Since its release in the summer of 1999, Deus Ex has become one of the most beloved games on PC. Set in a bleak cyberpunk future, Ion Storm’s ambitious first-person RPG, which was directed by Warren Spector, features deep systems, sprawling levels, emergent play, and a thrilling, conspiracy-laden plot. But one afternoon in Austin, Texas, where the game was developed, designer Harvey Smith and other members of the team were convinced that the game they’d been working on for years was destined for failure. 

“We brought in Caroline Spector, Warren’s wife, and she was the first person outside of the team to play it,” says Smith. “She got off the boat at the dock and she picked up a box and threw it into the water. She got into the water and swam around. She tried to interact with a seagull. Then she tried to float on top of the crate.” 

It’s worth noting that, in 1999, being able to manipulate physics objects like this in a realistic, simulated world was more of a novelty. And so this experimentation continued for 20 minutes as Harvey and the others watched over her shoulder, suddenly filled with dread. “We were gnashing our teeth,” remembers Smith. “We were like ‘God, we’ve fucking failed. She’s not even starting the mission! She’s just screwing around on the dock with all the stuff I put on there’.” 

But then, suddenly, she turned to the anxious developers and told them in no uncertain terms that this was the most fun she’d ever had playing a game. “We were like ‘Holy shit! She enjoyed that?’. So we just doubled down on these quiet moments in the levels and the object physics. We already believed in these things ourselves, but it was very validating to hear it from someone else.” 

Liberty Island, where New York City’s famous Statue of Liberty is perched, is the first level in Deus Ex. It’s a trial by fire, thrusting newly minted anti-terror agent JC Denton into the middle of a terrorist occupation of the island. It’s also the perfect introduction to Deus Ex’s unsurpassed freedom of play, with multiple ways to infiltrate the complex and deal with the terrorists holed up there. 

“Warren had grown up in New York and he wanted to feature locations like Battery Park and Liberty Island,” says Smith, who was behind much of the design of Liberty Island and other locations in Deus Ex. “And honestly, as a kid from Texas, I had no idea about these places and had never even visited them. But I still ended up inheriting a bunch of those maps, and it was Liberty Island that excited me the most because it was this big, open space. 

“I’d seen corridors, streets, and alleys before in games. But what I really wanted to do was make a wide open space with something big in the middle that you could go left or right around. I could put tunnels under it, I could make it multi-tiered so you could climb to the top. That felt really different and exciting. 

“When we shipped the game, Liberty Island ran at five frames per second on some machines. We’d see the frame rate nosedive because we had too many characters and the sight lines were too long. But we were making these huge, open levels because that’s the kind of game we wanted to make. A go anywhere game.”

Going underground

Once Denton has successfully dealt with the terrorist attack he returns to his headquarters for a debriefing—which, conveniently enough, is also located on Liberty Island. The underground UNATCO base, one of Deus Ex’s most memorable locations, is stuffed with characters to meet, secrets to discover, and world-building to ingest. But, Smith reveals, the game wasn’t always structured this way. 

“The original idea was that you turn up for your first day of work, get briefed, and meet your colleagues,” says Smith. The first Ultima Underworld, one of Smith’s favourite games, begins with the player in a hostile environment. The sequel, which he found wildly disappointing, starts with you hanging out in a castle chatting to people. “So rather than open Deus Ex with Denton turning up at the office, we started with the mission instead. 

“It was one of those epiphanies that comes mid-stream. By reversing this one thing, it changed everything. What if the terrorist attack was happening on your first day at work? It’s completely ludicrous and implausible, of course. But nonetheless, it was fun. You were immediately solving problems and doing shit.” 

This way, getting into UNATCO—the entrance to which is tantalisingly locked when you first encounter it—is a reward for completing the mission. “It also gave us the chance to reflect on how you played,” says Smith. “Which direction you took, what objectives you completed, who you met, and whether you behaved ethically.” 

An example of this is killing the unarmed terrorist leader you find at the top of the statue—do so and you’ll be harshly reprimanded. On the other hand, if you knock the terrorists out rather than kill them you’ll be commended for it. By some characters, anyway—the UNATCO grunts are not impressed by your pacifist methodology. This kind of granular reactivity defines Deus Ex, and was made possible by the limitations of the technology the game was built on. 

“Because the fidelity was so low, this wasn’t that hard to do,” says Smith. “That’s the problem with games now—the fidelity is so high that to support something you have to do it well. That’s a lot of work, which means you can only support so many things. But in Deus Ex we could just throw you a datalink or have some guy flapping his muppet mouth at you. We actually had this simple tech that would analyse audio files so NPCs’ mouths kinda matched what was being said. 

“We could also change the text in an email at the last minute or even easily re-record a line of dialogue because the guy who voiced JC [Jay Anthony Franke] worked in Dallas at Ion Storm. We tried to do the same in Dishonored, to account for everything a player would do, but it was much heavier lifting in that game.”

Liberty Island is a difficult level, especially if it’s your first time playing the game. If Deus Ex was made today it would likely be laden with tutorials, pop-up hints, and other hand- holding. “It’s almost like a test,” says Smith. “All the systems are in place in that level. But we did backtrack and add some things to ease you in.” This included JC’s brother, Paul Denton, meeting you on the south dock and offering you a selection of weapons to suit different play styles.

“I’ve always said that if you make your game super streamlined then you try to add depth later, that’s a hard road to walk,” says Smith.

“But if you make it as deep, emergent, and layered as possible, but then you figure out how to ease people into that, the end result is much better. Liberty Island was us testing that theory.”

But making design decisions like this was never easy at Ion Storm. Although Smith enjoyed working there, things were often made difficult by conflicting opinions about what Deus Ex should be. “The team was a weird combination of tech nerds and pen-and-paper nerds coming together,” he says.

“A more narrow slice of society than we have in game dev now. The industry is definitely more interesting and a lot more diverse now. That said, I loved Ion Storm, and I learned a lot from every single person I worked with there. But there was a schism. Three different factions were at odds, and that often involved trying to convince Warren that we were making one kind of game and not another. One part of the team, some of whom had come from shooter backgrounds, wanted to make an FPS like GoldenEye. Another group came from Origin and wanted to make an Origin-style role-playing game, but from a first-person perspective. Another was in love with Looking Glass, specifically Ultima Underworld and System Shock.”

This led to fights and compromises. One team would feel bad that they lost, another would be delighted that their values won out, and vice versa. “Some of us wanted the speed, movement, and precision of a modern first-person shooter,” says Smith. “Others wanted the world-building and atmosphere of a Looking Glass game. Then, over time, these elements began to overlap.”

Free rein

Liberty Island was a source of conflict, particularly when it came to determining how much freedom the player should be afforded at this early stage of the game. “We had people on the team who thought the first level should be about using one set of powers, then the next should be about another set,” says Smith. “A lot of classic games are structured like that, but another group of us thought that everything in Deus Ex should be possible all the time. It should be your decisions as a player that drive you, not the game itself.” 

Some people also thought that each style of play should be clearly delineated: a branching hallway, for instance, would lead to a stealth path and a combat path. “But we thought there should be the potential for stealth and combat in each hallway,” says Smith. “If you do that wrong it gets messy and doesn’t have any identity. But we developed rules about encounter spaces, like having a negative space between them to give the player contrast. That’s why there are empty areas on Liberty Island, to give you quiet, reflective moments.” 

About halfway through the development of Deus Ex it was decided that every level should support stealth, combat, and hacking. “You can have other stuff too, like maybe a bribery path,” says Smith. “Giving a guard some money to turn the other way, something like that. But overall those three styles had to be fluidly supported. 

“One thing that really helped us, and I don’t think this gets enough attention, is that during the development of Deus Ex, System Shock 2, one of the Thief games, and Half-Life came out,” adds Smith. “So we had the opportunity to play these games and take things away from them. That really helped Deus Ex.” 

While Deus Ex was a team effort created by many talented people, the nature of game development at the turn of the millennium meant that Smith was able to get much more hands-on than he can today, even down to designing individual props for the levels. “To get anything into a game these days, even a chair, you need a massive army of people, sometimes using external dev partners,” he says. “So everything has to be super documented and thought about. It goes out, it comes back, you make adjustments. It’s a huge undertaking. 

“But when we were making Deus Ex I spent one day in Unreal vertex-manipulating various pieces of furniture. I made tables, chairs, beds, everything. Then I made a separate level on the network that was just called ‘furniture’ or whatever, and it was full of them for people to use. This isn’t a humble brag. It’s just that, back then, one person could jam out of a lot of stuff. Now we have an environment team, an architecture team, and a level design team.”

Almost 20 years later, people are still playing Deus Ex, evidence of the depth and quality of its design, not to mention the talent and vision of the people who designed it. It’s amazing that from such a conflicted studio emerged a game that has so firmly stood the test of time. It may look uglier with every passing year, but Deus Ex remains an eminently playable game. Liberty Island is one of the greatest opening gambits in PC gaming and the lessons Smith learned making it have served him well over the years, notably in the wonderful Dishonored series, which he directed. “Along with Dishonored,” he says. “Deus Ex is one of the few times in my career where I’ve just non-stop played a game I’ve been working on and it hasn’t felt like a chore.”

In the era of old games made new, there's hardly a classic game out there that isn't being remastered or recreated. For those that don't have official new versions, modders have begun making their own remasters using machine learning to create higher resolution versions of a game's original textures. 

Below we've cataloged all the AI upscaling mods we know of so far with notes on how far textures have been upscaled from the originals, the machine learning framework used to create the new images, and of course a link to download and try them yourself. 

Some mods are complete overhauls, while others only replace background images, UI elements, or characters. We've given a quick overview for each on what you can expect them to handle.

Deus Ex: New Vision 2.0

Download here | Tech not listed | Resolution not listed

New Vision 2.0 is an experimental, alternate version to New Vision 1.5 by the same creators. While the original New Vision version is a project that replaces the majority of Deus Ex's textures with new versions created by artists, New Vision 2.0 instead uses AI upscaling. The creators say that while both versions will remain available as options, New Vision 2.0 is "much better suited to those who prefer the original art style and want as close to the 'classic' look and feel as possible."

Doom: Doom Neural Upscale

Download here | NVidia GameWorks Super Resolution & Topaz AI | 2x Original

Doom's neural upscale is an interesting case in which the creator originally upscaled Doom's textures to 8x the original resolution than then downscaled back to 2x in order to regain the pixelated look of the original game. The creator also provides the 8x and 6x original files created by the AI before being retouched for others to experiment with.

Dark Souls Remastered: ESGRAN Upscaled UI

Download here | ESRGAN | Resolution not listed

So far, this upscale mod for Dark Souls Remastered only upscales UI icons. The creator mentions in the comments that they are also attempting to upscale environment textures but have so far not had luck importing the new textures in either the Prepare to Die or Remastered versions of Dark Souls. 

The Elder Scrolls III Morrowind: Morrowind Enhanced Textures

Download here | ESRGAN | 4x Original

The Morrowind Enhanced Textures mod replaces 100-percent of Morrowind's game textures. If you're looking to return to Morrowind with a fresh face before the Skywind project comes out, this is a good way to do it.

Final Fantasy VII: Remako Mod

Download here | Gigapixel AI | 4x Original

The Remako mod for FFVII upscales background textures, battle textures, and even the full-motion videos for the game. The detail added especially in FFVII's backgrounds is particularly impressive, though the process needed to properly upscale its full-motion videos is worth noting as well. 

"The Steam version of FF7 might have had Full Motions Videos (FMVs) with a resolution of 1280x896, in reality, these were actually 320x224 videos blown up to a larger resolution. So I had to go through all of the game's 100+ FMVs, scale them down to their actual size before upscaling them again with my AI-powered upscaling tool. Now they actually have a HD resolution of 1280x896."

Final Fantasy IX: Moguri Mod

Download here | Tech not listed | Resolution not listed

Like Remako for FFVII, the most noticeable difference in the Moguri mod for FFIX is the background textures. The amount of detail added by AI is particularly impressive in all the natural, green environments. The Moguri mod only works with the Steam version of FFIX. It does a bit more than textures though, also adding in 15 new soundtracks by Pontus Hultgren. 

GTA: Vice City: AI Enhanced Textures for Vice City

Download here | Tech not listed | 4x Original 

This upscale mod for Vice City replaces most of the game's textures. Interestingly, not all original textures come from the PC version of Vice City. Some textures from the Xbox, PS2, and mobile versions of Vice City were used as they had higher resolution than the native PC counterparts. In order to use the upscaled textures for the Steam version of Vice City, you'll have to downgrade your game version to 1.0, which the modder explains just a bit on their page.

Half-Life: Half-Life Textures Upscaled

Download here | ESRGAN| Resolution not listed

This upscale for Half-Life isn't super well-documented but it appears that the uploader has replaced all of the environment and character model textures in its latest version. You can find a link to download the files from a Google Drive space in the description for the video above. 

Hexen: Hexen Neuro x4 Textures

Download here | Gigapixel AI & ESRGAN | 4x Original 

Hexen's original art style seems to play really well with upscaling by Gigapixel AI and ESRGAN in this upscale mod. According to its description, this mod upscales more than 3500 textures for Hexen. 

Knights of the Old Republic I & II: Complete Character Overhaul

KOTOR I & KOTOR II | ESRGAN | 2048x2048 resolution

Modder Red11by has created two different mods, one for Knights of the Old Republic and its sequel. Both should upscale textures for all NPCs in each game and all armors. 

