The Halcyon system is the backdrop for The Outer Worlds, and this latest trailer for Obsidian's RPG is formatted like a tourism advertisement for the colonies there. A chirpy narrator sings the praise of Halcyon's worlds Terra 2 and Monarch, while a grimmer reality plays out on screen.

Terra 2 seems like the more civilized of the two, with euphemistically named "employment communities" to keep settlers busy, though that doesn't mean it isn't also a place where you can get eaten by some alien animal. Monarch looks more like the frontier, with wilderness that's as untamed as the lizard monsters that live there. This video suggests a reason for why things are going pear-shaped on these planets, and will need a videogame protagonist to come along and fix their problems, boasting that "Halcyon accepts the lowest aptitude scores of any Earth Directorate colony!"

The whole thing has a very Fallout vibe, which is no surprise coming from the creators of Fallout: New Vegas. The Outer Worlds will be out October 25.

Borderlands 2 has already come to VR via the PlayStation 4, but an ESRB rating from earlier this year suggested we'd eventually be able to play the VR version on PC as well. Now it's been confirmed courtesy of the trailer above, and will be here in fall 2019. The PS4 version's getting a free update adding the DLC, which will hopefully also be true of the PC version.

This version of Borderlands 2 will apparently come with "new skills to virtually pay the bills" including a slow-motion ability called BAMF or Bad Ass Mega Fun time. Looks like there's a teleport-to-move system as well, with blue circles appearing where the player's about to zip to.

Multiplayer doesn't get mentioned, so this might well be a singleplayer-only deal as it is on PS4. Still, I imagine it'll be fun to look Face McShooty right in the virtual eyes before shooting him in the head.

Chucklefish has issued a statement in response to multiple allegations that it exploited around a dozen volunteer contributors on the 2016 outer-space exploration game Starbound. The complaints came to light earlier this week when Damon Reece, who is credited as a writer on the game, said on Twitter that they worked "hundreds of hours" without pay on the game, which went on to sell more than 2.5 million copies less than a year after it went into full release.

Reece's allegations were supported by at least two others connected to the project: Rho Watson, a graphic artist who worked on Starbound, and Christine Crossley, a concept art who said the same thing. Composer Clark Powell also tweeted to say that they "almost did the audio and music" for Starbound until he was informed that it was an unpaid job.

"We're aware and saddened by the current allegations against Chucklefish regarding Starbound's early development," Chucklefish said in a statement. "During this time both the core crew and community contributors were collaborating via a chat room and dedicated their time for free. Community contributors were under no obligation to create content, work to deadlines or put in any particular number of hours. Everyone was credited or remunerated as per their agreement.

"It's been almost a decade since Starbound's development first began, and from then Chucklefish has grown considerably into an indie studio that has a strong emphasis on good working practices, providing a welcoming environment for all employees and freelancers. Our doors remain open to any related parties who wish to discuss their concerns with us directly."

Reece acknowledged signing a contract, saying that contributors were required to do so if they wanted to work on the game, and that they were further enticed with the promise of possible employment at Chucklefish in the future. They also refuted part of the studio's statement, saying that "deadlines were absolutely in place—if not formal, then definitely heavily implied."

"I was a naive newcomer to the industry and my trust was utterly betrayed. There is no moral defense for this," Reece said.

"Regardless of any contracts signed, it's massively unethical to allow workers to contribute huge amounts of content for no pay when you, the ostensible leader of the team, are walking away with millions of dollars in personal revenue share. If your game sells over two and a half million copies and your only excuse for not treating people ethically is, 'but the dozens of teenagers whose labor we exploited signed contracts,' you may need to do some soul-searching."

Watson, who founded indie studio Igloosoft earlier this year and is now working on an unannounced project, was a paid contractor on Starbound but said they're aware of at least a dozen others who signed contracts to contribute to the game without pay. 

"Those who were passionate and wanted to help with the game that wasn't a paid member was given a standard 'contributor contract' and told it was 'industry standard'," they said. "Put simply, it was either sign that contract and get your foot in the door or get out. A few people were happy to donate their time or just wanted to see their work in the game, but for most people who wanted to work their way up to a paid position, they'd be forced to sign that contract and waive any right to compensation."

Chucklefish was founded in 2011 by Finn Brice, and has published a handful of notable indie games including Risk of Rain, Stardew Valley, and Timespinner. Starbound was its first in-house developed game; its second, the turn-based strategy game Wargroove, came out this year. Both Reece and Watson singled out Brice as the source of the pressure on volunteers to produce during Starbound's development: Watson described him as "a really smooth talker and excellent at making people assume the best and feel bad for requesting fair deal/compensation," but Reece went even further, saying that "shame is a powerful motivator and Finn Brice is highly adept at using it to manipulate people."

Typing of the Dead, but a real-time strategy game. That's the pitch for Touch Type Tale, and as many words as it took for me to say "I'm in." I love the absurdity of typing tests layered on top of other genres—why haven't more games ripped off Typing of the Dead?—but I honestly didn't expect Touch Type Tale to be so fun. There's more depth and smart design here than the gimmick prepared me for.

As real-time strategy goes, Touch Type Tale is a simple game, but it gives you a lot more to do than I first realized. Each level is a single-screen 2D map, with a honeycomb of roads connecting nodes where you'll find building plots or existing defensive structures. On a plot you can build a farm for earning money, or one of several military buildings that recruit swordsmen or spearmen or archers or cavalry. All of this is done with typing, of course.

Each road will have a short lowercase word on it that tells your units to walk down that path. Buildings use capital letters, and typing that word will open up a sub-screen where you interact with the building. On a farm, that involves typing four more words as quickly as you can to set your farmers to work on four plots of land. In a barracks, typing the word starts recruitment, which continues automatically until you type another word to stop it (or you hit a unit limit).

Then there are some commands that take only typing a single letter, like harvesting from a farm (fast money, baby!). It's a clever mix that mostly makes it easy to differentiate between types of commands and keep them all straight in your head.

After just a few minutes with Touch Type Tale I was bouncing between directing my units around the map, opening farm buildings to harvest my crops, and recruiting troops and workers. Occasionally I'd get "stuck" in a word I didn't mean to be typing and be confused why my command wasn't going through, until I spotted the word I'd queued into somewhere on the map. Touch Type Tale needs louder feedback for when you mess up, but I also think I'd be much faster at spotting my errors after an hour or two of play.

After a tutorial level, I played another that completely changed things up into a tower defense format, sending hordes of enemies at me who I could zap with a magic laser tower atop my base. I still had to recruit troops and send them around the map to guard against attackers, so this added yet another typing requirement, and with real time pressure. It reminded me of racing to score the best WPM in typing class, which was a blast.

A later level layered in a magic system, unit upgrades, special units, and demanded I control my armies a bit more strategically. By default, typing a road command will send all the troops there walking down to the next node. But hit Ctrl and a specific letter and you can control just a specific type of unit—say, your spearmen—or select half or even a single unit to issue a command to. It's slightly clumsy, but still allows for nuance I didn't expect.

Your troops do more damage when they attack enemies from more than one side, and cavalry will move faster if they aren't grouped with footmen, dealing extra damage when they charge. So there's reason to micromanage. 

In the levels I played Touch Type Tales' AI was disappointingly passive, but there's a flexible difficulty slider that hopefully makes them more aggressive at higher settings. It's still pretty lightweight as strategy games go, but juggling half a dozen different typing prompts at once is a fun and different sort of challenge.

The developers expect it to be out in early 2020, with a beta later this year to get more player feedback.

There's some big stompy dinosaurs coming to Total War: Warhammer 2 in its next bit of Legendary Lords DLC, but I'm more excited for the free updates coming alongside it on September 11th. In a development blog post yesterday, Creative Assembly broke down one of the free new features coming to the game, assuming you own both Total War: Warhammer games.

Forts are a new type of settlement that will exclusively appear in the Mortal Empires sandbox mode, adding a major new strategic wrinkle to the game. Instead of either fighting out on the plains or at the gates of cities, forts provide a huge defensive advantage at key choke-points on the world map, like narrow mountain passes.

In the dev-blog, we get to see the process of designing and decorating the fortress-town of Helmgart, located on the Imperial border to Bretonnia. If you're playing as the Empire, those layered walls are a huge advantage against any massed cavalry advance, and are just ripe to be covered with riflemen and artillery. For any attacker, it's a literal uphill struggle through walls of lead and will likely need a truly overwhelming force in order to break through.

Helmgart is just one of several Imperial fort maps that will be popping up around the Old World, although it sounds like most will be at the Empire's borders. The dev blog claims that each of these new battlefields takes three weeks of work to produce, and they want each to provide unique strategic challenges beyond the initial storming of the gates.

For those who are picking up the new Hunter & The Beast DLC, another recent developer blog detailed all the new features on the way there, including several new campaign mechanics, as neither Markus Wulfhart and Nakai (the two new Legendary Lords) are competing for the Eye Of The Vortex, and have their own unique victory conditions that directly oppose each other.

The Hunter & The Beast DLC arrives for Total War: Warhammer 2 on September 11th, priced at £6.99/$8.99/€8.99. You can find it here on Steam. The Old World updates (including forts) for Mortal Empires mode will be free for anyone who owns both Total War: Warhammer 2 and the original game.

Are you ready for one last dive into The Binding Of Isaac: Rebirth's filthy basements? The upcoming (and supposedly final) Repentance expansion is adding some fun new surprises, including the horribly wet and gooey sewers of Dross, one of several new areas showcased last night in a developer Twitch stream, which you can watch below.

There's a lot of tiny little new bits of polish, like animated bomb fuses, and some game-changing stuff on the way like True Co-op mode, allowing for two Isaacs to work together, each building up their own set of weird mutations and items.

Much of Repentance's content is coming direct from the excellent Antibirth, a fan-made expansion mod. For Repentance, Nicalis are working with the Antibirth team (as confirmed by lead developer Edmund McMillen) to make the mod official, and add a few new goodies along the way. You can see a full breakdown of everything eagle-eyed fans have spotted so far on this (obviously spoiler-laden) Binding Of Isaac wiki page.

McMillen also shared the rather imposing box art for the new expansion last night, crediting artist Eric Ridgeway for this gruesome depiction of Isaac's mum.

If you're lucky enough to be at PAX West this weekend, you can try Repentance for yourself. Just look for this menacingly-lit booth. While there's still no hard release date or price set for Repentance, Nicalis still aiming to to get it done by the end of this year.

Borderlands: When ruins of an alien civilization are found on the distant border world of Pandora, the Atlas Corporation calls first dibs on the planet, settling and attempting to uncover its secrets. Rumors of a cache of alien technology called the Vault get out and the rival Dahl Corporation follows suit, claiming they're after the planet's minerals in and setting up a mining industry with indentured convicts as most of its workforce. They secretly assign a science team, headed by Patricia Tannis, to find the Vault.

Atlas deploy their private army, the Crimson Lance, to drive Dahl off. Dahl leave in a hurry, abandoning some of their equipment, including a vessel called Sanctuary, and their workforce. Many of these freed convicts turn to banditry, with clans of them dividing up sections of the planet and taking over a settlement called Haven. (The dispossessed settlers found New Haven). Patricia Tannis also remains behind, now bereft of funding and fellow researchers.

