make those Creepers don't get too close to your house. See our Minecraft review. Overwatch quickly became a household name in the realm of competitive shooters. With the expert design philosophies of Blizzard and a familiar foundation from the likes of Team Fortress 2, Overwatch provides a deep and intense team-based multiplayer experience.
The nuances of their abilities leads to tactical considerations that deepen the experience beyond simply being an FPS. Overwatch's presentation will draw you in with colorful, detailed maps and heroes you'll grow to love just from playing them. Like any ongoing multiplayer game, balance is always shifting, but Overwatch always seems to strike it extremely well while fostering a sharp focus on the team.
It has a rich history of seasonal content and special events that keep it fresh, and even after five years, it's going strong.
See our Overwatch review. Portal 2 remains one of the funniest and most inventive puzzlers in games. It successfully built on the mind-bending multidimensional ideas of the first game and somehow elevated its storytelling and characterization to become incredibly fun and memorable. Those things alone would make Portal 2 worthy of your attention, but there's additional content that comes with playing the game on PC. Not only is there online and local co-op that extend the game beyond its single-player offering, but there's a huge amount of user-created content that includes whole story campaigns.
Portal 2 is great fun no matter where you play it, but with modding and puzzles built by other players, you get a superior experience on PC--and a ton more Portal to play for free.
See our Portal 2 review. After years of development, developer Double Fine's sequel to its cult-classic mind-warping adventure Psychonauts was finally ready to be unleashed. An absolute triumph of imaginative visual design and emotional storytelling, Psychonauts 2 confronts topics of mental wellbeing, regret, and grief in a way that is both heartfelt and touching, but never disrespectful to anyone who can relate to the issues being discussed. Fun and emotionally educational.
See our Psychonauts 2 review. Rainbow Six Siege is an adept mix of first-person shooting, strategic planning, and tactical teamwork. Two teams of five vie for control of a building, where the goal is to capture an objective, defuse a bomb, or secure a hostage.
The brilliance of Siege comes in learning these buildings in and out and knowing how to work with your teammates to get in and out most effectively.
Map knowledge can trump twitch shooting in the most dire of situations, rewarding its players for smart thinking and careful play. Siege is available on consoles, but the definitive way to play it is on PC with a keyboard and mouse. See our Rainbow Six Siege review. A prequel to the original game, the story delivers some eye-opening revelations about the wider Red Dead universe. The gameplay and world-building are incredible, with lots of freedom available for players to do whatever they want as they set out onto the frontier as Arthur Morgan.
The game is also gorgeous , especially on PC for those with a capable enough rig. The sweeping mountain visits and bubbling rivers shine on PC, making Red Dead Redemption 2 one of the best games we can recommend on PC. See our Red Dead Redemption 2 review. See our Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice review. It starts with an old broken-down farm and a handful of seeds. You clear out the weeds and rocks until you get tired, and then you do it again.
You get into the rhythm of daily life--visiting friends, watering crops, occasional light spelunking. Before you know it, it's been 75 hours and you're mostly managing your complex irrigation system and planning for next season's harvest. Stardew Valley is a friendly, relaxing experience that also somehow manages to be endlessly addicting. Fans know the feeling of assuring themselves they'll play just one more day before bed. And while it's appeared on just about every platform, PC often gets the first chance to test all of the little quality-of-life tweaks and new features that come with patches--most recently the massive 1.
Avernum: Escape From The Pit, the latest revisit to Spiderweb's original Exile trilogy, is a great starting point into these wonderfully well-crafted non-linear behemoths. Who Geralt allies with at the end of part one sends him to either end of a battlefield for two distinct campaigns, packed with mad kings, blood rituals, dragons and, er, poker dice tournaments.
CD Projekt Red fully commit to what could have easily been achieved with an army reskin or an expository shrug: there are bespoke missions, exclusive maps and consequences that echo through to The Witcher 3. Importantly, the brief campaign - a relatively swift 25 hours to encourage those multiple playthroughs - gives this a very different rhythm to Wild Hunt found elsewhere on this list. Six Ages will never conform to a genre. It is a game almost entirely unique, and stands out defiantly on any list, jutting its chin and daring you to categorise it.
Yes, you manage your tribe. You strategise and jostle for success among your neighbours. But most of all, this bronze-ish age fantasy village sim is about defining the ethos and personality of your people.
Those people have their own culture, shared with some neighbouring clans, and conflicting with other local cultures due to your diverging histories and beliefs. You must lead them not as a faction to efficiently game the numbers until you're unbeatable, but by earning respect, trust, and sometimes fear through your decisions. People come to you with their problems and challenges, and your advisors will inform and opine to the best of their ability and personality , but the decisions are yours, as are any decisions about the rippling consequences of those decisions.
