There’s a reason Rhino is one of Warframe's most classic frames. The bulky mech is able to take an ungodly amount of punishment for how early—and easily—players can construct him. That makes Rhino a favorite among newcomers, since not having to worry about dying lets you reliably practice things like shooting and parkour. Like all frames, he has four basic skills and one passive ability.

Abilities

Rhino Charge sends the Rhino surging forward in a straight line. Enemies caught in Rhino’s wake will take damage and also be sent sprawling. The charge specifically does “impact” damage, as well, so it’s most useful against enemies with energy shields, like the Corpus faction. Rhino is also invincible while charging.

And while the game doesn’t draw attention to it, Rhino Charge can also be combo'd with itself for extra damage and range, with a reduced energy cost for each time you use it in succession. You just need to recast the ability within a second after the last charge finishes, which when used three times will increase the damage dealt by up to 400 percent, for just 25 percent of the original energy cost. Rhino Charge also combines with Rhino’s Iron Skin ability. Dashing while wearing Iron Skin inflicts the “blast” status on enemies—knocking them down where they stand.

Iron Skin is Rhino’s second and arguably signature move. It’s pretty simple. The skill multiplies Rhino’s armor tremendously, causing him to take less damage from enemy attacks while adding a buffer of bonus health. As an added bonus, the Warframe is invincible for a few seconds after casting Iron Skin. In fact, any damage he would take during that time is absorbed and converted into even more bonus health. Iron Skin should almost always be active when playing as it effectively makes Rhino invincible until the bonus health wears off, by which time you've (hopefully) gathered enough energy to cast it again.

Roar is even simpler than Iron Skin. The skill causes Rhino and all nearby allies to do extra damage for a short duration. This only applies to weapon damage, unfortunately. So Rhino and co.’s special abilities will not be boosted.

Finally, there’s Rhino Stomp. It’s a crowd control ability that sends out a shock wave from Rhino’s initial position. You basically stomp the ground so hard that you slow time. Enemies caught in the wave’s radius are sent tumbling, but are also slowed way, way down for several seconds—leaving them suspended in midair for easy kills.

This light stasis offers two advantages. The first is that even high-level enemies become sitting ducks. Since they can barely move or attack, you can single out their weak points and remove them from the board before they become a problem. The second is that slowed and stumbling enemies can’t attack you. Which indirectly adds to Rhino’s valuable survivability.

You can achieve a similar effect with Rhino’s passive skill, Heavy Landing, which knocks down and damages enemies near Rhino when he falls from great distances. It’s a bit niche, but free damage and crowd control are rarely bad things. 

Construction 

Like many basic frames, Rhino’s primary blueprint can be bought from the in-game marketplace for a paltry 25,000 credits. But the remaining three pieces—his neuroptics, chassis, and systems—are all randomly rewarded for killing the Jackal boss on Fossa, Venus. Theoretically, you could get all three pieces in just three tries. Odds are it’ll take you more. The mission is quite popular with early players, so it shouldn’t be hard to match into a public squad and take down the Jackal in just a few minutes per run.

The bigger nuisance isn’t getting the blueprints themselves, but the materials required to use them. Most of the necessary minerals are found on the first three planets: Mercury, Venus, and Earth. The primary blueprint requires a single unit of gallium (easily found on Mars), but the systems blueprint requires a whopping 600 plastids. This material is found earliest on Phobos, a relatively low-level area, but it's a pretty rare find there. Your best bet is heading to higher-level zones like Saturn and Uranus to find it. Be sure to check our plastid farming guide, if you have any trouble. 

Builds

Being such a sturdy frame, Rhino is fortunately an easy Warframe for new players to tweak that won't require a lot of expensive rare mods. When starting out, focusing on adding and leveling up Steel Fiber, which will increase Rhino's already impressive armor stat and make him even more tanky. Vitality is always a good choice for new players as it gives you extra health in those rare instances where Iron Skin isn't protecting you.

From there, a basic build for Rhino focuses on increasing his energy pool and energy efficiency which will help keep Iron Skin active while still giving you room to use his other abilities. Steamline will lower the energy cost of abilities. Or you can use Fleeting Expertise for an even bigger boost at the cost of ability duration, which will impact the length of Rhino Charge's combo window alongside the duration of Roar and the slow effect of Rhino Stomp. Continuity can help offset that.

For more advanced (and expensive) builds, check out Warframe Builder or YouTuber MCGamerCZ's very recent Rhino build video.

If you're new to Warframe, knowing where to find the dozens of resources needed to build new frames and weapons is half of the challenge—especially when it comes to plastids. This uncommon resource is used in several systems blueprints for various frames, which makes farming them a necessity. But where can a new player find them? 

Warframe’s various resources are tied to specific planetoids and events. In the case of plastids, you’ll mostly find them on Phobos, Saturn, Uranus, Pluto, and Eris. And like most materials, they can drop from both enemies and in-level containers. They're also a key component for building your Railjack in the Warframe Rising Tide quest. One of the other resources is Warframe Cubic Diodes, an item added to the game in late-2019's Rising Tide update

For brand new players, Phobos will be the first place you can find plastids though their drop rate is minimal. Keep a keen eye out for the plastid carapaces that can sometimes be found on Phobos missions. If you're having trouble with higher-level zones like Saturn and are trying to grind plastids to build a stronger warframe, like the indomitable Rhino, you'll want to scour these levels carefully. 

If you're capable of handling missions on Saturn, Uranus, Pluto and Eris, however, farming plastids becomes much easier. Mission types like defense and survival will bombard you with endless waves of enemies. This typically makes them the best type of mission for resource gathering, since everyone you kill is another chance to earn the material you want. The longer you stick around, the greater those chances increase—along with the quality of rewards you earn in the meantime.

That’s why the Piscinas, Saturn is such a good place to farm plastids. Not only is it a mid-level survival mission, available to wide swathe of players. It sports the Infested faction. These typically spawn in much larger, more predictable swarms of foes than other groups. Piscinas is also what used to be called a "Dark Sector." In the past, these locations were warred over between player factions for certain bonuses. That PVP system is gone, but the bonus XP and drop rates it provided remain.

Location isn’t the only factor, though. A number of mods and companions can increase the odds of finding what you need, or at least relieve the tedium of collecting them, once you get where you’re going.

The Smeeta breed of Kavat, for instance, comes with the Charm mod. This periodically triggers an effect which might double your loot for two minutes. Then there’s the more common Scavenge mod. This will give your Kavat or Kubrow a percentage chance to open otherwise locked lockers on any mission—any of which might contain your preferred mineral.

And finally, the Carrier brand of Sentinel can equip the Looter mod. The item’s resulting shock wave will save you the trouble of destroying secure crates by blowing them up for you. How nice. Of course, all Sentinels can also equip the Vacuum mod, which might just be the most useful mod of all. This handy little tool sucks up any loot you approach automatically—which mostly eliminates the risk of sprinting right past whatever resources you’re looking for without seeing them.

