CES is always fertile ground for gaming laptop releases, and this year we weren't disappointed. But 2025 was something of a special show, as we also got to see the wraps taken off Nvidia's next-generation 50-series graphics cards—and they were a sight for sore eyes after months (nay, years) of speculation and rumour.

AI was still everywhere, as you might expect, but we carved our way through the crowds to find the implementations worth talking about. We also saw some impressive-looking CPUs from AMD (and a brief glimpse of the RX 9070 and RX 9070 XT, however fleeting), alongside some interesting gaming chair concepts, the odd clever case design, and even some handhelds worth talking about.

A pretty successful show in general then, and a good opportunity for us to get hands on with the very latest tech. We've narrowed down our awards to nine categories, and each recipient of our coveted trophy is well deserved. Roll on 2025 then, as it seems there's plenty of exciting hardware coming our way.

Best gaming laptop of CES 2025

1. Best gaming laptop of CES 2025

Razer Blade 16 (2025)
CES has long been a showcase for the latest laptop releases, and this year was no exception. But out of every gaming laptop we cast our eyes upon, it was the Razer Blade 16 2025 that really stood out. Not only is it a slimmer-looking, edgier-feeling machine, but it keeps the fantastic OLED panel from last years model while updating the hardware inside to include AMD's Strix Point chips in the CPU socket (all the way up to the Ryzen AI 9 HX 370) and RTX 50-series mobile GPUs. Razer also says it will be "aggressively priced", although what that translates to in practice remains to be seen. Still, it's a truly desirable object to hold in your hands, and one we can't wait to test out when it releases in Q1 of this year.

Best gaming chair of CES 2025

2. Best gaming chair of CES 2025

Razer Project Arielle
We've seen gaming chairs with fans integrated into them before, but Razer came sweeping in this year with a mesh chair design that makes the whole concept feel seamless. Not only can Project Arielle deliver a steady stream of cool air down your back in a way that feels soothing, not irritating, but it can even provide a subtle yet comforting blast of heat for those chilly winter mornings. Personally I was expecting it to be a bit gimmicky, but having tested it myself it was a delightful effect. It remains a concept for now, but I reckon it won't be long before we see something like this available for sale.

Best graphics card of CES 2025

3. Best graphics card of CES 2025

Nvidia RTX 5090 Founders Edition
CES 2025 featured a rare event this year—a fully fledged Nvidia graphics card launch, unveiling the RTX 50-series GPUs to the world. While a smorgasbord of cards were unveiled (including the rather promising-looking RTX 5070 touting RTX 4090 levels of performance for a mere $549), we'd be remiss if we didn't give this award to the new top-end card for this generation, the RTX 5090. Not only does it feature an astonishing 21,760 CUDA cores, 32 GB of GDDR7 memory and 680 5th gen Tensor cores, but it somehow manages to be remarkably slim and svelte looking to boot. Perhaps the best looking Founders Edition card of all time? You be the judge, but we were suitably impressed.

Best processor of CES 2025

4. Best processor of CES 2024

AMD Ryzen 9 9955HX3D
Stand back everyone, it's a monster. AMD's new high-end laptop chip is essentially a Ryzen 9950X3D with a 54 W TDP, which means it should be about as beefy as mobile CPUs come. 16-cores, 32-threads, 144 MB of L3 cache and a 5.4 GHz boost clock makes for a tantalising chip on paper, although thermals remain a question for now. It looks like a staggering amount of silicon for a mobile device on paper, and it'll likely feature in some of the 18-inch models we saw at this year's event—alongside some chonky cooling solutions, we expect. Still, it's a remarkably highly-specced mobile chip, and looks like a bit of a victory lap for AMD and it's gaming-friendly 3D V-Cache technology, especially now so many laptop manufacturers are starting to choose its mobile silicon over Intel.

Best new tech for gaming at CES 2025

5. Best new tech for gaming at CES 2025

AMD Ryzen AI Max
Ah, Strix Halo. We've been covering the rumours surrounding these mobile chips for such a long time, it feels slightly surreal finally seeing them in the flesh. And specs wise, they don't disappoint. At the top of the range sits the Ryzen AI Max+ 395, a 16-core 32-thread 5.1 GHz beastie with 80 MB total cache. It's the iGPUs on these chips that truly get us hot and bothered, though, as the top chip gets 40 CUs, with 32 CUs each on chips further down the range. Could this mean thin, light, dedicated GPU-less devices that possess the mettle to deliver excellent gaming performance? The Asus ROG Flow Z13 looks like a candidate, although as usual we'll need to benchmark one for ourselves before giving a final verdict. Still, exciting, isn't it?

Best handheld of CES 2025

6. Best handheld

Lenovo Legion Go S
Handheld gaming PCs are starting to refine down to a formula, and the Lenovo Legion Go S, on initial appearances, doesn't have a huge amount that makes it stand out. But it's got the right elements in all the right proportions, marrying an eight inch 1200p display with a choice of Z1 Extreme and Z2 Go APUs in a form factor that feels both familiar and comfortable. Plus, it's the first handheld other than the Steam Deck to use SteamOS—a development that's been a long time coming. There's something confidently refined about this one, although we'll have to put it through the ringer ourselves to see if it holds up to close scrutiny.

Most innovative use of AI at CES 2024

7. Most innovative use of AI at CES 2025

Nvidia DLSS 4 Multi Frame Generation
Walking the show floor and taking in the generative AI barbecues (you think I'm kidding) and the AI-touting cat toilets, you'd be forgiven for thinking all the AI implementations at this year's event were nothing but hype. Leave it to Nvidia though, as DLSS 4 looks truly impressive—not least because it now uses transformer-based AI models that reduce ghosting, improve temporal stability, and provide higher detail for all RTX card users. For the 50-series alone, though, you get Multi Frame Generation, which Nvidia says can multiply frame rates by up to 8x over traditional brute-force rendering. "Fake frame" doubters may protest, but we saw DLSS 4 in action for ourselves—and all those improvements stack up to look staggeringly good in person.

Consumer-first award

8. Consumer-first award

Asus ROG Strix Scar 18
In a world where gaming laptop manufacturers are increasingly soldering hardware to the motherboard to keep things slim, it was truly refreshing to see what Asus was doing with the latest version of the Asus ROG Strix Scar 18. Slide a latch on the back panel, and you'll reveal two diagonally-mounted latch-held SSD drives, just begging to be swapped out and upgraded on a whim with nary a tool in sight. The SO-DIMMs are tool-free to access too, meaning this big hunk of gaming laptop should be remarkably easy to upgrade. Chalk one up for a consumer win—and we can only hope more manufacturers follow suit in future.

Best gaming PC

9. Best gaming PC

Alienware Area-51
It wasn't just the Asus ROG Strix Scar 18 that impressed us when it came to upgradeability. Alienware makes some desirable (if pricey) gaming PCs, but its tendency to use proprietary parts has traditionally been a sticking point. No longer with the new Alienware Area-51, as it now uses standard ATX motherboards and power supplies. Not only that, but it's festooned the insides with a smattering of QR codes, linking out to tutorial videos on exactly how to remove and upgrade the components. A genuinely good idea, and one that shows—with the Area-51 models at least—that Alienware has been taking some of that upgradability critique on board.

The best thing about a wildcard is you never know what to expect next. They may at first brush appear to be nothing special, only to reveal hidden depths. They'll keep you guessing: Will they draw a card and conjure a figure from mythology—then hit you with an instant kill attack in the fighting game spin-off?

Okay, so clearly I've been playing way too much Persona 4 Golden because it turns out 'wildcard' can mean different things (or so my colleagues tell me). Here, it means we've seen a whole lot of impressive hardware throughout 2024, with the weird and wonderful not always neatly fitting into any one of our headliner categories. Still, outside of the usual suspects such as best graphics card or best gaming monitor for instance, there's a heck of a lot that still ought to get its flowers.

Hence, the wildcard represents our 'best of the rest.' From specialised peripherals, to robust performers that put the 'hard' in 'hardware,' there's quite a mix below. Not only are the nominees as eclectic as you'd hope, but they all scored highly in our reviews too; unlike last year, all three of our 2024 nominees secured a review score of 90 or higher, so you know they're each worth at least another look.

Alright, my colleagues are emphatically gesturing towards the 'get on with it' sign. So, without further ado, here are our three nominees:

Best of the rest 2024: the nominees

And those are PC Gamer's wild card nominations, representing hardware's best of the rest from 2024. Though all three be deserving of the crown, only one can snatch it up. We'll announce the winner (presumably after a flailing, Fall Guys-esque smackdown) on New Year's Eve.

If you want to go back to the original Dragon Age today, you'll need some help. Origins was made in the Eclipse engine, which had some long-standing bugs that never got patched and given there are "maybe 20 people left at BioWare" who understand how it works, aren't likely to ever be officially fixed. Unofficially, they've already been solved and all it takes is a dive into the PC Gaming wiki and Nexus Mods to sort them out.

Without these patches, running Dragon Age: Origins is likely to make your PC overheat, performance will degrade the longer you play without a reset, and you'll probably see flickering red squares appear underneath dead bodies. These issues are fixed, or at least mitigated, by two mods. The first is the 4GB Patch, which makes Origins large-address aware. By default it'll only use 2GB of your RAM, but as the name suggests the 4GB Patch doubles that. It's an easy install in either the EA App or GOG versions of the game, but if you're playing on Steam you'll need to follow a different installation guide.

Next up is the Performance and Memory Leak Fix. Take the d3d9.dll and dxvk.conf files out of the archive and put them in the "bin_ship" directory of your Dragon Age: Origins install. With that done, you'll have the game in a much more playable state—one that won't melt your laptop—and you'll be ready to install some mods for fun instead of just to make the game run properly.

How to install Dragon Age: Origins mods

Almost every mod for Dragon Age: Origins comes in one of two formats. Some you can paste into the "BioWare\Dragon Age\packages\core\override" subdirectory of your documents folder, and will work automatically the next time you launch the game. Others will be dazip files, which take a bit more effort to get working.

To install dazip mods, find daupdater.exe in the "bin_ship" directory of your Dragon Age install. It'll probably be in "Program Files\EA Games\Dragon Age". When you run daupdater.exe it'll open a window you can drag and drop your dazip mods into. Then highlight them and click on "Install selected".

Next time you launch Dragon Age: Origins, go into the DLC section of the menu. Your dazip mods will appear here next to whatever official DLC you have. Make sure they've got a green tick in the box next to them, and they'll be activated. With all that out of the way, here are the best Dragon Age: Origins mods.

Dain's Fixes

Does it bother you that ugly animations for buffs like the angry red tears flowing down threatening warriors or the glowing fire of burning weapons remain on even in cutscenes? Or that rogues drop out of stealth the moment they steal things? Or that you have to loot everyone manually after every fight? Or how slowly you have to jog around outside of combat?

All these annoyances and many more are fixed by Dain's Fixes, a modular set of tweaks that incorporates quality-of-life improvements as well as fixes for bugs you may never have noticed, like the fact that Mighty Blow doesn't actually halve the speed of anyone it hits like the description says it should. Each of Dain's Fixes comes in a separate folder, making them easy to pick and choose between.

Qwinn's Ultimate DAO Fixpack

If Dragon Age: Origins released today instead of in 2009 there would be a legion of YouTubers telling us about how its "cut content" proves it's actually unfinished and borderline unplayable. While obviously that's not true, there is a lot of dialogue and a fair few codex entries, items, and alternate quest options restored by Qwinn's Fixpack—including 18 interparty banters you'd otherwise never hear. It also fixes a bunch of bugged items and scripting.

FtG UI Mod—More Readable Fonts and UI

"Follow the Gourd" is a modder who has done the vital work of boosting the size of Origins' UI so you won't be squinting at your screen to read the text on a modern-sized monitor. Subtitles, codex entries, tooltips, and the inventory can all be resized to your liking, and the subtitles moved to the bottom of the screen if that's where you prefer them.

Extra Dog Slot

The mabari warhound is a Grey Warden's best friend, with their snappy jaws, pointy ears, and muscled chest. They're fantastic, happy partners, and essential tanks for mages and ranged fighters. Still, it's easy to let your canine companion get left behind in favor of more useful companions who can carry inventory, equip items, and, you know, talk.

With the Extra Dog Slot mod, your dog joins you as a permanent fifth party member. Adding a bloodthirsty mabari warhound isn’t the most balance-friendly addition to the Dragon Age combat system, but have you seen those big, sad eyes? You can't leave him behind. Who's a good hound?

Once you've recruited five companions, install Extra Dog Slot. Then on the party select screen, highlight four of the non-dog party members. When you return to the game, your faithful hound will still be by your side.

Character Respecialization

A dark raven appears on a fencepost. A sour elixir full of evil portent is strapped to its leg. Drink it, and… respec your skills and attribute points at any time! Well, that was unexpected.

As strategies shift in Dragon Age, it's great to be able to rebuild a team to better support each other. The Character Respecialization mod pulls this off in a (mostly) lore-friendly way, and can be used at any time. After installation, find the dark-but-slightly-stupid-looking raven perched in most of Ferelden's major cities.

Equal Love

Equal Love erases gender restrictions on companion interactions, so you can flirt, kiss, and get freaky with any companion you'd like to, regardless of your player-character gender. Best of all, the new genderless rules carry over into the storyline's conclusions, so now male player-characters can [spoiler] with [spoiler], provided he chooses the [spoiler] ending.

Madd Gift Guide

Interpersonal politics, as we all know, begin and end with the giving of gifts. In vanilla Dragon Age though, finding a special "gift" item only leads to a bunch of hassle as you try to figure out who is supposed to receive it. With the Madd Gift Guide, the item descriptions of gifts suggest which of your companions would enjoy them, saving a lot of trial and error. For anyone trying to win the Most Popular Grey Warden contest, this is a simple but essential mod.

You can get a gift guide for the Awakening expansion too.

Forced Deathblows

Every once in a while, a melee fighter will kill an opponent with a combo of brutal finishing moves straight out of Game of Thrones. These are supposed to be a rare treat, but if you’re the kind of person who rejects the idea cookies are a sometimes food, Forced Deathblows can dial up the carnage. A variable setting makes the special kill animations happen slightly more regularly, most of the time, or for every single melee kill. The highest setting is recommended for the folks who played Sniper Elite with the X-ray gore animations turned all the way up, as it leads to the same amount of repetitive, gratuitous spleen-smashing.

No Helmet Hack

From Mass Effect 2 on, BioWare's games featured a simple checkbox that made helmets invisible so you could see your characters' beloved faces at all times, even when they were strapped into a thousand pounds of high-tech armor. Back in the Bad Old Days, helmets would only go away in dialogue scenes. The rest of the time, you'd have to see them running around in a daft wizard hat or leather bonce protector. Enter No Helmet Hack, a simple little mod that gives each character a weightless, valueless book to read. Using it toggles their helmet visibility on or off. Beautiful, simple, and efficient.

Ser Gilmore Companion NPC – Fully Voiced

The Human Nobles among you may remember Ser Gilmore as your well-intentioned, but only briefly relevant, childhood friend. Originally thought to be the next Grey Warden recruit, Ser Gilmore instead sacrifices his life to give you and your mother time to escape your burning castle.

Thanks to the retconning of this mod, however, Ser Gilmore is back. Even better, he's ready to join your quest and features full voice acting. The voice acting isn't half bad, and it's remarkable how well he fits in with the other companions. After installing this mod, you can recruit your miraculously alive childhood chum near the Lothering chantry.

Baldur's Gate 2 Redux

For a taste of something a little different—and a break from Dragon Age entirely—the Baldur's Gate 2 Redux mod is a thing of beauty. The first dungeon, Irenicus's Dungeon, has been entirely recreated by a team of modders, including the original audio and famously snappy dialog. Though this project was supposed to eventually recreate all of Baldur's Gate 2, unfortunately it went on hiatus in 2014 when the project lead got a job at Beamdog. Still, this bite of BG2 is good for about an hour of nostalgic dungeon-diving.

Alley of Murders

Alley of Murders is an add-on campaign that introduces a serial killer in the grungier areas of Denerim. The local constabulary aren’t having any luck solving the case, so it's up to the Grey Wardens to step in. This mod is fully voice-acted (to varying degrees of success) and should take about half an hour to wrap up.

The Shattered War

Alley of Murders was the first fully voice acted Dragon Age: Origins mod, and an impressive proof of concept. The Shattered War is the real deal, a standalone expansion of near-professional quality with more than 3,600 lines of recorded dialogue. Set after the events of the game, it casts you as a member of a military expedition sent to investigate a darkspawn threat in the Frostback Mountains, and should give you around 10 hours of bonus adventuring.

Shortcut Through the Deep Roads

By your second or third playthrough, you'll probably be pretty sick of Deep Roads dungeoneering. This mod lets you skip straight to the Brood Mother, though you'll have to be careful not to get turned around after defeating her, because if you wander into the Dead Trenches you'll get teleported back to the Brood Mother Fight. On a similar tip there's Skip the Fade, though some users on Nexus Mods report issues with it and it does conflict with mods like Ser Gilmore.

Part of the action RPG genre's strength is, admittedly, its broad definition. Loot lovers have Diablo 4, soulslike sickos have Elden Ring: Shadow of the Erdtree, roguelike ruffians have Hades 2, and then there's Dragon's Dogma 2 for anyone who wants their action RPGs to be delightfully weird. Black Myth: Wukong and Final Fantasy 16 veer heavily into the action side of things, and we just got a new Dragon Age that is a better action RPG than I think anyone expected. And don't forget Path of Exile 2, which didn't quite make the cut, but is still on track to come out in early access this year.

My favorite part about action RPGs are the stories you hear about players coming up with ridiculous challenge runs or builds that the developers surely didn't really intend. That's the charm of a genre that hands you a buffet of combat systems and lets you gorge on whatever you're hungry for. Let's dig into each game, what ridiculous things players did in them, and what makes them stand out.