Max Payne: Max Payne Remastered

Download here | ESRGAN | 8x Original 

This Max Payne mod replaces what the uploader estimates as 95% of the game's textures. As with other upscale mods increasing detail on human faces, it's a bit eerie seeing higher resolution faces on lower polycount character models. 

Resident Evil HD Remaster: REupscale project

Download here | Gigapixel AI |  Resolution not listed

This mod for the Resident Evil HD Remaster replaces almost all of the textures in the new version of Resident Evil with upscaled and then manually corrected versions. However it doesn't replace rooms that were created in 3D for the remaster. In the future, modder Shiryu64 is planning to update the game's UI, background textures, and cutscenes as well.

Red Faction: Red Faction AI Upscaled Textures

Download here | Gigapixel AI| 4x Original  

The Gigapixel AI upscaled mod for Red Faction is supposedly complete, including upscaled versions for all of the game's textures.

Star Wars Jedi Knight: Dark Forces II: Jedi Knight Neural Upscale

Download here | ESRGAN | Resolution not listed

This upscale mod for Jedi Knight: Dark Forces II is usable as-is though modder "TreeMarmot" cautions that they have not been retouched to correct and visual oddities. They intend for this mod to be used as a jumping-off point for other modders to create their own high resolution versions with corrections and touchups.

Sonic Adventure 2: Sonic Adventure 2 Neuro-AI

Download here | Gigapixel AI | 4x/8x Original

This mod for Sonic Adventure Battle 2 upscales level textures by 4x original resolution and skybox textures by 8x. According to the modder, this mod "does not include Weapons Bed, Eternal Engine, Egg Quarters, Lost Colony, Cosmic Wall, Chao Neutral Garden, Boss Levels (except Big Foot) or in-game cut-scenes except the first two in Hero story." They are planning to include those areas in subsequent releases of the mode.

Turok 2: HD Textures (ESRGAN AI upscaled)

Download here | ESRGAN | 4x Original 

This mod for upscaling Turok 2 isn't well-documented but claims to include textures for the entire game.

Great moments in PC gaming are bite-sized celebrations of some of our favorite gaming memories. 

Horror's great when it's contrasted with not-horror. If it's all spooks all the time that can get tiring, but when you aren't constantly being frightened until your bones climb out your mouth and run away, you start to relax—and that makes the eventual explosion into real horror work even better. That's how it is with the Ocean House Hotel in Bloodlines, and that's how it is with the Shalebridge Cradle in Thief: Deadly Shadows. 

By this third game in the series you feel like a proper master thief, able to slide into any building and immediately start taking it over, one unconscious guard at a time. When you break into the Cradle, a former orphanage turned asylum turned abandoned haunted house, that feeling gets turned on its head. The building itself has become a living malevolent being, a witness to so many nightmares that it's stuck repeating them forever. You're not breaking into a building, but entering the psychic landscape created by everyone who ever lived there.

Asylums are normally cheap creeps in videogames, but the Shalebridge Cradle avoids some of the cliches. "The doctors are just as scary as the patients" as one of the notes hidden there reads, and it's the discovery of how those patients were mistreated that provides a significant part of the horror. Lobotomized, branded, heads and hands encased in protective wire cages, subjected to something called "the wet-wraps treatment", they've now been transformed into puppets. The staff also persist as shadowy figures, nonchalantly going about their business as the memory of the fire that eventually led to the Cradle being closed down burns in perpetuity around them.

Thief: Deadly Shadows is a stealth game, but the greatest act of stealth in it is the way it sneaks this horror show in unexpectedly, even though the series is famous for its scary levels. Like a bottle episode of a TV show, the Cradle level focuses on a single location to get all the drama it can out of the situation, but it's a bottle that's slowly filling and you're liable to drown.

Everyone's got alien fever—and not the kind that turns the veins in your face black and makes you vomit and die. Recently, the idea of banding together to storm Area 51 to finally meet the aliens housed there has taken hold on the brave and the bored alike. The plan was hatched by a Facebook event scheduled for September 20 and nearly two million people agreed to it.

And today is the day! People (not two million of them, though) are actually in the desert near Area 51.

Luckily, we don't actually need to storm Area 51 because video games have already done it. Repeatedly! Not to mention, loads of new games have been slapped together based on the Storm Area 51 event. Here's everything we know about storming Area 51 without having to actually do it ourselves, as predicted by video games.

We might not find aliens in there

I know, I know. The idea of storming Area 51 and not actually finding aliens sounds ridiculous! But there is a very, very slim chance that there are no aliens in Area 51 at all. It's possible that super intelligent alien beings may never have flown an impossibly advanced spacecraft across the entire universe, then suddenly forgot how the brakes worked and crashed in New Mexico back in 1947. It's also possible (though highly unlikely!) that after 70 solid years of people constantly yelling about how there are definitely aliens at Area 51, the government may have relocated them to, I don't know, literally anywhere else. Far-fetched, yes! But it's possible.

This weird, silly theory that you can stroll into Area 51 and not find aliens is held up by GTA: San Andreas. CJ gets a mission to Area 69, which is based on Area 51. (Fun fact: the '69' isn't just a random number! It's a reference to a sex act in which partners perform oral sex on each other simultaneously. Oh, Rockstar.)

After CJ breaks into Area 69, all he finds is a jetpack. Not that jetpacks aren't cool! They're just not alien cool. There are several PA announcements that reference alien bodies and spacecrafts, but we never see them in the game. So don't be surprised if storming Area 51 doesn't result in finding space travelers—and if there is a jetpack, all 1.9 million of us gonna have to figure out how to share it.

If there are aliens, they're not gonna be the cuddly type

There have been several games about Area 51, most notably, Area 51. The 2005 FPS is based on the 1995 arcade light-gun game Area 51, and was followed up by 2007's Blacksite: Area 51. In all of those games, the aliens aren't super happy to meet us.

In the 2005 version, an alien ship crashed in Roswell and that alien was voiced by Marilyn Manson. As you might guess, Alien Manson teams up with the Illuminati to create a mutant virus to dominate the planet. A bored-sounding David Duchovny (to be fair, 'bored' is his default setting) invades Area 51 to stop them, and sort of fails. There's a lot of shooting of both humans and aliens, not a warm and fuzzy meet-and-greet.

It's going to be overly expensive and shut down early

Storming Area 51 is going to cost way more than it should and it's going to end before we're ready. I'm basing this prophecy on our review of the Alienware Area 51m gaming laptop, which cost nearly $5,000 when we looked at it back in May (it has since dropped to around 2 grand). The battery life also wasn't great, lasting less than three hours, so expect an early end to the festivities.

"Powerful as it is, the Area-51m still gets hot and loud—not that it particularly matters since it's much too heavy to put on your lap—and its battery life sucks," our review states. "2 hours and 52 minutes of downstreamed video is nothing for a 90 watt-hour battery that needs two comically sized power bricks to charge."

Be prepared for alien corpses, a teleporter to the moon, floating apples, and zombies

If you think storming Area 51 is just about finding aliens, you're wrong. That's just one of the wonderful features it has to offer. There's lots of other great reasons to visit, like finding an apple hovering in some sort of futuristic electromagnetic field, or finding a teleporter that will take you to the moon, or being attacked by wave after wave of zombies.

That's what Call of Duty: Black Ops and Black Ops 3 tells us, anyway, and there's really no reason to doubt either of them. No worries, there are still aliens to be found. They're dead and under sheets, but they're still perfectly available for a great insta story.

If you're Superman, don't come along

This is specifically for people who are Superman, so if you're not Superman, please skip to the next entry. As for you, Superman, you might not want to storm Area 51 with the rest of us because that's where the government keeps all its kryptonite, that glowing green rock that turns you into a weak, sweaty little weenie.

This information comes from DC Universe Online, where Martian Manhunter alerts everyone to Brainiac's plan of invading Area 51 to acquire the kryptonite supply. And you (Superman) probably don't want to help us break into Area 51 only to get inside and then flop to the ground all helpless and trembling while two million people stand around staring at you, right? So maybe sit this one out.

Get ready to do a lot of corner peeking

If I were going to raid a classified military installation, I'd probably bring a few Arma players along. Yes, it would take absolutely forever, because they'd be creeping along corner peeking for, like, hours. If you have an entire afternoon to kill, for example, you can watch a squad invade a modded Area 51 and fight a bunch of aliens in the video above.

Slow, yes. But better safe than sorry. And in addition to Area 51 mods, Arma 3 players will have an official alien-related expansion coming out, coincidentally, July 25.

Wear sunblock because we might get nuked

In Deus Ex, the Illuminati is cancelled but there's something worse: Majestic 12. They claim Area 51 as their headquarters and use it to develop new technologies—turns out the aliens in Area 51 didn't crash land there, they were actually created by Majestic 12 using the DNA of different creatures including, possibly, cows.

Without getting into all the reasons why, a guy named JC Denton isn't a huge fan of Majestic 12 and its leader, Bob Page, and there's a chance he may decide to just nuke Area 51 to make that perfectly clear. This is precisely why you don't taunt your enemies over the radio, Bob.

It's going to suck

I know invading Area 51 sounds fun, like a big party in the desert with a lot of like-minded, curious, determined people you can hang out with until your internal organs are shredded by the bullets of US soldiers as you try to climb the fence. But it's not going to be as great as it sounds, according to Storm Area 51: September 20th 2019, an Early Access game that arrived on Steam a couple days ago.

Frankly, it's a steaming pile of shit. Sure, it's in Early Access, but it's hard to imagine this crappy game getting any better. You just clomp awkwardly around a dull map finding aliens and then leading them to an unconvincing flying saucer while brain-dead soldiers shoot in random directions and other NPCs yell things and Naruto run around uselessly.

Trust me, if storming Area 51 is gonna be anything like this game, just stay home.

Most of E3 2019 seems to be leaking this year, between Avengers details appearing on E3's own website, the classic array of Ubisoft leaks right before the event kicks off (at least a keyring isn't to blame this time), and one major rumour growing in credibility because George RR Martin mentioned a game on his blog. Nonetheless, a few surprises are guaranteed: there's always something kept under wraps for the conferences. 

But E3 is also a time for dreaming. We want to see game reveals that blow our minds—and E3 2018 had plenty of those, chiefly Cyberpunk 2077, Sekiro, and the reveal of two Bethesda RPGs (that are nonetheless years away). What's your dream E3 2019 game reveal? You'll find ours below, and we'd love to read about yours in the comments. 

Check out our E3 2019 rumours round-up if you want gossip, rather than dreams. 

Samuel Roberts: A remake of Metal Gear Solid 3 on PC

Readers, I think this game is real. I have no proof of this—just a hunch. Bluepoint Games, which has worked on a lot of HD remakes of console releases, most impressively Shadow of the Colossus, is working on a 're-envisioning' of an existing game. Those who speculate about such things have guessed it's Demon's Souls, the first in the Souls lineage that originally released on PS3.

But I think a remake of Metal Gear Solid 3, encompassing a much larger playing space than the corridor-y jungle of the original, combined with similar systems to Metal Gear Solid 5, is a more exciting bet. It's widely regarded as the best entry in the series, even if it's not the best-selling—and we are entering what I think will be a rich time for remakes of old classics, following Resident Evil 2 and the coming FF7 remake. I also hope that Konami's recent porting of old classics to Steam is part of a reawakening for the publisher. It's sitting on some of the best series in gaming history and is seemingly doing little with them. 

If I pray hard enough, it'll happen. 

Tom Senior: Space Marine 2

I'm only half joking. I love a good third-person action game and I'm not sure where my next hit is coming from. I had a great time playing through God of War last year and would like to see that level of detail and polish applied to a game that lets me play one of the Emperor's Finest. I want to mete out justice to hordes of Orks with a big hammer and look at vast skyboxes full of striding titans and orbiting battleships—is that too much to ask? Probably.

Fraser Brown: Some good Star Trek games

We're two excellent seasons into Star Trek Discovery and Picard's now coming out of retirement, so where the heck are the good Star Trek games? Only Star Trek Online has seemed to notice that there's life in the series again. What I really want is another Bridge Commander, which was a lovely middle ground between the incredible but bewildering Artemis and the half-baked Bridge Crew. Let me sit in the big chair, sip my Earl Grey and boss my crew around. 

Malindy Hetfeld: Star Trek games, or Tacoma 2

Fraser beat me to it. I've loved Star Trek for a long time, and what did I get? 2013's Star Trek game, that's what. I'm gonna go with something else instead: Tacoma 2. It's the closest thing to a Star Trek game to me and I love the characters so much I'd pay good money to see more of them. 

James Davenport: Bloodborne for PC

This is just an obligatory entry. I don't think it will ever happen. Let this entry function as the intersection of my hope and despair. More importantly, let my pain serve as an example to videogame executives. A sad man exists in the world and it is some amount of your fault. 

Steven Messner: An Ogre Battle reboot

Unless you were a very serious SNES RPG player or owned one of the rare copies of its Nintendo 64 sequel, you've probably never heard about Ogre Battle. Okay, maybe you've heard about Ogre Battle through its Final Fantasy Tactics clone that was on Game Boy Advance and PlayStation (called Tactics Ogre). But I'm talking about OGRE BATTLE, the ingenious strategy-RPG hybrid with a combat system unlike anything you've seen before. Characters can permanently die, there's a deliciously complex progression system for every unit in your army, and an excellent story that had twists and turns just like Game of Thrones. 