Finally, one last option is to set up a Titan Extractor on Uranus, which will farm plastids (and a few other resources) passively in real time. You'll need to beat every mission on Uranus first, but once you do you can purchase a Titan Extractor blueprint from the market and set it up using the Star Chart map. All you'll need to do is keep an eye on its health and wait four hours for it to complete a harvesting cycle and you'll have a good deal of plastids to use.

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

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

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

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

100. Path of Exile

RELEASED 2013 | LAST POSITION New entry

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

99. Twisted Insurrection

RELEASED 2010 | LAST POSITION New entry

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

98. Killing Floor 2

RELEASED 2016 | LAST POSITION 81

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

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

97. Night in the Woods

RELEASED 2017 | LAST POSITION New entry

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

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

96. Deadly Premonition: The Director's Cut

RELEASED 2013 | LAST POSITION New entry

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

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

95. Stick Shift

RELEASED 2015 | LAST POSITION New entry

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

94. Elite Dangerous

RELEASED 2014 | LAST POSITION New entry

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

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

93. Ni No Kuni 2: Revenant Kingdom

RELEASED 2018 | LAST POSITION New entry

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

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

92. Mu Cartographer

RELEASED 2016 | LAST POSITION New entry

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

91. Guild Wars 2

RELEASED 2012 | LAST POSITION 86

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

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

90. Super Mega Baseball 2

RELEASED 2018 | LAST POSITION New entry

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

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

89. The Stanley Parable

RELEASED 2013 | LAST POSITION New entry

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

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

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

88. Drawful 2

RELEASED 2016 | LAST POSITION New entry

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

87. Nidhogg 2

RELEASED 2017 | LAST POSITION New entry

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

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

86. Stephen's Sausage Roll

RELEASED 2016 | LAST POSITION New entry

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

Phil: I managed one level.

85. Battletech

RELEASED 2018 | LAST POSITION New entry

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

84. Football Manager 2018

RELEASED 2017 | LAST POSITION New entry

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

83. Thumper

RELEASED 2016 | LAST POSITION 34

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

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

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

82. Euro Truck Simulator 2

RELEASED 2013 | LAST POSITION 89

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

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

81. FTL: Faster Than Light 

RELEASED 2012 | LAST POSITION 21

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

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

80. Stalker: Call of Pripyat

RELEASED 2010 | LAST POSITION 41

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

79. Doom 2

RELEASED 1994 | LAST POSITION 76

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

78. Grim Fandango Remastered

RELEASED 2015 | LAST POSITION 96

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

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

77. Warhammer: Vermintide 2

RELEASED 2018 | LAST POSITION New entry

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

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

76. Oxenfree

RELEASED 2016 | LAST POSITION New entry

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

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

75. Regency Solitaire

RELEASED 2015 | LAST POSITION New entry

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

74. Metro: Last Light Redux

RELEASED 2014 | LAST POSITION 95

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

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

73. Final Fantasy 14: A Realm Reborn

RELEASED 2014 | LAST POSITION 40

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

72. The Norwood Suite 

RELEASED 2017 | LAST POSITION New entry

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

71. Mount & Blade: Warband

RELEASED 2010 | LAST POSITION New entry

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

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

70. StarCraft 2

RELEASED 2010 | LAST POSITION New entry

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

69. Galactic Civilizations 2

RELEASED 2011 | LAST POSITION New entry

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

68. Prison Architect

RELEASED 2015 | LAST POSITION New entry

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

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

67. Ori and the Blind Forest

RELEASED 2015 | LAST POSITION 62

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

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

66. Frostpunk

RELEASED 2018 | LAST POSITION New entry

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

65. Diablo 3

RELEASED 2012 | LAST POSITION 30

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

64. Bayonetta

RELEASED 2017 | LAST POSITION 32

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

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

63. Crypt of the Necrodancer

RELEASED 2015 | LAST POSITION New entry

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

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

62. Sunless Sea

RELEASED 2015 | LAST POSITION 75

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

61. Baldur's Gate 2: Enhanced Edition

RELEASED 2013 | LAST POSITION 48

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

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

60. Fez

RELEASED 2013 | LAST POSITION 67

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

59. 80 Days

RELEASED 2015 | LAST POSITION 37

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

58. Final Fantasy 12: The Zodiac Age

RELEASED 2018 | LAST POSITION New entry

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

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

57. Hexcells Infinite

RELEASED 2014 | LAST POSITION New entry

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

56. Homeworld Remastered Collection

RELEASED 2015 | LAST POSITION New entry

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

55. Dota 2

RELEASED 2013 | LAST POSITION 54

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

54. PlayerUnknown's Battlegrounds

RELEASED 2017 | LAST POSITION 25

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

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

53. Deus Ex

RELEASED 2000 | LAST POSITION 23

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

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

52. Fallout 4

RELEASED 2015 | LAST POSITION New entry

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

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

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

51. Stardew Valley

RELEASED 2016 | LAST POSITION 22

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

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

50. EVE Online

RELEASED 2003 | LAST POSITION 44

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

49. BioShock

RELEASED 2007 | LAST POSITION 17

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

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

48. Warframe

RELEASED 2013 | LAST POSITION New entry

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

47. Darkest Dungeon

RELEASED 2016 | LAST POSITION 83

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

46. Opus Magnum

RELEASED 2017 | LAST POSITION New entry

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

45. Planescape: Torment: Enhanced Edition

RELEASED 2017 | LAST POSITION 60

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

44. Civilization 5

RELEASED 2010 | LAST POSITION New entry

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

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

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

43. Invisible, Inc.

RELEASED 2015 | LAST POSITION 50

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

42. Overcooked

RELEASED 2016 | LAST POSITION 77

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

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

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

41. Super Hexagon

RELEASED 2012 | LAST POSITION New entry

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

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

40. Mass Effect 2

RELEASED 2010 | LAST POSITION 7

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

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

39. Hearthstone

RELEASED 2014 | LAST POSITION 45

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

38. Grand Theft Auto 5

RELEASED 2015 | LAST POSITION 12

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

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

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

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

37. Company of Heroes 

RELEASED 2006 | LAST POSITION 56

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

36. Half-Life 2

RELEASED 2004 | LAST POSITION 11

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

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

35. Devil Daggers

RELEASED 2016 | LAST POSITION New entry

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

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

34. Forza Horizon 3

RELEASED 2016 | LAST POSITION 29

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

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

Evan: All racers should be set in Australia.