The bizarre action RPG: Dragon's Dogma 2

Most impressive player feat: Beat the game naked in under 2 hours.

Play it to simulate a D&D party made up of player-created NPCs who can kill you at any moment.

Fast travel in Dragon's Dogma 2 is a pain in the ass. To travel between towns, you need to catch an oxcart before it departs and then pray you don't get attacked by a griffon along the way. Teleporting around the world is possible, but you need to have visited your destination once before and have a specific item on you. Dragon's Dogma 2 is an inconvenient action RPG where any quest could turn into a fantasy epic.

And then there are the pawns, NPC buddies who you recruit throughout your journey. Without them, Dragon's Dogma 2, like your main character, would lose its heart. "It feels like I'm in a proper RPG adventuring group, and each journey is made better by their company and funny little eccentricities," Fraser wrote in his Dragon's Dogma 2 review. He gave it a score of 89% for its originality and ambition.

I can still picture my party of pawns and all the surprises we encountered on the way to finish some mundane task. I owe them my life for how many beasts they kept off of me while I shot arrows from relative safety, and for being good sports whenever I hurled them toward items I didn't feel like jumping across a gap to get.

The slick action RPG: Hades 2

Most impressive player feat: Beat every boss without taking a single point of damage.

Play it for the jetpack that was just added.

The first Hades is up there with some of my favorite games of all time. Supergiant knows how to make unbelievably satisfying action RPGs that slowly unfold their complexity over time. Hades 2 isn't finished yet, but already has some new toys that might make me kick Hades 1 down a few ranks.

Simple things, like Melinoë's quick dash that leaves a trail of stars behind her to indicate how long you have until you can do it again, are the kind of little touches that give Hades 2's combat a sturdy foundation. If the basic act of moving around weren't so satisfying, Hades 2's entire arsenal of creative weapons and powers wouldn't work.

Every run you can stack boons together to turn your grenade launcher into an explosive shotgun or your sprint into Poseidon's tidal wave. Supergiant makes it almost impossible to stumble into a build that doesn't work, activating the right neurons that keep me coming back to do it all over again and again.

The relentless action RPG: Elden Ring: Shadow of the Erdtree

Most impressive player feat: Beat it with 1 HP, 1 FP, and 1 Stamina over 55 hours and 1,900 deaths.

Play it for its dual-wielded blades that let you slide behind enemies like a ninja.

Apologies to the other action RPGs on this list, but Elden Ring: Shadow of the Erdtree is easily the best one I've played this year. FromSoftware's enormous expansion delivers a beautiful new landmass, terrifying new monsters, and weaponry that stretches what I thought was possible in this flavor of action RPG.

As I said in my Shadow of the Erdtree review, it "rivals Dark Souls with a corkscrew world design layered with wondrous and horrific secrets to discover." And like Dark Souls, normal enemies—not just bosses—can tear you apart. One of my issues with Elden Ring is how uneven its difficulty scaling becomes in the last third. The expansion dodges this problem by having its own leveling system that almost makes you feel like you're level 1 again.

The challenge goes hand in hand with where FromSoft chose to set the expansion: In a land that echoes the base game with remixed enemy types and bosses built to exploit all the habits you used to rely on. Shadow of the Erdtree can see right through you and I was happy to be threatened by the smallest enemies in a world that is practically screaming at you to leave.

The bold action RPG: Black Myth: Wukong

Most impressive player feat: Beat the entire game without dodging.

Play it for its marvelous 10-minute intro.

This is the only action RPG on the list where you get to duel a tiger with a katana. I guess you also play as a monkey man with a polearm, so maybe that isn't surprising.

The creativity in Black Myth: Wukong's powers impressed me the most. The idea of turning into a giant frog to slap enemies with your tongue sounds like a joke but in Wukong it isn't, and it somehow doesn't feel out of place. You transform into a lot of different creatures in this game, and each one shifts the pace of the combat in satisfying ways. I spent so much time as a wolf man slicing enemies apart with a fiery blade that going back to the monkey man felt like a punishment.

Wukong is also just a great entry point for anyone who doesn't play a lot of soulslikes or action RPGs. It certainly gets difficult by the end, but most of it is fairly lax as long as you can handle fast-paced combat like you find in Devil May Cry.

The cerebral action RPG: Diablo 4: Vessel of Hatred

Most impressive player feat: Discovered powerful bugs that let the new class hit for billions of damage.

Play it to summon a giant poison-spitting centipede as its speedy new class.

Vessel of Hatred reboots Diablo 4 into an even stronger action RPG than I ever thought it could become; an expansion that revitalizes the endless loot chase with a variety of new dungeon types and items to discover.

Clicking demons and picking up loot remains almost unnervingly pleasing, and now there are even more ways to do it. You can speed through the Undercity for runes to steal skills from other classes, battle waves of enemies in Infernal Hordes with 'boons and banes' that randomize each run, and challenge yourself in The Pit, a 150-tier dungeon for benchmarking your build.

There's an entire buffet of activities to sample as you scoop up loot to make whatever build you can dream of. I made a spiritborn who electrified the entire screen using one button and a rogue who turns into a spinning top flinging knives in every direction. Blizzard's stellar visual effects and tactile combat design elevate Diablo 4 above the other loot-heavy action RPGs. It's one of the most expressive, satisfying games on this list and only promises to expand as each new season releases.

The unexpected action RPG: Dragon Age: The Veilguard

Most impressive player feat: OK, this one is too new, but I'm sure someone will beat it blindfolded or something by next week.

Play it for its snappy combat and gorgeous setting.

Where Dragon Age: The Veilguard misses with its early game character writing, it really hits with its completely revised action RPG battles. I liked the earlier games in the series, but I wasn't there for combat. In Veilguard, I've found myself poking through the skill tree, eager to see what kind of abilities and bonuses I can unlock. And after only a handful of hours, it's starting to click.

I'm playing a spellblade mage, a caster who likes to stab, and for the first time in a Dragon Age game, I don't want to drop the difficulty down to forgettably easy and skip straight to the cutscenes. BioWare nails the fun of rhythmically flinging magic at enemies and teleporting in to strike them with a devastating finisher. I'm essentially a magical rogue empowered by allies who can slow down time or buff my damage output.

Lauren says the dialogue finds its footing deeper into the game in her Dragon Age: The Veilguard review. And that's absolutely fine with me because I'm currently having way more fun than I expected fighting off darkspawn in its gorgeous high fantasy ruins and forests. Part of me wants to try the other classes too, but as this list makes clear, I probably won't have time for that.

Although it wasn't the very first, Taiwanese-developed Sword and Fairy, released on DOS-based hardware similar to the PCs English speaking RPG fans were using to play Stonekeep and Ravenloft: Stone Prophet on at the time, had a huge impact on everything that followed. The story charted a magically-infused romance from humble hometown to its tragic end, well-received not only in its original game form but also in the multiple luscious and lengthy TV adaptations made afterwards.

As timeless as the story is, the RPG that surrounded it followed a traditional town/dungeon formula familiar to gamers the world over, with action portrayed using isometric 2D pixel art. The battles in Sword and Fairy were strictly turn-based: Heroes on one side of the screen, enemies on the other, and all attacks handled using a simple menu system. But that was perfectly fine in 1995.

Sword and Fairy was more than a hit: it was a historically significant masterpiece, a fantastic game that every Chinese and Taiwanese RPG developer at the time wanted to create their own spin on. Sword and Fairy's sequels, spinoffs, and sister series Xuan Yuan Sword even ended up struggling to outdo. 

Old battles are given a new real-time twist 

Time marched on regardless, and soon mainland Chinese RPGs were also trying to bring a little action and excitement to the traditionally stat-heavy genre. 2001's Jian Xia Qingyuan Waizhuan: Yue Ying Chuanshuo merged an almost Baldur's Gate-like presentation with real-time skirmishes. Here fights play out naturally within the environment and how often and how fast I swung my sword depended entirely on how often and how fast I clicked my mouse button. Turns and formations simply weren't a thing, although an achy index finger was. Did this early attempt to "go action" work? Oh heck no, not even close. Clicking on tiny highly mobile VGA-sized sprites over and over again wasn't practical, let alone fun. It was an interesting experiment, though, even if it's also one I hope I never encounter again.

Thankfully the Fantasia Sango series, starting in 2003, offered a more successful mix of RPG and action. These games are set in a gloriously colourful take on Three Kingdoms-era China, mythical versions of famous people and fantastical takes on real-world locations used as a backdrop for heroes to battle and romance their way through. Taiwanese developer UserJoy Technology Co. came up with something a bit different from all the lightsaber action found in another RPG released that year—KoTOR—but it still had the same desire to bring something new and more directly interactive to the genre.

As in Sword and Fairy the heroes are lined up on one side of the screen while the enemies politely keep to the other, but there's a new and unstoppable layer of action running underneath it all, a truly fresh twist on traditional RPGing. A Final Fantasy-like ATB gauge governed when friends and foes alike could perform an action, but the game then expanded on the concept of active combat in ways Square's headline games never would.

Both sides arranged their combatants on a generously sized grid, the positions controlling which attacks could hit their mark (a 1x3 square swipe would leave the back half of a 2x2 formation unharmed, for example).

Formations could also be changed mid-battle, altering buffs and character positions in the process. Here a character was more than a bundle of numbers with some equipment attached. They were a physical presence on the battlefield.

And that meant when they attacked mattered just as much as who they attacked. Well-timed blows of any sort could combo with other characters' offensive skills, increasing the damage they caused. This battle system worked so well the series started with it and then kept it forever, the idea going from innovative action to comfortingly familiar as the years passed by. 

Embracing QTEs and a more active future

By 2010 singleplayer Chinese RPGs were somewhat stagnating in the face of the unstoppable threat/promise of endless money in mobile gaming and F2Ps MMOs. Shanghai developer Aurogon's Gu Jian Qi Tan made a great effort to drag them back into the limelight with polished, voice-acted cutscenes packed with animated characters. Its locations weren't just rendered in lavishly detailed 3D, but were truly awe-inspiring. Pink petals fell from blossoming trees near gorgeous lakes, cheeky monkeys hid in autumnal forests, and monsters loomed over the party in battle.

This beautiful bow was wrapped around a game eager to move with the times, and that meant introducing action wherever it could. QTEs allowed hero Tusu to perform dramatic leaps and gravity-defying runs, as if he was the athletic star of a wuxia movie. Battles tried to mix traditional turns with flexible timings, a bar across the top denoting when someone's attack was coming up, and whether that heal you needed would come before or after a powerful enemy had unleashed their next move. 

Gu Jian 2 would take this idea further, introducing free movement and using MMO-style skill cooldowns in battle. 2018's Gu Jian 3, which is one of the rare few Chinese RPGs officially available in English, reduced the party size down to one and transformed the game into a real-time action adventure. This series was a turning point for RPGs made in China, and another step away from their orderly past. After Gu Jian, any Chinese RPG hoping to turn heads and make headlines had to be as close to cutting-edge-gorgeous as possible, and ideally had to be heavily action oriented too. The trend abroad wasn't too different: The Witcher 3 bowled everyone over in 2015, while Final Fantasy 15, released in 2016, also pushed heavily in the action direction.

Even as action RPGs were clearly taking over in China, exactly how that action materialised was still somewhat open to interpretation. In 2016, Genshin Impact developer MiHoYo's first breakout game, Honkai Impact 3rd, presaged the arrival of mega-budget gacha RPGs. But not everything was headed that way.

2017's Faith of Danschant took a different path to modernising this ancient genre. In screenshots it has all the hallmarks of a modern AAA game: Feixing is a flexible hero who can generally rely on on-screen waypoints to guide him to his next event, and only needs to be given a nudge and maybe a quick button press to perform some sort of fluidly animated context-sensitive environmental traversal. NPC chatter automatically sparks up whenever he passes by, because who actually has the time to stop and talk these days, right?

This free and loose interactivity tied to sumptuous presentation was a firm foot forward, but in combat Danschant always kept one toe dipped in the past. Battles use a mix of broadly Fantasia Sango-like chaining coupled with tactical cooldown timing, and then combine it with a dynamic positioning system. One moment three people are lined up to face a powerful monster, as quintessentially RPG as ever, but the next the entire team's dashing off to the side so they can completely avoid what would have been a screen-filling attack. The battle then seamlessly continues on from this new position, reinforcing the game's modern 3D environments.

A little less RP, lots more G

Faith of Danschant was something of a curious outlier, and many games fully embraced real-time action and saved almost all of their RPGing for cutscenes. 2020's Xuan Yuan Sword 7 opted for seamless sword swinging set in various gorgeous 3D locations, coupled with a streamlined story that prioritised getting from one spectacular event to the next over anything else. Time-padding fetch quests were a thing of the past, and although the maps always looked expansive they kept players walking a relatively narrow path, with nothing more than the odd treasure chest hiding away down the occasional short and easily backtracked diversion. This same year, Baldur's Gate 3 entered early access and Cyberpunk 2077 had its somewhat wobbly launch—both embracing a freeform open world structure that Chinese RPGs didn't seem interested in following.

Xuan Yuan Sword 7's latest stablemate from publisher Softstar, 2021's Sword and Fairy 7, tilts the balance even further towards action over numbers.

There are sneaky stealth segments and seamless battles that rely on me perfectly timing dash-dodges in response to telegraphed incoming blows, or running off to take cover before a particularly devastating attack goes off. It's a thrilling spectacle, and one where my stats and equipment very much take a back seat. How I handle my heroes from one moment to the next and how I react to the damage headed my way are always the deciding factors in battle, much like in Black Myth: Wukong's soulslike skirmishes.

Where will mainstream Chinese RPGs go next? Who knows. But it's safe to say that whatever direction they take it'll be a spectacular, experimental, and constantly evolving ride that's different from everything that came before it—which funnily enough, would make it the same as everything that came before it too.

Since 2019, A Disco Elysium sequel, a sci-fi RPG in a new setting, and a full-size Elysium spin-off game have been canceled or "paused," while a heated personal and legal dispute between founding members hangs over ZA/UM's every move. That last canceled game, described as "a spin-off about one of the most beloved characters in Disco Elysium" and spearheaded by one of the first game's principle writers, wowed other teams at the studio in an internal demo at the end of last year. It could have been on our SSDs as early as 2025. 

This project was cancelled in February, much to the shock of most ZA/UM employees, and nearly the entire team⁠—including that Disco Elysium writer, Argo Tuulik⁠— was laid off. I spoke with 12 current and former employees, including Tuulik and fellow X7 lead writer Dora Klindžić, to find out what went wrong. Studio ZA/UM itself did not respond to a request for comment in time for publication.

The fall

In late 2021, three of Disco Elysium's most senior developers, including the setting's original creator, Robert Kurvitz, lead artist Aleksander Rostov, and Final Cut lead writer Helen Hindpere, left the company on acrimonious terms. The ousted artists have alleged financial malfeasance on the part of company management, with much of their ire focused on Tõnis Haavel, a producer on Disco Elysium who had previously been convicted of investor fraud in the developers' native Estonia in 2014. ZA/UM studio management, meanwhile, insists that the three were fired for refusing to return to work and creating a hostile environment.

After the departure of Kurvitz and friends was revealed in 2022, fan sentiment largely aligned with the ousted creatives, with a backlash against ZA/UM escalating into harassment and threats against developers still at the studio. That situation cooled down somewhat with the release of People Make Games' 150 minute-long documentary on ZA/UM, which featured interviews with senior developers still at the studio who had worked on Disco Elysium.

Disco Elysium writer Argo Tuulik, a longtime friend of setting creator Kurvitz, gave a raw appraisal of the studio and the ousted writer's respective missteps, asking fans to let those still at the studio prove themselves with their work.

Tuulik and his team didn't get that chance: They were laid off from ZA/UM in February alongside nearly a quarter of the studio's staff, predominantly developers on Tuulik's now-canceled project, X7, which would have been a spin-off "standalone expansion" to Disco Elysium featuring some returning characters and an advancement of that game's distinctive conversation and "psychological RPG" systems. 

Tuulik and fellow X7 lead writer Dora Klindžić lay the blame for X7's end squarely with management, particularly Tõnis Haavel, while 10 other current and former ZA/UM developers spoke with me under anonymity. They described a confused, rudderless studio that expanded too quickly in the pandemic, struggled to adapt to remote work, and has canceled three projects as the afterglow of its triumphant debut faded in the intervening five years.

"Most hardcore Disco since Disco"

In the absence of a full sequel to Disco Elysium, X7 was going to be a spin-off⁠—smaller than Disco, but still full-scale⁠—headed up by Tuulik, someone who has been part of the Elysium creative project from the start and who wrote some of Disco Elysium's standout characters like the foul-mouthed urchin Cuno and the Hardy Boys, a vigilante militia whose frat boy veneer conceals a strange nobility.

"It was a spin-off about one of the most beloved characters in Disco Elysium," explained one developer who worked on the project. "I feel like it was the best possible shot at a Disco-like game without [Kurvitz], Rostov, and other people that made the original Disco Elysium."

Klindžić said, "It was something no one else but Argo could have done, and it would have been 110% authentic, most hardcore Disco since Disco." She added that X7 "would have advanced the story, the emotional threads, and gameplay elements all at once to truly evolve the genre of psychological RPG as Disco Elysium started it.

"For a while it seemed like miracles were possible, and with them, redemption."

The internal response to a company-wide showcase of the game at the end of 2023 seems to have been uniformly positive, with developers on other teams at ZA/UM telling me they were impressed with the demo. "Everyone was looking forward to its development," one of them said. "Its internal announcement lifted a lot of spirits after a rough time of bad press around the studio."

They also thought it was "exactly the sort of game [ZA/UM] needs to put out," and that it could "reassure fans that ZA/UM is not a husk, that the IP is in safe hands and that the studio is full of talented people with a genuine love for the world of Revachol."