That culture draws on the extremely rich Glorantha setting, without asking familiarity with it. You'll come to understand how its societies work, but still get to define your clan's role within it, whether you're the hardy explorers, the vicious bullies, the gang who are always feasting, or some combination of all three.
But despite being the most impressive exploration of a fictional culture in any game, it never takes itself too seriously. It's about whatever brilliant, weird, tragic story your people live through. It's the mouse controls that do it. Instead of stumbling around for which keyboard buttons will quaff a potion, you click to move, click to attack, click to wear that cursed ring, and hover over any character to read a description of what it is.
Beyond its accessibility, it's a tightly designed game in its own right. You're descending through dungeons as normal, but the flora and fauna you encounter interact in more interesting ways than steadily increasing damage output. Find a monkey, for example, and he might steal from your pockets and run off. Find a monkey being held prisoner by some kobolds however, and you can set it free and gain yourself a monkey ally.
When combined with a system of potions and scrolls that encourages a casual disregard for your own safety, Brogue feels like a polished iteration of the systems that make the roguelike genre so compelling. A lot of isometric RPGs from the golden age of the late nineties and early noughties are fondly remembered - for good reason.
But very few still hold up to repeated plays 20 years later, and Arcanum is undoubtedly one of those that do. There's little to complain about in any of Arcanum - the writing is fabulous, the character creation deep even by today's standards, and the art a feast for the eyes even now.
But it's the setting that deserves some special attention. The world Troika created a traditional fantasy setting undergoing its own version of a late-Victorian industrial revolution feels totally original, despite elves and orcs running around threatening to make it a bit Tolkeinist. Look, this orc is wearing a fancy jacket and shirt with a high starched collar. Didn't expect that, eh? Magic and technology are not only ideologically opposed, but literally, and this comes out in fabulous bits of world building as you play.
If your character is a mage you have to ride in a special compartment on trains, 'lest the engine explode at your very presence!
Oh, there's some sort of epic quest, assassins are after you and someone is trying to end the world, but you can handwave that away and concentrate on crisscrossing the world map, visiting cities and towns positively stuffed full of different sidequests: murder mysteries involving demons, stolen paintings, strange fiefdoms clinging on to weird Medievalism, all with branching solutions to choose from, and very little handholding from the game itself. It's a real feast for the imaginative roleplayer looking for fantasy larks that are a bit different than the norm.
At a glance, the action RPG seems like it should be easy to get right. And yet so few ever do. Part of its success is its relative simplicity - whether in solo or co-op, it's the most pick-up-able of RPGs, letting you immediately get into bashing your way through a series of mythological settings, hoovering up loot, and constantly upgrading your equipment.
With Brian "Age Of Empires" Sullivan at the helm, and a team featuring at least one ex-Looking Glass developer, it certainly had an advantage starting out. But despite just how brilliant a game they made, and the continued brilliance of its expansion, Immortal Throne, it wasn't enough of a success for Iron Lore to keep going. Which remains one of gaming history's great injustices.
If you're looking for a way into action roleplaying games, then this is the one. Incredibly accessible and enormously fun, Titan Quest stands over the gaming landscape like a If you've ever looked at the evolution of JRPGs in dismay and declared, 'Why can't things just stay the same like the good old days?
Despite being the 11th entry in the series most of which have never been available on PC, sadly , Echoes Of An Elusive Age is as retro and traditional as they come. Sure, the graphics are prettier, the orchestral music more stirring, and the world itself more open and more expansive than practically every other Dragon Quest game put together, but peel away that shiny veneer and its epic tale of a world-consuming evil and simple turn-based combat will have you cooing about 'the good old days' in no time.
Indeed, the only big new improvements Square Enix added to Dragon Quest XI was a free-camera mode and some horse riding those mad mavericks , which should give you an idea of just how slow-moving this franchise has been over the years.
Still, there is something admirable about how closely Square Enix have stuck to their guns here. It's warm, it's cosy, it's familiar, and by god is it soothing. If you're after a classic JRPG with all the visual trappings you'd expect from a modern release, there really is nothing quite like it on PC right now. This open world turn-based space captain RPG has influences from all over the place, both in structure and setting, and they're assembled fantastically well.
Choose a starting career, ship, and snazzy outfit for your ship's boss, then head out into the void to do whatever you can find. Where other RPGs will find you cubbyholed into being a trader or soldier, Frontiers's busy, dynamic world and endless opportunities for profit, influence, and political intrigue will inevitably tempt you in another direction, and with the right ship and crew you can have a go at anything.