33. The Elder Scrolls 5: Skyrim

RELEASED 2011 | LAST POSITION 26

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

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

32. Proteus

RELEASED 2013 | LAST POSITION New entry

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

31. Crusader Kings 2

RELEASED 2012 | LAST POSITION 52

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

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

30. Portal 2

RELEASED 2011 | LAST POSITION 5

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

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

29. World of Warcraft

RELEASED 2004 | LAST POSITION 59

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

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

28. Undertale

RELEASED 2015 | LAST POSITION 61

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

27. Fortnite Battle Royale

RELEASED 2017 | LAST POSITION New entry

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

26. League of Legends

RELEASED 2009 | LAST POSITION New entry

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

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

25. Cities: Skylines

RELEASED 2015 | LAST POSITION 82

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

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

24. Arma 3

RELEASED 2013 | LAST POSITION 55

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

23. Her Story 

RELEASED 2015 | LAST POSITION 19

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

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

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

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

22. Total War: Warhammer 2

RELEASED 2017 | LAST POSITION New entry

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

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

21. The Sims 4

RELEASED 2014 | LAST POSITION New entry

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

20. Counter-Strike: Global Offensive

RELEASED 2012 | LAST POSITION 49

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

19. Rocket League

RELEASED 2015 | LAST POSITION 16

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

18. Hitman

RELEASED 2016 | LAST POSITION 14

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

17. Kerbal Space Program

RELEASED 2015 | LAST POSITION 39

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

16. Spelunky

RELEASED 2013 | LAST POSITION 10

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

15. Alien: Isolation 

RELEASED 2014 | LAST POSITION 8

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

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

14. Overwatch

RELEASED 2016 | LAST POSITION 13

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

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

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

13. Life is Strange

RELEASED 2015 | LAST POSITION New entry

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

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

12. Hollow Knight

RELEASED 2017 | LAST POSITION 46

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

11. Doom

RELEASED 2016 | LAST POSITION 9

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

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

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

10. Metal Gear Solid 5: The Phantom Pain

RELEASED 2015 | LAST POSITION 6

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

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

9. Dark Souls Remastered

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

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

8. Subnautica

RELEASED 2018 | LAST POSITION New entry

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

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

7. XCOM 2

RELEASED 2016 | LAST POSITION 4

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

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

6. Rainbow Six Siege

RELEASED 2015 | LAST POSITION 15

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

5. What Remains of Edith Finch

RELEASED 2017 | LAST POSITION 27

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

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

4. Into the Breach

RELEASED 2018 | LAST POSITION New entry

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

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

3. Divinity: Original Sin 2

RELEASED 2017 | LAST POSITION New entry

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

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

2. Dishonored 2

RELEASED 2016 | LAST POSITION 3

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

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

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

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

1. The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt

RELEASED 2015 | LAST POSITION 1

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

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

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

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

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

Personal picks

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

Philippa Warr: Cradle

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

Joe Donnelly: Kentucky Route Zero

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

Bo Moore: Prey

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

Steven Messner: Slay the Spire

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

Tyler Wilde: Chess Ultra

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

Chris Livingston: Duskers

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

Tom Senior: Thief Gold

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

Phil Savage: Shadow Tactics: Blades of the Shogun

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

Andy Kelly: Else Heart.Break()

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

Evan Lahti: Oxygen Not Included

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

Samuel Roberts: Assassin's Creed Origins

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

James Davenport: Stories Untold

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

One game costs 60 bucks, the other is free. One game looks like a series of gorgeous sci-fi book covers brought to life, the other looks like a fetish convention in space. The first game has a sprawling plot and characters voiced by famous actors, the other is a mess of made-up words and weird, unexplained factions. In spite of all this, Destiny 2 is dead to me, and Warframe is standing on its corpse looking cool with a samurai sword. 

What happened? I loved Destiny 2 in spite of its problems, but even on the verge of a major expansion, I can't bring myself to get excited about it the way I used to. 

I don't think it's just fatigue. I still dip in and play Destiny 2 crucible with friends every week or so, and I've done some grinding towards the new armour sets. I still love the art direction and the soaring soundtrack, and the complex co-op raid dungeons. The trouble is there's nothing to aim for that can surprise me in Destiny. A new armour set probably isn't going to alter how I play. I unlocked all the super abilities ages ago. A new gun might capture my attention, but I know getting it will be arduous.

Warframe feels like being thrown into a wind tunnel by comparison. As I fight my way through the star chart the game showers me with objectives within objectives. There are quests, faction missions, time-limited missions with useful resource rewards, open world sections, space combat sections, and more. There are a few slow markers of overall progress, like my character's rank, but they are supported by tiny sprints of progress—a blueprint for a new weapon, sub-components for a new warframe, faction milestones. There is always something cool within reach, and new weapons and warframes really matter.

Warframe's vast, messy economy of currencies, resource materials and reputation ranks adds depth and complexity to a simple action game. You dive into a facility, somersault your way to your objective like a looking like a hyperactive leathery clown monster, then kill/steal what you need and somersault out.

Bang. Five minutes. Have some rewards and decide where you want to go next.

Warframe's immediacy and the way it showers you with micro-rewards makes it seem overwhelming at first, but it quickly becomes compulsive. I walk home to my flat at lunch, make some toast, flip a few missions, level up a thing, and then head back to work. Crafting happens in real-time. Yesterday I told my spaceship to build a hammer, today I find it waiting for me as I munch my lunch—a little present from Warframe's weird universe.

I'm comparing Warframe and Destiny specifically because this is exactly how I used to play Destiny, and both games are aiming for a roughly similar experience. They are loot-driven session games with a co-op focus (though you can play PvP in both, Destiny's crucible is superior to anything I've found in Warframe so far). I admit that am in a honeymoon phase with Warframe, and inevitably the lure of something shiny and new can make the old game seem more tired than it really is. However I reckon Warframe's reward structure, and its strange, unpredictable sense of variety, make it a more compelling long-term prospect than Bungie's multi-squabillion dollar epic.

It comes down to the surprise factor. There's a lot of stuff in Destiny 2, but few points of substantive difference. You can ride around on a wide variety of space bikes, but beyond the cosmetic differences and some little side-dash abilities, one is much like another. You can say the same for most of the purple weapons in a given weapon archetype. I like Origin Story and the Iron Banner auto rifles for PvP, but out in the field one auto rifle plays like all the others, really. Exotics like the Sunshot hand cannon are decent loot, but for the most part the PvE loot pool feels restrained and not worth chasing. My postmaster cache constantly fills up, and I just delete, delete, delete my way through mountains of guns just to get rid of the notification icon. Guns in a shooter should not feel so completely worthless.

By contrast Warframe's weapons feel as though they are designed in isolation from one another, and not to round out a particular weapon class. You have a primary weapon slot, a secondary weapon, a melee option, and a companions slot (which I filled with a dog I hatched from an egg—long story). Your overall rank improves as you level up weapons, so you are encouraged to switch regularly to keep your experience pool ticking up. 

I have been playing with two primary weapons that loosely fit into an assault rifle class. The first is a highly conventional rapid-fire weapon, the second one is an auto rifle that shoots glowing stakes at pretty much the same rate of fire. The stakes protrude from enemies' faces like porcupine spines and the killing blow sends them flying backwards, pinning them to a nearby wall.

I know that my next primary weapon will feel completely different again. My first secondary weapon was a crappy pistol, but then I moved on to a pair of handcannons that felt amazing to fire, and now I'm throwing daggers. When I look at the secondary weapons list there are a bunch that, well, I don't know what they are, or how they even shoot dudes.

The Warframes look and behave very differently as well. My old Excalibur frame was all about sword combat, my current Trinity Prime is a squishy frame with neat support abilities that let me link myself to enemies to steal energy and reflect damage.  