My sources disagree on when X7 could have been ready for release, with some saying a 2024 launch wasn't out of the question, while others argued 2025 was more realistic. Klindžić, for her part, thought that with less interference from management, "it could have perhaps been a three-year development cycle start to finish." Project X7 began development in 2022.

One thing everyone I spoke to agreed on was that X7 was the closest major project ZA/UM had to release at the time of its cancellation, and that ZA/UM's main project in active development, codenamed C4, is still a long way out. The smaller-scale project M0 seems much closer to completion, but the mobile and tablet-oriented Elysium spin off, while well-received internally, doesn't seem to be the full Disco Elysium successor promised by projects Y12, C4, or X7.

X7 was promising: positively received internally and poised to be a long-awaited second outing from ZA/UM after a five or six-year wait since Disco Elysium. Multiple current and former employees also attest to ZA/UM president Ed Tomaszewski having assured staff in a December 2023 all-hands meeting that the studio was on strong financial footing, and that they did not have to fear the layoff crisis sweeping the industry. Two months later, X7 was cancelled and nearly a quarter of ZA/UM was laid off, primarily impacting the former X7 team.

Interference

Following the departure of Kurvitz, Rostov, and Hindpere, there seems to have been an understandable crisis at the studio. "Executive leadership and management did not provide any information about what was happening," said one developer who witnessed the transition. "It was very uncomfortable for everyone there." 

Work on a full Disco Elysium sequel codenamed Y12 was eventually halted⁠. My sources described flagging morale and a lack of direction after Kurvitz, Rostov, and Hindperre's departure leading to a decision to regroup on new projects.

Multiple sources describe the cancellation of Y12 as having caused friction between Tuulik, Klindžić, and management, with one stating that Y12 was cancelled without input from the senior writers, and that it looked like they were being "pushed out."

"In February 2022, I left my job as an academic physicist and space mission scientist in order to work on Y12, the sequel to a masterpiece, Disco Elysium," Klindžić said of this time. "Upon my arrival, I was told all the leads were gone and replaced, but this was framed as a good thing, a healthy thing. Four months later the project was shelved overnight. I began raising concerns, as I felt I had just abandoned my entire life and career only to end up in a studio where the people I had come to work with were fired, and the project I was meant to work on shelved with no reason given."

Tuulik and Klindžić were subsequently offered their own project, but under highly irregular constraints. 

"In August 2022, after production on the sequel was stopped, management approached Argo and I to come up with a pitch for a standalone expansion under the Disco Elysium label," said Klindžić. "We were given only around a week to come up with a fully-fledged game pitch, and we worked around the clock to come up with a new story, new characters, new gameplay mechanics, and a new creative direction, including an initial vision for design, art, and audio. We presented the pitch to management, it was a resounding success. It was greenlit and codenamed X7, and its initial production schedule was set for one year."

Tuulik, Klindžić, and everyone I spoke to who worked on X7 attest to it not having been allowed a pre-production period, the industry standard planning phase of developing a game. Making a game without pre-production is analogous to writing an essay without an outline, or building a house without blueprints. 

"We were set up to fail from the start and it was impossible to catch up," said Klindžić. "Whenever we raised concerns about this and expressed we needed more writers if the deadlines were to be met, we were accused of not wanting to do our jobs."

"Pretty much from the moment the writing team's pitch was approved in August of 2022, the other teams started production," Tuulik said. "We didn't even really know what the story or the characters were gonna be, when art teams were already making first character and environment concepts. I'm sure you can see how this is a big problem, when you're making a narrative-led game. 

"Essentially, the writing team had to work double-time from day one to supply other disciplines with work, whilst trying to write the first dialogues and sketch out the rest of the game at the same time. The writing team consisted of myself and Dora at the time."

A "be careful what you wish for" moment came for X7 with the cancellation of P1, a sci-fi RPG in development under Disco Elysium producer Kaur Kender, who after leaving the company sued ZA/UM with allegations similar to those from Kurvitz, Rostov, and Hindpere before dropping his lawsuit at the end of 2022. While the P1 writers added more hands to the project, X7's breakneck pace and lack of planning in pre-production led to Tuulik and Klindžić struggling to bring the new writers up to speed while still building the narrative of the game.

One thing that may have fundamentally doomed X7 was an issue of hierarchy: even though Klindžić and Tuulik pitched the project and effectively led development at the beginning, neither was formally designated X7's project lead. "I don't know if Dora and Argo ever felt in control," observed one ZA/UM employee. "You can't back people into corners and expect them to behave."

"I didn't ask for a title, because titles used to be meaningless back then," said Tuulik, noting that previously for ZA/UM, "writers who started projects had also been effectively leading them. 

"That's how it had been, and was at the time on other projects. That's how it was on X7 in the first four months, the most productive months."

"The work we were required to do throughout 2022 and 2023 was analogous to the work of other directors in the studio, but we were not given a title upgrade nor a wage adjustment to match," Klindžić said. "It resulted in a situation where I performed labor well outside my original role for the studio for over a year without being properly compensated or recognized for it."

That lack of specified roles seems to have quickly become a problem. Tuulik, Klindžić, and other members of X7 say there was fruitful collaboration between departments and good progress in the early months of development, despite the extreme workload taken on by the two-person writing team, and everyone I spoke to, both on the X7 team and outside, praised Tuulik and Klindžić as thoughtful, professional collaborators.

Klindžić and Tuulik described having been increasingly sidelined by management and unable to directly communicate with the X7 team⁠—ZA/UM had become fully remote, with most communication occurring through a company Slack⁠—while management introduced a new project coordinator/creative director the two had to go through instead of directly communicating with their colleagues. The two characterized much of this interference as coming from Tõnis Haavel, the Disco Elysium producer at the center of the company's dispute with Kurvitz, Rostov, and Hindpere. Indeed, according to Tuulik, toward the end of the project Haavel was officially the project's coordinator/director and "interim narrative lead."

"Nobody says that things are going to change," recalled one member of the X7 team, "But suddenly you have no more meetings with writers for some reason and you're not allowed to send them your work for feedback." Another ZA/UM employee who was not part of the X7 team told me that "in internal docs there was a lot of shifting around who was responsible for leading the project."

Klindžić characterizes this as a form of retaliation for Tuulik's statements in the People Make Games documentary: while the developer made a case for those still working at ZA/UM, he also criticized some of the studio management's decisions and expressed some admiration and understanding for Kurvitz. "I felt that a strong resentment developed towards Argo for growing too big for his shoes, so to speak," Klindžić said. "I got the sense that there was resentment for the fact Argo was getting so much support from fans, while [ZA/UM CEO Ilmar Kompus], Tõnis, and the company weren't.

"They put Argo through a humiliation campaign. They made him apologize to people for what he said in the interview. They undermined his confidence and tried to make him doubt himself. They told him he was incompetent, unqualified, and unfit to lead his own project, demoted him and made him invisible inside the studio."

A one-game studio?

X7's direction as laid out by management seems to have been incredibly fluid, with shifting targets including a 2022 Game Awards teaser to announce the game that was ultimately scrapped. Despite producing the well-received internal demo at the end of 2023, the X7 team has been laid off and the project cancelled.

Employees still at the company expressed confusion and frustration over the decision, especially considering president Tomaszewski's remarks regarding layoffs in 2023. One common sentiment among those I talked to was that it was just hard to tell if there was a problem on another project or even in a different department on the same project, such is the extent to which ZA/UM's employees are isolated from each other in its remote work environment.

ZA/UM expanded from 30 to 100 employees following the release of Disco Elysium, the sort of expansion that can drastically change the character of a company, and one that demands a commensurate increase in output to keep up with the costs. Five years later, the studio has canceled its major project that was closest to launch. It's unclear how much runway the studio has for an intensive, multi-year development cycle like the one demanded by project C4 without substantial new revenue coming in, while the legal battle with Kurvitz, Rostov, and Hindpere continues to haunt its every move.

And we'll never get to play X7, a follow-up to Disco Elysium masterminded by one of its principle writers, produced by a team that hit a major milestone and impressed its peers despite what they describe as a scrambled and untenable working environment. The livelihood of that team has been completely upended, and some developers' immigration statuses have been imperiled by their layoffs.

The developers I spoke to share the same sense of disappointment I do, that the idea of ZA/UM as a different kind of game developer, one driven by artistry and capable of pushing the medium forward with more games like Disco Elysium, was never meant to be. "For a supposedly 'leftist' company, this is a real mask-off moment," one current employee told me. Another mused that "We're not the first studio to go through that, it just feels worse when it's ZA/UM."

There's a quote from Disco Elysium itself that springs to mind here, one about capital taking off its mask of humanity to kill everything you love, but it feels a little on the nose.

"The entire X7 team loved the Elysium world⁠," Klindžić told me in our last interview. "As fan artists, musicians, iconic voices⁠, we only wanted to keep it going, rather than leave it to wither in some dark decrepit cellar of corporate intellectual property."

"The Fallout fans are waving and talking and taking pictures," he says. "We're in front of the Bellagio, and up comes this guy dressed as Goofy, and he stands right next to me. And I'm like, 'Oh my god, I'm about to get shanked by Goofy. This is their turf, and I didn't realise it.'"

More worrying still are the pensioners, who have stared at McLaughlin with scorn at more than one tourist site. To their eyes he looks like a Hitler Youth with a Trump head. But the occasional misunderstanding is worth it. "I love it," McLaughlin says. "Because I love the fans of the game, and they're everywhere you go."

McLaughlin's YouTube channel The Chip Monk Show, in which he visits locations from the Fallout games looking like a living bobblehead, grew from an unlikely source: professional disappointment.

From the age of 11, back when he made films with a Super 8mm camera, McLaughlin had wanted to break into Hollywood. As he reached adulthood he made some headway as a writer, scripting sitcoms. "A friend was a producer on Saved by the Bell," he says. "She hooked me up with an agent who had just left Disney. I wrote a lot of spec work and non-produced stuff." At the time, though, reality TV was peaking in the United States and laid waste to the landscape of scripted comedy and drama. "That's typical of my life," McLaughlin says. "When I get to the point where I'm really going strong and I've got everything in place, some unknown force just devastates it."

Nevertheless, he persisted, using his new contacts and experience to set up an independent production company and shift towards bigger and bigger projects. "I did do two TV pilots which didn't get picked up, but that's OK," he says. "It moved me into position to do my final project, which is a big Pony Express feature film. I had wanted to do it since I was a kid."

After six years of script development, McLaughlin had started putting together a seed budget for his reboot of the Charlton Heston-starring Western. "Right when everything was ready to go, all the contracts were signed and we were ready to start the financing phase, Covid hit," he says. "It just came to a grinding halt. That was devastating."

With the pandemic unfolding in earnest, McLaughlin and his wife began a playthrough of Fallout 76 with a friend. One night, he turned off his HUD to see what the game looked like when stripped of its heath bar, ammo count and various quest trackers. "Oh my god," McLaughlin realised: "Your character is a camera."

From there, he did something only a frustrated scriptwriter would think to do: plug in an external hard drive and start recording footage for a sitcom. That decision triggered what he says is "the most free and creative time I've ever had in my life."

West Virginia, mountain machinima

McLaughlin invented The Chip Monk Show, a dark comedy starring a plucky Pioneer Scout with an oversized Vault Boy head fused permanently to his body. After years of butting up against funding problems, the writer had finally found a place where the cameras, costumes and locations all came for free. Inadvertently he'd discovered the magic of machinima. "We can tell stories," he says. "We can have fun. There's no pressure, there's no stress, there's no financial impact."

Now deep into its third season, The Chip Monk Show retains the lo-fi voice acting and homemade editing style it began with—though by this point its characters have cracked wise against the backdrops of The Elder Scrolls Online and Red Dead Redemption 2 as well as Fallout. It remains McLaughlin's great passion, despite the fact that, by his own admission, it's a hard sell.

"Gamers are like, 'Well, I don't like it, because it's not lore, it's not what happens in the game," he says. "For some reason, people can't seem to separate machinima from the gaming experience, which is weird to me." Much more popular is The Chip Monk Show's spinoff, a travel series in which McLaughlin takes on the role of his star and tours the states that have featured in Fallout games.

Road Chippin', as the travel show is named, is a charmingly earnest watch. McLaughlin wears his enormous bobblehead throughout—a styrofoam pumpkin that has been shaved down, painted, and topped with a great big ice-cream scoop of yellow felt hair. To answer the most common question he gets: No, he's not completely blinded by his headwear. In fact, he looks out through a white mesh in Chip Monk's mouth. "When I'm walking down stairs, it's a little scary," McLaughlin says. "But I can see OK, and it's comfortable to wear for the most part."

Despite the goofy costume, McLaughlin isn't out to prank or poke fun at anyone. His comedy is good-natured and self-deprecating, and only really a delivery method for the local discoveries he's excited to share with viewers. Road Chippin' has the genial, low-key vibe of a Sunday afternoon docuseries on terrestrial television, stuffed with historical breakdowns and interviews with regional experts. 

The highlights of the show, however, are invariably the moments when McLaughlin spotlights just how faithful the Fallout games are to their real-life inspiration. That's especially true of the hub locations in Fallout 76. "To go to the Whitespring Hotel, or the Greenbrier, it's overwhelming to the senses," he says. "You go in there, and down to the vases, the colour schemes, the layout, the dimensions, it's represented in-game. Everywhere I went in West Virginia, I just kept encountering that over and over at every location. I really wanted to celebrate the work that the designers do—to me they're unsung heroes."

In lesser hands, an episode on West Virginia's Allegheny Asylum—better known as Fort Defiance to Brotherhood of Steel members—might lean into ghost stories and cruel clichés about incurable mental illness. Instead, McLaughlin presents the findings of his research with real sensitivity. "I had no idea how controversial this place was," he admits. "And it's like, 'Oh my god, do I just scrap the episode, or do I try and make this work? How can I take such serious subject matter and throw Chip Monk into this?'"

McLaughlin wrestles often with this tonal balance—which in many ways is the same tonal tightrope the Fallout series walks itself. In Road Chippin', as in the games and the Amazon show, the levity and absurdity of the naive vault dweller at the centre is crucial. It's the comedy that lets you sit with the horror of nuclear war, as well as the uncomfortable real-world history that Fallout feeds off. If the function of post-apocalyptic art is to let us process the possibility of our extinction, then the ironically smiling face of Vault Boy is what makes that process palatable. Fun, even.

"That is exactly why I made the character and wear the mask," McLaughlin says. "My favourite element of Fallout is the Vault Boy, duck-and-cover layer. It blows your mind that during the '50s and '60s in American history, that is what they marketed this into. It's horrifying, but it's hysterical at the same time. That is Vault Boy in a nutshell."

McLaughlin's own riff on Vault Boy, Chip Monk, was from the beginning a radical optimist—just like Lucy in the Fallout show. "He thinks he can rebuild the world the way it was," McLaughlin says. "By the end of the show, he comes to the realisation that the best he can do is be an example of what is good in people. Fallout itself really embodies that—there's hope. It may not be realistic, but you'll die living that, and that's a better way to be in my opinion."

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For our third and final roundtable from the 2024 Game Developers Conference, we put together a special panel—a quartet of developers who have all been making games since at least the year 1990, and are still active today. Joining us for this conversation: 

• Charles Cecil - Broken Sword, Beneath a Steel Sky
• Khris Brown - Voice director & editor for LucasArts, Double Fine, Ubisoft
• Jordan Mechner - Karateka, Prince of Persia, The Last Express
• Warren Spector - Ultima Underworld, System Shock, Deus Ex

Over the course of an hour our guests talk about how they got into games (and how unlikely their paths would be to replicate today), the challenges of making games with the technology of the '80s and '90s, run-ins with celebrity voice actors like Mark Hamill, and a passion for history. That fascination was key to the stories Jordan Mechner and Charles Cecil told in their beloved adventure games The Last Express and Broken Sword: The Shadow of the Templars (and also led to a particularly memorable encounter for Cecil with Hollywood director Ron Howard).

All four developers have seen the games they've worked on be remade, remastered or followed up by sequels over the years, and they discuss the feeling of leaving behind a legacy.

"System Shock getting remade recently, people still care about a game I worked on 30 years ago—that's cool," says Warren Spector. "Making things that last—when you get to my age, I'm 68 and proud of it, the word legacy comes to mind probably more than it should. I want to leave something behind that's bigger than me. Deus Ex in particular is that for me… later on, when Eidos was acquired by Square Enix and a new series of games set in that universe came out, people would ask me 'how do you feel about that? Does it bother you that someone else is making them?' No! I participated in something that has a life of its own, that has some cultural impact. It's like my baby grew up. Who's upset about a baby growing up? That was pretty special."

The conversation also covers the early days of voice acting in games, with LucasArts veteran Khris Brown talking about how difficult it was for actors at the time to understand the nonlinear storytelling of games compared to film (while working on Double Fine's Brutal Legend, she also taught Ozzy Osbourne how to use his new smartphone). 

You can find the PC Gamer Chat Log podcast on a whole bunch of podcast platforms:

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You can also check out PC Gamer Chat Log on YouTube:

Don't forget to check us out over on the PC Gamer forums, too! We'll be checking in every week to see what you lovely lot have to say about each week's episode, and joining in the discussion ourselves. 

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For this week's special roundtable episode of the PC Gamer Chat Log, recorded at the 2024 Game Developers Conference, we gathered a party of adventurers and ventured forth into our second annual deep dive into making RPGs. Here's who you'll hear talking about wizards, lovable and hateable companions, and, yeah, a little game called Baldur's Gate 3: 

• Swen Vincke, founder and director at Larian (Baldur's Gate 3)
• Carrie Patel, game director and senior narrative designer at Obsidian (Avowed)
• Sarah Gruemmer, acting lead quest designer at CD Projekt Red (Cyberpunk 2077: Phantom Liberty)
• Adrienne Bazir, founder and sole developer at insertdisc5 (In Stars and Time)
• Ted Peterson, co-founder Once Lost Games and former writer and designer at Bethesda (The Elder Scrolls 1-4)

Across an hour and 20 minutes, our RPG discussion includes a dissection of Baldur's Gate 3's approach to romance, as well as the immense challenges of designing intro quests for lengthy RPGs and finding the balance between linear and nonlinear. 