Word of the Vault attracts treasure seekers called Vault Hunters to Pandora, including Lilith (a superpowered mutant called a siren, only six of which ever exist at once), Mordecai (a sniper with a pet bird-monster called Bloodwing), Roland (a former Crimson Lance soldier), and Brick (a very large man). They are contacted by an enigmatic "Guardian Angel" who wants to help them find the Vault before anybody else does.

After the Vault Hunters discover the first of several fragments of the key needed to open the Vault, they're contacted by Commandant Steele of the Crimson Lance who wants the key for herself. As soon as they complete the key she steals it and opens the Vault, but finds that it isn't full of treasure. It's a prison for an alien creature called the Destroyer, which immediately kills her. The Vault Hunters manage to defeat the creature and Angel reveals this was her plan all along—she knew the Destroyer was the only thing in the Vault but believed it was too dangerous to be allowed to live, and this was the only chance to defeat it.

Borderlands: The Pre-Sequel: A programmer for the Hyperion Corporation named Jack learns there's another Vault on Pandora's moon, Elpis, this one definitely full of treasure, no for real this time. He puts together his own team of Vault Hunters including Athena (a former Crimson Lance assassin), Nisha (a bandit hunter), Wilhelm (a cyborg merc), and Claptrap (a shit robot), to find and open it. They're opposed by the Lost Legion—former Dahl soldiers who had already found the Vault, then decided it was safer left closed.

The Lost Legion take over Hyperion's space station Helios, powering up a weapon there called the Eye of Helios to use to destroy the moon and prevent the Vault being opened. On Elpis, the current crew of Vault Hunters befriend two of the previous crew, Lilith and Roland, as well as a bar-owner named Moxxi, and work together to prevent the moon from being blown up. They also track down an AI on an abandoned Dahl ship which Jack uses to create an army of robots.

After they take back the station, Lilith, Roland, and Moxxi betray Jack, knowing that the Eye of Helios is being powered by the eye of the Destroyer—the only part of the creature that survived—and is too powerful for Jack to keep. They sabotage it, and escape.

Jack and the Vault Hunters return to Elpis to open the Vault. Inside Jack finds an object carved with the Vault symbol. This gives him a vision of another Vault on Pandora containing a creature called the Warrior, which can be controlled by whoever opens the Vault and used to conquer the planet. At this point Lilith uses her siren powers to phase in and break the object, smashing it into Jack's face and scarring him permanently.

Borderlands 2: Jack, now wearing a mask and calling himself Handsome Jack, takes over Hyperion and uses his robot army to enforce order on Pandora while mining it for Eridium—a substance produced after the first Vault was opened—and trying to find the Vault of the Warrior. Roland, from the original Vault Hunter crew, heads a resistance to Jack's rule called the Crimson Raiders based out Sanctuary, a settlement built on the abandoned Atlas vessel.

News of this new Vault gets out and more Vault Hunters arrive on Pandora, including Maya (another of the six sirens), Zer0 (a mysterious assassin), Axton (an ex-Dahl sergeant), and Salvador (a man who can shoot two guns at once). Handsome Jack attempts to have them killed, dumping them in the same icefield he abandoned Claptrap in after the events of the Pre-Sequel. The Vault Hunters join up with the Crimson Raiders in Sanctuary after being guided there by Angel. But when Angel sabotages Sanctuary's defenses the Crimson Raiders learn that she's a siren, and also Jack's daughter.

Jack's been keeping Angel imprisoned while he uses her powers to charge up a Vault key. She rebels against his control by directing the Vault Hunters to her location and begging them to kill her and free her from the contraption that's leeching her powers. Aided by Roland and Lilith, the Vault Hunters follow Angel's wishes until Handsome Jack arrives, kills Roland, and kidnaps Lilith.

When the Vault Hunters find him at the Vault of the Warrior, Handsome Jack has used Lilith's siren powers to finish charging the key and opened the Vault. Working together they defeat both Jack and the Warrior, and find that there was something else in the Vault—a map, directing them to other planets that are home to Vaults.

Tales from the Borderlands: Rhys and Vaughn, two low-ranking Hyperion employees, travel to Pandora to buy a Vault key as part of a get-rich scheme. The key turns out to be a fake, and the whole grift orchestrated by two con artist sisters, Fiona and Sasha. When bandits take the money the sisters planned to con Rhys out of, the four reluctantly team up to get it back. Rhys, a cyborg, uploads a program into his brain he thinks will help find the bandits only to learn that he's just put an AI copy of Handsome Jack into his head.

The Jack AI leads them toward an even bigger score—another Vault, called the Vault of the Traveler, whose location can only be found by assembling a robot named Gortys. Rhys gets Jack out of his head by downloading him into Helios Station, then sending the station crashing into Pandora. Free from the AI, they assemble a team to open the Vault and defeat the Traveler, and just once a Vault turns out to be full of loot as promised.

Earlier today, CD Projekt streamed about 15 minutes of Cyberpunk 2077 gameplay, showing off two ways to play: the sneaky hacker and the guns-blazing fighter. After the demonstration, a few developers got together to chat about Cyberpunk's world design, character customization, playstyles, and guns.

Nothing huge was revealed in the roundtable—we already know a lot about Cyberpunk 2077—but we did hear a few small details and get glimpses at the character and inventory screens. You can watch the gameplay video and full discussion above, and I've snipped out a few interesting details below.

• There's a hacking minigame in which players select hexidecimal sequences to unlock computers and their contents, such as "Camera Log" and "Officer Tracing."
• There are "surprise" vehicles, aside from cars and motorcycles, that we haven't seen.
• You can fast travel, but you can also walk or drive anywhere you need to go.
• Your character background unlocks unique dialogue options.
• Attributes, skills, and the perks you assign to skills affect what your character can do—the example given was a perk for the Athletics skill which allows the player to run while carrying a body.
• CD Projekt is "looking into" how to divorce style from stats when it comes to clothing.
• "Street cred" is your reputation score, and gaining it increases access to vendors, services, and cyberware.
• A few weapons were discussed: nanowire, which can be used to hack or as a whip, an eight-barreled shotgun, a weapon that heats up bullets to "shoot off cyborgs' arms," and a handgun that shoots faster the longer you sustain fire.
• You can play as a "cyberninja" who specializes in katanas.
• Slow-motion cyberware isn't just for the player—some enemies may "zip around" while using it as well.
• There are gun skins and attachments, such as scopes and silencers. Guns also have stats that can be improved.
• As you get better at shooting a certain gun, your crosshair can become smaller, and your reload speed can increase, changing the animation.

For a more comprehensive overview, we've collected everything we've learned about Cyberpunk 2077 so far. Below, I've grabbed screenshots of the character creator, skill tree, and inventory.

Cyberpunk 2077 releases April 16, 2020.

While it may not be as life-defining an event as it used to be, your wedding day should always be special. And what's more special than having the gravelly baritone of Jon St. John—the one and only voice of Duke Nukem —declaring you husband and wife. Or husband and husband. Or wife and wife? It's 2019; it's all good.

I'm still torn on whether getting married by Duke Nukem would be a funny story to share with your kids decades later, or a terrible secret to take to the grave, but either way it's a thing that can theoretically happen now, thanks to Jon St. John becoming an ordained minister. Truly, a man of many talents.

He's even confirmed via Twitter that he's willing to switch character. Duke Nukem is all well and good if you're dealing with an alien invasion and/or abducted bikini babes, but not really my go-to for weddings, especially after Duke Nukem Forever. I'd much rather be wed by the eternally blank (but friendly) Big The Cat from Sonic Adventure, one of St. John's lesser-known roles. Or failing that, Mega64's totally unofficial Doug Huggem.

This raises a good few tangential questions. If you could pick any game voice actor to hold your ceremony in character, who would you pick. While Big The Cat would be hilarious, I can't help but feel that Deckard Cain from Diablo would convey the right tone. Just make sure everyone leaves after the rings and smooches are exchanged, no matter how much he asks you to stay a while and listen. Who would you pick?

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 global PC Gamer team gets together to decide the top 100 PC games. The process is simple: we take last year's list, propose a bunch of additions, tweaks and removals, and then hold a series of hours-long discussions going step-by-step through every suggestion.

Here's the result: a list of what we think are the best PC games you can play today. That caveat—play today—is important. These aren't necessarily the most important or most influential games (if you're looking for that, check out the 50 most important PC games of all time). Every entry in the top 100 is something we recommend that PC gamers play in 2019. 

As always, we prefer to celebrate the breadth and variety on the platform, so we've limited ourselves to one entry per game series. We've also included a selection of personal picks—games that didn't make the list, but that individual members of the team still love. Enjoy!

100. Grim Fandango Remastered

RELEASED 1998 | LAST POSITION 78

Tom Senior: It’s vague to suggest an adventure game has ‘heart’, but it evokes the warmth and humanity of Grim Fandango’s cast, who in story terms actually happen to be cold and dead. It’s a story of love, friendship, and death-after-death in an afterlife inspired by the Day of the Dead. The puzzles are often nonsense but it’s bursting with jokes and even features a few touching moments. Glottis the big orange demon is the friend we all deserve and Hector LeMans is a terrifying villain.

99. Battle Brothers

RELEASED 2017 | LAST POSITION New entry

Evan Lahti: Mount & Blade sandboxiness plus XCOMbat. Your mercs take the form of cute, legless pawn pieces, but it’s the brutality of Battle Brothers that stands out. Your guys can suffer stat-altering injuries like brain damage or a missing nose. It’s refreshing to play a campaign where your trajectory isn’t just steady accumulation of power and loot. The difficulty is all-you-can-eat, and getting on the wrong side of a barbarian or acid-blooded giant worm produces setbacks that you feel for days.

98. Max Payne 2: The Fall of Max Payne

RELEASED 2003 | LAST POSITION New entry

Samuel Roberts: Remedy’s slow-motion shooter is more challenging and interesting than pretty much every cover shooter I’ve played, turning each room into a puzzle that has to be solved (by diving through the air and firing guns wildly). Bullet time became passé a bit too quickly, as slow-mo crept into more and more games to no real benefit, but Remedy’s Max Payne games always did it incredibly well. 

Tom Senior: I wish Max Payne was a genre. I would spend hours in beautiful sequels wearing increasingly detailed leather jackets and shooting goons in slow motion. I’ll never forgive Max Payne 2 for making Max’s face normal, but improved level design and more physics-driven destruction make it the better shooter. 

Tyler Wilde: I don’t have any proof of this, but I swear I was the first person to post a mod for this game on the official forums. I mean, “mod” might be generous, as I just messed with certain numbers to make bullet time last longer, if I recall, but it speaks to the game’s spirit that it was so easy to mess around with—a better time, if I’m letting nostalgia take over. Cheesy. Silly. Weird. Modable. Max Payne 2 encapsulates what made me fall in love with PC gaming.