This variety makes the next unlock matter. It makes the grind exciting, and worthwhile. I'm certainly going to play the new Destiny 2 expansion, but once I'm done with it I have a feeling I'll drift away quickly once again, and Warframe will be there waiting for me in a weird skin-tight rubber spacesuit.

If you have the time and hard drive space, you can squeeze a huge amount of free entertainment out of your Steam client. With that in mind we've organised the best free and free-to-play games together into one list. The free games section consists of games that contain no microtransactions. You might be able to buy extra episodes or DLC packs, but you'll get the full core experience for your download in this category.

The free-to-play section contains games that are supported by in-game microtransactions. We've considered the fairness of the in-game stores when selecting these games, and believe you can get a lot of fun out of them before you put in credit card details. We'll update the list over time as we discover more gems hidden away in the Steam store.

FREE GAMES

Alien Swarm

Link: Steam

Up to four players fight through space stations overrun with hordes of alien bugs. Beating missions earns you weapons and equipment that let you specialise your marine. Expect almost Starship Troopers scale hordes at points, as the AI director tries to push your team to the brink of death.

Alien Swarm is a forgotten Valve experiment, but it's perfectly good fun in co-op. The complete game code and mod tools are available, but the community never produced enough to sustain the game beyond its opening months. It's still worth downloading the game with some friends and enjoying what's there though.

A Raven Monologue

Link: Steam

A beautifully drawn experimental short story about a mute raven trying to interact with his townsfolk. The project is described as an attempt "to tell stories or to communicate an experience using a constrained work of interactive art." It's quick, simple to play, and full of room for interpretation.

Cry of Fear

Link: Steam

A quality Half-Life total conversion that's full of scares. The game twists the old GoldSrc engine to give you an inventory system and a big, dark city to explore. Prepare yourself for relentless tension across eight hours of exploration and combat with 24 different weapons. The download also includes a bunch of custom campaigns and an unlockable extra campaign once you beat the main story. That's good value for a free download.

House of Abandon

Steam: Link

This experiment eventually became the excellent short story compilation Stories Untold. You can still download it to your library by heading to the page linked above and clicking 'Download PC Demo'. The first part follows someone playing a text adventure as things start to get strange, and quite scary.

Doki Doki Literature Club!

Link: Steam

It may look like a cheerful classroom drama but don't be fooled, Doki Doki Literature Club! plays with that facade. Sedate chats with classmates create a languid impression for the first act or so, but dark twists await—there's a reason the game opens with a content warning. If you end up enjoying it then you might also like Pony Island and Undertale. 

Off-Peak

Link: Steam

It's the future, you're stuck in a train station, and everything is weird. Chat with the station's odd inhabitants and explore its twisted side passages to discover surreal little anecdotes and piece together meaning from the assembled scraps. It only takes about half an hour to complete and the music is sweet, so give it a download.

FREE-TO-PLAY GAMES

Dota 2

Link: Steam

Dota 2 is one of the biggest games on Steam. Described simply, two teams of five wizards battle to knock over towers and flatten the enemy base in battles that tend to last between 30 minutes and an hour. In practice it's one of the deepest and most complicated competitive games in the world. Every year the huge International tournament draws millions of viewers, and with 110+ heroes and a consistently shifting meta, this could be the only game you ever need in your Steam library.

The free-to-play implementation is mostly good. Most microtransactions are tied to cosmetics. In addition to individual item purchases you can also buy battle passes that grant access to modes, quests that you complete by playing games, and more cosmetic items.

Warframe

Link: Steam

This third person action RPG about futuristic ninjas can be completely baffling for new players, but if you persist with it you'll find a deep and rewarding game on the verge of some of its most ambitious updates to date. At launch it was a game about repeating short missions—and that's still part of it—but there are also open world zones and plans to add co-op space combat. Warframe has been getting better and better in the last few years, and now we reckon it's one of the best free to play games on PC. 

You can spend real money to speed up crafting time, and to buy items and frames outright. Everything is perfectly craftable using in-game currency however, and players seem more interested in using the real-money Platinum currency to unlock new colour schemes.

Card Hunter

Link: Steam

Card Hunter is a cute squad RPG based around digital collectible cards. You battle through dungeons under the guidance of a dungeon master, levelling up your squad of heroes, building your deck and enjoying some affectionate tongue in cheek digs at D&D along the way. There's loads to play before you ever see a payment screen and there are also co-op and competitive modes. If only more free-to-play games were like this.

Team Fortress 2

Link: Steam

This team shooter has been around since 2007, but the character designs are timeless and the class design is still magnificent. Few shooters can point to a class as innovative as The Spy, who can disguise himself as an opposing team to sabotage their gadgets and stab their heavies in the back. If you prefer long-range engagements, the sniper has you covered, or you can ambush enemies up close with the Pyro. Whatever your play style, there's a class to match, and with enough play you will be switching between classes frequently to help your team push the cart or take a tricky point.

Path of Exile

Link: Steam

Path of Exile is one of the deepest action RPGs on the market, and one of the most generous for being free-to-play. The basic structure ought to be familiar: pick a class and embark on Diablo-style killing sprees to earn loot and level up. There's a huge amount of class and item customisation to dig into as you start to move past the tutorial stages. Slot different patterns of gems into your armour sets to min-max your character and take them into even tougher dungeons. You only need to pay money for cosmetics that reskin your weapons and armour

EVE Online

Link: EVE Online

This space MMO is famous for producing incredible stories of war and betrayal. Its player-driven corporations are fraught political entities that can be very inaccessible to new players. Even if you don't persist long enough to break into the grand PvP game it's still a gorgeous universe full of beautiful spaceships and nebulae. Some ships and skills are locked off in the free-to-play version, but you can spend a huge amount of time in the game before you need to look at paying for premium access.

Star Trek Online

Link: Steam

Fly ships, gather a crew, and beam down to planets with an away team in this massive free-to-play MMO. It has aged quite a bit since launch and it's riddled with microtransactions, but you can still play through the story and see every side of the game without paying. If you do get drawn in to collecting high end ships and decking out your crew with signature Star Trek livery then expect to pay for it. You can grind for items using in-game currency, but for advance items that will take longer than seems reasonable. If you're looking for a free Star Trek experience, however, it's surprisingly fun.

Realm Royale

Link: Realm Royale

If you like the idea of Fortnite but can't stand building, then Realm Royale might be your next battle royale game. It's still in Early Access, but there are enough features to separate it from Fortnite (which isn't on Steam), and paid-for battle royale games like PlayerUnknown's Battlegrounds. Realm Royale has a fantasy element with five classes and different spells and abilities for each. Hunters can leave proximity mines, while mages can heal themselves with ice magic. It's perfectly playable at this stage in Early Access, but expect it to evolve a lot in the coming months.

Battlerite

Link: Steam

An arena-based top-down brawler with shooting, spells and a colourful art style. As we've observed before, it's basically a smartly designed clutch teamfight generator. If you're tired of the long lanes of Dota 2 or League of Legends then you might enjoy Battlerite's punchy, fast-paced encounters, and while it's competitive, it has a cleaner learning curve than the major lane-pushing games. A separate paid-for Battlerite Royale mode is heading to Early Access in September, which has annoyed the community, but you can still find a battle in the original 2v2 and 3v3 modes.