On the romance front, Larian's Swen Vincke talked through their approach to making a mature-rated game and taking that responsibility seriously: "We try to be as true to life as we could," he said. "Internally in the studio there were some people who felt uncomfortable, and we said, it's a mature game, right? We're going to treat it like what you would see on TV. A series I refer to often was American Gods, which I thought was really well done [in how] it treated mature themes and fantasy settings. You can do really crazy stuff and still relate to it. It was always tastefully done. I mean, the famous bear scene—it was really a squirrel that was not looking. The rest was the theater of your mind. You filled that in, we didn't do that!"

Later, Ted Peterson, who served as a primary writer and designer on the original two Elder Scrolls games, talked about how the first game, Arena, was a linear story inside a large open game world—and how trying to make the sequel more ambitious posed some problems.

"[The Elder Scrolls: Arena] was not even meant to be a roleplaying game," he said. "Because it was turned into a roleplaying game it became super linear. The original idea was that you'd go around to a bunch of fighting arenas, build your characters up, and eventually go to the Imperial arena and fight the evil wizard at the end. But as the arena combat didn't work out, we changed it into a roleplaying game where you had to fight through these arenas in a distinct order… so linear was our easy choice."

Peterson remembered that when Arena came out, the reaction was positive—except for players who said "the story kind of sucked."

"I overcompensated by making Arena super nonlinear, and nobody understands the story to this day." 

Thanks to the revival of The Elder Scrolls 2 in fan remaster Daggerfall Unity, Peterson said he's actually been working on a series of books to "explain the background of this story that I wrote 25 years ago and try to patch it all together." 

If you haven't heard of indie RPG In Stars and Time, you're in for a treat: solo writer/developer Adrienne Bazir dives into the unique way the game deploys a time loop mechanic to consider the meta storytelling layers that come from a player and character reliving the final moments of a quest over and over again. And make sure you stick through to the end—I promise you won't want to miss Carrie Patel's story about a moment from The Outer Worlds that didn't make it into the final game for reasons that become more and more clear as the tale unfolds.

And if you're hungry for more after this conversation is over, you're in luck: our 2023 RPG roundtable is also a great listen with a whole different crew of experienced designers.

You can find the PC Gamer Chat Log podcast on a whole bunch of podcast platforms:

1. Apple Podcasts
2. Spotify
3. YouTube Music
4. Pocket Casts
5. Podcast Addict
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7. Amazon Music
8. iHeartRadio

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Fetch quests, which have earned a reputation as the lowest form of RPG sidequest, typically involve finding items and bringing them back to a recipient. The particularly bad ones make you run from area to area between lines of filler dialogue, compounding a boring objective with a limp justification for doing it.

"At their heart, almost every quest is 'go get a thing' or 'go kill a person,'" Avowed game director Carrie Patel said in a recent interview with PC Gamer. "When quests fall flat, it's just because there's not enough interest in what you're doing." 

Last year in One Piece Odyssey I did entirely too many errands for NPCs in the desert town of Alabasta, each of them telling me that I ought to ask the other guy for a key I needed to progress in the story. Honkai: Star Rail, a game I publicly love, also dragged me through fetch quests for its Belobog museum event. It was a chore despite some handsome rewards; I'd trade that bounty for quests that asked more of me than fast traveling somewhere, walking for 30 seconds and pressing one button. It's possible for a fetch quest to come across as an honest attempt to tell a real story, but too often they fall short, if they're trying at all. Patel says that "even if it's a fetch quest at heart," a quest should have "some moment where your expectations change, or something surprises you or things get more complicated.

"If it really is 'go pick up this thing and then bring it back,' you're just missing something."

But those kinds of quests do still exist in games. After so many years of players rolling their eyes at the fetchiest of fetch quests, are they still haunting our RPGs just so games can advertise longer playtimes? Developers say the truth is more nuanced.

So why are there still so many fetch quests?

Most quests are mechanically built from the same basic pieces, yet only some of them get labeled fetch quests. All quests need a quest giver and an objective, which should—big ask here—ideally entertain the player and fit into the overarching story. It's up to writers and designers to build on these points to create a quest worth our time, layering in sub-objectives, scattering lore throughout, or amusing us with a lively NPC. Finding which solution hits the sweet spot is the hard part. 

Adam Dolin, a writer and narrative designer who previously worked for God of War's Santa Monica Studio, points to execution as the problem in many fetch quests rather than the premise. "When there isn't much complexity beyond that initial structure, or there's TOO much of it, or the narrative wrapper feels arbitrary… that's when the quest is at risk of being labeled 'just another fetch quest,'" he says. 

"The reason fetch quests are so common is because finding that perfect balance is difficult and time-consuming. It requires MASSIVE amounts of collaboration between many different departments, and lots and lots of playtesting, iteration, and then more playtesting."

External factors can turn a potentially intriguing quest into a flat one. Many times game writers and narrative designers have an idea of how to improve a quest and just don't have the means to do it. Guild Wars 2 game designer Emily Morrow points to the boogymen so often outside of designers' direct control: time and budget. 

"Sometimes that big, engaging quest you're designing turns out to be too expensive, or it will take too long to implement and test, or there isn't enough broader team support to give it the consideration it deserves," she says. "I find that originality usually isn't an issue when coming up with quests: ideas are cheap, and it's easy to brainstorm lots of new and unique concepts.

"Unfortunately, real-world considerations often get in the way of that."

Fetch quests can be... good, actually?

Jeff Howard, senior lecturer in the Games Academy at Falmouth University, studies how different game design elements can strengthen a story—or fail it. To him, fetch quests are "underrated" for their untapped narrative potential and the entertainment they can offer players when they have a more complex purpose behind them. 

Howard points to The Elder Scrolls and Planescape: Torment as examples of games that do fetch quests right. He highlights the Daedric quests in Oblivion in particular, which task the player with collecting artifacts for demonic gods. "These items include the Sanguine Rose and the Masque of Clavicus Vile, which are both embedded in the eldritch mythologies of their associated daedric lords. Similarly, Planescape Torment involves the search for abstract ideas, such as songs and memories, which can operate as keys to open interdimensional portals."

Not every quest is supposed to be a narrative marvel, anyway—compared to the protagonist's ultimate goal of saving the world, it might feel inappropriate for a sidequest to suddenly take the spotlight when all it rewards you is a couple of extra bucks. 

"Not every quest in a game, particularly a large game like an open world adventure game or MMO, needs to be wholly original or a showstopper," Emily Morrow says. "Having a good mix of simple and complex quests gives players a variety of activities to participate in regardless of their skill level or experiences."

She also points out how fetch quests can even be necessary for the overall health of the game. "Fetch quests are a way to acquaint new players with a game's mechanics and give existing players a moment to breathe in between big beats. They can help make a world feel more vibrant and active, and they can be adjusted to fit just about any story setting."

Done well these quests don't just feel like chores, even when they're straightforward.

"Aloy hunting raccoons for a specific bone or pelt has a purely functional reward: better equipment," says Dolin, using his time working on Horizon Zero Dawn to highlight how smaller fetch quests can be effective. "The emotion you feel as a player when completing that quest is different from, say, one with cinematics and dialog and interesting NPCs. But the feeling of finally finding that last damn raccoon bone and getting a bigger ammo bag is still a positive feeling! Adding quest givers and cinematics and tons of dialog to this simple 'fetch quest' is overkill."

Avoiding "just another fetch quest"

So then, how do devs keep the "good" fetch quests that don't set off busywork klaxons in players' heads?

"I try to ask myself: what purpose does this particular type of quest serve here? Is it meant to be a big moment, or is it OK that it's more of a side activity or a way for players to grind?" says Morrow. "The answers to these questions play a big part in what a quest will ultimately be." In short, players just need a good reason to want to finish a quest. 

"If I'm working on a fetch quest or something that has the potential to feel tedious, I try to insert something else that makes it interesting or unique. It could be a funny character, a familiar item or setting used in a new way, or engaging dialog." 

"A bad fetch quest is one that feels pointless or a waste of time," says Dolin. "If you're going to ask your player to spend their time to go fetch something, ask yourself, "Why would players do this?" If there isn't an answer besides "experience points and/or gold," then there's no emotional investment."

His advice for junior devs: "Give your quest giver some personality, imbue the item you're fetching with a personal story, and lean on your themes for inspiration."

Weaving worldbuilding or character development into a quest can turn something that's a fetch quest by definition into a meaningful story. Dolin looks back on The Anatomy of Hope from God of War, when designers gave him a simple description that he needed to write into a quest: "While exploring the Lake of Nine, Kratos and Atreus encounter a spirit who asks you to collect his lover's bones so she can finally rest in peace. Once you return all the bones, they turn into a powerful Revenant you have to fight."

"I'd been conditioned by Matt Sophos (narrative director) and Rich Gaubert (lead writer) to always answer the question, 'why would Kratos agree to do this?' The strongest answer was usually 'to teach Atreus a lesson.' I thought having the spirit promise a reunion with the recently-deceased Faye was strong motivation for Atreus, but Kratos knows from experience that this is bogus. So the lesson became: 'Let the kid burn his hand on the stove.' It also gave me the rare opportunity to let Kratos and Atreus talk openly about their grief after collecting a bone and boating to the next location."

That bit of the game received the care needed to nurture something that is a fetch quest at its core into a meaningful moment. There was also a personal experience at its center, creating for Dolin the same kind of emotional investment he hopes to invoke in players. He wrote the quest not long after his father died in 2016, and was processing his grief while Kratos and Atreus were processing theirs. 

"Authenticity resonates with audiences. Don't be afraid to mine your own personal experiences for inspiration," he says.

Years of dedicated community efforts have culminated in New Vegas being a better game than ever (and arguably one of the best RPGs ever made), but only if you’re willing to go that extra mile through the Mojave to gather all the parts needed and cobble them all together at a crafting bench. So here’s a crash course on how to get the most out of Fallout: New Vegas in 2024. Get it all done, and your friends will be atomic-green with envy.

Install this one

What's the best version of Fallout: New Vegas? 

There are a few places you can pick up Fallout: New Vegas, but you’ll want the Ultimate Edition from either Steam, GOG or Epic if you plan on modding the game, which you will absolutely want to do. Also if you’re unfortunate enough to have the German version, you’ll need to follow some extra steps—see the Viva New Vegas guide below.

The full version of the game is normally $20, but New Vegas goes on sale multiple times per year, so savvy shoppers can often snag it for under $5. The Ultimate Edition includes four lengthy expansions that most bugfix packs require. The rest of this guide will assume you own this version of the game. 

You’ll probably want to skip on the Game Pass or Microsoft Store versions, because they don’t play nicely with the Script Extender used by many mods.

First steps

Before you do anything else

New Vegas is technically playable straight from the jump, but if you want to play the game at its best, you’ll want to go through a few steps before anything else: 

1. Install the game, and then run it at least once. This will create the directories on your PC to hold your saves and INI files. If you’ve got a PC from any time in the past six years, you’ll be fine cranking every graphics setting up to maximum too.

2. Make an account on Nexus Mods. You won’t be able to download the key mods and fan-made patches until you do this. Don’t worry about Nexus's premium subscription thing—it’s fully optional and only worth it if you’re very impatient.

The PC Gaming Wiki—a perennial tech-advice hub—has tips for how you can force higher frame rates, fix field-of-view for ultrawide resolutions and ambient occlusion. But aside from the Ambient Occlusion fix, you should hold off on doing anything, because we’re diving into the deep end with a lot of heavy changes.

Use these mods

Essential mods for the newest New Vegas possible (The Easiest Way)

A couple years ago, this process was a bit easier, thanks to a community mod pack named Viva New Vegas, which you could automatically install via Wabbajack, a time-saving app that downloaded mods for you, set up the correct load orders and handled all the finicky parts for you. Unfortunately, the maintainers of Viva New Vegas felt that updating the Wabbajack version of it continually was more effort than it was worth, and so you’ll have to follow a guide to assemble it yourself.

Viva New Vegas is still your easiest route to a smoother, more stable New Vegas, but now it’s in the form of a step-by-step guide to follow here.

As with the previous iteration, there’s varying levels of modded-ness you can pick from, with the default setup guide just focusing entirely on patches, fixes and some quality-of-life fixes.

While you should follow the guide to install them (most of which you’ll be slotting into place using Mod Organizer 2), the key mods of the most basic install include: 

• Yukichigai Unofficial Patch - Thousands of little errors ironed out
• Unofficial Patch NVSE Plus - Uses script extenders to fix even more issues
• Improved AI - Cleans up a lot of pathfinding issues that kneecapped combat
• Iron Sights Aligned - Makes your bullets go where they should when aiming

But there’s plenty more, including a separate guide on optimizing and tuning the game for your hardware. The more you add from the initial setup list, the smoother and more stable the game will become. You’re restoring the game’s foundation here, rather than building a wobbly Jenga tower of add-ons.

For those wanting to start on that tower and build up a richer, meatier New Vegas experience, the VNV Extended section of the Viva New Vegas guide is where you want to go. Split up into UI, Gameplay, Overhauls, Content, Visuals and Finishing Touches, you’re free to pick and choose what modules you use.

I personally recommend Vigor, from the Overhauls section, a further-refined version of the ‘JSawyer’ mod, which rebalanced the game to fit the personal preferences of New Vegas’ own development lead, Joshua Sawyer, making the game a bit tougher and less loot-centric, but also buffing a bunch of lesser-used items to make more playstyles viable.

I've returned to New Vegas every couple years for the past decade, and this has given me the most solid, polished and coherent version of the game I’ve played yet. It runs flawlessly on my new 3440x1440, 120hz ultrawide monitor.

More New Vegas mods

Extra mods for a wilder Wasteland

New Vegas wasn’t an especially handsome production even when it first launched. Partly because sacrifices had to be made to get the game running on the PS3 and Xbox 360, consoles with tight RAM limitations, and partly because Obsidian is a studio that always seems to be working with a shoestring budget.

One big budget shortfall of the game is the voice acting. While decent, there’s far too few actors to voice all the cast, and a lot of characters end up sounding almost identical. Fix that with:

Brave New World (previously featured on PC Gamer): Re-voices thousands of lines of dialogue with a much larger cast. They left the best performances intact, but a lot of minor NPCs are given a fresh lease of life. The voice-only version of BNW can be paired with New Vegas Redesigned 2 Revised to give almost all NPCs a makeover, too.

There’s also a handful of expansion-scale mods for New Vegas, not ideal if this is your first time playing, but interesting additions:

Fallout: New California: Gives your character a years-long origin story, starting out as a lowly vault dweller before getting caught up in a full-scale military conflict, eventually dovetailing back into the beginning of New Vegas. Our own Andy Kelly had nothing but praise for it, despite a few rough edges.

Fallout - The Frontier: A more guarded recommendation for this mod. It stands as the most ambitious mod for New Vegas, bigger than any of the official DLCs, and it’s a very different beast from the main game. Its three largely-linear storylines take a more ‘cinematic’ approach that leads to some interesting but awkward vehicular sections and a questionable assault on a space station. Balance is also geared towards a high-powered combat character. Flawed, but if you want more New Vegas, this is a huge chunk of it.

Autumn Leaves: Less ambitious, but a better fit for the original game. A single large narrative-heavy quest with multiple solutions and a ton of new voiced dialogue across a cast of quirky robots that you’ll find in a long-abandoned new facility. A full playthrough will take most players around 4-6 hours, making it roughly comparable to New Vegas’ own DLC, albeit a bit more self-contained.

It’s also worth noting that there are other New Vegas mod packs for Wabbajack, most of them centered around the massive Tale Of Two Wastelands mod, which combines the campaigns of Fallout 3 and New Vegas into a single game. You’ll need both FO3 and New Vegas installed for it to function, but if you really want to go large and work on that atomic tan, these will make the process of welding the two games together a relatively painless process. 

Time to start playing

Wasteland survival tips & tricks

Unlike Fallout 3 and 4, New Vegas is a little more old school in its structure. The moment you’re out of the character creation sequence, you are largely free to go wherever you like and do as you please. Of course, this being a harsh post-apocalyptic warzone, a lot of options will lead to near-certain death. Save early, save often and don’t be afraid to experiment. There’s no one right way to play, and New Vegas is famously replayable, supporting dozens of approaches.

During Viva New Vegas character creation, you’ll be given the option to enable Wild Wasteland mode independent of any other option, and without overriding another of your starting traits. Don't disable it unless the idea of silly easter eggs and alien encounters upsets you.

⭐In the early game, use Goodsprings as a safe haven—explore, scavenge what you can then fast-travel back for some rest. Take some time to fully explore the town and talk to all the NPCs. There’s one in the saloon that’ll offer to teach you some survival skills, including the basics of marksmanship and crafting. Well worth doing for both the XP and free ammo.

⭐There are a few early threats to be especially aware of. Cazadors (monsters that look like giant house flies with bright orange wings) are extremely fast, aggressive and powerful and will destroy most lower-level characters. If you see them, run, and keep a note of where they were.

⭐Deathclaws (giant humanoid lizards with coincidentally huge, deadly claws) are another critter that tend to be placed as a wall to dissuade lower-level characters from continuing. With enough explosives and maybe some armor-piercing ammo, you can brute force your way through, but it’s easier to run past them than Cazadors.

⭐Ammo types are important, especially early on when you’re largely using scavenged gear. The default hotkey to switch between ammo types is (rather unintuitively) '2' and it’s well worth experimenting with what you’ve got. Use cheap bullets and bulk energy cells when fighting low-level critters like molerats or coyotes, and switch to the premium gun-food when you need to serve up a feast.