Ogre Battle 64 was a mind-blowing, life-defining game for 12-year-old me, and I've spent many years of my life hoping against all hope that Atlus would see fit to resurrect the series in some way. I used to dream about what such a complex and nuanced RPG would look like with a fresh coat of HD paint (or hell, even an up-rezzed version of its charming, original aesthetic). I'm sure there's lots of other potential dream announcements that could get me bouncing with excitement, but if I ever saw Atlus revive Ogre Battle I would eat my shoes.

It's a great game.

Chris Livingston: Red Dead Redemption 2 for PC

Come on. Fer cryin' out loud. Just put it on PC. For months I've been watching gifs and videos and I can't take it anymore. I wanna play it. I wanna understand all the memes. I wanna ride horsies and fall off horsies and get in fights and lose fights and fight bears and get killed by bears. Just do it! Announce it! Put it on PC.

Andy Chalk: Thief 3 (no, not Deadly Shadows)

Yeah, Deadly Shadows is technically Thief 3 but Deadly Shadows also doesn't measure up to the first two games very well. So, a do-over: We pretend DS didn't happen and pick up where The Metal Age left off, with Stephen Russell back in the saddle as Garrett. It's a nice mix of sprawling monster missions and tight B&E jobs, with an overarching plot that doesn't tie itself up in convoluted "Garrett-as-chosen-one" knots. (Also, no loading screens.) And—this is important—it doesn't entirely overlook Deadly Shadows: The new game includes a remake of Robbing the Cradle, re-contextualized just enough to make it fit as a standalone mission. 

There's not much that could beat a Baldur's Gate 3 reveal (so I'm in pretty good shape as far as dream announcements go anyway) but that would do it.

Great moments in PC gaming are short, bite-sized celebrations of some of our favorite gaming memories.  

Sometimes, it's the little things. Yes, Deus Ex is a sprawling, complex conspiracy thriller that rode high in lists of the greatest games ever, but mention it, and it's rarely long before someone brings up being shouted at for going into the ladies' toilets. One of the few times a toilet has been considered a major game feature, if you don't count Infocom's text-adventure Leather Goddesses of Phobos tying your choice of toilet to in-game gender.

Of course, it’s more than just an angry bark from an NPC. It's proof that the game is watching, and taking notes on what you do, with the unspoken element of "If we’ve flagged this, what else are we flagging?" It's a demonstration that rules really are there to be broken, either through ignoring social mores, or handling a hostage situation with a shrug and some heavy explosives. Or just running away from a boss instead of fighting them, in clear violation of Shooter Character Rule 73B (no relation to 74C, which we all know is "respect the chest-high walls at all times").

It's not the first time that a game reacted to something like this, not even close. Ultima Underworld 2, for instance, would let you start attacking people in its central castle until you got thrown in jail, then let you out, and if you did it again, just put you back in there to rot. Deus Ex was part of the first wave of shooters really looking to marry action and simulation, to create the illusion of being part of a world rather than simply presenting one as target practice. Something as simple as going into the wrong toilet was a way of showing that even non-violent actions could have consequences, and that the simulation was complex enough to be able to sweat those little details as well as the big stuff. In practice, it never really does anything like that again, and many of the bigger features like the enemy AI were, well, less than groundbreaking.

That doesn't matter. It only takes a few moments to sell an illusion and encourage you to play a little smarter, a little more in keeping with your assigned role in the game. And if you want to break out of that for your own amusement? That's always pretty entertaining too.

The original Thief trilogy is still considered a high-water mark for stealth games by many people, and if you're one of them you probably already know about The Dark Mod. It's the place to go to get your fix of fan missions made in a new engine— specifically, the Doom 3 engine, whose lighting effects are put to good use in maps like those highlighted in our list of the best Dark Mod missions. (In addition to those I'm partial to Creeps, a spooky little horror experience.)

In spite of the name The Dark Mod's a standalone you don't need to own Doom 3 to play, and you can download it for free. It's still being updated today and the latest version is The Dark Mod 2.07. Called "the stability release", it sorts out various problems introduced by the inclusion of things like soft shadows, an uncapped framerate, and multi-core processor support in the previous update. It also sneaks in some new features like faster mantling over small objects, better AI for some very specific situations like when you flashbomb someone who is sitting down, and more you can read about over at ModDB.

It's not really a groundbreaking release, but it's still worth highlighting because well-supported projects like The Dark Mod are one of the things that's great about PC gaming. If you were at all into Thief: The Dark Project and its sequels you should check it out.

Thief: The Dark Project turned 20 years old this week—if you missed Richard's piece on how it defined the stealth game, then you should really give it a read. To celebrate the occasion, the community over at Through The Looking Glass released 24 new fan-made missions as part of a design contest, and you have until March 1 of next year to vote for your favourite. 

The creators all had a year to build their maps using the game's level editor, and could only use stock assets. If you want to get started, it's best to start on this forum post, which has instructions on how to download all the levels and score them for the competition.

From that page, you'll also be able to click through to individual forum threads for each mission. If you don't know where to start, reading the comments on those posts might give you an idea of which ones you'll enjoy, as well as some pointers for if you get stuck.

To play the fan missions using either Thief: The Dark Project or Thief: Gold, which is the updated version for sale in digital stores, you'll need to TFix, an all-in-one patch. Instructions on how to do that are here. As mentioned on the Through The Looking Glass forum thread, you should disable all the optional features TFix offers, such as Thief 2 textures, and avoid using any other enhancement packs or HD texture packs.

Happy hunting. 

When I think of Human Revolution, I think of black and gold. Few big-budget games have such a distinctive look, but that’s part of what makes Eidos Montreal’s prequel so immediately striking. As a Deus Ex fan, I was sceptical when I heard a new game was in development. But then I saw those first screenshots, of a futuristic Detroit bathed in shades of black and gold, and knew the series was in good hands. 

“That’s the first thing I said when I started on the project,” said art director Jonathan Jacques-Belletête when I interviewed him back in 2011. “I wanted the game to be very distinct. You see one screenshot and you know it’s Human Revolution. Art in games isn’t just about shaders, ambient occlusion, parallax mapping, or anything like that. It’s about ideas. And in that sense, the aesthetic is a crucial part of our game.” 

Set in 2027, 25 years before the first game, the prequel begins with Adam Jensen, head of security for Sarif Industries, being critically wounded in a terrorist attack. On the brink of death, Jensen is saved by his boss, David Sarif, who reconstructs his body with experimental cybernetic augmentations. An upgrade he, famously, never asked for, but that gives him the power to hunt the people responsible down. 

Part of Jensen’s appeal is his gravelly voice and deadpan delivery, which come courtesy of actor Elias Toufexis. “They had a specific voice in mind,” he tells me. “If I remember correctly, they wanted a tribute to JC Denton from the original game and Clint Eastwood. In the sequel I had more say and was allowed to bring additional nuance and texture to the performance, but Jensen’s voice is essentially my normal voice.”

Unlikely hero

While JC Denton was trained from an early age as a counter-terrorism agent and fitted with advanced, discrete nanoaugs, Jensen is thrust into the events of Human Revolution against his will, and his body is constantly fighting against his new implants. He, and other augmented humans in this dystopian world, need a steady supply of an expensive drug called Neuropozyne to prevent their bodies from rejecting the augmentations and killing them. 

Add to that a general distrust of augmented people from so-called ‘naturals’, which boils over in the sequel, and life with cybernetic implants is often more trouble than it’s worth – even if you can punch through a concrete wall and run faster than a gazelle. Of course, for the player, Jensen’s augmentations are an incredible amount of fun to experiment with, and make for a wonderfully diverse immersive sim. 

For the stealth-conscious cyberpunk there’s the Glass-Shield Cloaking System, which lets you turn invisible for up to seven seconds when fully upgraded. You can also upgrade the Hermes Cybernetic Leg Prosthesis to jump to superhuman heights, opening up new ways to sneak into places. Stealth is the most satisfying way to play Human Revolution, with multiple paths through the sprawling levels and plenty of vents to squeeze through. 

But if you’d rather make a mess, you can upgrade your Cybernetic Arm Prosthesis to reduce weapon recoil and throw heavy objects at people. Or use the Typhoon Explosive System to turn yourself into a human grenade, unleashing a blast of lethal shrapnel, taking out multiple enemies at once, including security robots. It’s a hugely entertaining collection of powers, and combining them to create your own bespoke play style is an important part of what makes the game great.

But, really, it’s the world that draws me back to Human Revolution. It’s one of the most visually compelling visions of the future on PC, with a cluttered, lived-in feel that transcends the dated visuals. Both cities, Detroit and Hengsha, feel slightly claustrophobic and boxy by today’s standards, but the visual flourishes—particularly the neon billboards and that dramatic double-stacked metropolis—still look fantastic. It remains an incredibly atmospheric setting, weighted by Michael McCann’s moody, understated score and some richly immersive ambient sound design.

“I approached our producer, David Anfossi, early in preproduction and told him that I’d need to design like 1,400 props,” says Jacques-Belletête. “Anything from cool sci-fi machinery, a given for this kind of game, to coffee cups and keyboards. I wanted every object to have its own concept art and individual furniture sets for different offices. He could have turned me down right then and there, but at Eidos Montreal we believe this kind of detail is absolutely necessary to create a believable world. We had to invent a hundred brands and company names, as well as their logos, which is expensive to do, but really adds to the richness of the setting. 

“There are very few designs where I just let the concept artist come up with something in their head,” he adds. “We were always looking at real-world designs for inspiration, because I wanted every object to have at least some basis in reality. Some people said it was too futuristic, while others said it wasn’t futuristic enough. But I read a lot of Ray Kurzweil (author of The Age of Intelligent Machines), and he thinks tech will be even more advanced than what we’ve portrayed.” 

But which version should you play? The original release of Human Revolution caught deserved flack for its awful boss battles, which didn’t respect the player’s augmentation choices, forcing stealthy players into combat situations. “I’m a shooter guy and I’m coming into this not knowing a lot about Deus Ex,” said Grip Entertainment president Paul Kruszewski, the company the boss battles were outsourced to, in a revealing behind-the-scenes video. 

But in the 2014 Director’s Cut, the boss battles were overhauled, giving you additional ways to beat them—including, importantly, stealth options. This version also includes the brilliant Missing Link DLC, AI improvements, and better lighting—although, for some reason, the divisive gold fi lter has been massively reduced, stripping away some of the game’s visual identity. If you can deal with that, the Director’s Cut is almost certainly the best way to play Human Revolution today.

Script notes

Seven years on, this is still a great immersive sim, and well worth revisiting. The weak link is the writing and story. I love Jensen, which is probably more to do with Toufexis’ performance than the actual script, but there’s something slightly cartoonish and unconvincing about his supporting cast. And the various parallels to contemporary society and culture have all the fi nesse of a drunk gorilla swinging a baseball bat—something Eidos Montreal doubled down on in the next game, Mankind Divided. That said, the story does provide a few memorable moments. 

In an interview this year with PCGamesN, David Anfossi admitted that while he considers Deus Ex the “brand of the studio”, no third game is currently in the works. “We’re a big studio with close to 500 people now, but at the same time we’re working on three other projects. When it’s time for Deus Ex, it’ll be time, and we’ll do it correctly.” So Deus Ex isn’t dead, but we might not play a new one for a while—which is as good an excuse as any to return to Detroit for another stint as Adam Jensen.

For a constantly updated list of our favorite games on PC, check out our list of the best PC games right now. 

Every year, the PC Gamer team embarks on an epic quest to choose the top 100 PC games. Where previously we voted for our favourite games, this year we talked: discussing each of our nominations and deciding which games should make the list. The result is a more honest, considered reflection of our conflicting tastes and opinions as PC gamers.

This list represents what we think are the greatest PC games you can play today. We wanted to celebrate the breadth and variety of PC gaming, and so, for the most part, have restricted ourselves to one game per series. You'll also find a selection of personal picks: games we individually love that didn't quite make the cut. Enjoy!

If you're looking for a list of the games that helped shape PC gaming as we know it, try the 50 most important PC games of all time.

100. Path of Exile

RELEASED 2013 | LAST POSITION New entry

Steven Messner: Path of Exile has quietly become one of the best action RPGs around thanks to its almost incomprehensible depth and wildly different seasonal leagues, where whole new systems are introduced. But the best part is its character customisation and spell crafting system. Path of Exile encourages players to make marauders who let spell totems do all the killing for them, witches who melt hordes with a fiery beam, or duelists that cover every inch of the map in a deadly rain of arrows.

99. Twisted Insurrection

RELEASED 2010 | LAST POSITION New entry

John Strike: Tiberian Sun's best mod brazenly shames the original Firestorm expansion in almost every way. It’s bigger and bolder, offering new buildings, a whole fleet of new units and even a new faction. There’s a completely new musical score and dozens of single player missions, some of which are based on the original Command & Conquer. Not only are new missions and units still being added, but, as a standalone free download, it's the most accessible way to play one of C&C's greats.