Warframe is one of the most complex and brilliant free-to-play games on PC. Though it started as a simple loot shooter set on randomly generated maps, developer Digital Extremes has slowly grown it into a sprawling pseudo-MMO with open world zones, public space stations to barter in, and a crafting and modding system so in-depth it can take hundreds of hours to fully understand. Warframe is a great but intimidating game—and new players are sure to be overwhelmed.

Part of that is due to how open-ended Warframe is. While a Star Chart helps guide you from one mission to the next, Warframe offers next to no guidance for what new players should try to achieve and, just as importantly, how they can achieve it. But that journey of self-discovery is half of the fun, so this guide won't be a checklist of items to mindlessly complete. Instead, I want to help you understand Warframe's myriad of complex systems and arm you with the tools so that when you inevitably become lost (and, trust me, it'll happen) you know where to turn.

Before we get too far, it's a good idea to complete the intro missions and glance through Digital Extremes' quick start guide to get a gist of the basics. 

Go ninja, go 

It's imperative that you understand what Warframe is and what it isn't. Digital Extremes' shooter is somewhat comparable to games like Destiny 2 and Borderlands but with a much greater emphasis on crafting and trying new playstyles. You play as a Tenno, a mystical space ninja in a far future version of our solar system where various post-human factions vie for control. To help restore balance to the solar system, you don fabled suits of armor called warframes and take them into battle. These warframes are like your character class, and each one has a set of four unique abilities to use in combat. Unlike typical RPG shooters, however, you can craft new warframes and swap between them in between missions so you're never confined to one playstyle.

While you won't see thousands of players on screen at once, Warframe shares a lot of DNA with MMOs. Simply put, this is a game that people frequently put thousands of hours into and it takes a long time to achieve anything noteworthy.

That said, Warframe also differs from MMOs in several key areas: 

• There is no true endgame. Some players try to collect every warframe, some will stick to a few and work on making them as powerful as possible. Other players partake in "fashionframe" and customize their warframe's appearance to stand out from the crowd. Warframe doesn't really have raids like you would see in Destiny 2, though there is extremely challenging group content. It's up to you to find a purpose in Warframe.
• Most things can be purchased for real money to skip some of the grind, but because you'll still need to invest significant time to power that gear up it's not really pay to win.
• There is a robust, player-driven economy that trades exclusively with the premium currency called Platinum. That means you can sell items you find for Platinum and use that to buy things from the premium cash store.
• There are few restrictions on free-to-play players except inventory slots for gear which costs around a dollar or two worth of Platinum.  

But, above all else, the biggest thing you need to understand about Warframe is that it is a deeply complex and involved game and a very slow burn. Crafting new equipment can take several days of real time and farming the resources can take much longer. Thankfully, Warframe's third-person shooting is sublime and makes it easy to want to play for hours at a time even if you're just grinding the same mission.

If you're looking for something to breeze through without much thought you might still enjoy Warframe, but new players will need to be okay with spending large chunks of time replaying missions, reading wikis and guides, and watching YouTube videos. That might sound intimidating at first, but Warframe's depth is absolutely a good thing because there's always something new to learn and master. Don't worry, though, this guide will show you where to find the best of that material and how to best equip yourself for the long journey ahead. 

Join a clan as soon as possible 

While this advice extends to just about any multiplayer game, finding a group of knowledgeable friends is extra important because of how confusing Warframe is. Being able to ask a friend for advice is a more efficient use of your time than spending hours crawling through wikis and videos trying to find the answer yourself—especially because, as you'll soon learn, some questions don't have one right answer in Warframe. 

Finding a clan to join will take a bit of work, but the Warframe subreddit's weekly recruitment thread is the best place to start. Other places to look are the Warframe wiki clan recruitment board and the official Warframe forum clan listing.

Don't overthink the decision too much for now. Offer to join a large clan and explain to the recruiter that you're new and they'll help you get situated. Once you're in a clan, you'll have access to chatrooms in-game (and usually through third-party services like Discord) where you can ask questions of other players. Don't be shy, either. The Warframe community has a reputation for being one of the most helpful and patient in part because the game is so intimidating to newcomers. The other upside is that missions are much more fun with a coordinated group rather than alone or with strangers.

Complete the Star Chart before getting overwhelmed 

It's important to understand that learning everything is part of Warframe and is a slow grind that will take time. It's easy to get confused by all the terminals in your spaceship and all the little nuances and wrinkles involved with any one system. And when that happens, your best bet is to head out to the Star Chart and take on a new mission and have some fun killing shit for a while.

Completing the Star Chart is one of the few universal objectives every Warframe player should complete. Not only will doing so unlock access to powerful weapons and warframes, but it will also open up new quests, provide access to cool public space stations, and a lot more. It'll take roughly 50 or more hours to do it, but completing those missions are the key to doing anything fun in Warframe.

Along the way, as you come to grips with Warframe's systems, you can begin diverting more and more time to other pursuits. For new players, the most exciting of those is often building new weapons and warframes.

The first warframe I would recommend building is Rhino because his Iron Skin ability makes him nigh-indestructible early on. To craft Rhino, you need blueprints from the Fossa assassination mission on Venus—essentially that planet's final boss. Each time you beat The Jackal, you'll be rewarded with a random blueprint which builds one of three Rhino components: neuroptics, systems, or chassis. All three take 12 hours to build and must be completed before building Rhino itself. Once you've farmed The Jackal, gotten all three blueprints, and constructed the requisite components, you can then buy the Rhino blueprint from the market on your ship and begin the final build which will take 72 hours. Once you have Rhino completed, you can level him up while deciding what other warframes you'd like to add to your arsenal. 

Meanwhile, experiment and build new weapons using blueprints purchased from the market or obtained as loot. Ranking up that gear will increase your Mastery Rank (explained below) and will eventually unlock access to the Hek shotgun at Mastery Rank 4. This is a great newbie-friendly weapon that packs such an immense punch it'll easily last you until the very end of the Star Chart. The Hek blueprint can simply be purchased from the market after you reach Mastery Rank 4. 

Mods are scary and will take time to understand 

At first, Warframe seems like a pretty simple game: You run through levels killing bad guys, completing objectives, and collecting resources. And then, after the tutorial missions are over, you'll be shown the modding and upgrading systems—an indecipherable mess of proper nouns and open-ended customization that feels impossible to grasp. It's a breaking moment for many new players. Don't worry, though, once you start to understand some basic principles it all becomes a lot more comprehensible.

One of the biggest differences in Warframe is that your level doesn't automatically make you powerful. Your warframe might be the max rank of 30 but enemies will still poke holes in you like a wet napkin. Unlike most RPGs, the level of your gear in Warframe is merely an indicator of its potential. In order to fulfill that potential you'll need to modify and customize that gear using mods. To understand why is to understand Warframe's myriad progression systems and how they overlap.  