97. Psychonauts

RELEASED 2005 | LAST POSITION New entry

James Davenport: Double Fine’s bizarre platformer is still a gleefully grim adventure through the strange corners of the human brain. Psychonauts is a game about nostalgia. It takes place in a summer camp and each level therein takes place in the distorted memories of the people there, little tours of their own hazy recollections; some traumatic, some tragic, others joyful, all lost time. Thanks to the fusion of the formerly massive genres of 3D character-based platformers and adventure games, Psychonauts’ nostalgic qualities take on more power. Deal with the tricky camera and pointless combat for a playful, funny and earnest coming-of-age story.

96. Oxenfree

RELEASED 2016 | LAST POSITION 76

Jody Macgregor: This horror game about teenagers on a spooky island does have eerie moments—if you’ve ever read about numbers stations you’ll understand the kind of creepiness it’s evoking with its story of radio ghosts. The best thing about it, though, isn’t the scares. It’s the way Oxenfree’s teens talk over each other realistically. You never know when choosing one of the word balloons to respond to their believably teenage banter might break the flow of conversation. Like every teenager, every time you open your mouth you might be jamming your foot in it. It’s hard to talk about Oxenfree’s horror side without spoiling it, but its conversational side—well-written, funny, and with a rhythm that puts most RPGs to shame—makes it worthwhile on its own.

95. Rising Storm 2: Vietnam

RELEASED 2017 | LAST POSITION New entry

Evan: An asymmetrical, 64-player historical FPS where it actually means something to be on the Red Team. It might cost 200 US Marines to claw your way up the steep, scorched earth of Hill 937, where the North Vietnamese have vision, bunkers, RPGs, traps, and can dig their own spawn points. Fighting through ‘unfair’ circumstances like this with your own faction-specific weapons (helicopters, napalm, the M16) provides a small insight into the brutality of the Vietnam War.

94. Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic 2

RELEASED 2005 | LAST POSITION New entry

Fraser Brown: The weird, slightly stoned, tragically unfinished sequel to Knights of the Old Republic is Star Wars at its boldest. It is Planescape: Torment to KotOR’s Baldur’s Gate, equally at home with pondering the nature of the Force as it is shooting lightning at Mandelorians. It takes a bit of effort getting it working well—you’ll want the unofficial patch at the very least, but some of the cosmetic mods are worth a look, as well—but the reward is one of the best Star Wars stories ever written, and a cracking RPG to boot. Word of warning: if you do decide to go down the Dark Side and take all of your crew with you, be prepared for some guilt pangs. It’s brutal. 

Jody: HK-47 is in it. That’s a recommendation.

93. Mordhau

RELEASED 2019 | LAST POSITION New entry

Evan: Messy, unfair, and brutal, just as medieval warfare was meant to be. I love the way that Mordhau makes kill-stealing a certifiable skill—I take pride in being that guy who can whirl his zweihänder into a steel party-in-progress and decapitate someone who’s already engaged (without gutting my teammates, usually). Likewise, it’s the heroic fantasy of winning outnumbered fights, of dancing around four dudes who are poking at you with spears and still being the last one standing. Also: the heroic fantasy of clubbing a Templar with a frying pan. 

It’s a shame it’s being undermined by an unusually toxic community and the absence of a modern player reporting system. Triternion’s response to this unchecked tire fire is pretty 13th century.

92. Thumper

RELEASED 2016 | LAST POSITION 83

Tyler: Brutal. There isn’t another rhythm game like it. 

Tom: You play a silver pill hurtling into the mouth of a god. You bounce through turns to protracted, nightmarish rhythms in an ethereal landscape. It’s beautiful and uncomfortable at the same time. 

James: Talking about Thumper requires describing it as a abstract sensory experience. But strip away the arcane sheen and what’s left is one of the most intense games ever made.

91. Hearthstone

RELEASED 2014 | LAST POSITION 39

Tim Clark: It’s easy to see Hearthstone as embattled on multiple fronts these days, what with the current fad for Auto Chess draining the game of streamers and the rise (at last) of a serious competitor now that Magic: The Gathering has a digital version that doesn’t look like Excel. But for all those travails, it’s also easy to forget how much Blizzard’s colourful card battler gets right. And recently, with more active card balancing and the first range of buffs we’ve seen since the beta, the game has felt more vibrant than it has for a long time. 

This year’s Rise of Shadows expansion was followed by the best single-player mode Team 5 has created yet in The Dalaran Heist, which provided a welcome outlet for those of us who like to build meme decks without having our heads brutally kicked in on ladder. Next up is Saviors of Uldum, which sees the return of the League of Explorers—the most iconic heroes Blizzard has designed without drawing on existing World of Warcraft lore. 

Still, the game is in danger of slipping out of the top 100 for the first time. In order to retain its place, Blizzard surely needs to implement a bigger feature shake-up, including revisiting the tournament mode that it mothballed last year. Oh, and nerf Dr Boom Mad Genius. I definitely did not order all these bombs.

90. The Norwood Suite

RELEASED 2017 | LAST POSITION 72

Phil Savage: A first-person exploration adventure about falling down the rabbit hole of a remote jazz hotel. You explore the converted mansion of celebrated musical icon Peter Norwood, solving problems for a quirky cast of characters. Whether you’re uncovering a finger-destroying musical score or just making a sandwich for a corporate stooge, everything you do is accompanied by a distinctive soundtrack and a witty visual flair. It’s a delightfully surreal space, full of mystery and surprise.

89. Galactic Civilizations 2

RELEASED 2011| LAST POSITION 69

Tom: With each expansion Stellaris creeps up on GalCiv 2. And yet this classic 4X game remains one of the smartest empire-builders you can play on PC. The factions are imaginative and the AI is slightly terrifying. If you’ve read Tom Francis’ Galactic Civilization 2 diaries you’ll know it’s a great story generator too. Oddly my favourite part might be the ship builder, which lets me customise the way my forces look on the map. You can build some very odd and broken stuff.

88. The Jackbox Party Pack 4

RELEASED 2017 | LAST POSITION New entry

Evan: Does your home have between five and 20 people in it? Do this. 

James: Lie to your friends via a quiz show, collaborate on grotesque town murals, place bets on bad arguments—the days of Pictionary and Cranium are over. No excuses to bail either. All you need to play is a screen and internet. Long live the board game, the board game is dead.

87. Rimworld

RELEASED 2018 | LAST POSITION New entry

Fraser: I’ve yet to experience what I would consider ‘success’ in RimWorld, despite countless hours spent nurturing colonies. The disasters, many of my own making, mount up, sending my sanctuaries into a spiral they can’t escape. Raids, poor weather and a multitude of other threats means a crisis is always looming. I love it.

86. Inside

RELEASED 2016 | LAST POSITION New entry

Samuel: Nice to see this on the list this year. A singular, horrifying platformer that I’d recommend to anyone, regardless of their experience with the genre, with a story that ends in a way no one could predict. 

Chris Livingston: The animation and imagery was beautiful and I loved taking a few moments here and there to just observe the world.

85. Vampire: The Masquerade – Bloodlines

RELEASED 2004 | LAST POSITION New entry

Jody: Bloodlines is one of few games that actually makes you feel cool. Being a vampire in a Los Angeles where it’s always dark and it’s always goth night at the clubs is great. You get to hang out with sexy people and murder anyone in your way. Occasionally you get trapped in a nightmare hotel, but that’s a small price for being a secret ruler of LA. 

Then you accidentally murder someone, or bump into a friend from your old life. Suddenly it’s not so cool being a monster. Bloodlines turns out to be a powerful horror game where you’re trapped on the other side of the fence. 

Phil: Bloodlines missed the Top 100 last year, but it’s back where it belongs—in part because the news of an upcoming sequel makes this a great time to check out everything that makes the original game so special. Just make sure you play it with the fan patch.

84. Shadow Tactics: Blades of the Shogun

RELEASED 2016 | LAST POSITION New entry

Jody: Top-down stealth set in feudal Japan. Shadow Tactics is a game of ninja stars and distracting tanuki, where you stab a guard and drag him back into a bush before a cherry blossom hits the ground. You have mastered the art of invisibility, and nobody needs to know it took four quickloads to get right. 

Phil: A worthy successor to tactical stealth classics like Commandos and Desperados. So much so that its creators are now working on Desperados 3.

83. Homeworld Remastered Collection

RELEASED 2015 | LAST POSITION 56

Tom: Make war with sad spaceships in one of the most beautiful RTS games ever made. The lasers, drive trails and spaceship designs are timeless, so the Remaster only had to touch up some textures. It’s one of the few games to try real-time strategy in true 3D. It can melt your brain at times but the action is always spectacular. Great use of Adagio for Strings too. 

Andy Kelly: People often say No Man’s Sky looks like the cover of a ‘70s sci-fi paperback come to life, but I think Homeworld does it better. The brightly- coloured ships are pure Chris Foss, and watching thousands of them duking it out against vivid nebulas is absolutely thrilling to behold. The campaign is also one of the best in the genre.

82. Elite Dangerous

RELEASED 2015 | LAST POSITION 94

Andy: Whether it’s a nimble fighter or a chunky freighter, the ships in Elite Dangerous are all a delight to fly, and you can really feel the weight and power of the things when you slam the throttle. They’re the real stars of the game, but there’s a massive, beautiful open galaxy to explore here too. With so many ways to play and make money, the game’s vast scale replica of the Milky Way can be quite daunting at first. But when you find your niche—for me it was trading commodities between systems for massive profits—you’ll lose weeks to it. It’s great with a gamepad, but playing with a flight stick and throttle takes it to the next level. 

Steven Messner: I’ve never felt so enamoured with the little things in a game, like the simple joy of hailing a station to request docking access and then slowly parking my ship. You know you’ve done something good when even an act as mundane as parking a vehicle is fun. 

Phil: With its representation of our solar system, Elite Dangerous’s map gives me a deep, overpowering fear at our complete insignificance against the vastness of all creation. And, just like in real life, I deal with that fear by buying things that I don’t need—ferrying goods between planets and transporting passengers to far off worlds to earn money for new ships.

81. Undertale

RELEASED 2015 | LAST POSITION 28

Tyler: I always second guess myself on this one. If Undertale was really so good, why don’t I think about it anymore? But I always conclude that yes, it was very good. It’s the best game that breaks the fourth wall of RPGs, commenting on authorship and fandom in a way nothing else I’ve played has even approached. It’s easy to forget how much I loved it because it’s been meme’d to death, but if you haven’t played Undertale, you should. Just don't read anything about it.

80. Thief 2: The Metal Age

RELEASED 2000 | LAST POSITION New entry

Phil: Incredibly influential, many of the games elsewhere on this list (not least Dishonored 2) owe a debt to the first two entries in Looking Glass’s first-person burgle-’em-up series. But Thief 2 isn’t just included here as a historical curiosity. The fact is it’s still one of the best stealth games you can play in 2019. Its levels are immaculately designed, its tools make for excitingly tense encounters, and its community is still active and still building new mods and missions.

79. Devil Daggers

RELEASED 2016 | LAST POSITION 35

Jody: The retro FPS has brought back secret areas, keycards, and doors that go pixelated when you smoosh against them. Devil Daggers doesn’t have any of that. It has crunchy demons, shootable knives, and death within seconds. It treats the FPS like an animal with one decent cut of meat, binning the rest. It’s Circle-Strafe: The Game. It’s perfect.