98. Killing Floor 2

RELEASED 2016 | LAST POSITION 81

Evan Lahti: There are disturbingly few places in video games where I can cut an evil clown in half with a quad-barrelled shotgun. Killing Floor 2 is the world’s greatest gore effects system laid atop an enjoyable skeleton. Hordes of monsters trickle into the map, magnetized to your position, and you mulch them with buzzsaw-spitters, incendiary shotguns, rocket launchers, or a microwave cannon that heats enemies from the inside until they burst. The dynamic slow-mo system adds so much, dampening the chaos just enough—granting extra moments to take aim or take in the sight of an intestine flying across the screen. Tripwire is a skilled digital gunsmith, and the detail lent to particle effects and reload animations holds up wonderfully even under the scrutiny of these plentiful, slowed-down sequences. I also love that KF2 doesn’t simply make these mutants into bullet sponges. On higher difficulties, enemies adopt different behavioral triggers that make them genuinely harder to handle.

Wes Fenlon: The precision and teamwork it takes to play Killing Floor 2 at higher difficulties is especially thrilling. Also, I once played a community map that was monochrome purple and themed after Game Boy-era Pokémon. It was pretty bad, but I appreciated the option.

97. Night in the Woods

RELEASED 2017 | LAST POSITION New entry

Phil Savage: A coming-of-age platformer starring an anthropomorphic cat returning home to a dead-end town after dropping out of college. On paper, Night in the Woods sounds like it could be intolerable, but its relationships are so well developed—so warm and fraught and human—that it’s impossible not to get drawn into Mae's world, and to want the best for her and her friends. I particularly love the frequent use of minigames as a way to highlight the need to escape the monotony of day-to-day responsibility.

Andy Kelly: A beautiful, heartfelt story brought to life by flawed, nuanced characters who just happen to be talking animals. It says something about life, but always knows when to crack a joke—and always with perfect timing—when things get too heavy.

96. Deadly Premonition: The Director's Cut

RELEASED 2013 | LAST POSITION New entry

Philippa Warr: Deadly Premonition is always a gamble of a recommendation. It's a gamble worth taking, though, because if you get on with its strangeness and its idiosyncrasies, it rewards you with a weird and beautiful experience of a kind you don't often get in gaming. Yes, the cars handle horribly. Yes, the PC version has crashed on me extensively. Yes, it starts off more as an irritating pastiche of Twin Peaks. Yes, it has frustrating quicktime events. And yes, some reveals draw uncomfortably on lazy tropes. But within that is a supernatural-tinged mystery that alternates between survival horror third-person shooter and a horror comedy investigation. None of the game's shortcomings were dealbreakers for me and several of the characters I encountered as I hunted for the Raincoat Killer have stayed with me for the best part of a decade.

Wes: The jank may be part of the charm, but at least make sure you install Durante's DPFix, which lets you select resolutions above 720p and fixes many minor graphical issues—mitigating some of the PC port’s shortcomings.

95. Stick Shift

RELEASED 2015 | LAST POSITION New entry

Pip: Stick Shift is my go-to example of a game which invokes complex subject matter while also being really fun to play. As per developer Robert Yang's description: "Stick Shift is an autoerotic night-driving game about pleasuring a gay car." It's part of a trilogy alongside Hurt Me Plenty and Succulent, and together they explore aspects of eroticism, consent, arousal, politics and more. It's also a game where you move your mouse rhythmically, working your car to a climax.

94. Elite Dangerous

RELEASED 2014 | LAST POSITION New entry

Phil: Frontier's galactic sandbox treads a fine line between excitement and tedium. Aliens! Dogfights! Smuggling! Interdictions! Ferrying pesticides to an outpost six lightyears away! However you decide to play, though—whatever amount of excitement you desire—Elite is still a masterfully crafted spaceship simulator. I love the design and feel of its ships, particularly the holographic UI and peerless sci-fi sound design. The thrill of warping to another solar system is never entirely diminished, meaning Elite remains entertaining even if you’ve chosen the life of a glorified space trucker.

Andy: Whether it's a chunky cargo hauler or a nimble fighter, every starship in Elite has its own distinct personality. They're all a delight to fly. Even the most mundane task feels wonderfully tactile.

93. Ni No Kuni 2: Revenant Kingdom

RELEASED 2018 | LAST POSITION New entry

Andy: While the original Ni no Kuni was co-designed by Spirited Away creator Studio Ghibli, it wasn't involved in this sequel. But developer Level-5 has done fine on its own, creating a rich fantasy world with a cast of vivid characters worthy of the Ghibli name. This is a sweeping JRPG about an usurped boy king on a quest to rebuild his kingdom and reclaim his throne. It's also one of the most colourful, vibrant games on PC.

Wes: The cutscenes are remarkably Ghibli and full of pep and puns, but what really made me fall for Ni No Kuni 2 is just how many systems it layers atop systems, like a big-budget JRPG of old. The sprawling kingdom builder is the centerpiece, with characters to recruit and buildings to construct and upgrade.

92. Mu Cartographer

RELEASED 2016 | LAST POSITION New entry

Pip: Mu Cartographer is initially obtuse. You'll probably feel utterly lost as to what you’re supposed to do for a while. But once you start tinkering with all the different buttons and dials on the interface you begin to see how to explore the strange map. The peaks and troughs of digital noise on your display suddenly turn into recognisable shapes as you tweak the settings and find the sweet spot. Stepped pyramids rise up where seconds ago all you could see was a fuzzy mess.

91. Guild Wars 2

RELEASED 2012 | LAST POSITION 86

Phil: Guild Wars 2 is full of clever quality-of-life features—it's still one of the few MMOs that's figured out how to let you easily play with friends of a different level. The flow and pace of its maps are a thing of beauty, too. Groups expand and contract naturally, as people wander off to explore on their own, before coming together for a small-scale event or organising to complete a single map-wide objective. You get all the joy of cooperation without the need to commit a significant amount of your time. Just turn up and play. Then, when you eventually get tired, go off and do something else. There's also no subscription, and none of the expansions have raised the level cap, so you're free to come and go as you please, playing at your own pace without ever worrying that you're falling behind. You can play for hours every week if you want—ticking off the hardest achievements and earning the rarest loot—but I'm happy to log back in every six months or so, safe in the knowledge that I'm ready for whatever's next.

Tom: I have fought huge dragon bosses and a marionette the size of a skyscraper, and I didn't need to grind for 200 hours for the privilege. Guild Wars 2 earnestly tries to reinvent the MMO by reshaping the bullshit grinding and levelling systems that had become rote in the genre.

90. Super Mega Baseball 2

RELEASED 2018 | LAST POSITION New entry

Wes: I'm about as bad at this surprisingly deep baseball game as I am at real baseball, but as a lapsed fan of America's pastime I appreciate how good this rendition is. It walks the line between a hyper-detailed sports sim and an arcadey NBA Jam-like, with simple controls but tons of nuance in pitching and hitting.

Chris Livingston: The customization is great, letting you change everything from player abilities to team logos, and its Pennant Race mode makes every online game feel important.

89. The Stanley Parable

RELEASED 2013 | LAST POSITION New entry

Samuel Roberts: You start in an abandoned office with a narrator telling you what you're supposed to do next. If you obey his instructions it will lead you to an ending. But if you don't, you'll discover many more fascinating, exciting little stories.

Phil: An antagonistic dialogue between a man with no body and another with no voice. Weird, funny and full of ideas.

Pip: Games often struggle with comedy. The Stanley Parable manages to be consistently funny as well as whip smart.

88. Drawful 2

RELEASED 2016 | LAST POSITION New entry

Wes: A chill, surprisingly hilarious party game I can play for hours. Everyone joins in on a smartphone and gets a phrase to draw on the touchscreen, then writes their own descriptions of everyone else's drawing to trick the crowd or simply get the most laughs. It's like millennial Pictionary, so inevitably people draw a lot more dicks.

87. Nidhogg 2

RELEASED 2017 | LAST POSITION New entry

James Davenport: The back-and-forth struggles of Nidhogg were already unpredictable, but bows, axes, swords, and daggers transform simple fencing standoffs into tense, sweaty battles for control. Nidhogg 2 is an excellent way to graft friends to the couch. 

Evan: A see-sawing melee mess. No PC game produces more smile-yelling than Nidhogg 2.

86. Stephen's Sausage Roll

RELEASED 2016 | LAST POSITION New entry

Pip: Stephen's Sausage Roll and I are on a break. I can't remember exactly why, but I know that I definitely rage-quit the sausage-grilling puzzler a while ago and haven't become sufficiently not angry to go back. That isn't a criticism, though; this is the puzzle game I recommend to the friends who want a real challenge.

Phil: I managed one level.

85. Battletech

RELEASED 2018 | LAST POSITION New entry

Evan: It's turn-based MMA with walking tanks. Unlike XCOM 2, the durability and modular design of mechs makes for drawn out, back-and-forth exchanges that become micro-stories of attrition and mettle. You trade blows with an Atlas, weave and evade it, it cleaves off one of your body segments, you circle around, knock it down and KO it with a face stomp. I love BattleTech's degrees of failure. You might complete all objectives but lose your rare, damage-boosted PPC, put a pilot in a two-month coma, or have to spend every nickel you just earned fixing up your battered Highlander. The campaign wrapped around BattleTech's granular combat is a bottomless well of procedurally generated missions with a heartwarming story of underdog regal revenge at its nucleus.

84. Football Manager 2018

RELEASED 2017 | LAST POSITION New entry

Joe Donnelly: Following some less comprehensive annual instalments, Football Manager 2018 gives us the most sophisticated soccer management simulation yet, where success is no longer determined by match performance alone. Piss off the wrong combination of players, and you'll risk a dressing room revolt. Suck up to the most popular, and you'll isolate your fringe stars. You need to balance influence and social standings to prevent the beautiful game from turning ugly.

83. Thumper

RELEASED 2016 | LAST POSITION 34

Pip: I don't think many people can consciously identify a 'fast-moving rhythm action space beetle combat game with a heady metal album aesthetic' void in their lives. But it exists and Thumper can fix it.

Phil: The dark, grungy synths and unusual time signatures create a fascinatingly ominous soundscape that draws you into the claustrophobic, reactive action. Thumper offers a mesmerising blend of palpable dread and empowering mastery—at least it did for me until the later levels, which required a degree of dexterity I'm not sure I possess.

James: That scarab scrapes down the interdimensional highway at the centre of Thumper with so much speed and ferocity that the game almost literally breaks apart by the end. Nod your head to dull the pain. 

82. Euro Truck Simulator 2

RELEASED 2013 | LAST POSITION 89

Andy: The problem with simulators is that they're often badly designed, technically janky or both. But Euro Truck Simulator 2 is neither of these things. This is a deep, polished, and immensely playable driving game set in a vast, mostly accurate replica of Europe. You can drive seamlessly between countries, and there's an understated beauty to the scenery that passes you by. It's also incredibly atmospheric, especially at night or in the rain. There's no better game to play while listening to music or catching up on podcasts, and it's deeply customisable too, meaning you can make each road trip as realistic or accessible as you like, depending on how deep you want the simulation to be.

Phil: In many ways I prefer American Truck Simulator. That's not because I love weigh stations—they're fine, if that's your thing—but because America's vast, terrifying emptiness feels more isolated, more epic, and, dare I say, more romantic. Euro Truck Simulator 2, on the other hand, is dense and busy, but also muted—it's altogether greyer and more moodily atmospheric. Both games are fantastic, and which one you prefer is likely a matter of which style of road trip speaks more to your personality. How many simulation games can you say that of?

81. FTL: Faster Than Light 

RELEASED 2012 | LAST POSITION 21

Samuel: It turns out being the captain of your own spaceship is stressful as hell, but you'll take part in some great stories along the way. FTL is a superior mix of roguelike and strategy. While Into The Breach is taking its place in my life, this is still one of the best space-set games around. 

Wes: It can make for a great party game, too. Put someone in the driver's seat and let the crowd make choices. Suddenly half your ship is on fire and you've accidentally vented one of your crew into space.

80. Stalker: Call of Pripyat

RELEASED 2010 | LAST POSITION 41

Chris: This grim and unforgiving open world FPS never turns you into an invincible superhero. No matter how much gear and weaponry you scrounge from the irradiated exclusion zone, you're still mortal and fragile, alone in a terrifying world of mutants, monsters, and roaming factions of AI-controlled humans. This lends Stalker an unending tension and fills every encounter with dread. From start to finish, there's a sense that at any moment you could meet your unceremonious end.

79. Doom 2

RELEASED 1994 | LAST POSITION 76

Wes: People are making mods and maps for this game like it was released a year ago. That's awesome. But what really strikes me about Doom 2 is how fun it still is, and how different it feels from decades more advanced shooters. There's a purity in how it moves, how it sounds and the minimum frames of animation it takes to sell firing the super shotgun.

78. Grim Fandango Remastered

RELEASED 2015 | LAST POSITION 96

Pip: Twenty years after its initial release it's still a real pleasure to revisit the film noir world of Manny Calavera, travel agent of the afterlife. Nowadays I play purely for the story so I keep online hints at hand for when progress stalls.

Tom Senior: Shout out here to Glottis, the giant orange demon who's too big and happy to quite fit into the world he’s in.

77. Warhammer: Vermintide 2

RELEASED 2018 | LAST POSITION New entry

Samuel: There's a long tail to Vermintide 2 if you're willing to stick with this four-player Left 4 Dead-alike set in the Warhammer universe. It looks prettier than the first game, offers more in-depth character progression, and has much better combat.

Phil: It feels really good to stab up a rat, and if that's not worth a spot on this list, I'd love to know what is.