⭐Invest in at least a little bit of Repair skill, and make sure you pick up weapons identical to whatever you’re using. The janky, low-quality gear that raiders drop can easily be stripped for parts to improve the quality of your usual gear. Look for the prompt to repair in your inventory menu.

⭐Even with the JSawyer mod (or its descendants) making things a little more intense, Hardcore mode isn’t quite as scary as it sounds, and some players find having to keep a cursory eye on hunger, thirst and other negative effects adds to the experience. Nobody will judge you for just playing on Normal though.

⭐Keep an eye open for escalating hostilities. New Vegas does level scaling in a fun way, with the war between the NCR and Caesar's Legions stepping up as you become more powerful. Keep an ear open for NPCs talking about new enemy types entering the fray, especially around military bases. 

New Vegas is built to be replayed. There are a vast number of dialogue branches, endings, several major factions that you can throw your lot in with, go to war against or ignore entirely, and the game remembers a surprising amount. Even if your actions don’t immediately return to haunt you, the ending monologues will probably acknowledge any acts of heroism (or crimes against humanity) you performed along the way.

Don't miss

Sights to see and folks to visit in New Vegas

Once you’ve got a few levels under your belt, you’ll want to make some friends. Firstly because New Vegas’ companions are excellently written with their own morally complex questlines, but also because they’ll soak up an impressive amount of lead for you in combat. You’re allowed one human and one non-human buddy with you at any given time, so here’s one of each to get you started: 

⭐The easiest companion to get is the floating drone Ed-E, found in the town of Primm just slightly south of Goodsprings. You’ll need to fix him up but it’s not a hard quest.

⭐As for a steadfast human pal, if you’ve got positive Karma (she only hangs out with heroes), Cass is a hard-drinking, hard-brawling sort down on her luck. You can find her at the NCR Mojave Outpost far to the west and a little south of Nipton. Talking with her will start a quest chain that’ll need you to talk her into selling her caravan, requiring either good Barter or Speech skills to clear, but she’ll eventually find her way into your party. 

As for the rest of the friends to look for, they’re spread pretty thin and far, but it’s well worth meeting them all. Each brings something useful to the party, and each has a personal quest-line to follow that fills in more of their backstory. Here’s a list of them all on the Fallout Wiki, but I’d personally just recommend exploring.

⭐Once you’re feeling confident, it’s time to head north to the Vegas strip proper. It’s a hub of iniquity, inequality and intrigue, as well as some other words beginning with ‘in’. It’s also where you’ll find most of the big plot hooks of the game. Investigate what’s up with that casino chip that you nearly got killed over, and make sure you grill the local NCR forces on what they’re doing in the region.

⭐While you’re in Vegas, it’s highly recommended you do some investigating (see, another in-word) into the three families running the strip. Not to spoil too much, but the White Glove Society are attached to one of New Vegas’ most reactive and freeform quests, with many possible branches and endings depending on what kind of character you’re playing.

⭐ If you want to see the main story of New Vegas to its end, you’re going to have to pick your poison. There’s three factions fighting for power here. Mr House (in his big casino penthouse) is trying to carve out a capitalist hotspot here, and you can follow his questline in the questline The House Always Wins.

⭐ The democratic NCR are trying to establish American business as usual, and will try to recruit you pretty actively once you’ve made a name for yourself, so just swing by the NCR embassy on the strip to sign up. Lastly, Caesar's Legion are a bunch of ancient Roman larpers, slavers and raiders, perfect for evil characters or people who follow too many ‘trad history’ Twitter accounts with marble statue avatars. Begin the misadventure with Render Unto Caesar at Caesar’s camp Northeast of Hoover Dam.

⭐ The DLC is extremely worthwhile. Arguably the best expansions the Fallout series has ever seen, and ranging from survival horror in Dead Money to screwball super-science comedy in Old World Blues. They build on your personal story, filling out the The Courier’s history, and are best played in release order (Dead Money, Honest Hearts, Old World Blues and then Lonesome Road), ideally once you’re above level 20. Start your personal side-story when you pick up a radio signal leading you to the Sierra Madre casino, via an abandoned Brotherhood Of Steel bunker far off in the east.

That should be enough to start you on your wasteland wandering. Exploring and finding stuff for yourself is half the joy of the game half the joy of an RPG like this is carving your own path through its world. So off you go, Courier—you’ve got deliveries to make. Try to stay away from any glowing barrels and keep some big iron on your hip.

The Vaults were built to protect human life from atomic bombs, providing safe underground shelter for years until the surface world was once again safe to be inhabited. At least that's what the Vault-Tec Corporation told everyone. As Fallout 2 revealed, in truth most of the Vaults were built to perform sinister, cruel, and occasionally quite funny experiments on the unsuspecting inhabitants.

There are a lot of Vaults in the Fallout games, and even more have been revealed in Prime TV's Fallout TV series. For the record I haven't included every Vault in Fallout history on the list below since some are only mentioned in passing in the games and some have been deemed non-canon by Bethesda.

Considering the amount of evil and suffering involved in Vault-Tec's Vaults, it's hard to say what makes one Vault "better" than another. I mostly based these rankings on how interesting they are to visit, how memorable they are to explore, and how interesting the lore surrounding them is. Here are the Fallout Vaults, ranked from worst to best, and be aware that there are major Fallout TV show and game spoilers below.

Vault 88 (Fallout 4: Vault-Tec Workshop)

Vault 88 was never completed, but that's where you come in. Part of Fallout 4's Vault-Tec Workshop DLC, it's ostensibly a chance for you to become an overseer and perform your own experiments. 

Unfortunately, it winds up being essentially just another Fallout 4 settlement, albeit one with Vault-themed building options and a lot of room to build. The experiments, however, are a bit on the tame side and don't leave much of an impression. Some of them let you be a bit mean to your dwellers, but not truly evil. Instead, you make them power generators by riding stationary bikes or serve them tainted cola. Tainted cola. It's not exactly the Overseer experience I've always dreamed of.

Vault 111 (Fallout 4)

Cryogenics doesn't sound like a bad idea for surviving an atomic war, but only if you actually inform the Vault residents about it first. Naturally, Vault-Tec didn't, instead saying the pods were for decontamination. Surprise! You're an ice cube.

Due to a short-sighted lack of supplies, the non-frozen staff eventually staged a mutiny. Over 200 years later, one frozen resident (you) woke up long enough to witness their spouse being murdered and infant son abducted. Another chunk of time passed, and the resident found themselves the sole survivor of the cryogenic experiment. After it provides a kick-off to Fallout 4's main quest, there's not much reason to hang around the somewhat dull Vault 111: not when there's the settlement of Sanctuary Hills just outside.

Vault 95 (Fallout 4)

Vault-Tec set up Vault 95 as a rehab center for drug addicts, and did an admirable job carefully and thoughtfully treating its residents' addictions. Nice! Then five years later it popped open a secret hatch filled with a bunch of drugs just to see what would happen. Not nice!

Many of the addicts relapsed, others fought and killed one another (at least the Vault-Tec jerk who opened the drug hatch was killed too), and it eventually became a Gunner hideout. Apart from clearing out Gunners, you can also use Vault 95 to cure your companion Cait of her Psycho addiction. Nice!

Vault 3 (Fallout: New Vegas)

Vault 3 was a control Vault, scheduled to open just 20 years after the bombs fell. The residents weren't eager to expose themselves to the dangers of the outside world, however, and quite sensibly kept it locked longer than was planned. They even managed to stay indoors without everyone killing each other. Weird!

There wasn't a sinister experiment (as far as we know) taking place within the Vault, which therefore makes it one of the more successful yet least interesting Vaults in the series. After a malfunction in the water system, the people of Vault 3 finally opened its door and were promptly slaughtered by a collection of drug-addled raiders called Fiends. When you visit you'll get to exact revenge by wiping out the Fiends and freeing some of their prisoners.

Vault 34 (Fallout: New Vegas)

Vault 34 was low on living quarters which eventually became an issue due to massive over-population. Also, Vault-Tec filled it with a ridiculous amount of weapons—and an armory door that couldn't be locked. Do you see where this one is going? Riots broke out during attempt to plunder the armory, leading to damage to the Vault computers, a radiation leak, and a whole lot of inhabitants being turned into ghouls. Whoops!

In addition to learning the story of the Vault, there's plenty of weapons and ammo still left, making it a worthwhile visit.

Vault 19 (Fallout: New Vegas)

Red vs Blue: a war as old as time. Vault 19 was separated into red and blue sections accessible only to those with the correct colored keycards, most likely as an experiment to see how the different colored teams might interact with (read: turn on) each other.

Unfortunately, a sulfur leak from caverns below Vault 19 made the inhabitants abandon it before they could completely devolve into the violence and murder that seems to be the desired outcome of many Vault-Tec experiments. The Vault was partially occupied later by Powder Gangers. Make nice with them and they're perfectly friendly, or you can blow the whole place up with C-4. As with so much of Fallout: New Vegas, it's entirely your choice.

Vault 92 (Fallout 3)

Vault-Tec invited the world's most talented musicians to Vault 92, hoping to not just preserve the human race but also its musical culture and history. Ha ha, no. They really invited them to use them as unwitting test subjects for white noise experiments in an attempt to create a legion of obedient super soldiers.

Hold on to your eyebrows, because they're about to shoot up in surprise—it all went horribly, horribly wrong. The white noise eventually drove the test subjects into fits of extreme rage, which isn't a terrible side-effect if you're building super soldiers. Not so useful is the fact that they couldn't be controlled. There was eventually a mass slaughter in the Vault, compounded by the collapse of a portion of the Vault walls which allowed a swarm of mirelurks to enter. Mirelurks are gross and their clicking and clawing isn't music to anyone's ears.

Vault 4 (Fallout TV series)

Some fine intentions went horribly awry in this Vault from the Fallout TV show, which began with a group of scientists sealing themselves in before the bombs even dropped to study the effects of radiation on human DNA. But it wasn't long until they overstepped their ethical bounds and tried to create human-salamander hybrids using unwilling test subjects. They wound up with a rampaging Gulper in their Vault and the immoral scientists were overthrown.

Now Vault 4 isn't a bad place to live. They attempt to ease the pain of former test subjects and treat mutated humans like anyone else. They're so nice that even if you break their rules, their most extreme punishment is to ask you to leave the Vault. They'll even give you a couple of weeks of supplies so you don't leave empty handed.

Vault 75 (Fallout 4)

Vault-Tec may have topped themselves for sheer evil with Vault 75. Supposedly built as a safe place for schoolchildren, the kids who took refuge there were separated from their parents on entering, and the parents were quickly executed an incinerated. Children were tortured and tested to determine which had the 'best' genes, and at age 18 those genes were 'harvested' for the next generation in a revolting attempt to create a master race, if you will. Those not up to snuff were snuffed out like their parents. 

At some point the subjects of the tests learned what was happening and rebelled, killing the scientists and escaping. Wherever those kids wound up, it's gotta be a better place than Vault 75. Now it's inhabited by Gunners, though the Brotherhood or Institute may show up, and while you're too late to help the long-departed children of Vault 75, you get the satisfaction of making sure the 'research' conducted here never falls into the wrong hands.

Vault 22 (Fallout: New Vegas)

Seemingly a decent place with an admirable goal, Vault 22 was staffed with scientists who undertook agricultural studies and subsisted on the plant life grown inside. Unfortunately, as sometimes happens with videogame scientists, they made an oopsie and the fungus meant to control pests wound up becoming pests. The spores of the fungus infected the human population, turning them into horrible plant monsters. 

It's a deadly and harrowing battle through the Vault as you fight these lightning-fast creatures along with giant venus flytraps and mantises. At least you get to blow the entire lab up at the end to make sure they don't escape to the surface.

Vault 31, 32, 33 (Fallout TV series)

I can't really separate these three Vaults because they're all part of the same terrible system. While things seem peaceful and idyllic in Vault 32 and 33 at the start of the Fallout series, the ugliness of the society eventually becomes apparent. The plan is to repopulate the surface world with the best dwellers possible, so there are arranged marriages and no unsanctioned interbreeding between residents of 32 and 33 to keep the stock pure (not to mention quite a bit of incest between cousins while waiting to be assigned a partner).

As it turns out it's all the master plan of Vault-Tec corporate suit Bud Askins, who cryogenically preserved a bunch of his junior executives and unfreezes one each time the other two Vaults needs a new overseer. (Bud himself is a brain in a jar mounted on a little robot.) Fearing competition from Vaults owned by other companies, Askins hoped to raise a perfect society to recolonize the surface world, nuking any settlement that could threaten Vault-Tec's monopoly on civilization.

Vault 15 (Fallout, Fallout 2)

One of the few Vaults you can visit in two different games, Vault 15 was an experiment to see how a population composed of a variety of cultures and backgrounds would get along when crammed into a confined space together for decades. In short: they didn't, and when the door opened 50 years later, the dwellers split into several warring factions of raiders, plus one group that eventually form the NCR. 

Though Vault 15 has been stripped and pillaged, it's still being fought over by a few different factions. At the very least you can bring a little peace to the contested Vault by dealing with the raiders who have been kidnapping people living at the entrance, and broker a deal between the locals and the NCR.

Vault 81 (Fallout 4)

Entering this Vault is an absolute shock because it's filled with… normal, well-adjusted people living their lives. Vault 81 was intended to find the cures for all known diseases by secretly experimenting on its inhabitants—by infecting them with those diseases. However, in a surprising twist, the Overseer of Vault 81 wasn't actually an evil prick and prevented most of the medical scientists from ever entering the Vault. She then sealed off the rest of the scientists from the population permanently. 

The scientists were pretty good sports about it, honestly, and carried on studying diseases for the rest of their lives, though not on unwilling human subjects. Best of all they created Curie, a very nice robot with a French accent who can accompany you on your travels.

Vault 118 (Fallout 4: Far Harbor)

Up for a murder mystery? Built under a hotel,  Vault 118 was never completed and its experiment (to house Hollywood hotshots in the lap of luxury and working class stiffs in cramped quarters) was never realized. There's still plenty of drama. A robobrain has been murdered, and when you arrive you get to play detective, question the suspects, and make an accusation. It's fun, and there's some great loot to be acquired, too.

This Vault and quest is a contentious one in the Fallout community, though—it bears a lot in common with a mod called Autumn Leaves for Fallout: New Vegas, which also contains a robot-themed murder mystery and a few other details that feel suspiciously similar. The modder didn't seem too bothered either way, but would like at least to be credited. As for Bethesda, it's denied copying the mod altogether.

Vault 114 (Fallout 4)

Leave it to Vault-Tec to drop the ball on their one good idea. Vault 114 was advertised to rich politicians and the wealthy elite, who would arrive to find themselves crammed into tiny apartments with shared bathrooms and at the mercy of a deranged, pantsless, Abraxo-eating Overseer named Soup Can Harry.

Unfortunately, the Vault was never completed and it appears no one ever moved in. On the plus side, this is the Vault where you first meet Fallout 4's best companion, robotic gumshoe Nick Valentine, and face off against gangster Skinny Malone. Plus, you get to listen to Soup Can Harry being interviewed on holotape—a definite bonus.

Vault 106 (Fallout 3)

This is pretty a unimaginative experiment by Vault-Tec standards: 10 days after the door was sealed, psychoactive drugs were pumped into the air supply. Everyone went crazy and killed just about everyone else. So, uh, yeah. Crazy drugs make people crazy. Good work, everyone!

It's also a creepy and disturbing place to visit. While exploring you'll inhale some of the drugs still in the air and trip balls, your vision flipping between a pristine and populated Vault and a rusting and ruined one. You'll imagine your father, Butch, and other residents of Vault 111 are present as well. While they're attacking you, you're also being attacked by the real and really deranged residents of Vault 106. It's a jarring and memorable experience.

Vault 12 (Fallout)

Radiation: how does it work? Vault-Tec decided to find out by herding a thousand people into Vault 12 and then making sure the door wouldn't close when the bombs fell. Sorry-not-sorry, citizens!

The results of the experiment: it turns out radiation is pretty bad for humans. Who knew? The citizens were transformed into disfigured ghouls and glowing ones, who still live there when you arrive. The true revelation of Vault 12, however, is that not all ghouls are simply monsters. Ghouls can be good people, and despite their tragic circumstances they carry on with their lives—a tradition that has carried through the rest of the Fallout series. Many of the ghouls from Vault 12 went to the surface and eventually founded a ghoul-town on the ruins of Bakersfield called Necropolis.

Vault 11 (Fallout: New Vegas)

The social experiment in Vault 11 was a damn grim one. Residents were told that every year they would have to sacrifice one resident or they would all die. You even get to visit the sacrifice chamber, where a filmstrip is shown to the unlucky lamb stressing how important their sacrifice was for the greater good—after which the walls slide open and a score of robots and turrets open fire. The actual sad truth of Vault 11 was that if the citizens chose to stand together and refuse the annual sacrifice, nothing bad would have happened to them.

But these are human beings we're talking about, so naturally they went with the sacrifice option, which led to bouts of infighting, plotting, back-stabbing, and murder. In the end, only five inhabitants were left to discover that all the killing had been done for nothing. They then considered the only 'logical' option: killing themselves. They didn't, though, because one of the five shot the other four dead. What a great group of people, huh? Of all the Vaults, this one sounds like a pretty accurate depiction of human nature.

Vault 8 (Fallout 2)

Vault 8 contained nearly 1,000 inhabitants and was intended to remain locked for 10 years, after which its residents would attempt to rebuild society on the surface. What went wrong? Well, nothing, really. In fact, Vault 8 was a smashing success, which shows just what can be accomplished when you don't perform a bunch of horrifying secret experiments on people trapped underground.

Vault 8 eventually formed the foundation for Vault City, a sprawling community that was also highly successful. The Vault itself remained mostly in good shape, housing an excellent medical center, plus a host of quests and characters.