Until they die, and suddenly you can no longer use that vital ship boarding attack you were counting on. But you can switch death off if you want a stress-free time of it. Your crew's skills contribute to the running of your ship, and gain special talents every few levels based on their job.
Those talents range from mundane but vital re-rolls for background tests to powerful combat attacks or ship-saving escape manoeuvres. They can emphasise your captain's playstyle, shore up weaknesses, or you can scout the galaxy recruiting and training up a crew of specialists that let you cover your weird hybrid pirate-diplomat-doctor playstyle. The same is true of ships, with their extensive upgrade systems. Want to refit your cargo barge to launch a wing of fighters?
Go for it. A barely-armed spy ship that can flit up close and let you board attackers so your quartet of saboteurs can kill off their crew and blow up the engine? You should be a pirate, though.
Pirates in this just want your cargo, not to murder everyone for nothing. Star Traders: Frontiers gets it. Clearly, the vast majority of RPGs on this or any other list are fantasy-themed, but the other great roleplaying setting is cyberpunk. The Deus Ex games have arguably claimed the crown there, but for solid, generous, fully-fledged cyberpunkery in the classic Gibsonesque vein, Dragonfall hits the spot despite throwing a whole lot of fantasy into the mix.
Between its West-meets-East fusion-world, replete with cybernetic implants and Blade Runneresque neon noodlebars, are elves, dwarves, trolls and dragons. It sounds faintly absurd on paper, but seems like the most natural thing in the world in practice. It's far more important to know that this is a game about roleplaying as a gumshoe in a case which only ever gets stranger. In this iteration, you're cast as Vaan, a scrappy orphan thief who dreams of making it big in the world.
After a chance encounter with a rebel princess and a pair of sky pirates one a posh Han Solo, the other a tall rabbit lady with infinitely better quips than Chewie , he's off on his grand adventure, eluding the evil empire as they work to get Ashe back on the throne. See where we're going with this? It's a bit of a slow starter although less so now thanks to The Zodiac Age's new fast-forward feature for PC , but once you get to the meat of its semi real-time, semi turn-based combat, it really comes into its own.
Known as the Gambit system, XII effectively lets you program your fellow party members to do whatever the hell you want. It's a bit like Dragon Age: Origins' tactics. The Gambit system also gives you a lot more freedom to create the types of characters you want, too. Unlike Final Fantasy X's Sphere Grid, there are no obvious paths for moulding your characters here, which, yes, can mean you can accidentally screw yourself over early on if you don't know what you're doing, but does let you create some interesting class combos later on if you pick your abilities carefully.
The Zodiac Age also brings some important quality of life improvements to this rather aged PS2 classic that smartens it up for a modern playthrough, including that aforementioned fast forward button that lets you battle and run around town in double quick time seriously, all JRPGs should have this as standard , a 60fps frame rate, ultrawide support and higher resolutions.
It's not the first Final Fantasy we'd recommend to newcomers of the series, but it is one of the more playable and interesting entries on PC today. Skyrim might get most of the memes, but for some people, Morrowind will always be the best Elder Scrolls game. Very few edges are filed off in the name of explicability or trope. With mods, you can make it feel something close to new again, too. There are HD texture packs and quality-of-life tweaks aplenty to make it accessible.
Its age means it's still not the Elder Scrolls game we'd recommend you start with, but if you've experience with the genre and are looking to visit a place you've never seen before, Morrowind holds up. Ultima VII is a game engineered to convince the player that they are part of a world that doesn't revolve around their character. You are not the centre of the system, the sun around which all things orbit.
More than twenty years later, it's still one of the best examples of its type. It's an RPG that starts with a murder investigation rather than a dungeon crawl, set in a place where NPCs work, eat and sleep. It is an RPG about life rather than death and the experience that death bestows. Interacting with the world is as unusual and gratifying as observing it. There is no crafting skill in Ultima VII, you simply learn to make things. You can bake, you can make clothes, you can rearrange the books on a shelf, position your bedroll in a clearing under the stars, shift the furniture around in an NPC's house when their back is turned.
The iconography of Fallout's world has become so powerful that it can make a crowd at E3 holler in excitement and is suitable for merchandising and special edition branding opportunities. Vault Boy, the vault dweller's uniform, the faux-fifties post-apocalypse — these are big budget concerns and where the series once parodied popular culture, it has now become a part of it.
With the sound and fury of the Wasteland louder than ever, it's easy to forget where it all began. The first Fallout game, released in , was as memorable for its societies of ghouls and weird religions as for its between-times flavour. It's a wonderfully liberating game. Interplay throws so many ideas at the wall, it doesn't matter when a few slither to the ground rather than sticking. There's a richness and weirdness to the tonal shifts — from grave survivalism and harrowing oppression to B-movie trashiness and Dr Who references — that the shift to 3D has never entirely recaptured.