78. Doom 2

RELEASED 1994 | LAST POSITION 79

Andy: It’s remarkable how playable old school Doom still is. Watching a demon being torn apart by your shotgun is as satisfying now as it was in the ’90s. The original is a classic, but the sequel’s enemies and complex levels make it the one to play today. 

Phil: And away from the official campaign you’ll find an active mod scene packed full of delights.

77. 80 Days

RELEASED 2015 | LAST POSITION 59

Samuel: All it takes to bring a late 19th century steampunk version of our world to life is gorgeous illustrations and some of the best writing that you’ll find in games. 80 Days really makes you feel like you’re travelling across a fascinating world, and it gives you plenty of reasons to take that journey again and again, whether you succeed or fail.

76. Overcooked

RELEASED 2016 | LAST POSITION 42

Jody: Cooking is stressful. There are sharp objects, things burn if you don’t take them off the heat right now, and that order of soup was supposed to go out ages ago. Overcooked puts you in a kitchen with your loved ones, who all have their own ideas about how long to let dirty dishes pile up. Arguments are inevitable. In the chaos of Overcooked, everyone is an idiot sandwich. 

Phil: A great test of any relationship. Survive Overcooked’s chaotic co-op and you can survive just about anything.

75. Life is Strange

RELEASED 2015 | LAST POSITION 13

Joanna Nelius: In this adventure game you play as a teenage girl named Max, who must navigate an increasingly complex web of angst while making decisions that may or may not end in the entire destruction of her hometown. You also have developed the power to rewind time, which doesn’t always save you from the consequences of your decisions. This gut-wrenching, coming-of-age tale left me sobbing for my best friend by the end—and made me fall in love with branching narratives.

74. Warhammer: Vermintide 2

RELEASED 2018 | LAST POSITION 77

Samuel: Playing through this co-op shooter’s campaign with the UK team was one of the most fun experiences I’ve had with games in the last year. It’s got a good, broad range of difficulties, the characters are so much fun, and the levels are so pretty. This sells me on the excitement of the Warhammer fantasy universe better than anything else has. 

Tom: It’s hard to make first-person melee combat feel good but Vermintide 2 nails it. Even the magic flaming staffs feel powerful and hefty, and trying not to blow up as the Bright Wizard is a fun minigame in itself. I still prefer killing Skaven to the tougher Chaos enemies, but the levels are larger, prettier and more ambitious than the original game. 

Wes Fenlon: The gear system is robust enough to give you some satisfying progression from replaying levels over and over again, but the combat’s so good you barely need it anyway. Mostly I love flinging myself through the air as a berserker dwarf, and also the tension of trying to clear a level with the well-hidden grimoires in hand, which improve your loot drops but lower your health while you’re holding them. It’s so much harder and completely optional, but I go for it every time. Rat men just don’t keep my heart pounding without a dusting of extra danger on top.

73. Factorio

RELEASED 2016 | LAST POSITION New entry

Chris: There’s a certain exhaustion that can set in when playing resource management games—there are only so many trees you can chop or so much coal you can chisel before it becomes a joyless chore. But in Factorio you build little factories to do all that busywork for you and it’s a genuine rush to turn a barren landscape into a massive assembly line of busy little conveyor belts, robotic arms, and research labs. All the harvesting, transporting, and crafting you’ve been doing by hand can be turned over to machines, and the machines themselves can be built by machines that have been built by other machines. Once you’ve gotten a taste for the automation possibilities in Factorio, you’ll never want to lift a pickaxe in another resource management game ever again.

72. Deus Ex

RELEASED 2000 | LAST POSITION 53

Andy: I replay cyberpunk RPG Deus Ex every couple of years, and I’m always heartened to discover that it still holds up. I mean, visually it’s hideous. But those big, detailed, complex levels, and the sheer amount of ways to navigate them, make this a game that is somehow immune to the passage of time. Every time I play it I find new ways to complete objectives, and there’s something compelling about its bleak pre-apocalyptic world where every wild conspiracy theory is true.

71. Invisible, Inc.

RELEASED 2015 | LAST POSITION 43

Fraser: There are a lot of good stealth games that fall apart the moment you get spotted. The game devolves into a less tense, less thrilling action game, maybe. Or you’ve failed instantly and that’s the level over. Not here. Invisible, Inc. is a turn-based tactics game that’s pure stealth, but it’s equally brilliant when you screw up and get caught. Maybe your agent has an ability that can save them. You might simply be able to escape, ensuring your agents make it to the next mission. But if you’ve got an agent down, stunned and in another room, do you rescue them first? There are a bounty of options, and they’re almost always followed by persistent, dramatic consequences that change the complexion of a campaign that’s constantly teetering on the edge of failure.

70. EVE Online

RELEASED 2003 | LAST POSITION 50

Steven: EVE Online is a space-faring MMO with an uncanny ability for creating some wild and incredible stories, and it’s the only game on this list that might be more enjoyable to read about than to play. EVE Online players just keep finding new ways to screw one another over in the most wonderful ways. The last few years have seen long-standing empires implode, betrayals, and even a recent alien invasion that temporarily crippled all of its biggest player alliances.

69. Overwatch

RELEASED 2016 | LAST POSITION 14

Bo Moore: While its popularity has waned some in the face of battle royales like Fortnite and Apex Legends, Overwatch remains one of the most accessible multiplayer hero shooters you can play. Its enormous cast of 30 characters (and still counting) cater to just about any playstyle that takes your fancy. From fast-twitch damage dealers like Tracer and Widowmaker to less aim-intensive heroes like Reinhardt and Brigitte (and everything in between), there’s something here for everyone.

68. Sea of Thieves

RELEASED 2018 | LAST POSITION New entry

Samuel: It’s been fantastic seeing Sea of Thieves transform from something with potential into a game I want to play every week. I hope it keeps growing. 

Tyler: Some of the puzzles and boss fights are terribly designed, and I would never describe the non-ship combat as good, but we always have fun messing around within Sea of Thieves’ loose structure. A great moment the other night: two fellow pirates held book pages in my face so I could use the symbol keys on them to decode a different page without flipping back and forth. Just after I finished translating the last line, thinking I’d have to start all over because I’d already forgotten the first line, a notification popped up. “Found it,” said Andy Chalk. None of us knew it, but he’d stumbled on the puzzle as I was reading and silently followed my bumbling instructions. I love the moments when we surprise each other, and Sea of Thieves is full of them. 

Chris: It’s got the best water in games. It’s got the best sunset in games. It’s definitely got the best barfing in games. That’s plenty right there, but I also love how tactile Sea of Thieves is. There’s something wonderful about physically handing an item like a key or a fish to another player rather than dropping it on the ground for them to pick up. It just feels great.

67. Don't Starve Together

RELEASED 2016 | LAST POSITION New entry

Tim: I type this with a stuffed Beefalo plushy on my desk, despite being a man in his forties, which should give you some indication of the hold Klei’s Burton-esque survival game holds on my imagination. Much as I enjoyed building my own isolated megabase ringed by meat effigies (one of a few items which can cheat death in this roguelike), the appeal of encountering strangers or working with a friend to stay alive in this gothy land is undeniable. 

Klei’s attention to the game also remains admirable, adding new characters Wortox and Wormwood this year, plus rebalancing old favourites and providing ongoing support for modders. Thanks to its gorgeous art and carefully considered mechanics, Don’t Starve in its various versions is the kind of game which never need go away on PC. Unless there comes a time when shrieking “The bearger* is coming!” at your teammate loses its appeal. Which seems unlikely. 

(*A part-bear, part-badger, obviously.)

66. Baldur's Gate 2: Shadow of Amn

RELEASED 2000 | LAST POSITION 61

Jody: The first Baldur’s Gate was BioWare recreating Dungeons & Dragons on a computer. It had rules that got in the way and dungeons that went on too long—just like most real games of D&D. Then Black Isle made Planescape: Torment with the same engine. It was a 60-hour RPG, but also a thrown gauntlet. Baldur’s Gate 2 was BioWare’s response. The plot made sense of the bit where you do sidequests in the middle and companions felt like they had real personalities. Everything good about BioWare’s RPGs started here. 

Andy: The bustling city of Athkatla is one of my favourite RPG settings: a weird fantasy metropolis that feels genuinely alien and intimidating when you’re first let loose in it. Baldur’s Gate 2 is, for me, BioWare’s greatest moment.

65. Her Story

RELEASED 2015 | LAST POSITION 23

Samuel: Her Story’s unusual style of play—you’re piecing together bits of video by searching for words from the audio in a police database—makes it very easy to recommend to people who have never played games before. This is the game that gets the closest to making you feel like an actual detective: following your own intuition and coming to conclusions yourself, rather than trying to figure out exactly what the game’s designer wants you to do next.

64. Final Fantasy 12: The Zodiac Age

RELEASED 2018 | LAST POSITION 58

Samuel: Not my personal favourite Final Fantasy, but the one I think will resonate the most with PC players due to its flexibility in classes and programmable party members. Plus it still looks amazing. 

Tom: The story’s all over the place but FF12 has some good characters (basically any that aren’t Vaan) and the squad development system is awesome. The Zodiac Age update adds a fast- forward command that makes the grind more manageable. Without it I wonder if the game would make this list. If you like toying with character builds then this is a must-play. The Gambit AI system is genius too. 

Wes: The flavourful writing and voice acting puts almost every other game in the series to shame. But what I really love is that its world is all the same scale, with no abstract overworld map. It makes the journey feel much more immersive.

63. Frostpunk

RELEASED 2018 | LAST POSITION 66

Chris: Am I the baddie? I’m still not sure. Frostpunk not only mixes city-building and survival but also right and wrong, resulting in one of the biggest moral gray areas I’ve ever seen in a game. As you construct a city on a frozen wasteland and put your settlers to work in the hostile environment, you’re faced with decisions that force you to weigh the things you want to do with the things you need to do. The simulation is as harsh as the weather, and keeping people alive isn’t the same as keeping them hopeful. Frostpunk is beautiful, grim, and challenging, a game where saving lives can come at a cost so great you feel like a villain even when you succeed. 

Phil: Likely the only game in which you can make children work in coal mines that we’ll ever include in the Top 100.

62. Half-Life 2

RELEASED 2004 | LAST POSITION 36

Andy: Valve’s FPS is still one of the best examples of the genre. Varied, intelligently designed, and backed up by some entertainingly chaotic physics, Gordon Freeman’s battle against the Combine is full of memorable moments. From the zombie-slaying gloom of Ravenholm to the final strider battle at White Forest, few first-person shooters are as consistently entertaining. It tells a great story too, but one that simmers away in the background, never getting in the way of the action.

61. Euro Truck Simulator 2

RELEASED 2012 | LAST POSITION 82

Andy: Our favourite trucking sim just keeps getting bigger and better. Now, thanks to the Beyond the Baltic Sea expansion, you can drive as far as Russia, which makes the sensation of being on a long road trip even stronger. The map is enormous and you can drive across it in real-time without any loading breaks. Beyond that it’s just a great driving game. The handling is weighty and nuanced, and it occasionally looks stunning—particularly when your truck is being pounded by rain. The idea of driving a truck might sound boring, but Euro Truck Simulator 2 is absolutely transfixing when you get into it.