Vault 101 (Fallout 3)

It's hard not to have fond memories of Vault 101. In Fallout 3, it's where you're born and grow up in a series of scenes that constitute the tutorial. There were so many good times: shooting your first radroach with a BB gun, watching a robot cut a cake with a buzzsaw on your birthday, passing your Generalized Occupational Aptitude Test, bludgeoning that asshole Butch to death with a baseball bat... and, oh yeah, realizing your shitty dad lied to you for years and then abandoned you to almost certain death. So many memories!

The ghastly truth of Vault 101 was that it was supposed to remain closed forever. It didn't, making it another of Vault-Tec's expensive failures. But the experience of beginning the game here, from the very moment of your birth to your eventual violent and dramatic escape, makes it one of the most memorable Vaults in the series.

Vault 13 (Fallout, Fallout 2)

Depending which source you trust, Vault 13 was either a control group, or a study of prolonged isolation, intended to remain closed for 200 years. When an element of its water purification system failed, Vault 13's Overseer began sending explorers out to locate a replacement. Which is where you come in, as the protagonist of the original Fallout.

When the Vault Dweller not only found a water chip but solved the super mutant problem that threatened Vault 13's safety, the Overseer hailed him as hero—then exiled him, worried that other Vault dwellers would hear his stories and leave to join the outside world. The Vault was to be protected even if it meant banishing its savior. The theme of hiding the truth from those who inhabit the Vaults, denying them free will under the guise of protecting them, carried on through the rest of the Fallout series. It began here, in Vault 13.

Vault 112 (Fallout 3)

A great way to pass the time in a nuclear shelter would be in cryostasis, with your mind plugged into a virtual simulation that creates an idyllic utopia you can happily inhabit forever. This is Vault-Tec though, so under the tree-lined streets and white picket fences of Tranquility Lane lies a torturous and unending Hell. The Overseer, Stanislaus Braun, is a sadistic madman who uses the simulation to stalk and virtually murder the Vault's inhabitants. Then he wipes their memories and murders them again. Repeat roughly forever.

You get to take part in the trippy simulation while being directed by Braun to torture the other residents both psychologically and physically, from making a little kid cry to straight-up stabbing everyone to death while dressed as an adolescent slasher.

Vault 21 (Fallout: New Vegas)

What happens in a tin can underneath Vegas stays in a tin can underneath Vegas, except in the case of Vault 21. Vault-Tec, in its infinite wisdom, decided to fill a Vault with compulsive gamblers. Surprisingly, the gamblers-only society seems to have done fairly well, all things considered, with games of chance being used to settle differences. Eventually, Robert House set his sights on a takeover of Vault 21 and did a bit of remodeling.

Vault 21 was turned into a casino and hotel, which is a far better fate than most Vaults experience. The door was even appropriated into a sign for the hotel, and it's refreshing to visit a Vault with actual life in it instead of just another rotting tin can of death. You can even acquire a personal and permanent hotel room there.

Vault 108 (Fallout 3)

When Fallout fans discuss the various Vaults, it's never without a mention of Gary. Looking over the series, I'd really hoped to find a Vault that was better than Gary's, just to shake things up a little. But I'm with everyone else on this. Gary. Gary? Gary! 

Vault 108's experiment was about how people function in a crisis with a lack of leadership and an overabundance of weapons. The Vault was assigned an Overseer who would die of terminal cancer within months, outfitted with a heavily stocked armory, and given a malfunctioning power supply. What would happen in the vacuum of leadership when the lights went out and guns were everywhere?

We don't really know, honestly, because a cloning chamber was included in Vault 108. That doesn't really fit in with the leadership experiment in any way that I can tell, but it does bring us to Gary. (It brings us to several Garys, actually.) Gary was a resident of 108 who was cloned multiple times, with each resulting Gary only able to speak the word "Gary" and each Gary more violent than the last Gary—at least to any non-Garys. Gary was cloned over 50 times, which was a few too many, as ultimately the only survivors of the Vault are a handful of variously numbered Garys—and they are not at all happy to meet you.

It's certainly one of the more memorable locations. Encountering Gary after angry Gary is a surreal experience. Vault 108 isn't the only place Gary appears, either. Interestingly, Gary 23 somehow escaped and was found by the Brotherhood in the Operation: Anchorage expansion. They cut off his arm to remove his Pip-Boy after growing frustrated by his inability to say anything but his own name. Another Vault in Fallout 4 has a number of alphabet blocks that spell out Gary—perhaps an escaped Gary had children? Could be there are more Garys out there, waiting to be discovered in future Fallouts? I hope so.

On the day that the fan-run Homecoming server officially became the future of the resurrected City of Heroes, one player professed to have something in their eye. Another was so excited they felt dizzy. Some reminisced about the moment City of Heroes was first shut down over a decade ago, posting videos and testimonies. "I was at the sunset in front of Atlas Park City Hall with my torch! I actually cried at that point," wrote mnbeave. "Now, time to arrest some baddies!"

The celebration on the Homecoming forums this January was a long-awaited catharsis—an outpouring of relief and a bonfire of painful memories many had been too wary to let go of. City of Heroes was a remarkable MMO: a decade and a half before The Avengers came to Fortnite, it was the first game to deliver on the fantasy of the superhero team-up. More than that, it was a landmark in online self-expression—boasting a powerful character creator in which you shaped a unique look and costume for your alter ego, right down to the mask that hid your real-world identity.

In today’s gaming world of purchasable skins and social media personas we take that sort of individualism for granted. But for many this MMO was "one of the only places they felt comfortable being themselves," says the team behind community revival City of Heroes: Homecoming. "A lot of us grew up with it, and losing it in 2012 was quite literally us losing a part of our childhoods."

The shutdown of City of Heroes was met with in-game protests and petitions, but neither could halt the bulldozers. So the community went underground, like the outlawed supes of The Incredibles. In one notorious instance, a fully-functioning City of Heroes server was kept running in private for six years—its players sworn to secrecy, until a YouTuber leaked its existence to the dismayed fans who had been left out. The colourful spy thriller twist: the server was named SCORE, or Secret Cabal Of Reverse Engineers.

Such lengths are extreme, but understandable. Revival efforts for MMOs have forever been plagued by cease and desist orders, and where community servers do operate in public their players typically live in fear of a sudden publisher slapdown—a second loss to compound the trauma of that initial closure.

City of Heroes: Homecoming, a fan initiative formed in the aftermath of SCORE’s reveal, was different from the start. Its team was aware of rare precedents like Project 1999, the EverQuest private server which in 2015 was officially sanctioned by the game’s publisher. Instead of running dark, the Homecoming team dared to be hopeful. 

"We were in contact with [City of Heroes publisher] NCSoft from day one in pursuit of having a friendly, stable, and long-term version of the game for everyone to enjoy," the Homecoming team says. "We believed that working with NCSoft was the only way to make this possible." The team had some connections with the right people at the publisher, but they were still very nervous. "Even though we believed this was the best course of action for keeping the game alive, we knew it was far from a sure thing."

NCSoft, too, had its reservations. "We were initially skeptical about their proposal," a spokesperson told PC Gamer. "To our knowledge, a AAA publisher/developer like NC West had never undertaken a non-commercial license of a sunset game. Ostensibly, such an undertaking would be too resource-intensive and risky to justify without benefiting a meaningful number of a game’s fans." 

Yet NCSoft wasn’t blind to the unusual fervour of City of Heroes veterans in the wake of the game’s shutdown. "This support created unique conditions in which evaluating Homecoming’s proposal about working together as a serious venture was not dismissed."

Heroic efforts

It helped that the Homecoming team consciously held itself to high professional standards. It was transparent and diligent, taking its technical and security infrastructure seriously and running a player support and moderation team. In short, the Homecoming team was designed from the outset to be easy to work with. "Our aim was to run the game in a way that would instill confidence in our ability to keep things going long-term," the Homecoming team says. "All of this definitely helped lay the groundwork for the license agreement."

NCSoft appreciated the Homecoming leadership’s familiarity with City of Heroes’ lore and game operation; its dedicated staff, sophistication, and vision of where to take the server next. "From there we needed to subject Homecoming to meaningful guardrails in its operation of City of Heroes," NCSoft says. "And take steps to confirm that, as a practical matter, Homecoming was likely to abide by all guardrails we imposed." 

Many back-and-forth conversations, "tire-kicking sessions" and contract drafts followed. Whatever guardrails the Homecoming team agreed to, they’re not telling—perhaps as a result of that professionalism that has gotten them this far. In the end, NCSoft was convinced. "Only once we believed they would be capable stewards of the City of Heroes IP did we begin exploring a license agreement," the publisher says. 

That agreement will now "keep Homecoming’s independent server running as a sanctioned, legitimate City of Heroes option for the game’s loyal fanbase." The deal was announced in January of this year, to much rejoicing. "Having our plan, nearly five years in the making, bear fruit was cause for immense celebration for us and the entire community," the Homecoming team says.

It’s an extraordinary arrangement that provides a positive example for other MMO owners to follow—a way to lift up the lost communities that once adored their games and have drifted ever since. Homecoming’s server costs continue to be funded by donations, which open up each month and tend to meet their targets in a matter of hours.

"Before the license happened, we’d been running Homecoming independently for nearly five years—with oversight, of course," the Homecoming team says. "There was no real benefit for anyone in changing that. Approval, support, and guidance is what we needed, and that’s what we’ve got, and are very thankful for." Full-on integration into NCSoft’s operations would, the Homecoming team suggests, probably have been counterproductive for all involved.

City of tomorrow

Today the Homecoming team is a volunteer operation made up of nearly 50 people. A leadership group, or City Council, makes decisions about policy and direction with input from various parts of the project. "We believe that this range of experience and expertise at the top helps us make informed decisions as a group," the Homecoming team says.

One group of volunteers tackles player support and moderation across the project’s official Discord and forums. And another team, still recruiting and growing, handles development—loosely divided into traditional disciplines like programming, writing and art. "With a relatively small team of talented people, there’s naturally a lot of overlap and cross-discipline work going on," the Homecoming team says. "But overall everyone works great together and there’s a lot of cohesion." There are plans for new additions to the game, though they won’t be announced until they’re almost ready: "There’s no telling quite how long something might take, or if it’ll even be finished at all, due to the volunteer nature of the team."

Meanwhile, NCSoft keeps a watchful eye over Homecoming to make sure its services, updates, and overall play experience "align with our desire to support the City of Heroes community with an enjoyable online gaming experience." But the trust established in those initial conversations remains, and the partnership has been harmonious.

"We’ve had a really positive working relationship with NCSoft so far and don’t expect that to change going forward," the Homecoming team says. "It’s not unlike a traditional developer-publisher relationship—just without the pressures of, y’know, hitting deadlines or needing to make any money. Which is quite a liberating set of circumstances, all things considered."

Through it all the Homecoming team has stuck to the mission statement it laid out in May 2019—one which held true to City of Heroes’ values of freedom and self-expression. "Our prime directive is to keep the servers online and available to everyone," wrote the volunteers at the time. "The key is in the name: we want this to feel like the home we all lost, and we want everybody to feel welcome."

I wanted to know for sure what was going on, so I tracked down a few Steam users who'd recently used the same username and committed a PC gaming faux pas: sending friend requests to complete strangers. Surprisingly, a few of them friended me back, and one of them had an interesting story to tell.

"I was personally the Joel in the clip," the imposter, who goes by Steve, told me. Steve and at least one other friend have been donning the Joel disguise for a while now, visiting random players' lobbies and dropping unreleased toys onto the battlefield. They're not just showing off, he tells me, but promoting their boosting business.

"We were trying to think of some ideas to try to organically promote some of our boosting stuff we do without jumping in a lobby and dumping samples to ruin it for people who do enjoy progressing through a game," Steve said.

The part of the viral clip that didn't make the cut, he said, was his friend coming clean to the unsuspecting player about not being the real Joel before advertising their services.

"We weren't expecting it to be clipped and definitely wouldn't have expected the popularity of it even if it had been."

Powering their cheats is a trainer that Steve tells me their outfit developed especially for Helldivers 2. He says their trainer is different from the cheats anyone can download from Nexus Mods because it "actually parses the game files to look for new stuff each time it's activated so we'll see as stuff is patched in."

Ride along

I wanted to make sure Steve wasn't all talk, so I took him up on his offer for a ride along. I joined the group of two for what seemed like a standard Automaton mission at first, but the irregularities began at the loadout screen. While I equipped my favorite support weapons and airstrike stratagems, Steve equipped a bunch of stuff that doesn't exist: two vehicles (an APC and buggy that've been well-documented by now) and a few other weapons I didn't recognize.

Things got weirder once our hellpods hit the dirt. Steve and his friend started skating around the sandy dunes at Mach speed and flying through the air. They also wielded machine pistols that never ran out of ammo and fired 100x faster than they usually do. Immediately, the pair started calling down secret goodies. One of those secrets was the Quasar Cannon, a support weapon that, at the time, none of us knew would be released legitimately a few days later.

I won't spoil everything I saw, because who knows how much of it will actually come out, but suffice to say there is a lot of work-in-progress stuff hidden in Helldivers 2's files (much of it you can find online elsewhere), and I'm excited to see these ideas pan out once they're ready for primetime. I do think players will be surprised by how tough the vehicles are to drive. As suggested by the leaked videos out there, you do indeed have to manually shift up and down. That means pressing backwards doesn't do anything—to go in reverse, you have to shift to "R" and then press forward.

It was almost frightening how much control Steve had over the session. Not only was he unkillable, but he could bend the rules of the mission to his will, like calling down an extraction beacon wherever we were standing. Our ride along came to an abrupt end when my game crashed while driving a buggy, a bug I'd previously been warned about.

It was an awkward end to my first vehicular excursion in Helldivers, and the experience made me wonder: What's the appeal of cheating your way through a PvE game?

Why boost?

Boosting, or hiring players to "boost" you through a progression system through skill or cheats, has recently taken root in Helldivers 2. I've always associated the practice with PvP games like Rainbow Six Siege, where it's possible to hire cheaters to illicitly boost your ranking, but it's prominent in PvE games too, especially ones with lots of grinding. Through the use of cheats that grant them unlimited ammo, extra health, max damage, and super speed, Steve and his cohorts group up with customers and run level 9 difficulty missions, gobbling up as many samples as Helldivers will allow in a single go. When all goes well, one mission takes less than two minutes.

It struck me as odd that some people are willing to pay a premium, as well as risk a potential ban, simply to skip the grind. You can reach level 20, which unlocks most stratagems, within 20-30 hours of normal play. That's not a wild number, at least not by videogame standards. It takes a lot longer to gather the samples needed for the best ship upgrades, like the ones that lower stratagem cooldowns or add an extra barrage to missile strikes, but these are entirely optional.

It's not about farming Super Credits, Helldivers 2's premium currency, either. Arrowhead is relatively generous about giving out free Super Credits on missions, but the number of credits Steve can gather in an hour, I'm told, doesn't make up for the price of hiring him. For his customers, the decision to boost comes down to time.

"Most people who want boosting are people that just don't get a lot of play time and are really just wanting to play the game socially with friends," he said. "We've had a cool mix of people come through, this game has an amazing community."

In that context, boosting makes a little more sense. I've made the time to play Helldivers 2 a lot over the last few months, so unlocking the latest and greatest gear hasn't been a problem. When mechs released, I had already reached the required level 25 and pocketed 20,000 Reqs. My friends who have tighter windows to play still haven't gotten there. I wonder if they'd ever consider boosting over the finish line for the price of lunch.

Boosting in a PvE game may be a mostly victimless crime, but it's against Helldivers 2's terms of service nonetheless. Steve doesn't seem too concerned about getting banned, but he does keep his main Steam account on a separate machine just in case. "I personally have almost 130 hours legitimately played and I absolutely love the game," he said.

Seeing Helldivers 2 through the lens of an all-powerful god was enlightening, but also pretty dull. We had all these new toys to play with, but no stakes to make any of it matter.

My Joel impostor encounter was a well-timed reminder that half the fun of Helldivers 2 is the result of hard work by Arrowhead in building a meta narrative around the need for powerful weapons and escalating action. The new Quasar Cannon isn't just a random weapon drop, it's the answer to the growing Automaton threat. Termicide defense wasn't just a fun new mission type, it was a story beat that eventually led to the birth of Shriekers. Mechs didn't just show up one day—we fought for them ourselves.

That's the sort of magic you can't replicate with cheat software.

Hearthstone turned 10 this week, which on a personal note means I've been playing, watching and writing about the same game for a decade. From the halcyon days of peak RNG being Sylvanas stealing your opponent's Ragnaros, through the absolute degeneracy of Demon Hunter on day one, to the Colossals and Titans of the modern game, it's been a great ride. I was chatting to a colleague who also covered the game back in its golden era, remembering how great it was when there seemed to be a new tournament on Twitch every other week and the esports scene was doing legitimately huge viewership. 

For years the game fizzed with a constant influx of Mensa-smart young players who generated new memes as fast as they did game-breaking decks. As with all games that last this long, that imperial phase couldn't last forever, and none of us knew quite how good we'd had it until we were on the downslope. But even now I get excited before a new expansion—the nostalgia-heavy Whizbang's Workshop is out next week—eager to see what madness the current designers have cooked up. 

To celebrate the game's big anniversary, I decided to catch up with many of the OG stars who still share a love of the game, to see what their favourite memories are (and hear a few nightmares too).

Kripparrian 

Favourite moment: The biggest moment I've had in Hearthstone was the first big button press. I was regularly playing Arena and earning golden cards and many packs filled with extra copies, but rarely ever crafted the golden cards I was missing, or got rid of the copies. The copies were best kept as extras, because if Blizzard ever nerfed a card, they would offer a full refund for disenchanting it, and playing the (very) long game of grinding out a full golden collection meant that patience was key. 