76. Oxenfree

RELEASED 2016 | LAST POSITION New entry

Samuel: This spooky adventure game has a group of young friends inadvertently unlock a supernatural force on a haunted island. The relationships and various tensions between all the characters feel very real, and the dialogue is funny and poignant. These characters feel like they could've been people I went to school with.

Phil: The snappy, fun dialogue makes Oxenfree feel more theatrical than realistic, but that fits perfectly with the eerie mystery and interpersonal drama.

75. Regency Solitaire

RELEASED 2015 | LAST POSITION New entry

Pip: I added Grey Alien's card-game-slash-Regency-romance to our Top 100 discussion list, then reinstalled the game and spent three hours of the Top 100 discussion playing this in the background. I'm fighting the urge to play it again now instead of finishing this incredibly short paragraph about why it's good. The solitaire aspect is really strong, it's super easy to play just one more round, and the story is light but charming. Are we done? Can I boot it up again?

74. Metro: Last Light Redux

RELEASED 2014 | LAST POSITION 95

Tom: Not many shooters have you frantically pumping up a pneumatic gun before you can fire it, but that’s Metro for you. These ramshackle weapons carry you through a filthy, atmospheric corridor shooter set in the depths of the Moscow undercity. The tunnels hide mutant creatures and nests of horrible spidery things, but the most dangerous enemies are the human clans trying to scrape out a living in the post-apocalypse.

Samuel: A beautiful and grim FPS that's refreshingly bleak for a modern triple-A game. The world building in Metro: Last Light is dazzling to me—the little snapshots of human civilisation that show how there are children in these underground settlements who never knew the world before it got into this bleak, decrepit state. And the story features some unforgettable moments, such as an early flashback that shows—from the perspective of the pilots—how a passenger plane was destroyed in the nuclear blast. It's a chilling world that's hard work just to exist in, but I love that it's a post-apocalyptic setting that doesn’t succumb to the desire to over-stylise anything. It commits to showing the horrors of what a nuclear war would do to the modern world, and I'd recommend it to absolutely anyone.

73. Final Fantasy 14: A Realm Reborn

RELEASED 2014 | LAST POSITION 40

Steven: Square Enix's from-the-ashes MMO enjoyed another stellar year following the release of Stormblood, a revolution-themed expansion that whisks players across the sea to Eastern-inspired worlds that add much richness to an already great story. Though its endgame has become a predictable grind at this point, Final Fantasy 14 is still able to keep things exciting thanks to the steady pace of new bosses, dungeons, and raids to clear. Each one is just as memorable as the last thanks to a stunning soundtrack and beautiful world design.

72. The Norwood Suite 

RELEASED 2017 | LAST POSITION New entry

Pip: Cosmo D's first-person jazz hotel exploration has you poking around a converted mansion and uncovering the secrets of its former owner, celebrated pianist, Peter Norwood. Musicality shapes the whole experience, warping the space and affecting the denizens. As you dig around you'll also discover the game's sense of humour via visual gags and surreal chats with guests and visitors. For a related experience you should also check out the developer’s free game, Off-Peak.

71. Mount & Blade: Warband

RELEASED 2010 | LAST POSITION New entry

Evan: Mount & Blade: Warband is what we so often clamour for: an RPG where you're not an intergalactic savior or chosen one, but just some dude leading a small army on a sprawling, simulated map filled with other dudes leading other armies. It's sandbox in the truest sense, and the feeling of loosing an arrow into a line of galloping cavalry still holds up.

Phil: You start with nothing: left for dead in a town with few weapons, no supplies and barely any gold. From such inauspicious beginnings, you're free to do just about anything. Hunt bandits, befriend lords, rob pretty much anyone. Or, if you don't fancy leading hundreds of soldiers, just go fight for prestige in the arena. We've been waiting years for Mount & Blade 2, but Warband still has much to offer.

70. StarCraft 2

RELEASED 2010 | LAST POSITION New entry

Andy: Across its three campaigns, StarCraft 2 boasts some of the best, most cinematic single-player RTS missions on PC. New challenges are constantly being thrown at you, forcing you to try new units and tactics, and the story isn't bad either. When you're done with all that, you can take your newfound skills online, which still has a huge and dedicated following. There's a bottomless pit of tips, tutorials, and strategies online, meaning new players have a decent chance of catching up.

69. Galactic Civilizations 2

RELEASED 2011 | LAST POSITION New entry

Tom: Maybe a game like Stellaris will knock this classic spacebound 4X strategy game out of the Top 100, but not this year. It's hard to beat a game that's so smart and complete, and that can generate so much strategic intrigue with every campaign. The AI is so cunning that former PC Gamer staffer-turned-developer Tom Francis once wrote an entire book about one of his attempts to thwart it. Singleplayer games don't get much deeper than this.

68. Prison Architect

RELEASED 2015 | LAST POSITION New entry

Chris: There's an engrossing amount of depth to the management simulation of Prison Architect, where building a workshop for inmates to make license plates doesn't mean they'll just walk in and begin working. First they'll need training, which requires classrooms, which require instructors, who require work and class schedules and their own facilities. Oh, and metal detectors to make sure the inmates don't smuggle out tools to use as weapons against guards or other inmates, or to tunnel under the walls of your prison. It's not easy building and managing a small city where most of the population is plotting escape.

Andy: I love it when things go to shit in management sims, and Prison Architect is enormously fun to watch (and manage) when disaster inevitably strikes. A streak of black comedy runs through the game, and there's something darkly hilarious about a riot erupting—these cartoonish little characters shivving each other, starting fires and beating up guards. Something as simple as a fight in the canteen can be the flashpoint for a full-scale riot, and trying to suppress it safely and quickly is a real test of skill. But that doesn't mean you can't have some fun observing the chaos before rolling your sleeves up and stepping in to deal with it.

67. Ori and the Blind Forest

RELEASED 2015 | LAST POSITION 62

Pip: An adorable Ghibli-esque aesthetic—particularly the opening cutscene—gives way to a rock hard Metroidvania platformer. Your eyes are as likely to tear up with emotion as they are with absolute fury if you fail a boss one too many times. 

Tom: It looks like sugar but tastes like salt. Ori is not the moonlit animal paradise it appears to be at first glance. It’s a game about loss, revenge, and bastard-hard jumping challenges. The art is absolutely gorgeous. It's a hazy, dreamlike world of artfully twisted overgrowth and spike pits. The movement is so quick, precise and responsive I just want to squeeze it, even as it stabs me repeatedly in the heart. Approach with caution and keep some hankies and a swear jar within reach.

66. Frostpunk

RELEASED 2018 | LAST POSITION New entry

Chris: A survival and crisis management sim about building and sustaining city in a frozen world. In addition to providing food, warmth, and shelter to your citizens, you have to provide them something much trickier: hope for the future. That's immensely difficult when people are starving, freezing, and working themselves to death under your direction, and the choices you face are grim ones that never leave you feeling like a hero, even when things work out. Frostpunk is a game that asks two questions: 'How far are you willing to go to save lives?' And, 'No, really, how far are you willing to go?' It's a masterful exploration of the burden of leadership, the true costs of survival, and the balancing act between guiding your citizens and controlling them.

65. Diablo 3

RELEASED 2012 | LAST POSITION 30

Tom: 'Maybe I should start another Crusader run': seven words that could take up 60 hours of my life. Diablo 3 is still a stellar action RPG that has only become more generous year on year after its unsteady and controversial launch. The necromancer is a fantastic addition that calls back to Diablo 2 without nostalgically retreading the same ground. If you want to smash up thousands of monsters for gold and loot, there aren't many games that do it as well as Diablo 3.

64. Bayonetta

RELEASED 2017 | LAST POSITION 32

Samuel: A superb hack-and-slash game that rewards mastery with feeling like a badass. It's pretty much the first place I'd send anyone new to this genre of game that has its modern roots in Capcom's Devil May Cry series. This, from that game's creator, is funny, stylish and satisfying to learn. Its sequel, which Nintendo published, doesn't come close to matching the original. The range of weapons here fits together perfectly.

Phil: The fast-paced combat is yet to be bettered, and the world and story are equal parts stylish and absurd.

63. Crypt of the Necrodancer

RELEASED 2015 | LAST POSITION New entry

Pip: The rhythm combat in this game is so polished that I love it even when it's at its most stressful. You have to move on every beat or risk losing your cash multiplier, which means there's no downtime to plan your next move. Is a multiplier all that important, you ask? "Oh," I reply, "Only if you want to keep being able to afford new items at the shop where the amazingly catchy soundtrack is suddenly given an EVEN MORE AMAZING operatic flavour thanks to a singing shopkeeper called Freddie Merchantry."

Wes: This would be a great roguelike in its own right, but it's almost unfair how cleverly the musical element is threaded through exploration and combat. Try dungeon dancing to your own music for a new challenge.

62. Sunless Sea

RELEASED 2015 | LAST POSITION 75

Pip: I bounced off Sunless Sea so hard when it first came out—I remember clunky combat and irritating resource grind as core objections. Returning to the game with the Zubmariner DLC I found myself well and truly suckered in—devoting hours to pottering away in the Unterzee, drinking in Failbetter's expert prose and luxuriating in the art style. Sunless Skies is shaping up to be another step forward so I'm singing Sunless Sea's praises now, lest seas be eclipsed by skies in the near future!

61. Baldur's Gate 2: Enhanced Edition

RELEASED 2013 | LAST POSITION 48

Tom: Baldur's Gate 2 is still a magnificent achievement. Few RPGs since have been as broad, deep or fully featured as this sprawling classic. Pillars of Eternity and other games are steadily bringing the classic RPG back to prominence, but Baldur's Gate 2 is still very much worth playing today, and is still one of the most faithful videogame interpretations of D&D's Forgotten Realms setting. It's a great party RPG too. Few modern games would be brave enough to implement a morality system that causes party members to fall out with you and leave the party—the closest you might get is Wrex's rebellion in Mass Effect. While we all remember Minsc and his space hamster companion Boo, the roster went much deeper and accurately reflected the spread of D&D classes, from lawful good paladins to chaotic neutral thieves.

Phil: After the slightly too long tutorial dungeon, Baldur's Gate II hits the ground running, setting you loose in the massive city of Athkatla to earn money to fund the next leg of your journey. It’s a great way to encourage you to explore the city, seeking out its stories and adventures.

60. Fez

RELEASED 2013 | LAST POSITION 67

Phil: A vast, beautiful mystery that's equal parts intriguing and relaxing, Fez is a puzzle-platformer that forgoes enemies and peril, instead offering a pleasant adventure about a strange world full of questions to answer. At its most basic, you rotate between four 2D planes, shifting the world in order to create a path to the next door. But over the course of the game, you'll solve riddles, uncover secrets, and even decode languages. Fez is a tantalising puzzle box just waiting to be unlocked.

59. 80 Days

RELEASED 2015 | LAST POSITION 37

Samuel: Take a journey around a steampunk-infused world as Passepartout, Phileas Fogg's indispensable assistant. Then, whether you succeed or fail, take the journey again and again, and see all the places and stories you missed the first time around. 80 Days is almost entirely dependent on great writing and little bits of art, and it's enough to bring the entire world to life. While it feels made for mobile, you should definitely pick it up on desktop if you've never played it. 

58. Final Fantasy 12: The Zodiac Age

RELEASED 2018 | LAST POSITION New entry

Tom: This feels like the most PC-friendly Final Fantasy to me. Like the rest of the games in the series, it's a beautiful big RPG with a cast of characters that span from annoying (Vaan) to awesome (Balthier). This entry is the only one with the excellent gambit tactics system, which lets you program your party's AI to blitz dungeons and bosses with satisfying efficiency.

Samuel: You can fast-forward this version of the game, too, giving the combat the pace and catharsis it desperately needed back when it came out on PS2. 

57. Hexcells Infinite

RELEASED 2014 | LAST POSITION New entry

Pip: This is the third game in Matthew Brown's hex-grid logic puzzler series, and it's the best of the bunch. The 'infinite' part of the title refers to the fact that it can generate infinite puzzles if you want to keep playing. But the real joy, and the reason I keep replaying it, is the set which Brown has hand-crafted. Absolute puzzle bliss.

56. Homeworld Remastered Collection

RELEASED 2015 | LAST POSITION New entry

Tom: The saddest spaceships in games must travel the galaxy looking for a new home in Relic's classic RTS. If you love brain-scrambling 3D battles then this is the only strategy game that really delivers. Deserts of Kharak is excellent too, but I'd sooner play a game bold enough to deploy Adagio for Strings in a scrap.

55. Dota 2

RELEASED 2013 | LAST POSITION 54

Pip: I have spent north of 2,000 hours in this game. You do not need to know how much money I have spent in this game. But that investment, both temporal and financial, was because this MOBA continued to reward me. There's a rich esports scene, a daft and creative community, the ability for friendships to blossom and for groups of players to cross pollinate as friends of friends move in and out of your teammate invite list. I only stop by occasionally now, but Valve continues to offer interesting updates. Turbo mode is my favourite addition in recent times, not least because it affords newbies a space where they can try characters out without as much pressure as a normal match.

54. PlayerUnknown's Battlegrounds

RELEASED 2017 | LAST POSITION 25

Samuel: It's a phenomenon I'd recommend trying to anyone who plays on PC, even if they bounce off it. That tension of landing in this world and seeing what plays out is an experience everyone should have. Evan put it best last year, so allow me to repeat it here: "it compresses the time and space that survival games like DayZ give you, forcing you into contact with other players and out of your comfort zone."