Mastery Rank is the closest thing you have to an overall character level. Each time you level up a piece of equipment like a weapon or warframe to rank 30 by using it in combat, you gain a small bit of Mastery Rank. At certain thresholds, you can undertake a quick trial to increase your Mastery Rank, unlocking the ability to wield more powerful weapons and gaining some secondary upgrades like one extra base mod capacity in all your gear (explained below).

Rank is the level of each piece of equipment and it maxes out at 30. It's a bit complex, but by simply equipping that gear and taking it on missions it'll slowly earn experience points (called affinity) and rank up. The only thing that ranking up a piece of gear does is increase its Mod Capacity—increasing the potential to fit more and more powerful mods to augment that gear's base stats.

Mods are found from all sorts of sources and provide a ton of different upgrades. These are essential because they are what makes any piece of gear powerful. More basic mods might simply increase a weapon's damage while others might add elemental damage or trigger special effects. Collecting and upgrading these mods (there's over 800 of them!) is what will actually make you powerful in Warframe. 

There's so much to learn about mods, but focus on one simple philosophy: Mods are best used to emphasize the inherent strengths of your gear. If you're playing a warframe like Valkyr, for example, you're far better off using the Steel Fiber mod to further increase her armor (which is already absurdly high) rather than wasting valuable mod capacity on the Redirection mod that would only marginally increase her wimpy shields. The more you play around with this system, the more you'll slowly begin and appreciate the incredible depth it offers. Just know that this is arguably the biggest hurdle new players have to overcome, and once you do it's (relatively) smooth sailing. 

Study up, Tenno 

If you've followed this guide (especially the part about joining a clan), you should easily be able to make it several planets through the star chart and should have a basic grasp on the more common systems like modding and crafting. But knowledge is power, and eventually you'll want to acquaint yourself with Warframe's more esoteric concepts—especially when it comes to modding.

Fortunately, the Warframe community is full of fantastic resources that will help you with anything you could ever need. Here are the best websites to keep bookmarked as you push further into the solar system.

The Warframe Wiki will become your bible, especially when you're looking for information about what loot drops where. If you don't have a clan to ask, the wiki is likely where you'll find the answers to any questions you might have. Two topics I would recommend studying early on are how damage works (because you want to kill stuff really quickly) and the warframe page so you can gush over all the options and plot out which frames you want to craft first.

If you're really lost, iFlynn's Ultimate Beginner's Guide is exactly what you need. This staggering 31-part YouTube series is a literal step-by-step walkthrough from mission one all the way to high level content. This is basically Warframe for Dummies and an invaluable resource for new players who just want someone to show them how to play. One must-watch video is his explainer on how damage works because, again, killing stuff is really important here. 

Warframe.Market is the best place to organize trades with other players and list items that you would like to sell for Platinum. Getting involved with trading in Warframe is something that could use a whole other guide, but if you're willing to spend a bit of cash to buy Platinum, you can use Warframe.Market to buy rare mods instead of trying to farm them—a really useful way to save on time. Youtuber 'xplainthegame' has a great guide for using Warframe.Market.

DapperMuffin's Warframe Handbook is the most comprehensive guide to Warframe out there that handily breaks down every major system and concept in a really easy to read way. I also enjoy using this Ultimate Beginner's Guide to Warframe 2018 because it has some great recommendations of weapons and warframes new players should focus on. 

The final frontier 

Now that you have a grasp on the basics and a bookmark bar stuffed full of resources, the next steps are up to you. Like I said, there's no real endgame in Warframe and it's up to the player to decide what is worth their time. One area worth checking out is the Plains of Eidolon, a vast open world zone full of dangerous, towering Eidolons. Though it unlocks early on, the Plains are best visited after you've completed a good chunk of Star Chart.

Another major milestone to look forward to is completing the few structured quests that can be found in your codex. Of those, the most important one is The Second Dream, which begins a series of "cinematic quests" that help fill in a great deal of information about Warframe's story. They're cool as hell.

The best thing you can do, though, is get involved with the community, make friends, and try out a little of everything. Warframe is an inherently social game—more so than most MMOs—and it also has an enormous amount of things to do. You'll never accomplish everything in one weekend and I routinely meet players that have invested thousands of hours playing. That won't appeal to everyone, but if you can learn how to appreciate and understand Warframe, you'll also learn how easy it is to let an entire evening slip away looting and shooting.

I wish I could articulate what it was like seeing two thousand people's heads explode when Warframe developer Digital Extremes showed off their upcoming expansion, Railjack. After a 45-minute-long presentation at Tennocon 2018 demoing the impressive open world zone of Venus, Digital Extremes hoodwinked fans with an extensive, surprise look at Railjack's co-op space combat. No one knew it even existed. People lost their shit. At one point, I was seriously concerned the mob of cheering fans might storm the stage. But the audience wasn't angry, they were just so damn excited. I was excited too. Not because Warframe is adding an ambitious new space combat mode that glues its disparate parts together, but because all of this is coming from a free-to-play game that, four years ago, was completely overlooked.

I mean, who doesn't love a good underdog story?

And that's, essentially, what Warframe is. When Digital Extremes first released it in 2013, people immediately wrote it off because it was a free-to-play game. "It was a cuss word at the time," creative director Steve Sinclair joked with me when we spoke before the presentation. "No one even wanted to talk about it." Today, Warframe regularly sits in Steam's top 10 most played games just under esports titans like Dota 2 and trendsetters like PlayerUnknown's Battlegrounds. And, as I found out when I reviewed it two months ago, Warframe absolutely deserves every bit of its success.

Aside from the screams and cheers I witnessed sitting the audience of Tennocon, that success has been oddly quiet though. It's not the result of a single big reveal like Railjack, but years of slow growth, honest dialogue with players, and risk-taking development. And it all contributes to why Warframe is the best free-to-play game on PC.

Study the blade 

That moment during Tennocon when community director Rebecca Ford's character piloted a spaceship while her two teammates fired guns, rebuffed invasions, put out fires, and even infiltrated an enemy ship takes context to understand why people lost their minds. For Warframe's long-time fans, the biggest surprises are how dramatically it continues to grow and change.

When it launched in 2013, Warframe was little more than a procedurally generated co-op loot shooter. You played as a cool ninja and ran around cutting up bad guys for resources to craft into gear. That was it. In the five years since, though, Digital Extremes has turned Warframe into what basically amounts to an MMO that easily dwarfs both Destiny games. There's public space stations to hang out and trade items in, customizable dojos for your clan to build, several dozen planets to visit, a massive open world zone to explore—the list goes on.

It seems like there's no idea too big or strange for Warframe. The first half of the Tennocon presentation was a long walkthrough of another open world zone on Venus coming later this year. It started with a two-and-a-half minute musical number, of all things. But when Digital Extremes finally showed off new features, like a hoverboard and giant walking robobugs, people were screaming with excitement. To then cap all of that off with a 15-minute surprise live demo that involved seamlessly flying a ship into space and blowing up an enormous enemy capital ship was almost too much for people to comprehend. Take note, E3 press conferences, because Digital Extremes knows how to please an audience.