The big button press was over three years in the making, but it came at a point that I realized I couldn't keep up with the release schedule of card sets. [Kripp was eligible for 660,620 Arcane Dust at the time he nuked all the extras—Ed.] I later learned from the dev team that they weren't sure what would happen when I pressed the button, as nobody had disenchanted so many cards with one click before.

Coolest card design of all time: Coldlight Oracle is my favorite overall. An amazingly versatile card that later spawned the fatigue Druid archetype, which became my favorite deck of all time.

Card you wish had been nerfed sooner: My most frustrating experience with a card in Hearthstone has to be with Firelands Portal. While existing as a fairly mundane removal option for constructed play, it plagued the Arena game mode because, as at that time, card frequency in the draft was determined by a card's rarity. With Firelands Portal being a common, and competing against some of the strongest cards in the game mode, Mage decks would regularly have fistfuls of them and dominate all other classes. This was tough to swallow, because Firelands Portal was released as part of an adventure, not a card pack-based set, so the rarity of each card had no relevance outside Arena, where it was massively problematic.

Best Meta: While I mostly played Arena, I would check out constructed Hearthstone each cycle to see what Blizzard had come up with, and get some experience playing the new sets and their decks. While I often only played for a few days, Whispers of the Old Gods kept my interest for almost the entirety of the set's cycle. Building decks around each Old God was a blast as it could be done differently with each class, and you could even combine decks with several Old Gods in one!

Worst Meta: While it was fun to see the first real class addition with Demon Hunter, it quickly got out of hand. I would regularly play against Demon Hunter opponents exclusively for long periods at a time. [The first set of Demon Hunter cards were so ridiculous they had to be nerfed within 24 hours—Ed]

Kibler 

Favourite Hearthstone moment: Casting the World Championship Finals in 2015—or this nonsense [embedded above]. 

Coolest card design of all time: Elise the Trailblazer. I loved getting an Un'Goro pack from Shadow Visions and then trying to win with whatever nonsense was in it.

Card you wish had been nerfed sooner: Warsong Commander. Patron being dominant for as long as it was led to entire sets feeling like they didn't matter. [Sottle actually wrote a defence of the card for PC Gamer back in 2015, but as a huge Patron player, it may have been a little biased—Ed.]

Best Meta: Journey to Un'Goro (minus Quest Rogue)

Worst Meta: United in Stormwind. It felt like every deck was either a super linear quest combo or hyper fast aggro.

Savjz 

Favourite Hearthstone moment: Winning SeatStory Cup II. That whole event was very special to me. [The SeatStory series was an early Hearthstone tournament held at a studio in Germany, where all the players would hang out, and was known for its chaotic but fun vibe.]

Coolest card design of all time: The OG Reno, because it encouraged the 'highlander' playstyle for the first time.

Card you wish had been nerfed sooner: The original Undertaker. It took Blizzard six months, even though it was ultra OP. The game was picking up pace at an incredible speed at the time, so I assume they didn't want to touch anything. It was painful. 

Best Meta: Honestly, if I thought about it for a long time I would probably give a different answer, but Prince Renathal was a breath of fresh air when it came out in its original form. It slowed the game significantly, making it a bit closer to the type of grindy, back and forth gameplay that I enjoy, but has been absent at times due to the single-turn power spikes that I don't enjoy as much. 

Worst Meta: I don't have a specific answer, but whenever there is an OTK that happens from hand early, that's the worst. OK, I do have an example: Mozaki, Master Duelleist which existed at a time when there was no counterplay in the form of any disruption.

Sean 'Day9' Plott 

My favorite Hearthstone moment:  The Best Worst Game. [For those not familiar with Sean's oeuvre, this is a a 30-minute Priest Mirror with some iconic belly laughs and quotes like: "Oh my god, I'm going to vomit blood."—Ed.]

Coolest card design of all time: Echo of Medivh! I built some awesome giant decks with that card! Or Astral Communion, for the clown show.

My favorite meta: Journey to Un'Goro. It was so insanely fun with Discover, Quests, and Adapt. Every game felt very rich and decision heavy.

My least favorite meta: Undertaker Deathrattle Hunter. Unless you had an instant answer, it spiraled out of control SO HARD my god.

Card I wish had been nerfed sooner: Symbolically, Mind Control from 8 to 10 mana at Hearthstone's launch. It foreshadowed the next five years of my Hearthstone experience where it felt like Blizzard was so slow and so conservative about balancing and changing overpowered and/or problem cards.

Dan 'Frodan' Chou 

Favourite Hearthstone moment: Hosting the winning moment on the BlizzCon stage when Li 'Liooon' Xiaomeng made esports history [as the first woman to win the Hearthstone Grandmasters Global Finals—Ed].

Coolest card design of all time: Yogg-Saron, Hope's End.

Card you wish had been nerfed sooner: Yogg-Saron, Hope's End.

Best Meta: Yogg-Saron, Hope's End.

Worst Meta: Yogg-Saron, Hope's End.

Simon 'Sottle' Welch 

Favourite Hearthstone Moment: Liooon wins Worlds and her subsequent speech. A lot of people that know my history might expect me to single out Hunterace vs Viper as my favourite moment [which remains the most incredible World Championship final in the game's history—Ed], but the following year is just that little bit more special to me for a number of reasons. Firstly, due to various travel issues and other logistical nightmares, the casting lineup was heavily impacted, meaning I had to be front and centre for the majority of a World's broadcast, which was an incredible privilege. Far more importantly than that though, the history-defining moment of Liooon's victory and her words on stage brought tears to my eyes. 

[Liooon's speech below is embedded below—Ed.]

If you ask me what story I'll be telling my grandkids for the 34th time while they look on in disbelief that I'm still talking about Hearthstone, it's this one.

Coolest Card Design of all Time: Zephrys the Great. I think as hands-on time with this card passed, more and more people started to focus on the fact that the card wasn't a living breathing sentient empath that knew intuitively what your gameplan and innermost desires were. Instead, I think it's worth celebrating what an ambitious project this card was from a design perspective, and how it (mostly) achieved what it was supposed to do.

Card I wish had been nerfed sooner: None! Leave the strong stuff alone. Let chaos reign. Adapt or die.

Best Meta: Even though The Grand Tournament was a very hit and miss set in terms of overall impact, the meta it landed in was awesome. Patron Warrior, Control Warrior, Handlock variants, Tempo Mages, and then everyone playing Secret Paladin that you just rolled over by being a good Patron player. Those were the good times. Honourable mention to the Cubelock/Hadronox Druid meta.

Worst Meta: Master's Tour Seoul. Specialist format. 5-Mana Luna's Pocket Galaxy. The perfect storm. When you're a person like me, who is focused on the competitive side of things, metas like this with individual cards that spike winrate by 10%+ when drawn on curve or held in mulligan are just the absolute pits. The problem was amplified by the Specialist format, which really highlighted the dominance of the deck, and all the mirror match finals. A good time was had by few.

Neil 'Lorinda' Bond 

Favourite Hearthstone moment: Liooon winning worlds, but I'm aware Sottle has also chosen that, so I'll pick Feno winning HCT Orange County. It was the culmination of Hunterace's dominant year, but Feno had performed incredibly consistently without a win and was a hugely popular player. Although I wasn't there for that event, I'd been at many many featuring him that year and although it wasn't the most important win ever in the scheme of things, it was the loudest I'd ever screamed at a match. I'm pretty sure I tweeted something out with joyous expletives when he won.

Coolest card design of all time: Zephrys the Great.

Card you wish had been nerfed sooner: Prince Renethal or Edwin Van Cleef.

Best Meta: The one-day Demon Hunter meta!

Worst Meta: The one with Cubelock and Hadronox.

RDU

Favourite Hearthstone moment: My favorite moment, outside of winning a tournament, would be when I got #1 legend and then decided to queue some games with Whizbang decks for fun. [Whizbang is designed to help new players, and gives you one of 18 random decks each time you play it—Ed.]

I was so happy when I heard that not only is he coming back, but he's also the central theme of the next expansion.

Coolest card design of all time: I think the coolest cards ever made were the Death Knight heroes, so I rank Shadowreaper Anduin as the most badass ever. It completely changed the dynamic of how the Priest class is supposed to be played.

Card you wish had been nerfed sooner: The Rogue Quest and some other game-dominating Quests that made gameplay repetitive.

Best Meta: The Patron Warrior meta was by far my favorite, even though it was super dominated by one deck, because it was very skillful and interesting to play in both the mirror match and against other decks.

Worst Meta: There were a few metas that I didn't like but nothing compares with Goblins vs Gnomes. It came out right after Naxx, which was one of the best releases, and it felt horrible to play with so much randomness that couldn't be controlled in a skillful way.

Trump

The Mayor of Value Town skipped the other questions but sent a truly old school clip featuring one of our favourite crusteaceans. Trump wrote: "It's fitting that the video's just about 10 years old." 

Fighting to stay alive is hard-coded into our DNA, so it's pretty easy to see why we love survival games. The best survival games on PC push players to their limits, presenting them with tough problems and challenging them to find creative solutions.

You need to take a lot more into account than your standard health bar in survival games. Things like hunger, thirst, and extreme temperatures will need to be considered, alongside disease and threats from any hostile enemies.

Paired with exploration, foraging, and crafting tools and gear, a lot of the best survival games will put your every instinct to the test.

But in such a popular genre, it can be hard to know where to start, especially if you're jumping into the world of survival games for the first time.

Below you'll find our favorite examples of simulated survival on PC, whether it's among the stars, deep underground, and in other dangerous environments packed with monsters, mutants, zombies, dinosaurs, or the deadliest enemy of all: other players. Here are the best survival games on PC.

Palworld

In a sentence: Kinda like Ark: Survival Evolved, but with Pokémon-like critters instead of dinosaurs
Status: In early access since January 18, 2024
Link: Steam

We knew this Pokémon-with-guns game would draw a crowd, but we didn't expect it to become the mega-hit of 2024. The mixture of survival and collectible creatures drew millions of players overnight, and you know what? It's fun. Build a base, add to your creature collection by battling monsters, make them work for you... cook and eat them... there's lots of stuff you can do, not all of it savory.

Further reading: Palworld is the Pokémon this sinful world deserves

Abiotic Factor

In a sentence: Half-Life, but it's a survival game about the nerdy scientists left behind in Black Mesa.
Status: In early access
Link: Steam

You may be a scientist in a Black Mesa-like facility as its overrun but monsters, but this time you're no Gordon Freeman. You're one of the eggheads left behind. It's a different kind of survival game because you're in a sprawling lab instead of stranded in the woods: harvest snacks from vending machines, fashion armor out of sofa cushions, and cannibalize broken computers for electronics. Abiotic Factor is bursting with fun twists on the survival formula, like a clever crafting system where you use your nerdy brain to come up with an "idea" for a new item, and a minigame you play while sleeping that buffs your rested status.

Further reading: I fell in love with Abiotic Factor the minute I strapped a couch cushion to my chest and called it armor

Sons of the Forest

In a sentence: Plane crash survivor angers cannibal tribe. Again!
Status: Released February 23, 2024
Link: Steam Store

After picking through the wreckage of the plane crash that stranded you here, you'll quickly discover you're not alone. You share a mysterious island with a tribe of terrifying cannibals, and while you struggle to stay fed and hydrated, build structures from simple tents to log homes, and construct traps to snare animals, you'll have to defend against the hungry and determined locals. Best of all, you've got an AI-controlled pal, Kelvin, to help you out.

Further reading: Sons of the Forest review is the funniest game on the internet

Valheim

In a sentence: Exploration and base-building in the Viking afterlife.
Status: Released in Early Access on February 2, 2021
Link: Official site

It didn't take long for Early Access co-op Viking survival game to draw a crowd, and it's easy to see why. A massive procedurally generated world, fearsome boss fights, and excellent base-building systems mesh wonderfully with survival elements like cooking and crafting. Solo play is great, but it really shines in co-op, and players can busy themselves with base construction or set out on perilous journeys across the sea to find dangerous new continents.

Further reading: Valheim is making me love survival games again

Subnautica

In a sentence: Survival, crafting, and building—underwater.
Status: Released January 23, 2018
Link: Offical site

Explore an alien, underwater world while piloting your hand-crafted submarine through mysterious submerged landscapes. From beautiful coral reefs to deep-sea caves and trenches, you'll gather resources and sustenance, build habitats and a fleet of subs, and craft new tech to help you survive the depths. It's hard not to compare it to Minecraft, yet developer Unknown Worlds has put their own unique stamp on the survival genre.

Further reading: Subnautica: Early impressions of Minecraft under the sea

Project Zomboid

In a sentence: The deepest and most complex zombie survival game, period.
Status: Released Nov 8, 2013
Link: Steam

If you're looking deep and complex survival systems in a massive sandbox sim, there's only one game that truly fits the bill. There's a big learning curve in this zombie survival game but once you've got a handle on how the various systems work you'll find an unending and engrossing challenge in the harsh post-apocalyptic world. Loot buildings, craft gear, farm and fish, fight zombies (or better yet, avoid them) and struggle with everything from injuries to disease to boredom to how much noise you make while moving around. This is a brilliant zombie survival simulation like nothing else out there.

Grounded

In a sentence: You're tiny and trying to survive in someone's back yard.
Status: In Early Access since July 28, 2020
Link: Offical site

Obsidian shrunk you down and dropped you in a normal backyard, but due to your size it might as well be a jungle. Surrounded by killer spiders, hungry birds, and annoying ants, you can build a base by chopping down blades of grass and forage for food and drink by roasting aphids and collecting drops of dew. It's a beautiful and somewhat wonderous environment from the perspective of a someone the size of a bug.

Further reading: Obsidian's Grounded has extreme spider horror and a few fun survival twists

Frostpunk

In a sentence: Survival, city-building, and crisis management in a frozen world.
Status: Released April 24, 2018
Link: Official site

Frostpunk is a blend of city-building, society simulation, and survival in a grim and frozen world. With a handful of cold, hungry, unhappy people, you'll need to construct a working city inside a snow-filled crater heated only by a massive coal furnace. Gather resources, hunt for food, and manage your citizens by giving them hope for the future. It's a harsh and beautiful survival game that confronts you with difficult choices at every turn.

Further reading: Frostpunk review: an incredibly stylish and addictive survival management game.

Pacific Drive

In a sentence: Your car is your only companion in this driving survival game
Status: Released Feb 21, 2024
Link: Steam

A novel survival game where nearly all the survival systems are contained within a station wagon from the 1980s. Drive through a world filled with horrible anomalies, gather resources and use them to soup up your car with sci-fi gadgets, and drive even further the next time. It's different than just about any other survival game out there, though it's pretty darn punishing, too.

Further reading: Pacific Drive review

Escape from Tarkov

In a sentence: A brutal and hyper-realistic shooter all about hoarding and managing loot.
Status: In beta
Link: Official site

Escape from Tarkov is a savage evolution of survival games with just a pinch of battle royale thrown in for flavor. Instead of playing in a persistent world, you spawn on a map with a few other players and several dozen enemy NPCs. To survive, you have to reach an exfiltration zone on the other end of the map, but you also get to keep anything you loot to sell on a player-driven marketplace or use in subsequent rounds. It's a lot like poker only way scarier. What really sells Tarkov, though, is it's hyper-realistic gunplay and ridiculously deep gun customization.

Further reading: How I became an arms dealer in Escape from Tarkov

RimWorld

In a sentence: Sci-fi colony management simulation inspired by Dwarf Fortress
Status: Released October 17, 2018
Link: Steam

It's been five years of Early Access, but RimWorld has finally reached version 1.0. In this management and survival sim you oversee a colony of randomly generated people stranded on a procedural alien planet. Expand the base, keep your colonists healthy and sane, and deal with disasters thrown your way by RimWorld's AI director, which can include anything from disease outbreaks to alien attacks to weather events. The toughest challenge may be just making your colonists simply get along with each other: each one has a distinct personality, desires, and moods.

Further reading: Making a clan of cannibals with RimWorld's scenario editor

Raft

In a sentence: Survive on a raft while building it into a floating fortress
Status: In Early Access
Link: Steam

It sounds almost idyllic, floating through the world serenely on a raft, building and expanding upon it as you fish flotsam from the ocean with a grappling hook. There are sharks, though. Hungry ones, and if they can't eat you they'll settle for eating your floating home. You'll need to somehow find food and fresh water while keeping your raft afloat and growing. Luckily, you can play co-op with a pal and double your chances for survival.

Further reading: How Raft conquered the seas of Steam

The Long Dark

In a sentence: Atmospheric survival in a Canadian post-apocalypse.
Status: Released August 1, 2017
Link: Official site

With a focus on atmosphere and environmental survival, The Long Dark stands out in an increasingly crowded genre. You play as a bush pilot stranded in the frozen wilderness after a mysterious global calamity. There are no zombies, no mutants, and no other players: it's just you fighting against the elements, the wildlife, and your own human fragility.

Further reading: Survival gets serious in The Long Dark

Don't Starve

In a sentence: Survive a cartoon wilderness filled with beasts and monsters.
Status: Released April 13, 2013
Link: Offical Site

With charming artwork yet punishing gameplay, Don't Starve is an addictive challenge and one of the best survival experiences out there (and in a rare turn of events, one of the few games here to graduate from Early Access). The crafting is complex and satisfying as you attempt to survive busy days and deadly nights. Fight (and eat) animals, practice both science and magic, and keep an eye on your mental health so you don't go insane. The standalone expansion Don't Starve Together even lets you play with pals.

Further reading: Don't Starve: Shipwrecked is a breath of fresh... Nope, that's a hurricane.

DayZ

In a sentence: Online zombie survival in the Eastern European countryside.
Status: Released December 13, 2018
Link: Steam Store

Yes, it was a long road out of Early Access, DayZ's technically still isn't done. But the survival elements of DayZ are strong, with complex nutrition, hydration, and health systems that go beyond merely eating, drinking, and bandaging wounds. Scavenge a sprawling and decaying persistent open world, engage in tense interactions with other players, customize weapons and craft gear, and try not to die: if you do, you start again with nothing.