Most importantly, beneath all of the surface feeling there is a solid RPG system that encourages playful experimentation rather than determined min-maxing. It's a system entirely in keeping with the unexpected playfulness of the setting. Darkest Dungeon would be an inventive and challenging roguelike even without its two major innovations: ongoing, reactive narration and an extended investigation into the psychological effects of repeatedly chucking adventurers into dungeons full of unspeakable horrors.
The more you make them fight, down there in the dark, the more vices and phobias they develop, steadily becoming greater liabilities even as their skills improve. This is presuming you can keep them alive in the first place, of course. The Dungeon has a high turnover. Where the Bioware model of RPGs has you chat to team members at length to keep them happy, Darkest Dungeon is a thoughtful - and stressful - management game.
The papercraft visual style is a treat too, while the turn-based combat is massively strategic and full of deadly variety. After the delightful Dungeon Master tribute that was first-person RPG Legend Of Grimrock, Almost Human could likely have rested on those laurels and created another series of descending dungeons packed with monsters and puzzles.
But they decided to go bigger, and indeed better. Grimrock II takes things upstairs and outdoors, with an enormous, sprawling map of multiple regions, to explore one tile at a time. Ooh, and that fireball spell - what a treat. You create a character, and then wander a huge world looking for an army to recruit. To begin with, you're crap at everything, but through play your mental and physical stats improve. You win fights, use your winnings to pay and grow your army, and win bigger fights.
When not hitting things with swords or poking them with spears, you deal with a dynamic economy of traders and caravans, do jobs for the criminal underworld, or try to woo the nobles. Where previous games in the series painted every part of your adventures with a broad brush, Bannerlord dives down into the details.
There are more weapons and different kinds of soldiers to hire, and more complexity to combat. There's more variety in jobs to perform and far less repeated dialogue. Each system is now more interesting to tinker with, and you need a lot less imagination - or fewer mods - to string those systems into a fun story than before.
The only caveat is that Bannerlord remains in early access, with balancing and bug fixing still in progress. New Vegas crafts a more believable world than any other Fallout game to date.
Where the other games in the post-nuclear series have been crammed with colour and flavour but somewhat lacking in theme, Obsidian's take on the Wasteland borrows inspiration from the water wars of Chinatown and the great Western land grab. It asks how and why people will struggle to survive in a place that is at best inhospitable and at worst outright hostile to human survival, and it plants the player character in the burned-out remains of a region that was already parched before the bombs fell.
There's an attempt to make sense of the weird clash of cultures and styles that had become a hallmark of Fallout's world and it's all wrapped in a story, engine and reputation system flexible enough to allow for free-form roleplaying within the boundaries of its blighted territories.
A common dream, and one which is indulged by the Victorian astro-wanderers of Sunless Skies. Like its predecessor, this is often a game about turning your ship slowly around to fire steampunk cannons at unimaginable horrors. There is horror here, yes, but there is also wonder. By rewinding the timeline to centuries before the original films, they had free reign to use everything we so badly wanted to see in a Star Wars game without any fear of toe-treading.
Monster Hunter: World is about being the most fashionably efficient beast killer in the jungle or desert, or swamp. It has a story campaign about catching a gargantuan beast, along with some questionable ecological practices.
But really this is a solid turn-your-brain-off tramp through a detailed landscape, full of slow, careful brawls with giant beasts after which you collect their skulls to wear as bone helmets. There is so much gear to craft. Scaley kneepads, massive hammers, pooey slingshots - you will make use of all these and more to track and tranquilise a big fire-breathing T-Rex.
All this gear-chasing does mean there is the endless levelling-up feel of an MMO at times, but when you stumble across a new species, part Jesus lizard, part Jaguar, all that dissipates like a puff of tranquiliser gas, and another long fight begins. NEO Scavenger initially seems like a roguelike. You wake up in a cryogenic facility with no idea as to who or where you are, and then stumble across a countryside wasteland populated by mutated animals, radioactive sludge, and most terrifyingly, other NPC humans trying to survive in the wilderness.
You get in a fight and you die. Wizard Play now. Wild Terra 2: New Lands Play now. League of Angels — Heaven's Fury Play now. Subterrain Sci-fi space survival horror with a huge open world and procedural generation of game content. Styx: Shards of Darkness Stealth-action game series featuring RPG elements and unique story about the adventures of a goblin thief.
Devil May Cry 5 The latest instalment in the legendary series of slasher games about demon hunter. Stardew Valley Indie roleplaying video game in a farming simulator genre.
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