Andy: I play PlayerUnknown's Battlegrounds as a stealth game, moving carefully between cover, keeping out of sight, biding my time. But the thrill here is that the 'guards' are real people, which makes sneaking under their noses even more exhilarating.

53. Deus Ex

RELEASED 2000 | LAST POSITION 23

Tom: This one has slipped down the list this year, largely because in recent times we've seen developers pick up the immersive sim baton and run with it—see entry number two in this list for the results. Deus Ex is still a classic, though. Even though the visuals, UI, dialogue and sound design seem more creaky each year, the scope for experimentation and emergent player-authored action is still impressive. 

Phil: It's creaky for sure, but Deus Ex's freedom still feels remarkable, as does its level of respect for the player. Most games feel compelled to clearly flag when you’re about to make a narrative choice that might have a consequence. But Deus Ex thrusts you into a paranoid world where everyone has an agenda and every command should be questioned.

52. Fallout 4

RELEASED 2015 | LAST POSITION New entry

Samuel: I'd recommend all of the modern Fallout games to someone who’s never played them for various reasons, and this, in essence, represents that entire era of the series on our list (we were very close to including the original Fallout, too, but ultimately stuck with our one per series rule). New Vegas is the best for reactive storytelling, Fallout 3 has my favourite side quests, and Fallout 4 feels the most refined when it comes to combat, presentation and world design. Even if the choices towards the end didn't produce outcomes I was happy with, I loved journeying around that world with Nick Valentine and Piper. And taking on the role of pulp-style hero The Silver Shroud represents my favourite superhero experience in any game. 

Evan: There's nothing quite like Fallout's setting. Its cynical, post-apocalyptic, Atomic Age sci-fi is dripping with black humour and absurdity. I'm grateful that something so esoteric continues to get the big-budget treatment.

Phil: We're big fans of immersive sims at PC Gamer, and yet I love Bethesda's RPGs for being practically the opposite. Fallout 4 lets you be a silent stealth killer who wears a giant suit of power armour—not because it makes sense within the world, but because it makes sense within the underlying systems. It's an anti-immersive sim, offering satisfying freedom in how you build your wasteland wanderer.  

51. Stardew Valley

RELEASED 2016 | LAST POSITION 22

Andy: A miserable office worker inherits a farm and starts a new life in the idyllic Stardew Valley. This Harvest Moon-inspired farming sim is pleasantly freeform and lets you live the way you want to, whether that's just lazily growing a few crops here and there, or starting a ruthlessly efficient mayonnaise empire.

Bo: Stardew Valley is everything I ever wanted out of Harvest Moon, but unchained from Nintendo's puritanical approach to content.

50. EVE Online

RELEASED 2003 | LAST POSITION 44

Tom: It's obtuse, and it takes a lot of time and effort to become properly mixed up in the corporations that drive EVE Online's greatest dramas, but I have taken a lot of pleasure in hopping into a vessel and mining for a few hours, quietly turning in a small profit and enjoying the vibe of EVE's cosmos. It looks beautiful stretched across two monitors, and if I do find myself yearning for the grand stories of war and betrayal, I can always read about them later in PC Gamer.

49. BioShock

RELEASED 2007 | LAST POSITION 17

Samuel: While as a shooter it's far from best-in-class these days, exploring the different parts of this underwater world and learning its story is an experience no other game has matched for me.

Andy: Rapture is still one of the most atmospheric settings on PC, letting you explore a bizarre, broken society in a state of fascinating decay.

48. Warframe

RELEASED 2013 | LAST POSITION New entry

Steven: Digital Extremes' cooperative loot shooter quietly became one of the best free-to-play games and people are only just now catching on. In the years since its rocky release, Warframe has grown into a deeply satisfying and complex online game with thousands of hours worth of quests to complete and gear to farm.

47. Darkest Dungeon

RELEASED 2016 | LAST POSITION 83

Evan: Even as DLC has made it a bigger experience, I continue to value Darkest Dungeon's focus. It's an intimidating game for all the right reasons: difficulty, uncertainty, risk and reward. The audio and combat camera effects deserve an award for how they make fights between illustrated paper characters feel like Eldritch kung fu.

46. Opus Magnum

RELEASED 2017 | LAST POSITION New entry

Tyler: Solving an Opus Magnum puzzle isn't satisfying the first time. You build an alchemy machine with tracks, rotating arms and flowchart instructions—producing gold from lead, for instance. Your sloppy contraption may look beautiful in motion, but how could you move on to the next challenge when your friend solved the same problem more elegantly? That quest for perfection is deviously engrossing. Few puzzle games feel so good to finally master.

45. Planescape: Torment: Enhanced Edition

RELEASED 2017 | LAST POSITION 60

Andy: The Enhanced Edition of Torment is currently the best way to play this supremely weird RPG on modern PCs. You play as an immortal being with amnesia, trying to piece his past together. The writing is the star here, bringing Dungeons & Dragons' Planescape setting to life in exquisite, wordy detail. Think of any RPG convention and Torment will subvert or twist it in some fascinating way, and the characters who join your party along the way are truly strange.

44. Civilization 5

RELEASED 2010 | LAST POSITION New entry

Tyler: I vacillate between them, but even though I like Civ 6's city districts, Civilization 5 with all the expansions is still the evening destroyer I'd recommend. I wish the series would reexamine its assumptions about the world and make more radical changes in the future, but for now, Civ 5 is still the standard bearer for turn-based empire building: complex enough not to become too rote, but accessible enough for just about anyone who enjoys rewriting history.

Evan: I prefer Civ 6—it's shallow, but I need my 1440p boardgames to look as pretty as possible, and the expressive, animated leaders of Civ 6 add a lot. But the fact that there's still a debate between the two is an endorsement of Firaxis' approach to putting meaningful new spins on one of PC gaming's longest-standing, most celebrated genres.

Andy: In all the time I've played Civ 5, I've never actually won a game. And so it's a testament to just how compelling and accessible its strategy is that I keep coming back, trying new tactics and shaping my civilisation in new and interesting ways. It's the journey—taking my people from humble beginnings to advanced empires—that I really enjoy. The destination ultimately isn't that important.

43. Invisible, Inc.

RELEASED 2015 | LAST POSITION 50

Tom: This turn-based tactics game has you controlling a squad of superspies in missions to knock out guards and steal data before the alarms detect you. I love Klei's angular art, and it's miraculous that the team were able to build such a tight and nuanced tactics game with procedurally generated offices. As with Into the Breach, Invisible, Inc. gives you tons of information about what's going on with enemies. You can see their sight lines clearly and judge their intentions. Your main decisions come down to your use of power points to hack systems. You can disable alarms or unlock doors to access tantalisingly placed upgrade terminals. Do you grab your objective and flee before security arrives, or take a gamble for an upgrade that might make future missions a lot easier?

42. Overcooked

RELEASED 2016 | LAST POSITION 77

Evan: Pure co-op calamity with a deceptively cheerful art style. You will never yell "I need lettuce!" with more anger and urgency. 

Samuel: So enjoyable to pick up, then appallingly difficult to master as you chase those three star ratings. If only I could take it less seriously—me and my partner had to stop playing because I was treating it like a part-time kitchen job. "Plates, plates, PLATES!"

Phil: It's like if the TV show Hell's Kitchen was a game—swearing and all.

41. Super Hexagon

RELEASED 2012 | LAST POSITION New entry

Jody Macgregor: Terry Cavanagh of VVVVVV fame's twitchiest game, Super Hexagon makes you a triangle trapped in pulsing, multicoloured hexagons, dodging through gaps in spinning walls at high speed. It's the definition of easy to learn and bloody impossible to master. I used to think hexagons were fine. Perfectly respectable shapes. Maybe not as fun as parallelograms, which are basically drunk rectangles, but pretty good overall. Now I've played Super Hexagon I hate them. They give me a rash. Terrible shapes. To hell with hexagons.

Phil: Before writing this paragraph I fired up Super Hexagon for the first time in five years, and after only a few tries I was already pushing up near my best times. This is the kind of game that sears itself into your subconscious; burrowing deep down into your muscle memory just waiting for you to return. As a shortform arcade game it's practically perfect—a pulsating, rotating, constantly shifting assault of shapes and sounds with an instant restart that has you back in the action before the voiceover can finish saying "game over".

40. Mass Effect 2

RELEASED 2010 | LAST POSITION 7

Samuel: The facial animations really date BioWare games, but Mass Effect 2 is still the best at showing darker, more interesting sides to its dense sci-fi universe. Plus it still has my favourite party of characters from a modern BioWare RPG. Maybe it's time for another trilogy replay.

Andy: The greatest ensemble cast in RPG history. The idea of recruiting the galaxy's most notorious warriors and criminals is a brilliant excuse to gather up a motley crew of weird, flawed, interesting people, and I cared about all of them.

39. Hearthstone

RELEASED 2014 | LAST POSITION 45

Tim: Hearthstone is in a funny spot. It's as gigantic as it's ever been, but with the departure of game director Ben Brode and the looming threat of Valve's Artifact, now would be a good time for Blizzard’s CCG to shake things up a little. The arrival of a tournament mode later this year may do that, but despite an atypically diverse meta, I've felt my desire to grind the ladder wane. Regardless, for now Hearthstone remains peerless in terms of the quality and polish of the experience.

38. Grand Theft Auto 5

RELEASED 2015 | LAST POSITION 12

Andy: GTA 5 is one of the most lavish singleplayer experiences you can have on PC, with impeccable production values, superb mission variety, and a wonderfully vibrant city. It's massive, but I've finished it three times—that's how much I love being in Los Santos. For me, Michael is Rockstar's best protagonist: a weary, slightly pathetic crook past his prime trying to make it in a world that’s left him behind.

Samuel: I change my mind about GTA Online every few months, but the fidelity of the world is unbeaten. I adore the original heists, and I've had a lot of fun playing the game with other people. I've seen those streets so many times now, though, and am desperate to play whatever comes next in the series. Or, you know, they could bring Red Dead to PC.

Phil: Whatever you think about GTA Online (relationship status: it's complicated), that first set of multiplayer heists are among the best co-op experiences you can have on PC. The way they divide your team of four into smaller groups, each performing a specific task that slowly draws everyone together for a single, action packed finale is—when you successfully pull it off—tense, exciting and memorable.

Joe: GTA Online is a shop window, and few games let you observe other players' wares with such impact. Seeing that new car, aircraft or chopper hurtling towards you makes you want it—which makes grinding to get it less of a chore.

37. Company of Heroes 

RELEASED 2006 | LAST POSITION 56

Tom: It's Relic's best game and frankly still one of the best real-time strategy games ever made. Jumping into a skirmish against the AI, it holds up today as well as it did at launch, which is a testament to the quality of the art and sound direction, and the success of Relic's squad-based take on unit control. The expansions are decent, but I still relish the purity of Company of Heroes' asymmetrical core matchup. The US has a slight numbers advantage in the early infantry stages of a battle but the Axis forces can bring halftracks to the mid-game and elite tanks into the endgame. A few games have tried to imitate Company of Heroes over the years, but none have really come close.

36. Half-Life 2

RELEASED 2004 | LAST POSITION 11

Andy: Gordon Freeman awakes from stasis to find Earth transformed into a dystopian hellscape by an invading alien force. Valve's influential FPS is still fantastic, particularly its eerie, understated atmosphere. The Combine are genuinely unnerving antagonists, but they didn't anticipate going up against a mute physicist who can yank radiators off the wall and launch them at high speeds.

Chris: A linear FPS but one that makes you feel as if you're finding your own path through it, rather than being shoved along rails by the developers. And the gravity gun is still the most enjoyable multitool in games: perfect for solving physics puzzles, playing catch with Dog, using a metal door as a shield, or flinging a toilet into a Metrocop's head.

35. Devil Daggers

RELEASED 2016 | LAST POSITION New entry

Jody: FPS design often copies the Halo idea of a single, repeatable loop of fun, but Devil Daggers really boils it down. Here the loop is backpedalling in an arc while shooting daggers at nearby enemies, clearing enough room to aim at the weak spot of a distant, tougher enemy, then spinning around to take out the skull-face jerk sneaking up behind you. It's just you and infinite bastards to shoot. Perfect.

Evan: If you die and don't go to heaven or hell, you play Devil Daggers until you win.

34. Forza Horizon 3

RELEASED 2016 | LAST POSITION 29

Phil: A gloriously silly arcade playground that takes the Forza Motorsport series' deep love of cars and customisation and transports it into a vibrant, luscious world full of ridiculous races and entertaining off-road mayhem. Forza Horizon 3's best feature is the skill chain system, which transforms an otherwise basic drive between events into a challenge to string together stunts without crashing.

Andy: Driving pretend cars doesn't get any better than the Forza series, and Horizon brilliantly softens the simulation while still maintaining a feeling of weight and realism.

Evan: All racers should be set in Australia.

33. The Elder Scrolls 5: Skyrim

RELEASED 2011 | LAST POSITION 26

Andy: Skyrim remains one of the most evocative settings on PC. It's not as big as some game worlds, but the varied biomes—from the bubbling hot springs of Eastmarch to the snow-battered coastline of Winterhold—make it feel much bigger than it is. The role-playing is shallow and the writing isn't great, but the sense of place and feeling of freedom make up for it. Picking a direction, going for a wander, and seeing what you'll find out there among the snow and ice is The Elder Scrolls at its most captivating.