Phil: By all rights, driving a big lorry to Brussels to deliver some cabbages should not be a good time. And yet Euro Truck Simulator 2 is a beautifully meditative, relaxing game that keeps me coming back. If you want more, it’s there: you can upgrade and tweak your vehicle, unlock skill points that let you take more challenging jobs, and even hire new drivers as you work to build a transportation empire. But I don’t need any of that. My particular kink is driving at night, enjoying the melancholy loneliness of sparse motorways as I slowly make my way across the continent.

60. Baba is You

RELEASED 2019 | LAST POSITION New entry

Phil: This is a deceptively difficult top-down block-pushing puzzler about manipulating your surroundings. You combine nouns like WALL, ROCK, BABA with verbs like STOP, PUSH, YOU to affect the conditions of the level. If a WALL is no longer STOP, you can walk through it. If a ROCK is made to be PUSH, you can move it across the screen. And if BABA is no longer YOU then... what are you? Are you the wall? Are you the rock? Are you nothing? Oh no...

59. Mass Effect 2

RELEASED 2010 | LAST POSITION 40

Samuel: Still my BioWare RPG of choice, which I kind of hoped wouldn’t be the case by 2019, almost 10 years after its release (although Inquisition would be up there for me, too). Nonetheless, Mass Effect 2 fulfils that fantasy of flying around a galaxy with friends you really give a crap about. I’m due a replay of that entire trilogy. 

Jody: Assembling a crew of badass experts for a dangerous mission is the perfect RPG structure. It’s weird that BioWare hasn’t reused

58. Stalker: Call of Pripyat

RELEASED 2010 | LAST POSITION 80

Chris: Step into this bleak open world and you’ll find an FPS that refreshingly doesn’t turn you into a superhero. Start to finish, you’re always one misstep away from death. Your fragility makes every stash a treasure and every bullet a precious resource. An empty field in broad daylight becomes just as spooky as a basement full of mutants.

57. Unavowed

RELEASED 2018 | LAST POSITION New entry

Fraser: A brilliant fusion of role-playing and classic adventure gaming, Unavowed is designer Dave Gilbert’s strongest thriller to date. It’s a supernatural mystery full of twists and conundrums, but with companions and choice-laden consequences that evoke modern RPGs. The excellent pairing is bolstered by an extremely likable cast.

56. Pillars of Eternity 2: Deadfire

RELEASED 2018 | LAST POSITION New entry

Fraser: Pillars but with pirates! What a concept. Obsidian’s nautical follow-up to its fantasy RPG is a confident sequel that, instead of trying to recapture Baldur’s Gate again, strikes its own course. Its real strength is in how it supports roleplaying, giving you a bounty of dialogue options and interactions.

55. StarCraft 2

RELEASED 2010 | LAST POSITION 70

Evan: Protoss, Zerg, and Terran are the closest thing we have to a holy trinity of game balance. 

Andy: I haven’t touched multiplayer, but StarCraft 2 is one of my favourite real-time strategy games purely for its quality campaign. Every mission throws something new at you, dipping into the game’s systems to keep things fresh. 

Tom: The entire Wings of Liberty campaign is free to play. That’s an awesome set of branching missions, polished to near perfection, as Blizzard’s standards demand. StarCraft 2 is famous for its esports scene and incredibly honed multiplayer, but even in casual skirmish it gets so much right. The units are responsive and beautifully animated, and in singleplayer you get to have fun with units Blizzard deemed to be too overpowered for multiplayer.

54. Anno 1800

RELEASED 2019 | LAST POSITION New entry

Fraser: After spending a couple of games in the future, Anno once again has us building cities and getting rich in the past. Keeping your citizens happy with increasingly elaborate production chains will also keep you up until dawn. It starts modestly enough, maybe tasking you with getting some wood so you can build some simple houses, but by 5am you’ll have colonies across the sea, a sprawling international trade network and wealthy businessmen demanding an opera house.

53. Dusk

RELEASED 2018 | LAST POSITION New entry

James: A grindhouse FPS about eviscerating an evil cult tangled up in the military industrial complex made in the style of a mid-’90s shooter, Dusk does as Doom (2016) did and revels in the unhinged glory of fast-paced, acrobatic shooting. It’s not a shooter that rewrites the rules of enemy AI—enemies are dimwitted and numerous—but one that gives you massive arenas filled with jump pads, secrets, and seemingly impossible geometry to explore. Each level is stranger and more conceptual than the last, a liberating reminder that shooters shouldn’t be limited to corridors and waist-high cover. Give me more ribcage cathedrals. 

Evan: I still prefer Ion Maiden’s Build Engine aesthetic, but what a beautiful time for these neo-retro FPSes we’re living in.

52. Stardew Valley

RELEASED 2016 | LAST POSITION 51

Phil: The PC’s best farm-based RPG, in which you stick it to corporate drudgery by moving to the country to grow radishes. 

Wes: In late 2018 Stardew Valley finally got its long-promised co-op mode, and it’s just such a pleasant way to pass the time. My friend and I co-founded Blood Gulch farm, and I’ll admit there were some struggles at first. Who got to spend the first $2000 out of our shared bank account, a fortune early on, to upgrade their backpack? And look, if you don’t want to water the crops every day, maybe you shouldn’t have upgraded to that shiny steel watering can. 

But mostly it was a great way to play. We’d divide and conquer our chores, one person tending the farm while the other dug for ore in the mine or caught fish to shore up our income. Fashioning your farm exactly how you want to is fun, but coming home after a long day in the mines to find the mayonnaise machine your friend built is pumping out that sweet gold star artisanal good? That’s even better. 

Jody: I played alone, but it wasn’t lonely. Partly because I have a dog on my farm, as well as two chickens, a duck, a cow, a goat, and a wife. But also because this game’s so popular I’ve had conversations at the pub about it. Pretend farms, dogs, and wives are an odd thing to bond over, but so are football and renovating.

51. Darkest Dungeon

RELEASED 2016 | LAST POSITION 47

Evan: A burning example of how a small team can make something singular and genre-defining. Even more than my 2019 favourite Slay the Spire, Darkest Dungeon gets every mile out of its 2D illustrated characters with concussive camera work that adds tempo and impact to every attack, parry, and poisoned goblet hurled in your party’s direction. Why hire dozens of voice actors when you can thread a single, unforgettable narrator through the whole experience?

50. Path of Exile

RELEASED 2013 | LAST POSITION 100

Steven: Path of Exile is an action RPG like Diablo 3 except every few months everything changes and you have to start from scratch. That might sound exhausting, but it’s a key reason that Path of Exile will probably be a game I play well into old age – the perfect blend of complex theorycrafting and cathartic violence that keeps you clicking and clicking. And just when you think things are getting boring, its developers roll out a new expansion that remixes the whole formula.

49. The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim

RELEASED 2011| LAST POSITION 33

Chris: We’re in for a long wait for The Elder Scrolls 6, but thankfully Skyrim is still utterly playable whether it’s your first time or your fifteenth. There’s adventure around every corner and the freedom to experience it however you want. And if you’ve done it all there are thousands of mods to give you dozens more hours of fun.

48. Opus Magnum

RELEASED 2017 | LAST POSITION 46

Phil: My favourite of Zachtronics many idiosyncratic machine building puzzlers. In Opus Magnum you lay out alchemy machines using tracks and arms and a handful of commands. Once done, leaderboards show how all of your friends have somehow made better, more efficient designs, encouraging you to refine your own creation.

47. Minecraft

RELEASED 2009 | LAST POSITION New entry

Andy: As a platform for accessible creativity, Minecraft is unbeatable, really. Whether you’re just building stuff freeform in creative mode, or fighting to stay alive in survival mode, this is an enormously playable game—especially with friends. And when you join a multiplayer server, seeing the work of hundreds of players is really impressive.

46. Devil May Cry 5

RELEASED 2019 | LAST POSITION New entry

Tom: A third-person brawler with beautiful animation and an incredible moveset spread across three varied characters. Dante provides fan service with four familiar combat styles and some classic weapons while Nero and V entertain with rocket arms and demons you can summon from thin air. Normal mode is a long tutorial that drip-feeds weapons and abilities. With that done you’re free to attack difficulty levels that remix enemy mobs and provide a great challenge.

45. Sunless Skies

RELEASED 2019 | LAST POSITION New entry

Fraser: Sunless Sea in space is probably a pretty reductive description of Sunless Skies, but it’s Sunless Sea in space. Failbetter’s cosmos is a wild place, though, and the game is all the weirder for it. 

Evan: To expunge the creeping nightmares that haunt your captain, you have to buy “comforting lies” at an opulent psychic retreat where a hallucination of The Queen might cure what ails you. You owe it to your imagination to spend a few hours in Sunless Skies’ wholly original setting.

44. Sid Meier's Civilization 6

RELEASED 2016 | LAST POSITION New entry

Fraser: The most recent Civs have all gone through this cycle where they start out very promising, with some intriguing shifts in direction, but don’t truly knock the previous game off the top spot until they’re a couple of expansions in. Civilization 6 has reached that point. The unstacking of cities, climate change, golden ages and dark ages—it’s full of new features and twists on old ones, but stops short of becoming bloated. Some of the best changes are in diplomacy, whether you’re a bloodthirsty bastard or only interested in love and peace, with a World Congress and international crises making everyone work together, or at least pretend to. Pretending is the best part, because then you get to do the maniacal laugh and the big reveal when you suddenly betray your pal in the World Congress and send them spiralling into a dark age. Diplomacy is brutal stuff. 

Samuel: Like Fraser, I’ve waited until Civ 6 got its two expansions, as with previous entries in the series. It’s the dependable ‘dad’ game everyone needs in their lives, one of those constants on PC we all need to sink 40+ hours in every now and then when we can’t think of anything else to play. Adding climate change, golden ages and dark ages in Gathering Storm and Rise and Fall keeps the formula from getting stale.

43. World of Warcraft

RELEASED 2004 | LAST POSITION 29

Andy: This remains the only MMO that I’ve dedicated a decent chunk of time to, and it’s still one of my favourites to occasionally dip back into. Its large, interconnected world, Azeroth, is the culmination of decades of craft, making it one of the richest fantasy worlds on PC. Hell, I even enjoy playing it by myself.

Steven: A lot of people don’t enjoy its latest expansion, Battle for Azeroth, but I love the direction Blizzard is taking WoW these days. It’s more accessible and ambitious, taking risks and throwing out the rulebook on how MMOs should work. Sometimes Blizzard gets it wrong, but other times they create something new and special. Either way, the ride is always interesting.

42. Arma 3

RELEASED 2013 | LAST POSITION 24

Phil: Bohemia’s military sim is a broad enough platform that it can be whatever you need it to be. Want to embark on large-scale multiplayer tactical operations? You can do that. Want to muck about in go-karts? You can do that, too. 