I love the audacity. Where many game developers are content with just feeding their players more of the same thing, Digital Extremes constantly changes the shape of Warframe to include new—and often very bizarre—features. You can hatch alien dogs that fight alongside you. One warframe comes with a programmable, in-game synthesizer. There's even a parasite that organically spreads between players. Features that work continue to get iterated and improved upon while those that don't are often abandoned, like Warframe's PvP mode.

Each of these little experiments, successful or not, congeal to give Warframe an absolutely unique shape that is hard to describe. What other game can you fish on a tranquil lake one minute and the next minute bullet-time jump through an enemy spaceship in a suit of armor that punches the souls out of people?

Instead of just striving to give players more of what they want, Digital Extremes endeavors to always give them something different at the same time. And, as I'm quickly realizing, it creates an exciting tension where I cannot wait to see what surprises the developer is cooking up. I'm just excited for the future of Warframe as I am to play it, and that's a rare feeling.

Warframe isn't the most coherent game but it is certainly one of the most recklessly ambitious. And considering how honest and communicative its developers are, it's hard not to find that quality endearing. When talking with their audience, you get a sense that Digital Extremes isn't trying to spin the truth or sell something. Their weekly streams are informal and fun peeks behind the development curtain. Yesterday, I discovered some of Sinclair's archived livestreams where he hangs out with viewers on his day off and talks about the technical nitty-gritty of Warframe's development. It's the kind of stream you see from small-time indie developers, not the director of one of the world's most popular games. During one stream, Sinclair even talked about his decade-old dream of making seamless space battles in Warframe and showed off his work in progress—the seed that would eventually become Railjack.

Sinclair's inviting demeanor is a philosophy spread across the entire company. During the VIP breakfast before Tennocon, most of Digital Extremes' developers were chatting away with fans that they obviously had an established relationship with. Warframe wouldn't exist today without the dedication of a few thousand players who stuck through those rough early years, and in watching these conversations it's obvious that Digital Extremes knows it.

Ninja theory 

Of course, it also helps that Warframe is damn good too. The parkour combat is kinetic and sublime, and there's a sense of depth to each of its progression systems that is, at first, daunting. Once I got to grips with it, though, I began to see why people routinely sink thousands of hours into Warframe. It elegantly solves one of the bigger problems with MMOs' gear grinds by not treating the grind and the reward as two separate concepts.

In Destiny 2, for example, the moment I get that exotic rifle, I immediately need something new to work for or what's the point of continuing to play? Bungie is continually having to move the goalposts back but is, at the same time, creating 'power creep' as players' stats become wildly disproportionate along the way. It's a treadmill that is completely arbitrary.

Warframe, on the other hand, understands the value of horizontal progression—the idea that variety is the spice of life. Instead of always seeking The Most Powerful Gun, I'm building a vast arsenal of wildly different weapons and warframes that each have extremely long progression curves until they reach their true potential. It's a slow process that turns away those who want more immediate rewards, sure, but I love that I've never logged into Warframe and felt like I had nothing to do. And the game is so fun to play that I don't really mind the slowed pace of progression.

Of course, it's to Digital Extremes' benefit that the grind be as drawn out and as layered as possible. It's easier to monetize it that way. Warframe's microtransactions also set a high standard that other games should aspire to, though. Yes, it's possible to pump a ton of money into the game in exchange for blinged-out gear, but Warframe's upgrade system still means you're going to have to spend the time to level it up and make it good.

Even the premium currency, Platinum, can be freely exchanged between players. Warframe's bustling player-driven economy uses Platinum almost exclusively, and it's easy enough to earn it by selling items that others want. That means even Warframe's most expensive cosmetics are within grasp of enterprising players who don't want to spend money.

Warframe feels like a near-perfect symbiotic relationship between player and developer. There are definitely some free-to-play annoyances, like having to wait for items to craft and needing to buy inventory slots, but in exchange I get one of the most robust and distinctive online RPGs I've ever played. And the fruit of that give and take is moments like the Railjack reveal, when the dreams of both Warframe fans and its creators are realized in one beautiful instant.

I've spent nearly 200 hours with Warframe so far, but I can see myself spending many, many more. There's parts of it that I love and there's part of it that I hate, but there's no part that I don't feel invested in. I want to know more about its systems. I want to be a part of its community. And that's because Warframe is fearless in its pursuit of new ways to improve and expand while also respecting its audience.

Warframe's success is already impressive but it feels like a much bigger sleeper hit in the making. I get the sense that this is just the beginning. At the end of the Railjack demo, the spaceship the developers were piloting warped off to parts unknown—an on-the-nose foreshadowing that Warframe's next expansions are going beyond the solar system it's called home for years. And, judging by the thousands of cheers from the audience, I suspect their fans are just as excited about the trip as Digital Extremes is. I know I am.

Warframe has some of the most fluid and fun movement out of any shooter I've ever played. I said as much in my review, but Digital Extremes is taking things in a decidedly more radical direction with the addition of 'Bondi K-Drive' hoverboards. Revealed during a special presentation live from Tennocon, Warframe's annual fan convention, these new hoverboards are going to be a key mode of travel in the new Venus open world zone that is five times larger than the Plains of Eidolon.

But who am I kidding, the real draw is that you can do tricks on these bad boys. While the live demo only showed off a 360 spin, I was told there will be plenty more stunts, like backflips, that players can perform as they jet through the gorgeous frozen mountains of Venus. Sadly, you won't be able to grind on anything because, uh, it's a hoverboard. You can jump on enemies' heads and bounce off of them, however.

Now, Warframe veterans will know that the Archwing jetpack is the defacto method for travelling Warframe's open worlds. Digital Extremes did confirm that those will be available in Venus too, but obviously the K-Drive has its own appeal. While I haven't had a chance to pilot one personally, they appeared to glide through the mountainous environment with relative ease and the sense of speed is great.

Unlike the Archwing, K-Drives don't have any real offensive weapons so they're purely used for zipping around. But creative director Steve Sinclair did say that it's something the team is still figuring out and there's a "heated debate" over whether players should be able to fire their guns while riding them. They will, like everything in Warframe, feature extensive customization options. Sinclair confirmed that there would be different models along with cosmetic upgrades that you can earn in various ways including cool graphics for the underside to show off how gnarly you are. We'll update this post with more details as they emerge.

I'm here at Tennocon in person and will continue to cover all of the exciting news and reveals as they happen. For now, check out our breakdown of Warframe's ambitious as hell expansion, Fortuna. You can also watch the full presentation from Tennocon live on Twitch.

At Tennocon 2018, Digital Extreme's annual Warframe convention, the developer had a huge surprise in store for fans—one that promises a radical change to what Warframe, as a videogame, actually is. A live presentation showcasing the new open world zone of Venus ended with a major twist that I'm still trying to wrap my head around. During the demo, villain Nef Anyo bombarded the player repeatedly from space, but just when everyone thought the preview was over, Digital Extremes showed how players will get their revenge.