Chris: You can finish (or completely ignore) the main story and still have a couple hundred hours of self-guided fun—especially by adding mods to the mix. Skyrim gives you a special kind of freedom seen in few RPGs.

32. Proteus

RELEASED 2013 | LAST POSITION New entry

Pip: If this was Pip's Top 100 Proteus would be in the number one spot. It's a contemplative experience where you wander a procedurally generated island, delighting in what you find. I often find myself drifting back to it in moments of stress, treating myself to a short digital holiday. One time I forgot I'd tweaked the game files and accidentally turned everything red, so that was a surprise. Seas of blood. But if you don’t make seas of blood it's gloriously restful!

31. Crusader Kings 2

RELEASED 2012 | LAST POSITION 52

Phil: Crusader Kings 2 isn't just a grand strategy about medieval kingdoms. It's a grand strategy about the people in charge of those kingdoms. You're not the abstract concept of the country of France; you're the King of France, a 60-year-old man who, after a protracted battle against the rebellious Duke of Burgundy, is now on his deathbed, about to leave the fate of his dynasty to an idiot son. You're not the ever-expanding territory of the Holy Roman Empire; you're an increasingly deranged emperor who people think has been possessed by the devil. By generating stories about people, Crusader Kings II is an endlessly fascinating soap opera that's different every time. In my last campaign, I didn't even play. I used the command console to simply observe the action, watching as an epic period drama played out across the map.

Chris: What's most interesting is how your relationships change when you die and continue playing as your heir. Those three children you had don't seem so wonderful once you've assumed the role of the eldest. The other two, while devoted to their father, now hate you and may plot against you. Your entire view of the world changes regularly, not just because the players change but because you yourself do, by dying and playing as someone new.

30. Portal 2

RELEASED 2011 | LAST POSITION 5

Chris: It should have been impossible to top the near-perfect Portal in comedy, storytelling, and physics-bending first-person puzzles, but Portal 2 somehow manages it, and even throws in some fantastic multiplayer on top. 

Andy: Portal 2 brings a funny and sometimes disarmingly poignant story to its mind-bending puzzles, and the results are exceptional. Your journey through the various eras of Aperture Science make the game a constant delight.

29. World of Warcraft

RELEASED 2004 | LAST POSITION 59

Andy: Blizzard's long-running MMORPG simply refuses to die, and in fact seems to be getting better with every expansion. The most recent, 2016's Legion, brought in a swathe of quality-of-life improvements and some of the best questing in World of Warcraft's nearly 14-year history, making it worth playing all over again. It's still pretty grindy, especially compared to the more streamlined Guild Wars 2, but there are few online worlds this rich and storied to spend time in.

Don't miss Steven's Battle For Azeroth review for some more recent WoW words.

28. Undertale

RELEASED 2015 | LAST POSITION 61

Tyler: Undertale subverts RPG cliches with constant self-reference, but unlike many 'parody games', it's not cynical or derivative. It plays on expectations without succumbing to them, with characters we’d love even without the metacommentary on game design, fandom, and authorship. Undertale is a great RPG even if you don't get every reference.

27. Fortnite Battle Royale

RELEASED 2017 | LAST POSITION New entry

James: Fortnite's battle royale mode started as a weak PUBG imitation, but an unprecedented update cycle has made it not just the best battle royale game, but one of the most fascinating games in development today. With map changes, new items, and one-off world events almost every week, Fortnite is endlessly entertaining to live in.

26. League of Legends

RELEASED 2009 | LAST POSITION New entry

Wes: Regular changes to the meta have kept League alive and on top for years. It’s still the best entry point for the MOBA genre.

Pip: I favour ARAM—a five-vs-five battle where randomly assigned characters let spells and punches fly across a single lane. I visit the pressure of the three lane Summoner’s Rift from a safe distance—as an esports spectator.

25. Cities: Skylines

RELEASED 2015 | LAST POSITION 82

Andy: While the most recent SimCity did everything it could to stifle creativity, Cities: Skylines gave players the power to make anything they want—in part thanks to the deep mod support. The result is the best city-builder around.

Samuel: The best game of its kind in a genre that people have enjoyed and will play forever, well supported by compelling expansions. Plus, you can destroy your city with meteors if you're having a dark day—like I did when I was mayor of Pipville several months ago.

24. Arma 3

RELEASED 2013 | LAST POSITION 55

Evan: Arma 3 stands alone as the highest-fidelity FPS, the best multiplayer story generator, and a bottomless trough of community missions and mods. You can play it with the utmost seriousness, with an add-on that lets you administer simulated CPR on injured comrades, or as a silly military take on Black & White with its Zeus DLC. It's no coincidence that Arma was the fertile terrain that produced the last two biggest trends in PC gaming: battle royale and survival games.

23. Her Story 

RELEASED 2015 | LAST POSITION 19

Phil: You start with a police database open and the word 'MURDER' entered into its search field. Hit enter and you’re given four short video clips from a police interview. In one, the woman being interviewed says, "I didn't murder Simon." OK, let's search 'SIMON'. More video clips—more hints at a tantalising mystery that twists and changes as you unlock more of its parts.

Samuel: Probably the best mystery game ever made, because Her Story is over when you feel you've found the answer (or when you've discovered all the clips, depending on the type of player you are). It truly puts the drama of uncovering the truth in your hands, which is so hard for a game to do in any meaningful way. One of those games I would recommend to someone who has never played games. 

Tyler: A fantastic performance that made FMV, for once, not cheesy.

Andy: A narrative game that really makes use of the medium. The mystery unfolds differently for everyone who plays it, which is a wonderfully original way of telling a story. What you think happened might be different to someone else’s interpretation, turning us all into unreliable narrators.

22. Total War: Warhammer 2

RELEASED 2017 | LAST POSITION New entry

Tom: Total War is a complex grand strategy series that fuses turn-based 4X-style empire-building with vast real-time battles. So far we've mostly seen the format used to explore historical scenarios, but it turns out the Warhammer universe is a perfect fit. For fans of the setting it's a joy to see each faction rendered so vividly, but I would recommend Total War: Warhammer 2 to any strategy fan regardless of your Warhammer knowledge. If you want to command a traditional army, the Empire is there for you. If you want something more adventurous, you don't need to know much about the undead Tomb Kings to enjoy sending hordes of skeletons after magical relics. The sequel's campaign is brilliant. Four factions fight for control of a big magic vortex in the middle of the map, which keeps the campaign interesting all the way into the endgame.

Jody: Replay that campaign and eventually you'll see behind the curtain, but what makes it worth replaying is the factions. Warhammer 2 gets its factions right in ways that should please all but the fussiest fans, even though they're a diverse collection of uptight magic elves, dinosaur-riding lizards, sneaky rat bastards, and "we're really into leather" sex dungeon kink elves. That's no easy feat.

21. The Sims 4

RELEASED 2014 | LAST POSITION New entry

Pip: The latest instalment of the long-running life sim has absorbed many hours of my life as I generate idiotic stories starring my beloved cast of citizens. Four years after release it's at the point where features missing at launch have been patched in (toddlers! pools!) and you can use the glut of expansions, game packs and stuff packs to tailor the game to your playstyle. I'd like to see the pricing model better support people who dip in and out, but overall there's still no other game like it. 

20. Counter-Strike: Global Offensive

RELEASED 2012 | LAST POSITION 49

Evan: Valve's half-hearted updates dented its ranking this year, but CS:GO remains the purest team FPS on the planet. Every round is a joust of plays, counters, and outmaneuvering, where a smart flash or reflex AWP pick shifts the balance. You can spend a lifetime improving your grenade technique, your de_inferno mid push, your eco round playcalling. It'll never be enough. Each gun is a wild animal with its own unique spray pattern and tendencies that can take dozens of hours to learn.

19. Rocket League

RELEASED 2015 | LAST POSITION 16

Tyler: I've hit a skill plateau in the best and only rocket car soccer game (I play the hockey variant), but I just have to find the next slope. I don't think one can ever stop getting better at Rocket League. There's always a better position I could've been in, an aerial I shouldn't have botched. It hasn't changed much over the years, but I feel like I could play it forever.

18. Hitman

RELEASED 2016 | LAST POSITION 14

Phil: This stealth sandbox about a bald assassin features six huge, absurdly detailed maps, each filled with interesting ways to bump off your targets. Hitman's social stealth systems—where disguises are more important than not being seen—gives you the time to plan, experiment and refine your approach. It's now the best game in the series.

17. Kerbal Space Program

RELEASED 2015 | LAST POSITION 39

Phil: Build a rocket, launch a rocket, fly a rocket, crash a rocket. And then do it all again—tweaking and experimenting until your design is bona fide spacefaring craft, able to maintain orbit or visit nearby celestial bodies. Kerbal Space Program is a sublime mix of physics and slapstick that makes for the perfect playground for space exploration.

16. Spelunky

RELEASED 2013 | LAST POSITION 10

Wes: No one's topped the way Spelunky's pieces play off one another to make its world feel deeply knowable and random at the same time. It's a game you play for hundreds of hours, until getting the key to unlock the chest to find the Udjat Eye to reach the black market to buy the ankh to die and come back to life to fight Anubis to take his sceptre to unlock the City of Gold to find the Book of the Dead to journey through Hell to fight King Yama just feels like another day playing Spelunky.

15. Alien: Isolation 

RELEASED 2014 | LAST POSITION 8

Andy: The best horror game on PC, because the thing chasing you has a mind of its own. There's no pattern to predict, no patrol route you can exploit. The alien is intelligent. It will learn your habits and it will fuck with you, and that is terrifying.

Samuel: I replayed it this year, and it's amazing how much mileage they get out of the same two repeated enemies by making clever use of set pieces and different types of environments. Probably the best horror game ever.

14. Overwatch

RELEASED 2016 | LAST POSITION 13

Andy: I love Overwatch because, as someone lacking the skill to play most other online shooters competently, I can still make a difference in a match. The sheer variety of brilliantly-designed characters and their wildly varied toolsets means there's something for every kind of player, even if they can't pull off a decent headshot. It's also impressively accessible, cleverly explaining the intricacies of its heroes' abilities without overloading you with information.

Bo: A year ago, Blizzard told me they had "barely scratched the surface" of abilities and character archetypes they'd like to explore in Overwatch. With the newest hero being a giant hamster ball mech with a Spider-Man-style grappling hook piloted by a literal hamster, I'm finally inclined to believe them. Overwatch continues to be one of the most unique and accessible shooters. And on the esports front, the Overwatch League's adoption of a city-based team model has ignited local enthusiasm in a way that no other game, tournament, or organization has been able to thus far.

Phil: We decided this list's order before Wrecking Ball was announced. I'll leave you to speculate whether he would have raised or lowered Overwatch's position.

13. Life is Strange

RELEASED 2015 | LAST POSITION New entry

Pip: Dontnod's episodic, time-rewinding teen drama develops (Look! A photography pun! Because the lead character is into photography!) from a gawky, awkward-but-sweet first episode with slightly clunky dialogue into a story capable of delivering real emotional sucker punches. It's not perfect—some puzzle segments outstay their welcome and the plot often throws subtlety out of the window—but OH MY! The cast of characters and the strength of their relationships elevate the whole thing, and the Instagrammy aesthetic bolsters the teenage intensity. 

Phil: It also features probably the best use of mid-'00s indie boys playing sad acoustic songs about relationships and feelings in all of gaming. Max listening to José González while riding a bus across Arcadia Bay is a beautiful, understated sequence that gives us the time to empathise with the character and her feelings about the town she's returned to.

12. Hollow Knight

RELEASED 2017 | LAST POSITION 46

Wes: The best Metroidvania since Super Metroid. Hollow Knight is open-ended almost to a fault, giving you a massive, decaying, interconnected bug kingdom to explore and frequently find yourself lost in. It can be overwhelming at first, but the feeling of discovery ends up being immensely rewarding as a result. The super responsive platforming and combat keep backtracking from ever feeling like a chore, something similar games have struggled with.

11. Doom

RELEASED 2016 | LAST POSITION 9

Tom: A modernisation of Doom that puts the focus firmly on speed and sweet guns. The DOOM reboot resists decades of shooter trends that either ape Call of Duty or try to crossbreed the FPS with other genres. There's nothing wrong with that sort of experimentation, but it's so refreshing to boot this game up and blow gooey chunks out of the forces of hell. Bring on the next one, id.

Samuel: The best single-player FPS there is in 2018. A clever update of Doom that turns fights into melee-heavy duels, with a not-overly-serious tone that hits just the right spot.

Wes: And the levels are actually intricate mazes full of secrets, just like classic Doom! I expected good shooting in bland corridors, but this is so much more.

10. Metal Gear Solid 5: The Phantom Pain

RELEASED 2015 | LAST POSITION 6

Tom: I loaded back into my MGS5 save a month ago to find Snake decked out head-to-toe in a leopard skin combat suit. I forgot that my dog had a knife and my horse had a face shield, and I forgot that I named my squad TACTICAL OCTOPUS. It’s a terrific open world stealth game, but its quirky sense of fun makes the supernatural military nonsense bearable. 

Samuel: My favourite stealth action game ever, that sits somewhere between immersive sim and Metal Gear of old.