Andy: For a while I was hooked on player-made Arma 3 singleplayer missions. There are thousands out there, created using the game’s deep scripting tools, and some of them are better than anything created by developer Bohemia.

41. Crusader Kings 2

RELEASED 2012 | LAST POSITION 31

Fraser: Crusader Kings 2 was one of the first games I reviewed, and it’s grown to the size of around a dozen games since. It’s still an RPG-infused grand strategy game where you take charge of a dynasty and muddle your way through history, assassinating the occasional spouse and maybe fomenting rebellion against your king (or squashing it, if you are the king), but these days you can join Satanic cults, become mates with the Emperor of China or even play in a world populated by talking animals. Now it’s not weird when you marry your horse. 

Chris: Even if you’re not into strategy or history, you should play it. Once you’re past the learning curve it’s an amazing story generator and every session will result in a memorable soap opera.

40. Caves of Qud

RELEASED 2015 | LAST POSITION New entry

Steven: This open-world adventure roguelike is one of the most ambitious games I’ve played. Forget the ASCII- inspired graphics for a second because Caves of Qud takes the intricate social simulation of Dwarf Fortress and packages it up in a sci-fi world where sentient bean stalks trade water for the locations of lost religious sites. It’s a world brimming with mystery, brought to life by sparkling prose, and rooted in a diverse RPG where you can shoot lasers with your mind.

39. Grand Theft Auto 5

RELEASED 2015 | LAST POSITION 38

Samuel: Its roleplay scene and relentless sales keep GTA 5 from fading away, and while GTA Online’s updates have slowed down in the last year, the fact it’s getting a casino update six years after its original release shows what staying power it has. And if you’re picking it up for the first time this year, it’s still Rockstar’s best singleplayer campaign in terms of set pieces and pure entertainment. That said: I’d love to play a new one before I turn 40 (which gives Rockstar nine years).

38. Counter-Strike: Global Offensive

RELEASED 2012 | LAST POSITION 20

Evan: Other than its ongoing fling with the battle royale genre, CS:GO has resisted the breakneck pace of updates and change-for-change’s sake that we see in the other multiplayer giants of gaming. 20 years later, our kids are making the same plays we were in 1999: pop-flashing banana, rushing B, scoring lizard-brain flicks with our AWPs down mid, and spending a non-trivial amount of our lifespans in the comforting tans of Dust2. 

It’s strange to advocate against constant progress in an era where Fortnite thrives based on its latest weird grenade, seismic map event, or absurd emote. Comparing them, it’s tempting to knock Valve for not kitchen-sinking every possible feature, idea, and improvement into CS:GO in order to reach a giant audience, and instead relying so heavily on the community to produce the new stuff. To some extent it feels like the studio didn’t take full advantage of the game’s golden years in 2014-16. 

But what we’ve got has been what most Counter-Strike players have always wanted: stability and consistency in one of the purest competitive FPSes that has ever existed. Global Offensive remains the best esport of this decade.

37. Spelunky

RELEASED 2013 | LAST POSITION 16

Wes: Still the pinnacle of randomness, AI and environment clashing in a seemingly simple but truly deep platformer. There’s room for so much expression in Spelunky’s simple jumping, whipping and bombing. Do you creep along with utmost care, or devise wicked traps for shopkeepers? Are you crazy enough to use a teleporter that can warp you into the floor? If you’ve never made it all the way to Hell in Spelunky, give it a shot before Spelunky 2 arrives. 

Chris: Spelunky would be great even if it was just 16 levels of platforming, but there’s so much more to discover: Hell, The City of Gold, The Mothership... It’s a rare game where beating the boss isn’t the biggest challenge.

36. Fortnite

RELEASED 2017 | LAST POSITION 27

James: I’m running out of ways to describe Fortnite, because it’s a battle royale that is also a dozen other things. The item and weapon pools grow and change almost weekly, two years in. Airplanes came and went. The Storm Flip creates a bubble of purple hell or blue sky sanctuary depending where you toss it. The baller is a hamster ball with a grappling hook. OK? OK. Every week I think Epic is out of ideas but it still manages to flip the meta on its head. Beyond battle royale, Creative mode has produced hundreds of fascinating custom levels, ranging from low-grav Unreal Facing Worlds recreations to Toy Story 4 prop hunt maps and race tracks and official Weezer nightmare islands and downhill skating modes that get turned into official game modes.

35. Forza Horizon 4

RELEASED 2017 | LAST POSITION New entry

James: It would be so easy for Forza Horizon 4 to be terrible, but it welcomes players of any skill level into its open world car fantasy with open arms. Accessibility makes FH4. Dozens of switches and pulleys create a spectrum of difficulty from Mario Kart to Gran Turismo levels of simulation. I err toward Mario Kart—I’m a fan of going fast with few repercussions, taking my Surge soda liveried van off cliffs to pose for photos. Pump up the bad EDM, because this is where I want to die.

34. Dark Souls Remastered

RELEASED 2011| LAST POSITION 9

James: I’m never going to tire of running poor travellers through the fruitless cycle of life and death amidst the ruins of long gone civilizations and decrepit castles. Please replace my blood with broken ramparts and skeletons and grim prose. And please do it in high definition without community fixes required to make it happen. Remastered doesn’t reinterpret Dark Souls, but it finally gives PC players a stable, accessible version of the classic, unrepentant action RPG about dead/dying gods and the dark nature of humanity. 

Wes: Still the purest example of FromSoftware’s ability to create a tight, winding Metroid-like world in 3D, with secrets and horrors around every corner.

33. Company of Heroes

RELEASED 2006 | LAST POSITION 37

Tom: Our favourite RTS has climbed a few places this year because we remembered how much we like RTS games. It’s a quiet era for the genre but Company of Heroes still delivers. The two core factions are beautifully designed and balanced. The destructible maps still feel novel, and there are some classic missions in the singleplayer campaign that stand up to repeat play. It’s aged a little visually, but the sound design is still remarkable. Explosions rarely have this sense of crunching impact, and the way gunfire distorts as you sweep across the battlefield is perfect. 

Fraser: The best Band of Brothers game, and one of the last big leaps for the genre. More than a decade on, it’s still a bold blockbuster of an RTS.

32. Assassin's Creed Odyssey

RELEASED 2018 | LAST POSITION New entry

Fraser: I didn’t think I had another one in me, but here I am, almost 100 hours later, still playing Assassin’s Creed Odyssey. It’s huge, and it’s the most fun I’ve had with the series since it started. I live in ancient Greece now, with my boat, my bird and my big biceps. I have no complaints. 

Samuel: Odyssey is closer to a BioWare game than Anthem is, which is weird, but good news for people who enjoy light blockbuster roleplaying games. Assassin’s Creed is on a hot streak.

31. Cities: Skylines

RELEASED 2015 | LAST POSITION 25

Chris: There’s depth to Cities: Skylines if you go digging for it – particularly when it comes to managing (and mastering) the traffic simulation – but I’ve always opted for more of a chill, breezy, soothing city building experience. I just want to place my zones and see the buildings come to life, watch the city grow, and follow the teeny tiny people as they inhabit the neighbourhoods that spring up. With nearly two dozen paid expansions and thousands of free mods, it’s not hard to find something new to add to your latest city, whether it’s a new challenge or just some cool new buildings. 

Wes: I gave my uncle, a lifelong contractor, a copy of Cities: Skylines, and he stopped renovating his house, he was playing it so much. He was watching Youtube videos and called to ask me what mods are. I love that the game that has become the PC’s de facto city-builder is so customisable and has all those official expansions, too. And for people who don’t play tons of games, it’s still good for a few hundred hours even without the add-ons. Modest system requirements are a big plus, too. 

Andy: Skylines grabbed SimCity’s ball and ran with it, becoming the best city-builder you can play on PC. I love how flexible is, allowing you to make small towns as well as sprawling metropolises.

30. Portal 2

RELEASED 2011| LAST POSITION 30

Chris: The first Portal was as close to perfect as a game can be: original, hilarious, just the right amount of challenge and the perfect length to leave you satisfied (yet ready to play the entire game over again). Portal 2 somehow upped the ante on all of the above, adding Wheatley and the voice of Cave Johnson (both hilarious), fun new movement systems to master, and far more levels and lore than the original. Once again, somehow, Portal 2 was close to perfect.

29. Resident Evil 2

RELEASED 2019 | LAST POSITION New entry

Samuel: As big budget horror games go, this remake captures the best parts of the original Resident Evil 2, like the puzzles, setting and imagery, and presents it through the refined third-person shooter lens of Resident Evil 4. And even then, it feels like a very different thing, focused on knocking enemies back and survival rather than trying to kill them all. It’s arguably as close to the spirit of the classic Resident Evil games as you could hope for from a modern take on the series.

28. Final Fantasy 14

RELEASED 2014 | LAST POSITION 58

Steven: Square Enix’s MMO is low-key the best Final Fantasy story since FF9. You’ll have to put up with the usual MMO grind, but FF14 excels thanks to a spectacular and intricate narrative that builds upon six years of story updates and worldbuilding to create a grand adventure unlike anything else in PC gaming. It’s daunting to get into, but damn is it worth it.

27. Warframe

RELEASED 2013 | LAST POSITION 48

Tom: A surreal futuristic shooter built around extensive crafting systems, Warframe gives you a lot of game for free. It’s been expanding relentlessly for years, and with the huge Railjack update on the way, it’s a great time to slip into a skintight battlesuit. Digital Extremes has even been revamping old zones to keep the game beautiful by 2019 standards.

26. League of Legends

RELEASED 2009 | LAST POSITION 26

Steven: LoL remains one of the biggest games in the world and is easily the go-to for entering the MOBA world. Recently it’s joined the Auto Chess craze with Teamfight Tactics, an addictive, RNG-heavy mode where you draft teams of champions, place them on a board, and then watch them fight other players. It’s compulsive, even when you lose.

25. Rocket League

RELEASED 2015 | LAST POSITION 39

Tyler: Over 800 hours in, I’m still improving, still chasing the ridiculous aerial skills of the best players. Rocket League doesn’t really change, but every time my crew and I pull off a murder with some unreasonable passing play, it feels completely new. 

Andy: About twice a year I get hopelessly addicted to Rocket League, using every spare 10 minutes I have to play a game. I love how, within minutes of booting it up, you can be in a match. And it’s simple enough that a dabbler like me can still make a difference and score a few goals, while the layers of mastery are there for people who want to take it more seriously. My favourite sports game. (Is car football a sport?)

24. Apex Legends

RELEASED 2019 | LAST POSITION New entry

Evan: The Quake and Titanfall player in me delights in knowing that something this athletic can be this widely embraced. You can always be a little faster, a little more efficient with Apex’s verbs: looting, tracking, sliding, target prioritisation, timing. That sky-high skill ceiling will keep it on my SSD for years. 

Bo: From respawning your teammates to its innovative ping-communication system, Apex refined the battle royale genre with fantastic quality-of-life improvements.

