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Last year brought RPG gems like Disco Elysium. Was there an RPG as good released in 2020? We’ve updated our list of the best RPGs of all time to reflect the best of the past year – and there’s still dozens of older classics, too.

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The games industry has been hit pretty hard from the Covid-19 pandemic. Most events this side of the year have been cancelled or postponed, and now hundreds of workers being urged to work from home (including all of us here at RPS). The impact of this style of working will be different for everyone, so I spoke with some UK studios to see how they’re getting on.

“What we fear might be affected is creativity, as a lot of what defines Bossa stems from impromptu chats, quick discussions, serendipity between team members. We’ll have to offset these with more organised structure around online meetings, which invariably will change things a bit,” said Henrique Olifiers, co-founder of Bossa, creators of Surgeon Simulator and I Am Bread.

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The best RPGs have always found their home on PC, but it’s a big genre and it can be difficult to know what you should play next. That’s why we’ve put together this list.

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Look! A ranking of the 50 best RPGs on PC. I know, you never asked for this, but here it is. It is 100 percent correct, we double-checked. The RPG is a broad and deep sea and fishing out the best games from its characterful waters is no easy task. But we are capable fishers on the good ship RPS, and know when to humanely throw back a tiddler or fight to heave up a monster. Enough of this salty metaphor. Here are the 50 best RPGs you can play on PC today.

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It s often said that the more restrictions you re working against, the more creative you ll become. We re planning to test that theory to its limits next Friday at PAX West, where our Nate will be inviting a team of developers to puzzle their way around some real thinkabouters in Rock Paper Shotgun s Game Design Hotseat.

How could you make a grand strategy game with only six old Casio calculators for display? How would you design a massively multiplayer online beat em up? What about an FPS controlled with a trombone? We won t be posing these questions (because we ve just put them here and that ruins the surprise), but we ll be posing questions just like them, and giving the team a tablet to sketch out their workings as they scramble for answers.

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Even in the midst of E3 Hell Week, it’s nice to see that smaller studios keep on kicking. Today, Failbetter Games rolled out their next major update for Victorian space-train RPG Sunless Skies. There’s a new officer to add to your crew, sporting a positively nautical set of whiskers and with his own story arc to follow. Old Wonders Of The Skies will now have story events attached to them, you’ll find new agents to get missions from, and The Reach appears to have a bit of a fungus problem developing. Yet more reasons — and all free — to return to riding the aetherial rails.

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Bizarre, beautiful and brilliant sky-train simulator Sunless Skies is a stonking game, and a notable improvement over its nautical (but nice) predecessor, but nothing is perfect. Today, Failbetter rolled out the first major update for the game, overhauling Albion, home of space-London and the second hub area of the game. The Wayfarer update also gives officers more options for work outside of your train, adds dangerous new consequences for taking damage in battle and toughens up the survival aspects of the game. The sky is slightly less vast, but more terrifying now.

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The word ‘lonely’ comes up often when discussing Sunless Skies, which seems like an odd thing to say about a game in which you haul yourself around the stars in the company of up to two-dozen crew members. But that’s the tone of Failbetter’s twisted sci-fi Victoriana roguelike: feeling desperately alone and vulnerable, in a desperately large and lethal place. Those crew? They’re all nameless, faceless, hired only to die on your dime. In Sunless Skies’ merciless vacuum, care is a luxury you cannot afford.

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Sunless Skies, the cosmic horror, spacefaring roguelite, splits my brain like a log beneath an axe.

On the one hand, a certain ennui – I have seen all this before, I have made these long, fraught voyages before, many times, in its fine predecessor Sunless Sea.

On the other, late at night my thoughts drift, unbidden, back to its dark places, its lonely ports and clockwork suns and frozen voids. Places that left impressions, places that told me unsettling stories and implied many more stories still.

I don’t want to do it all over again. I don’t want anything except to do it all again.

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Exploring the world of Sunless Skies with a mouse and keyboard is all well and good, but now you can do it solely with your imagination – and the rulebook to Skyfarer. It’s an official pen & paper RPG based on Sunless Skies, released by Failbetter Games for free on Saturday. You might recognise designers Grant Howitt and Chris Taylor, with their impressive tabletop chops.

Skyfarer wasn’t the only reveal from Failbetter over the weekend – we now know that Sunless Skies will tootle out of early access on January 31st.

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