A ship descends that the group of four boards and then pilots seamlessly into orbit where they engage Nef Anyo's capital ship directly. Called Codename: Railjack, it's an entirely new game mode where players explore and fight in space from the comfort of their own battlecruiser. It's basically Warframe's take on beloved indie game FTL. Each member of a group will man a station on the ship, like piloting or manning turrets, while simultaneously fighting off enemy fighters, capital ships, and even direct invasions inside the ship. Similar to FTL, players can also divert energy to different systems like powering up thrusters to increase speed and maneuverability. There was even a moment when a hull breach depleted life support systems that had to be repaired.

You won't just be on the defensive, either. At any time, players can depart their own ship and fly around space in their personal Archwing flightsuit to engage enemies more directly. More impressive, however, is the ability to infiltrate enemy capital ships and sabotage them from the inside to weaken them for a killing blow. During one intense sequence, one developer was running through the halls of the enemy capital ship while another was in what creative director Steve Sinclair called "commander mode" which let them hack the enemy ship to open airlocks and assist her teammate.

It's a stunningly ambitious new mode, but it's unclear how this experience will fit into the greater Warframe campaign. During an interview, Sinclair did confirm that these ships would feature a progression system similar to most everything else in Warframe. Players will be able to level them up, upgrade, and modify their various abilities. They aren't just giant boats either, but have special abilities similar to Warframes. Sinclair described one as a "death blossom" of missiles that "destroy everything in sight."

In my review, I said "Warframe is the most Frankenstein-esque game I've ever played." It's a mish-mash of different ideas and systems that don't always work well together, but Sinclair said Codename: Railjack is intended to be the glue that binds Warframe's open-world levels, procedurally generated corridors, and Archwing space combat together. These ships will also be instrumental in exploring space beyond the solar system that Warframe has been confined to for its entire lifespan. Last month, Warframe released a new "cinematic quest" called The Sacrifice that turned the page on another chapter in Warframe's esoteric and wonderful story. The next chapter, called The New War, was also teased at Tennolive and sets up an inter-solar system conflict with the arch-villain Sentients that exist beyond the borders of our star system.

This update "takes Warframe down a totally uncharted path," reads a press release I was provided with ahead of time. It's described as being the next part of a "grander vision." When I asked Sinclair to explain what that meant, he spoke of Dark Sector, the unreleased game that Digital Extremes tried to make before Warframe. In that game, Sinclair says, groups of players would explore and invade ships in procedurally generated sectors of space. It was an ambitious project that Digital Extremes was never able to realize, as detailed in the No Clip documentary. Codename: Railjack is their attempt to finally bring that vision to life. I already have a difficult time explaining Warframe to my friends. I have a feeling it's going to get worse.

Codename: Railjack has no release date, but considering the new Venus open world zone isn't expected until late 2018, I'm willing to bet it's going to be a long wait. Check out our coverage of the new Venus open world zone and the awesome hoverboards you'll use to explore it.

Stepping onto the Plains of Eidolon the first time was a surreal experience. For years, Warframe players had been dashing and bullet-time sliding through the claustrophobic corridors of alien-looking spaceships. Last year Plains of Eidolon ditched all of that, taking Warframe's kinetic sword and shotgun combat into wide open spaces. Now, developer Digital Extremes is taking it a step further. During a presentation at TennoCon in Ontario, Canada this weekend, Warframe fans were shown an extended 20 minute demo of the new Venus open world zone called Orb Vallis, and it already looks like a massive improvement over the Plains of Eidolon.

Forget the auburn—and slightly monotonous—rolling hills of the Plains. Orb Vallis is a stunning alien landscape covered in a light sprinkling of snow, giant mushrooms, sea-like flora, and towering robot bugs that clamber over its mountains (yes, they will attack you). It's five times as big as Plains of Eidolon (which was about 5 square kilometers) and already feels much livelier. It's a vast space where groups of up to four players will explore, complete bounties, fish, mine, and fight.

Orb Vallis is the central addition to Warframe's Fortuna expansion, which will be arriving later this year. Living in this terraformed version of Venus are the Solaris United, a bizarre race of half-human half-robot slaves that are fighting for freedom against their Corpus overlords. It's a cliché-sounding premise that Warframe is adding its own weird twist to as evidenced by the opening cutscene featuring a chain gang humming a solemn tune as they work. They're a people so in debt that they've had to mortgage their own partly mechanical bodies to the Corpus.

The new hub is the underground city simply called Debt-Internment Colony where players will pick up quests, buy Fortuna's new tools, and put together more pieces of Warframe's esoteric lore. Similar to Plains of Eidolon, there is a new weapon crafting system but instead of melee Zaws players will be forging Kit Guns that fill your secondary weapon slot.

At its core, though, Orb Vallis will function the same way as Plains of Eidolon. For the most part that means completing a rotating list of bounties or farming materials for various uses. The bounty system has been greatly improved: now, Solaris United agents will appear at bases that you liberate on the map so you can more easily hop from one bounty to the next.

Mining and spear fishing are two activities that will directly carry over between the Plains and Venus. But one really cool new addition is a unique animal preservation system where players seek out and capture endangered animals for relocation to safer environs. It's keeping in tune with Warframe's often weird features (this is a game where you have a gun that shoots music you create in a synthesizer).

What I love most is how involved it is. While exploring Orb Vallis you might come across tracks in the wilderness that you can follow. If you have the appropriate lure, you can make animal calls to try and lure the beast out. It's a weird call and response mini-game where the animal will make a specific noise that players have to mimic. It's hard to explain, but creative director Steve Sinclair said it was heavily inspired by hunters using moose calls. The animal will make a certain sequence of noises that players then recreate using a user interface element that simulates different pitches. It's weird, so just watch the Twitch livestream to see it in action.

Once the animal is lured out, you'll then have to find a place to hide until it's exposed and then you'll shoot it with a tranquilizer. Animals have different rarities that is partially dependent on how successful you are with recreating their call, with rarer animals offering more Solaris reputation. Once the beast is knocked out, you can extract it with a drone in a way that feels very reminiscent of Metal Gear Solid 5.

Not everything living on Venus is friendly, though. Corpus bases are scattered all across the zone, but an even bigger threat is the 'Orb Layers'—giant spider bots that stomp around. Similar to the massive, titular Eidolons, these are essentially endgame bosses that players will have to initially avoid at first. What's cool, however, is these giant spider tanks aren't confined to anyone space and can be constantly seen scaling mountains in the distance. 

In that sense, Fortuna feels like it shares a similar structure to Plains of Eidolon. Players will farm materials, complete bounties, and eventually form groups to hunt and kill powerful endgame bosses for powerful loot. I just hope that, unlike Plains of Eidolon, Fortuna won't be so compartmentalized from the rest of the game. Still, Orb Vallis looks like a promising and ambitious update coming on the back of Plains of Eidolon, which was in itself an ambitious update.

Speaking with Sinclair, he was also able to confirm that many of the innovations of Fortuna will be retroactively applied to Plains of Eidolon. The new bounty system, the K-drive hoverboards, and potentially even the animal conservation minigame will all be added into Plains of Eidolon at a later date.

I'll continue our coverage as more details emerge from TennoCon, which I'm attending all weekend.