23. Alien: Isolation

RELEASED 2014 | LAST POSITION 15

Andy: Influenced by Ridley Scott’s 1979 movie, rather than Cameron’s more videogamey sequel, this is one of the very best horror games you can play on PC. Creative Assembly perfectly captured the grimy, lo-fi feel of the movie, and populated its stricken space station with a genuinely terrifying, unpredictable alien. This is a creature that thinks and learns, stalking you relentlessly, and the monstrous hiss heralding its presence in the level is always a chilling moment. Not only that, but it’s a lightweight immersive sim of sorts, allowing you to use an array of clever gadgets to creatively avoid the beast. 

Fraser: I’ve still not finished this game. Creative Assembly simply did their job too well, bringing to life the movie monster I’m still the most spooked by.

22. Total War: Three Kingdoms

RELEASED 2019 | LAST POSITION New entry

Fraser: It finally happened: a historical Total War I like more than Shogun 2. Heroic warriors revitalise the real-time fights, relationships give the game dynamism and the characters personality, and diplomacy is finally good! It’s good to talk, at last. Especially when the conversation involves lots of scheming and proxy wars. There’s very little that hasn’t be reconsidered, and while it’s still recognisably Total War, this is a big upgrade. 

Steven: Three Kingdoms is so good it inspired me to pick up the ancient Chinese novels it is based on. I can’t remember any other game that has done that. But in reading Romance of the Three Kingdoms, I’ve only become more impressed with how carefully Creative Assembly has brought that world and its vibrant characters to life while translating their personalities into systems and rules that govern the strategy. As Cao Cao, I’m a manipulative bastard who will do whatever it takes, but as Yuan Shu I’m kissing ass and winning favours so I can shore up support and declare myself emperor. And that’s just two of the dozen warlords, each with their own ambitions and playstyles. Three Kingdoms reimagines history through the eyes of a few heroes, and in doing so finds a surprising kind of humanity in all the blood and violence.

21. Metal Gear Solid 5: The Phantom Pain

RELEASED 2015 | LAST POSITION 10

Samuel: Still one of my stealth games of choice, and the only Metal Gear Solid sequel I can recommend to someone who doesn’t give a crap about the series. That it was followed up with a mediocre survival game is a crime. This open world game lets you order a dog to attack a man while an attack chopper swoops in playing A-Ha’s Take on Me. Magic. 

Wes: The Fulton balloon, which magically lifts tranquillised guards up into the sky, is the best game mechanic of the decade.

20. Outer Wilds

RELEASED 2019 | LAST POSITION New entry

Steven: Outer Wilds is a space exploration game that dishes out epiphanies and revelations so casually it often makes me dizzy. I can’t count the amount of times one of its quantum puzzles or natural phenomena broke my brain as I tried to understand the mysteries of this hand-crafted solar system. But what I really love is that, underneath everything, Outer Wilds is obsessed with cultivating a childlike sense of wonder at the big mysteries of our existence.

19. The Sims 4

RELEASED 2014 | LAST POSITION 21

Joanna: The Sims 4 is arguably one of the most comprehensive—and hilarious—sim games ever created. One of the biggest changes to the series was the addition of nuanced moodlets that make your sims feel inspired, flirty, famished, etc. This means their actions are influenced by their emotions. They can take an angry poop if they are fired up enough.

18. Subnautica

RELEASED 2018 | LAST POSITION 8

Jody: It’s a survival game set in an alien ocean. Even though deep water gives me the heebie-jeebies, I still love Subnautica. You slowly get to master this strange world, turning vines into rubber then making fins, crafting protection to board a radioactive crashed ship, making vehicles to reach new depths, and at every turn meeting increasingly more terrifying fish beasts.

17. Kerbal Space Program

RELEASED 2015 | LAST POSITION 17

Wes: Kerbal is so much more than entertainment. It’s a cheery beginner’s course on rocket physics and aerodynamics. Soon you’ll have tabs open on YouTube and Wikipedia, trying to figure out how to smoothly enter a lunar orbit. It’s inspiring to realize how much humanity has accomplished, and to understand one fraction of one percent of it.

16. Rainbow Six Siege

RELEASED 2015 | LAST POSITION 6

Evan: I like CS:GO, but this Home Alone Counter-Strike is my favourite Counter- Strike. The relationship you have to the map, and the way Siege empowers you to alter it, fortify it, poke holes in it is very special—every piece of drywall is a tactical canvas for clever setups. That gadgetry doesn’t supercede Siege’s focus on stealth, coordination, and communication. Four years in, I love that I win as many rounds of Siege with my ears and my remote-controlled drone as I do my aim.

15. Yakuza 0

RELEASED 2018 | LAST POSITION New entry

Phil: The best game in Sega’s long running crime series, and—as a prequel—a great place for newcomers to jump in. It’s a celebration of ‘80s excess, in which you punch the money right out of the enemies that you fight. It’s a hardboiled drama, in which you work to uncover the machinations of the rich and the powerful. It’s an absurdist comedy, in which you can let a chicken—called Nugget—manage a portion of your real estate business. It’s heartfelt, silly, and easily recommended.

14. Destiny 2

RELEASED 2017 | LAST POSITION New entry

Tom: This ambitious, sprawling online shooter has excelled since the launch of the Forsaken expansion, and has just completed a mostly-successful year of seasonal updates. There have been mistakes but a move away from Activision into a new cadence of updates will be fascinating to watch, and as a free-to-play game it should be an irresistible package for new players. Cross save will help a generation of console players make the jump to PC too. The servers should be full for years to come. 

Phil: The simple fact of Destiny 2 is that it feels good to shoot the guns. However angry you are at a nerf, however bullshit the grind for a specific gun, however much you wish you didn’t have to load onto a planet in order to load into a Black Armory Forge, it won’t change how fundamentally pleasurable it is to shoot Destiny 2’s enemies. That was true in the dark days before the Forsaken expansion retooled the endgame. And it’s true now, as players enjoy what might be the game’s best season to date. In the future there will be ups and there will be downs and there will be frustrating quests for whatever Crucible pinnacle weapon the community has decided is now the best. But—even after many hundreds of hours—that headshot will always feel good.

13. XCOM 2

RELEASED 2016 | LAST POSITION 7

Jody: In this golden age of turn-based tactics, every game in the genre makes me wish I was playing XCOM 2 instead. It does so many things right. The enemies and mission types are varied enough to not feel repetitive. The way the camera zooms in makes you feel connected to your troops. And the way the Chosen rant makes you hate them. It’s engaging enough that even if you planned to go to bed after this mission you’ll end up putting it off. 

Tom: I played a few hours while drunk and created a soldier called Balls Balls. He became my most powerful guy and I was sad when a Chryssalid ate him. Few games endear you to your characters as well as XCOM 2.

12. Monster Hunter: World

RELEASED 2018 | LAST POSITION New entry

Wes: Monster Hunter is ultimately fighting the same monsters over and over again, but to me, it never feels repetitive. Every weapon in its arsenal behaves completely differently, giving you a perfect game loop. Hunt Odogaron, a giant pissed off dino dog, for the parts to make a new longsword, then learn its combos and parry for a few hours. I’m still not tired of leaping into the air with the insect glaive, and at 150 hours there are still a dozen weapons I haven’t even touched.

11. What Remains of Edith Finch

RELEASED 2017 | LAST POSITION 5

Joanna: This first-person adventure game is a heartbreaking account of a young woman’s family history as she tries to figure out why she’s the last Finch alive. Edith tells the story of her ancestors and relatives’ untimely deaths from their point of view —and does a masterful job of emotionally connecting you to each family member in a short amount of time. Depending on the age of the family member or their mental state, their deaths can range from fantastical to not-so-subtle. The fantastical ones make it easier to cope with the loss of these characters, especially for me. What Remains of Edith Finch coincidentally mirrored some details of my own family history. It resonates as strongly with me today as it did when I first played it over two years ago.

10. Doom

RELEASED 2016 | LAST POSITION 11

Wes: More games should start with a mission statement. In Doom, that statement is “Shut up and let me kill things.” It follows through on this by making the killing very, very good, but critically, it captures the same feeling of exploring tightly packed, intricate spaces that helped made 1993’s Doom a PC gaming phenomenon. The shotgun also helps.

Phil: Glory kills were a masterstroke. A lot of shooters incentivise you to get close up to the action—to overcommit past the point of safety—through small tricks of level design, or subtle tweaks to a bullet’s damage fall-off. Doom does it by letting you brutally tear up a demon until they explode in a shower of health. It’s absurd, loud, fun.

9. Hitman 2

RELEASED 2018 | LAST POSITION New entry

Phil: Hitman 2 is the best stealth murder sim. Its six levels are huge, varied and full of surprising ways to kill the deserving targets. With the Legacy Pack DLC adding in all of the previous game’s episodes too, this becomes a massive platform for IO Interactive’s assassination puzzles. 

Samuel: Downloading all the Hitman levels into Hitman 2 then playing them sequentially was the best 100 hours of my 2018. So many great murder boxes, in a fantastic, modern format with perfect controls, offering loads of scope for player-made stories. 

James: Pure catharsis for these trying times. Imagine the worst people in the world. You get to take them out however you want. Don’t feel bad.

8. Return of the Obra Dinn

RELEASED 2018 | LAST POSITION New entry

Jody: The crew of the Obra Dinn are dead. Your stopwatch lets you see the final moments of their lives as a frozen tableau. It’s a nautical tale of despair and unparalleled suffering, and a crossword where the clues are corpses. 

Chris: It took me from “I don’t know what happened here and I’m sure I never will” to “I just figured this out and I’m a genius.” Along the way it accomplished what very few games have ever truly done: it made me feel like a bonafide detective. 

Wes: A vote for Obra Dinn is basically a vote for creator Lucas Pope’s brain, which somehow generated every damn bit of this brilliant game, right down to the phenomenal music.

7. Hollow Knight

RELEASED 2017 | LAST POSITION 12

James: Hollow Knight is the best Metroid game. An action adventure with a heavy emphasis on exploration and—stick with me—bug lore, Hollow Knight treats every enemy, location, and character with more attention to detail than the vast majority of videogames. I’m on my third playthrough now, the first with every free DLC add-on. I’ve fought six new bosses and know I have far more than that to meet. There’s a brand new endgame after the bonkers secret ending that reinterprets the story from the base game in a whole new light. This is a huge game wrapped around a mystifying world. 

6. Into the Breach

RELEASED 2018 | LAST POSITION 4

Wes: It was almost rude of Subset Games to make a game better than FTL, a mainstay of our Top 100 for many years. Where so many strategy games are built around risk and randomness, Into the Breach puts all the information in front of you and hands you a toolbox of three mechs. It’s up to you to build your way out of near-impossible situations. As you realize every tool can be used three or four or five different ways, the hours start to fly by. 

Phil: Into the Breach is a game about puzzling your way out of trouble. You’re challenged to take your time; to end each turn without loss. Successfully doing so feels amazing, and balances out the pain of all the times you have to (knowingly) accept your defeat.

5. Dishonored 2

RELEASED 2016 | LAST POSITION 2

Samuel: Nothing is more PC to me than a first-person stealth game that rewards freedom of approach. Dishonored 2 has the best sandbox-y levels this genre has ever seen, from high-concept environments like the Clockwork Mansion, where the level changes on the fly, to intricately detailed locations like the Royal Conservatory. It feels like the future of this genre is under threat, but to me, this is the kind of game everyone should be playing. 