9. Dark Souls Remastered

RELEASED 2018 | LAST POSITION 2 (Prepare to Die Edition)

Tom: Have you met Gravelord Nito? He's a roiling mass of skeletons shrouded in a cape of souls. He lives deep in Dark Souls nightmarish catacombs, and he's just one example of the game's extraordinary art direction, and powerful sense of dark fantasy horror. People go on about Dark Souls' bottomless lore with good reason, but underneath the theatrics it's actually a very simple game. You raid dungeons, chop up monsters, loot chests and level up. Without strong, enduring combat fundamentals I wouldn't have kept playing long enough to uncover the gods' tragic stories.

8. Subnautica

RELEASED 2018 | LAST POSITION New entry

Pip: Subnautica is my game of 2018 so far. I usually tap out pretty fast when it comes to survival games but this one takes place in a gorgeous underwater world, involves a compelling plot, AND I adore tinkering with my little underwater base. It also lets me choose how much survival-ing I care to have as part of the game experience, meaning I can switch off thirst. It's not exactly better down where it’s wetter given the wealth of creatures and situations which can kill you, but it's exactly where I want to be.

Andy: Exploring is genuinely rewarding, both in terms of finding resources to build cooler submarines and environmental detail. It's a world with a story to tell, and it tells it brilliantly.

7. XCOM 2

RELEASED 2016 | LAST POSITION 4

Tom: Strategy games are good at making me care about numbers and systems, but XCOM 2 is one of the few I can name that translate the numberwang into emotional investment. Losing a squad member can feel devastating. You nurture them between fights, gradually upgrading their gear and unlocking sweet new skills, only for an alien to cruelly blast them in a routine mission. When things go wrong in XCOM, they go very wrong indeed, which is all part of the drama in a game that casts humanity as the underdog.

Evan: XCOM's art direction is ridiculously underrated. Its maps are believable, colorful dioramas that shatter into pieces under the heat and intensity of your insurgent combat. 

6. Rainbow Six Siege

RELEASED 2015 | LAST POSITION 15

Evan: Sure, you can play Siege as if it's Counter-Strike, pre-firing and out-angling your opponents with snap marksmanship. But the real joy is in outsmarting the other team by poking clever holes in the maps, placing your gadgets in unexpected positions, and careful drone scouting. I also love Siege's tempo: this is a shooter that gives you time and a canvas of breakable space to stop, strategize, and execute a dumb plan with absurd gadgets like an eyeball turret that shoots lasers, invisible poison mines, and a drone that shoots concussions. Ubisoft remains devoted to supporting Siege with meaningful systems renovations and with four annual updates that add new characters and maps.

5. What Remains of Edith Finch

RELEASED 2017 | LAST POSITION 27

Samuel: This first-person narrative game is constantly inventive. Edith Finch ventures into the home where her family used to live, before they all died in various tragic circumstances and their rooms were sealed up. You uncover each of their stories. It's the high point of this genre.

Andy: Exploring the abandoned home of the eccentric Finch family and uncovering their history is one of the most satisfying storytelling experiences a game has ever given me. But it's a game I'll never play again, simply because one scene in particular was so emotionally-charged that I can't face it. Any piece of media that holds that kind of power has to be special.

4. Into the Breach

RELEASED 2018 | LAST POSITION New entry

Tom: Into the Breach is a game about quick turn-based battles between mechs and kaiju-sized bugs, and it's almost perfect. Unlike many turn-based strategy games, Into the Breach doesn't use chance to inject battles with tension—the UI tells you pretty much everything that's going to happen next turn. The pleasure comes from solving the next turn state as efficiently as you can. It's a small game—battles only last a few turns on an eight-by-eight grid—but the varied mech teams and increasingly nefarious bug types create a huge amount of tactical variation. It shows that strategy games don’t have to be long and laborious.

Wes: There's so little randomness that random moments have immense impact. In one run, I had two buildings resist damage at a pivotal point. I've never done a more exaggerated fist pump.

3. Divinity: Original Sin 2

RELEASED 2017 | LAST POSITION New entry

Tyler: Divinity: Original Sin 2 feels less stodgy than other classic RPG revivals while heightening their best qualities: turn-based combat (I hate real-time, sorry) with physics-based spells and exploding barrels (necessary), great characters, and a commitment to letting players do what they want, even if it breaks everything.

Wes: It offers you an intricate RPG sandbox to play in, and it invites you to break the rules in as many ways as you can imagine. The first game did that, too, but this one marries that freedom with across-the-board great writing and genuinely thoughtful roleplaying. It walks the walk and talks the talk.

2. Dishonored 2

RELEASED 2016 | LAST POSITION 3

Samuel: This is the best stealth game there has ever been. While the high-concept levels like A Crack in the Slab and Clockwork Mansion get a lot of attention for their clever one-off twists, more traditional stages like Royal Conservatory and Dust District are so detailed and fun to explore. There's no sense of repetition, and each level feels like a huge event. It's the precision of Dishonored 2 I love. Every successful takedown or evasion feels like something you've earned. 

Andy: Dishonored 2 has some of the best level design on PC, both in terms of the architecture and aesthetic, and in how the environments are rich playgrounds that let you really flex your creativity. Every location has something interesting about it, whether it's the time-hopping of A Crack in the Slab or the intricate house-sized puzzle box that is the magnificent Clockwork Mansion. And the sheer volume of ways to navigate the levels and complete your objectives really captures the spirit of PC gaming.

Tom: I want to savour every moment in Karnaca, because those levels are so dense and fun to explore. Immersive sims have always been good at creating broad levels like these, full of sandbox opportunity, but I really value that simple acts of moving, shooting and fighting feel great in Dishonored 2. Your regenerating mana bar gives you license to use your traversal powers freely, and I love blink and Emily’s tentacle leap. The introduction of Emily just broadens your toolset further. Domino, which lets you chain NPCs fates together so that one attack affects them all, is an inspired ability, and it's emblematic of the way Dishonored 2 builds on the tenets of immersive sims like Deus Ex, and spins them out in spectacular new ways. Augmented special forces dudes are cool, but warlock assassins are even cooler.

Phil: For me it's the reactivity of the world. Yes, the combat is fluid and satisfying, the level design is intricate and beautifully balanced, and the abilities perfectly tailored for absurd displays of skill and problem solving. But what ties it all together is the lengths Arkane has gone to make it all feel believable and real. Immersive sim is, I will admit, a clunky term, but it’s a useful way to encapsulate a core philosophy: that a game’s systems must work to make you believe in a world, even if that world features magical parkour assassins. I believe in Dishonored 2's world because throughout I encountered ways Arkane had anticipated player behaviour. The most extreme example is found in the standout mission A Crack in the Slab, which features an alternate timeline that only occurs if you do something that’s never asked of you—that most people will probably never try. Arkane knew someone would try, and so made a response. That's amazing dedication to the craft.

1. The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt

RELEASED 2015 | LAST POSITION 1

Tom: It's a great execution of the ronin fantasy set in one of the most beautiful worlds on PC. The craggy Skellige isle might be one of my favourite places in games, or is it Novigrad, or the sunlit vineyards of Toussaint? Even the dripping bogs in the early areas are pretty, in their own miserable way. Within these gorgeous places you meet people with interesting problems. Maybe their local well is haunted. Maybe their spouse is haunted. Usually something is haunted, or cursed, or being pursued by a hideous mythical beast. I treated the sidequests as the main quest, to be honest, roleplaying a mutant outcast on a mission to make the world a slightly better place. Oh, and let's not forget Gwent, one of the best games-within-a-game since Final Fantasy VIII's Triple Triad. 

Jody: The fact you play a character with his own place in the world, including allies, enemies, and ex-girlfriends, is a definite strength of The Witcher 3. But it wasn't always this way. In the first Witcher game Geralt was an amnesiac sleazebag and honestly a bit of a tool. He wasn't a fun person to be around, let alone to be. But by The Witcher 3, Geralt's a caring father figure with a heart of gold beneath layers of beard and gruff, and more than that he feels like someone you personalise. How much he cares about getting paid, who he loves, how seriously he takes his creed, that’s all you. The Witcher 3's version of Geralt is the perfect videogame protagonist not because he's more integrated into his world than a character you make from scratch, but because he's a solid outline with room to manoeuvre inside that. He contains multitudes—but not too many. He has well-defined areas of doubt and uncertainty.

Wes: "Place" really is what makes The Witcher 3 so spectacular, and like no other game I've played. It's not just that the world is gorgeous and detailed, though it is both of those things. The Witcher 3 has this unparalleled combination of artistry and technology that makes its locations and characters feel authentic. Accents and architecture differ between the mainland and Skellige. The characters you encounter out in the world have quests that involve their families or monsters native to their region, and the more of these quests you take, the more you appreciate how natural and human they seem. No one's asking you to go out and slay five wolves because that's a good way to spend ten minutes in an RPG. If you're killing beasts, it’s probably to save a village's flock or get revenge for a grieving father, and even straightforward quests often end with surprising deviations. Depending on how you play Geralt, you can be a mercenary in search of coin, or calmly talk someone out of a decision you know they'll regret. You can haggle with assholes who don't respect the value of a witcher's work, and you’ll have to decide what to do when a poor farmer doesn't actually have the money he promised you. Those touches, along with the motion capture, the voice acting and the wind on a blustery night in Velen, make the whole thing come alive. What a world.

Phil: A thing I hate about most RPG writing is that something as simple as asking to be rewarded for your time and effort is treated as the most evil thing a protagonist can do. But in The Witcher 3, Geralt is a professional doing his job. His haggling with clients over money isn't a deviance or a crime, but the expected cost of hiring a man who is good at what he does for a living. 

Andy: I love The Witcher 3 because it’s a game where almost everything is meaningful. When you pick up a quest, it isn't just some thinly-written excuse to get you to go kill a monster. There's a backstory, a motivation, and often a twist. Quests can spiral, turning an encounter with a peasant in a tavern into a sprawling epic that ends with you fighting some great, mythical beast atop a crumbling tower in a raging storm. The game is heaving with interesting characters and worthwhile things to do, and Geralt is the foundation of it all: a complex lead who makes other videogame characters look like cardboard cutouts.

Personal picks

We love many more games than we can fit onto one list, so here the PC Gamer team has spotlighted a few of their favorites that didn't make the cut. 

Philippa Warr: Cradle

Cradle, like Deadly Premonition, is wonky but fascinating and stays with you for years. It's a transhumanist puzzler where you try to repair a mechanical girl who is also a vase in a yurt on the Mongolian steppe next to an abandoned theme park which dispenses block-based minigames.

Joe Donnelly: Kentucky Route Zero

Kentucky Route Zero is wonderful. Its storylines are weird and interesting. Its minimalist art style is gorgeous. Its sprawling open road and Mark Twain-esque Echo River are a joy to explore. Its cast of characters are quirky and often funny. And it's not even finished. Look for its final act this year.

Bo Moore: Prey

The first 20 minutes of Prey form one of the most inspired sci-fi set pieces of recent memory. An immersive sim that offers fantastic problem solving, enjoyable enough combat (even if the enemies are a bit uninspired), and, true to its pedigree, a level of environmental storytelling that rivals Rapture.

Steven Messner: Slay the Spire

This deckbuilding roguelike isn't out of Early Access and already I've sunk more hours into it than I’d care to admit. It's a deceptively simple game that anyone can easily pick up and play, but learning to build the perfect deck—and getting all the lucky drops to pull it off—can make hours vanish.

Tyler Wilde: Chess Ultra

For online chess, I recommend Chess.com. But if you want to relax with a few AI games, Chess Ultra has many of the features of pro chess software without the complexity. It's for people who just want to play chess, and it works wonderfully. The Twitch integration and VR support are cool, too.

Chris Livingston: Duskers

Issue text commands to drones to steer them around abandoned space stations where terrifying aliens lurk. You can only see what your drones see, giving Duskers a spooky found-footage feel. It's a scary and surprising roguelike where everything going wrong is as much fun as everything going right.

Tom Senior: Thief Gold

It's surprising how well 1998's Thief still holds up. It's tense and atmospheric, and the labyrinthine levels feel huge, substantial and ambitious even today. It's punishing, and the spindly NPCs look kind of ridiculous now, but I still get the fear when I snipe out a torch with a water arrow, hoping that nobody sees it.

Phil Savage: Shadow Tactics: Blades of the Shogun

A stealth puzzler that's not afraid to make you wait. You embark on missions throughout Edo period Japan, silently breaking into well-guarded strongholds using wits, patience and an adorable raccoon dog. Deep, tactical and rewardingly tricky.

Andy Kelly: Else Heart.Break()

In a digitised world, anything can be hacked. That’s the premise of else Heart.Break(), a unique game about love, freedom, and cybercrime. You can hack objects to change how they behave. Hero Sebastian uses his newfound coding skills to join a gang of hacktivists.

Evan Lahti: Oxygen Not Included

The intricate systems-maths of a sim wrapped in the handmade charm of a Klei game. Within hours of starting a new colony, you're optimizing airflow and figuring out the right number of toilets to fertilize your plants. It's still in Early Access, but this is already my favorite ant farm on PC.

Samuel Roberts: Assassin's Creed Origins

I'm not traditionally a fan of Ubisoft’s series, but almost everything here, from world layout to combat to quest structure, has been revamped. I think everyone should see this open world before they die. It's a staggering creation.

James Davenport: Stories Untold

Using a computer shouldn't be scary, but Stories Untold makes it so. The fidelity of the keys and knobs draws you into its world. Sitting at your computer while the protagonists are tormented by their own makes the events of these four short stories feel more real and unnerving.