Phil: Dishonored 2 does a lot of things well, but its greatest success is how much fun it is to experiment with. As Emily, I loved comboing Mesmerize and Domino to slip through rooms full of hypnotised guards. Plenty of games offer the choice between stealth and action, but here you have cool abilities and options for every playstyle.

4. Slay the Spire

RELEASED 2019 | LAST POSITION New entry

Wes: I have spent so many hours playing Slay the Spire this year. It’s bad for me. I’m addicted to trying to create the perfect deck for The Defect, whose cards revolve around queuing up magical orbs, then buffing them, then setting them off in glorious combos while you walk away from the explosion with sunglasses on. At least that’s how it feels. What’s really happening is I’m dragging cards across the screen. 

Tom: Slay the Spire teaches you to spot synergies as you encounter new cards across the course of a few runs. It’s accessible, replayable, and engrossing.

3. Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice

RELEASED 2019 | LAST POSITION New entry

Samuel: FromSoftware’s dark fantasy version of Sengoku-era Japan offers some of the most intense sword fights ever put in a game. In one month, I went from hating how bad I was at Sekiro’s combat encounters to unironically mastering the blade. It’s the most rewarding experience I’ve had learning a game. 

James: I may have cheated the game and myself, but FromSoft somehow transposed Dark Souls’ enigmatic storytelling onto historical fiction, and invented the best sword combat system ever made to accompany it. 

Tom: Reviewing this was one of the most tense experiences I’ve had working at PC Gamer. Fuck that ape boss for real though.

2. The Witcher 3

RELEASED 2015 | LAST POSITION 1

Wes: I know this is going to sound like a strange endorsement, but I still haven’t played The Witcher 3’s two expansions, Hearts of Stone and Blood and Wine. This game meant that much to me: the idea of there being more out there for me to play someday, when the time is right, is comforting. I’m not quite ready to live in a world where I’ve experienced the true end of Geralt’s journey. Just thinking about it actually makes my stomach sink. 

There are things I could nitpick, like the combat being a bit shallow, or quests relying a bit too much on Geralt’s Witcher sense smell-o-vision. But that stuff ultimately doesn’t matter. It’s all about the world and the people in it, the outstanding quests and difficult questions and opportunities for shaping who Geralt is. What an adventure. 

Phil: Even The Witcher 3’s most basic mission type, the monster hunting contract, is clever in what it tells us about Geralt’s relationship with the world. Most RPGs think asking to be paid is a dick move. “You want payment for the service performed?! The cheek! The nerve! You should be saving my life for exposure...” But Geralt is doing a job, and the game treats his time as valuable – even letting you negotiate your fee before taking it on. 

Jody: When I read the books I pictured Geralt from the game. I heard voice actor Doug Cockle in my head while I read the comics. God knows what’ll happen when I watch the TV show, but if it manages to live up to The Witcher 3 I’ll be happy. There’s a scene in the game with a Nilfgaardian captain, where Geralt insults him by suggesting the first words of the local language he learned were probably ones that were useful for dealing with peasants like “hands up” or “kill them”. The captain replies that actually the first words he learned were idioms, like “‘don’t play with fire’, for example.” That’s the level of writing quality I’m hoping for. 

Andy: In terms of writing, quest design, and world-building, The Witcher 3 is galaxies beyond any other modern RPG. One of its greatest strengths is making every side quest interesting, rewarding you with a memorable set-piece, an intriguing little self-contained story, or just a fun, throwaway joke. When you pick up a job from a notice board, it’s rarely as simple as slaying a monster: that’s often just the starting point for something totally unpredictable. And as if its 70-hour story wasn’t good enough there are two superb expansions to enjoy, including the stunning Blood and Wine, which could have easily been a standalone game. The Witcher 3 is the greatest adventure on PC. 

Phil: Outside of the story and the quests, the world is an enjoyable place to inhabit—bleak and harrowing though it is. I must have spent tens of hours travelling the map, looking for inns in which to play Gwent. The Witcher 3’s minigame is a terrific way to unwind after a hard day’s monster hunting.

1. Divinity: Original Sin 2

RELEASED 2017 | LAST POSITION 3

Phil: Larian’s RPG was already brilliant, but it was last year’s free Definitive Edition update that prompted us to bump it up to the top spot. It tightens up this massive, sprawling adventure with an expanded and improved final act, and also brings some much needed quality of life improvements—the changes to the quest journal alone make a world of difference. 

Wes: I really fell in love with Original Sin 2 when the helmet I’d been wearing for several hours turned into a demon. Or, well, the demon had been sealed in the helmet, but I’d inadvertently released it in the middle of a fight which was already going badly before a freaking demon joined in. He was not on my side. 

Shit like that is constantly going wrong in Original Sin 2, and rolling with every small disaster and trying to recover from it is such a joy. I’m standing in fire and close to dying, but if I use a precious Source point, I can bless that fire and make it heal me. An enemy has a giant health pool, but if my friend can just knock off their last few points of armour, I can use a polymorph spell to swap their massive HP with my own. Each battle is a puzzle with a hundred different solutions. 

And then there are moments where your friend casually turns a knob and accidentally poisons an entire city, killing every last NPC and ending every unfinished quest inside it. Those are the moments when I decide to reload the last save. But that’s a choice. I could’ve easily stuck with it, and my experience with Original Sin 2’s story would’ve been dramatically different. Divinity exemplifies the best of PC gaming because it has the nuanced characters and writing and clever quests of a great RPG, and a staggering degree of choice in how you experience those things, or choose not to. The rare game to fully, wholeheartedly embrace you breaking it whenever you want. Also, consider this: You can turn your enemies into chickens.

Jody: You can talk to chickens as well. Heck, you can do quests for them. Being able to talk to animals is the best ability in any game that allows for it, but Original Sin 2 goes all out with the Pet Pals talent. You can get clues from rats, help a sad dog, and have an argument with a crab.

Tom: Divinity: Original Sin 2’s worldbuilding is underrated as well. Larian doesn’t have the weight of the Forgotten Realms behind it. The game manages to sell a somewhat derivative medieval-era fantasy world with a bit of flair and humour. It starts with the race choices. You can be an arrogant lizard that’s good at persuasion and digging, or play as an undead character who needs to hide their terrifying face from view. They can pick locks with their bony fingers too. I love that evocative attention to detail. It helps to fill the gaps in a world you’re viewing from twenty feet in the air. 

Fraser: The campaign is great, the battles are amazing, but there’s also this portal to an infinite number of player-created scenarios and mods. Original Sin 2’s GM mode captures the spirit of tabletop roleplaying, but with the convenience of a PC and some fairly easy to use tools. In 30 minutes I was able to cobble together a wee quest where a group of adventurers had to confront the Pork King, a pig with a crown, and his court of poultry. Playing the main campaign in co-op similarly feels like a tabletop game given digital life, especially when you end up murdering the person your mate was just about to get a quest from. It’s rare for Original Sin 2 to stop you from trying to do something stupid. 

Phil: It wasn’t until my second playthrough that I realised just how many options you have—how neatly the story and interactions are tied together. Case in point: I’m in a resistance camp attempting to help three injured soldiers. They’re long past the point where potions could cure what ails them. If I want them to live, I’ll need to use healing magic, but no one in my party has the restoration spell. In most other RPGs that would be a problem. In Original Sin 2, it’s an opportunity for an elaborate workaround. My main character is specced for summoning. Summoners have a spell that lets them call forth an elemental that matches the surface they’re summoned to. And water elementals do have the restoration spell. I use a rain scroll that was collecting dust in my inventory to create some nearby puddles, and use one to raise the needed elemental. Original Sin 2 rewards your ingenuity.

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.

Chris Livingston: Prison Architect

No matter how wonderful a warden, builder, and manager you are, it doesn’t change the fact that none of your residents want to be there and will do just about anything to escape the hard work you’ve done for them. It’s an intriguing hook for a fantastic and engrossing management sim.

Samuel Roberts: Nier: Automata

This lost out on its place in the main list because the PC version isn’t good enough, (hey, fix it, Square enix, and maybe you’ll make it in 2020). Part sci-fi action RPG about attractive robots with swords, part existential fiction that changes significantly on each subsequent ‘playthrough’. I love it.

Jody Macgregor: Fallout

Every problem in Fallout has a violent solution, a diplomatic one, and a sneaky one. At first I went full sneaky bastard, but was so curious about the diplomatic options I restarted with a more charismatic character. Exploring the expanded dialogue trees was so fun I finished it again.

Phil Savage: Team Fortress 2

There’s a perception that Team Fortress 2 is baggy, bloated and more of a hat store than a game. Those things are true to some extent, but it’s also still a great multiplayer shooter. There’s all manner of weirdness if you want, but the core appeal of its nine great classes remains today.

James Davenport: Pathologic 2

If you believe bathing in misery is necessary for growth, then there’s a slim chance Pathologic 2 is for you. Food and water is short, the entire town hates you, and you play an unreliable piece of shit tasked with preventing a plague from killing everyone. You only have 12 days. Do or die. Or probably just die.

Tom Senior: Diablo 3

It’s gone from the main list this year—shock horror! I still love the game, but the seasonal updates aren’t consistent enough to keep my interest and Path of Exile is ultimately more deserving of your time this year. And yet every so often I’ll still boot up Diablo 3 for some good Necromancer action.

Evan Lahti: Deep Rock Galactic

Look, it’s Left 4 Dwarves in procedurally-generated alien cave networks that you can fully blow up and burrow through. That tech produces a mixture of physical problem-solving, tricky platforming, and gorgeous subterranean shapes not seen anywhere else.

Fraser Brown: Heaven's Vault

I can’t believe I let a game trick me into doing homework again, but I forgive you, Heaven’s Vault. I’m still thinking about the translations I never completed and the secrets I left on lonely, desolate rocks floating through the cosmos. Thank goodness for that New Game Plus.

Steven Messner: Dragon's Dogma: Dark Arisen

Capcom’s open-world RPG is so weird. It’s also ambitious, with an excellent combat system that lets you climb on giant monsters and a weird party system unlike anything else. In a world of copy-paste RPGs, this is the most original thing Capcom has made in a decade.

Andy Kelly: Shenmue 1 & 2

This martial arts adventure stars Ryo Hazuki, a teenager on a quest for vengeance. It’s part revenge epic, part Japanese teen life simulator, set in wonderfully detailed recreations of Yokosuka and Hong Kong. One minute you’re fighting a mob of gangsters, the next you’re feeding a kitten.

Joanna Nelius: The Stanley Parable

There aren’t many first-person adventures that actively encourage you to break the game while trying to get you to follow the ‘right’ storyline at the same time. With 19 different endings, The Stanley Parable is a complete meta commentary on choices in games, right down to its achievements.

Bo Moore: BioShock

Even when you know what’s coming, BioShock remains a master class in both narrative and level design. And if you somehow, incredibly, have managed to go the last decade plus without BioShock being spoiled, you owe it to yourself to experience the utopia turned nightmare that is Rapture.