Further reading: DayZ Diaries: the one where Ben force-feeds Andy a rotten banana

Rust

In a sentence: Naked men running around hitting each other with rocks.
Status: Released February 8, 2018
Link: Official site

Join or battle other players—or attempt to go it alone—starting with primitive tools and weapons and advancing to firearms and massive bases. You'll have to contend with wild animals, hunger, and thirst, but this is a very PVP-intensive survival experience and your main threat will come from the dozens of other players on the servers. Rust left Early Access in Early 2018, but continues to add new features.

Further reading: Trick-or-treating in Rust went about as well as you might expect

Minecraft

In a sentence: Build things, destroy things, fight monsters.
Status: Released October 7, 2011
Link: Official site

You may have heard of it. There are many different ways to play Minecraft: alone, in creative mode, with friends and strangers, as an explorer, or with custom game modes on specialty servers. As a survival game, it's still excellent, with well-implemented hunger and thirst systems and incredibly robust crafting and building. Dive into its blocky and beautiful world and you may never want to leave.

Further reading: The 40 best Minecraft custom maps

Terraria

In a sentence: Side-scrolling Minecraft.
Status: Released May 16, 2011
Link: Offical site

A wonderful, expansive, addictive, and not to mention inexpensive survival crafting sandbox. Explore randomly generated worlds, gather resources, and enjoy a simple yet satisfying crafting system. Tunnel through vast caverns, battle monsters, befriend NPCs, build yourself a palace, and play alone or with friends in co-op. Terraria has been around for years, but it's stood the test of time.

Further reading: Terraria review

This War of Mine

In a sentence: Struggle to survive in a war-torn city.
Status: Released November 14, 2014
Link: Offical site

Depicting war not from the perspective of an elite soldier but from that of a group of civilians simply trying to stay alive amidst the chaos, This War of Mine is a different and more desperate kind of survival game. You'll face tough choices as you manage your survivors' health, both physical and mental. Scrounging for food and supplies during the night is tense and harrowing, and no matter what you find it never seems to be enough. It's not just a survival game but a harsh and unblinking look at the reality of war.

Further reading: This War of Mine review

Unturned

In a sentence: A free-to-play multiplayer survival sandbox.
Status: Released July 7, 2017
Link: Steam store

It costs you nothing to play Unturned, but this isn't some slapped together free-to-play title. Its creator (a teenager) has released scores of updates to the zombie-based survival sandbox since 2014, which makes it easy to see why it's been downloaded by millions of players since its initial release. Despite Unturned's blocky visuals it contains deep and satisfying crafting, skill, and survival systems, plus there's a massive and exuberant community surrounding it.

Further reading: How a survival game made by a 16-year-old racked up 24 million downloads

The scale of the past year of videogame layoffs is a hard thing to wrap your head around. We're confronted with more big numbers almost every week: the latest "regrettable" cuts made by this or that gaming company in the name of staying "agile and competitive." The announcements blur together and the numbers become talking points, but within each statistic are scores of intimate miniature apocalypses: someone's livelihood, maybe their dream job or first break in this competitive industry, dashed against the wall.

The causes of this recent industry contraction include studio consolidation, tightened margins after an early Covid-era boom, and good old fashioned corporate greed. Today, we're just focusing on the personal impact: a snapshot of the industry crisis from January 2023 through January '24 with testimonies from some of the people who lost their jobs.

Each individual dot on the graphic above represents one person laid off at some point in the last 13 months. In addition to PC Gamer's own reporting, Gamesindustry.biz, Wrapped.games, and the public Games Industry Layoffs tracker hosted on Obsidian Publishing were essential resources in compiling the big picture. 

Our own estimated total for 2023's layoffs was 11,250 people (the Obsidian tracker posits at least 10,500), while in 2024 we had already reached nearly 6,000 layoffs (5,900 on the public list) by the end of January. More layoffs have been reported in the early days of February, including an unknown number at Visual Concepts Austin, which Take-Two acquired in 2021.

As many observers have pointed out, the industry is already halfway to 2023's total layoffs just one month into 2024. 2023 was higher than 2022's estimated 8,500 total layoffs, and the wider tech downturn that these games layoffs spun off from was already underway by the end of that year.

One question we keep coming back to at PCG is how aberrant these layoffs are in games history, with the possibility that a combination of social media attention and increased scrutiny of industry labor practices has brought an issue that's always been this bad more to the forefront. While we don't have a statistical answer to that question, I was struck by former HakJak sound designer and industry veteran Michelle Hebert's testimony on the matter. Despite this being the fourth time she's been laid off in 15 years, Hebert has found the recent situation far grimmer than in the past.

"Before there were plenty of places to land and studios would respond to swoop up talent," she said. "This time, they're not there because everyone is drowning it feels." 

On the other end of the spectrum, this is the first time former Blizzard senior environment artist Molly Warner has been laid off in her 10 years in the industry, but she understandably says that "one is enough."

With thousands of developers now looking for work, new roles are difficult to come by. But there are also resources dedicated to help game developers find new jobs. On LinkedIn, Amir Satvat organizes volunteer mentorship and CV reviews in addition to constantly updating lists of laid off developers and job opportunities. Cristina Amaya runs a Slack server for job-seeking devs. There's also a UK games industry Slack group to turn to.

Below we've included a number of responses from developers who were willing to share their stories with PC Gamer. All of them have been affected by layoffs in the last 12 months. They represent just 0.05% of the total impact.

Faces of the 2023-2024 games industry layoffs

Recent additions include a horrific poison swamp maze, one of the most stressful underwater levels I've ever seen, and confusing captchas you have to solve to respawn when you inevitably die. That's on top of features like a rocket launcher that takes 30 seconds to reload, a cute dog that explodes into giant ants if you pet it, and a mechanic where you have to regularly type compliments into the game to prevent the protagonist losing the will to continue.

Rapp doesn't make games for a living—he's an enthusiastic amateur—but through this bizarre project he seems to have discovered a whole new way to get into the industry. "It's been a hobby thing since I was like 12," he says. "I got into web development instead of game development and I've kind of regretted that ever since, so this is me correcting that.

"I've tried and failed to make, over my lifetime, 50 games. Everyone who makes games has done the same thing. So I thought, okay, I'm just going to do the most fun part of making videogames, which is implementing cool new features, and not do any of the boring things, like polish the game,  make it make sense, make it work correctly… no, it's just a bad game, and that's fine,  because that's the most fun thing for me to make right now. Just keep, every two days, adding something new."

And, importantly, show that new thing to an ever-growing TikTok audience. The unique social media platform surfaces videos in users' feeds based on what it thinks they'll enjoy, not just who they follow, allowing creators to flourish quickly without an existing audience. "Where else can you upload a video and people will just see it? Nowhere!" says Rapp, who initially gained a thousand followers with just one video. 

Now that the game is available to the public, it's getting thousands of plays too—and even a budding speedrun community. It taps into the same vein as the ever popular "masocore" genre, exemplified by games like I Wanna Be the Guy and Getting Over It with Bennett Foddy which take rely on players' stubbornness more than their need to be entertained.

"It's not a game anyone would play normally right?" says Rapp. "No one's going to sit down and play it just for fun. It's going to be something you play for content, or because you like really hard games, or you want to speedrun it. It's all the weird, fringe parts of playing a game, that's how you're going to approach this."

But it's only in watching others finally go hands-on with his creation that Rapp has come to appreciate quite how vicious the game really is. The irony of the project is that its greatest victim is Rapp himself—he's the one who has to actually play it over and over to test it, regularly wasting hours and thousands of attempts trying to beat his latest additions. All that practice, however, has given him plenty of chance to get used to its worst foibles.

"I had totally forgotten how bad the control scheme is," says Rapp. "I kind of realised a couple of days ago—I don't think more than two people have gotten past the first part of the second level, because of just how strange it is to even do a normal jump in this game."

When I add that one of the worst parts for me is the audio—the way the dreadful, out of tune flute soundtrack restarts every time you die profoundly adds to the pain—Rapp seems surprised anyone's even still listening to it. 

"I've been watching TikToks and the music's playing in the background. I'm like, 'people aren't muting their browser when they play the game?!' I haven't heard it in a month!"

And yet, enough people are happy to subject themselves to this digital torture to leave Rapp excited for the game's future. "My loftiest goal, the biggest one I have, would be for someone to speedrun it at Awesome Games Done Quick. That would be the best thing that's ever happened. Beyond that, I'm just seeing what happens."

There's something wonderful about seeing someone whose game design dreams have always gone unfulfilled suddenly finding their own unique joy and success in a project. Monster Sniper Season 3 is deliberately awful, but it's also a testament to Rapp's creativity and sense of humour. Energised by his sudden audience, he's already got stranger concepts brewing. ("I had this idea for a game where you can only play it once in each state. So if you lose you have to go to Missouri and play again…")

So I finish by asking: what advice would Rapp give to other aspiring and amateur developers hoping to find their own unique place in the hobby too? 

"Just make anything and put it out. And make TikToks about it!" he says. "Whatever you make, it is a piece of art, and it is interesting because it came from a human. So just make something, make some content about it. 

"That's actually my number one piece of advice—I've seen so many people, peers of mine too in the game development Discords, they make a game, they put it out, no one plays it, and they're like 'Aw, dang it!'. No, that's just the first part; the second part is getting people to play the game. Make some content, talk about it for a long time, don't just give up. That's my advice."

That's advice Rapp lives by—follow him on TikTok and you'll be treated to multiple hilarious and/or distressing updates a week. For the braver among you, you can try the latest build for yourself on his itch.io page. Just… maybe mute the music. 

Fluegelman characterised this model as "an experiment in economics more than altruism", and sure enough, it soon started making people rich. Free distribution gave software developers such enormous reach long before internet downloads that even voluntary payments from a fraction of their users resulted in huge profits. They settled on a name: shareware.

Apogee founder Scott Miller grew up in a household with a former NASA engineer for a dad and an IBM PC packed with shareware. "My father had even sent a couple of guys some money," he says. "So it was on my mind." By the mid-80s, the younger Miller was coding videogames in his spare time at college and making them available much the way Fluegelman had.

"I had written some text adventure games in the style of Infocom, released those into shareware and asked people to send me money," he says. "And it just was not working out at all. I wasn't making anything worth talking about."

What Miller was missing was an enticement—a way to lure players into payment, without giving away a whole product. In 1987 he put out a trilogy of fantasy roguelikes named Kroz: The first, a 25-level game, was released for free, but the second and third parts cost $15 each. "That was the magic trick that worked," he says. "No one else was doing that. I immediately wrote another three Kroz games and did the same thing with those." 

By the end of the decade, Miller was making $100,000 a year through cheques showing up in his mailbox. He quit his day job and began reaching out to other game authors through pre-internet services like BBSes and CompuServe. One was Todd Replogle, an "amazing, amazing talent" who dreamed up Duke Nukem with Miller and worked as a programmer on the series from its origin as a platformer through to its final, 3D form.

Another was John Romero. At the time, Romero and the team that would become id Software were pumping out a new game every month for Softdisk, a company that promised subscribers 12 original games over the course of a year for a total of $89.95.

John Carmack had blown Miller away with his demo of a smooth-scrolling platformer on the PC—a feat akin to distilling Super Mario in his garage (id literally did that, too). But the nascent id Software wasn't convinced of the merits of shareware. "If you want us to make a game for you," they told Miller, "you gotta pay us $2,000 to do it." Miller practically punched the air, knowing he would have gladly paid 10 times that amount to publish id's first game. 

Keen dreams

In December of 1990, Miller uploaded Commander Keen's first episode to bulletin board systems that served as file sharing hosts. For $30, players could order the two follow-up episodes on floppy disks in Ziploc bags. And they did. In droves. By the end of the month, Miller had sent Romero and co. $10,000 in royalties.

The next cheque, in January, was for $25,000. "It just grew from there," Miller says. "At that point, they were completely sold on the whole idea of shareware."

Yet shareware wasn't solely a pact between the publisher, developer and consumer. It required the cooperation of the postal service, which was completely fascinated by this new mail phenomenon—taken to a new level by the launch of Wolfenstein 3D. "They actually sent an empty truck to our office, just to load up all the packages and everything we were sending out," Miller says. "We got really close to them, and also developed a really good relationship with our local printer for all the labels and everything. Early on, Apogee developed more as an order-taking company." 

Only in the months after Wolfenstein 3D, as id Software's star continued to rise, did Apogee move into internal development. While the company was still working with several shareware creators, Miller knew that Romero and Carmack would want to break off on their own, and so asked former id Software designer Tom Hall to lead work on Rise of the Triad, a new Apogee FPS that would keep the company's mail order staff and infrastructure busy.

"It actually started off as a Wolfenstein sequel," Miller says. "Wolfenstein 3D: Rise of the Triad. That's why it has the whole military angle. But about 10 months into development we got a call from John Romero, who said, 'You know, we really don't want another Wolfenstein game coming out. We'll let you continue to use the engine, but you can't call it Wolfenstein anymore.'

"Their worry was that it was going to be released too close to their coming game, Doom, and they didn't want the competition."

Doom ended up sweeping away any and all competition. Shareware players bought 1,154,541 copies, placing it among the best-selling games of the '90s. In the process, Doom brought shareware to the attention of an enormous audience, and inextricably associated the model with the budding FPS genre. By then shooters were becoming too large and complicated to be developed as trilogies like Kroz and Commander Keen, so the convention was to release a generous set of taster levels for free. If players wanted more, they could mail in for the rest. 

Shadow war

Shareware's sales structure couldn't help but have an impact on the shape of a game itself, tempting developers to stick the finest levels upfront to make the best possible impression. At Apogee, though, development tended not to pan out that way. "We gave a lot of thought to maybe developing the middle episode first," Miller says. "And once we become experts in making our own game, then we can do the first episode, make sure we get it right. But it never worked out, we always made the first episode first. For a lot of our games, the later episodes were the better ones because of that."

Of course, many players never saw those later, more refined episodes. For Rocksteady web developer Jason Burt-D'Arcy, who was a young teen living in the small Southampton suburb of Netley Abbey in 1994, access to free games was a revelation. Wolfenstein, Doom, Heretic, Duke Nukem 3D, Shadow Warrior, Rise of the Triad, Descent, Quake—he played them all. Up until they asked for a cheque, that is.

"You got some levels, a bunch of weapons and a cool boss to kill at the end," he says. "Because these games, Doom in particular, were so good you would just go again. It had scaling difficulty and loads of hidden things so there was still plenty to do. I never felt like I wanted more because I'd been given so much already."

At the time Miller reckoned that Apogee's games were in some cases reaching tens of millions of people: "My estimate was that about one or two in every 100 people that would download a game would end up sending us money for it," he says. "Nowadays, ordering on Steam is just pressing a button. Back then you had to pick up the phone and have your credit card ready or write a cheque. There was a lot more friction."

There were additional barriers for international players, too. Apogee established a worldwide network of partner distribution companies and published lists of local dealers that could be accessed via the menus of its games. Yet even so, some customers were put off by US-centric advertising in an age when the oceans between continents felt wider. "I remember taking one look at the purchase information and it was 0800 numbers and dollar signs," Burt-D'Arcy says. "I wouldn't have known where to start."

Those borders came down with the internet, and by the late '90s shareware had made enormous successes of not just Apogee but other lasting companies like Epic Games. It had shaken the traditional industry to its core. "I remember hearing a story that there was a board meeting at Electronic Arts," Miller says. “And one of the top people slammed Wolfenstein 3D on the table and said, ‘How are these guys beating us? How can some little company out of nowhere be making better games than us?’”

By 1996, Quake’s shareware edition was the sixth-best-selling game of the year in the US. 

But in the end, the internet brought down shareware too. Over time it became possible, and then trivial, to download full games online, making mail order the preserve of lavish collector's editions.

Sharewhere?

While the idea of episodic gaming still appeals to developers, it's often proven to be a poor fit for the volatile and unpredictable nature of game production. Valve abandoned Half-Life 2's expansion episodes after two entries stretched across multiple years. And although Hitman's World of Assassination trilogy is now a huge commercial success, that wasn't true while its first levels were releasing one-by-one—most players prefer to wait for a whole, finished product before investing. 

The original Telltale Games remains the biggest name in episodic gaming—yet financial insecurity and the crunch associated with an aggressive release schedule saw the company unravel in sad, spectacular fashion back in 2018.

So where does the spirit of shareware live in PC gaming today? Not with free-to-play, according to Miller. "There's always some sort of grinding element that you can somewhat bypass if you pay, which I'm just not a fan of at all," he says. "We never had anything like that. There were no throttle [points] in the shareware releases of our games."

Miller's more keen on demos, which have seen a reemergence in recent years thanks to both the rising cost of full-price games and high-profile events like Steam Next Fest. "They're super important for game developers to be doing nowadays," he says. "Even more than early access. Because what you're trying to do with a demo is just get your game out there, allow people to download it for free, and once again get hooked to the point that they wishlist it." 

Crucially, demos are a way to spread word-of-mouth without exposing an unfinished game to Steam user reviews. "It's a way to have the public help you playtest, get great feedback from them and modify your game as necessary," Miller says. "At most you want to give away about 25-to-30% as your demo, which is what we did back in the shareware days." It's a model the modern-day Apogee will be following for all its upcoming releases.

As an adult, Burt-D'Arcy works as a web developer, and sees something like a shareware spirit in his field. "The sheer amount of code that is written and given away for free is completely mind blowing," he says. "So much of the systems that run our daily lives is [built] on code that people wrote because they love making things."

Yet in games? "I don't think there is anything really like it anymore," he says. "Shareware was about faith. Faith in your own ability to make something good, and faith in people to respect and respond to that." It wasn't altruism, as Fluegelman pointed out in the beginning. But it was rooted in something pure—an optimistic belief that generosity would be rewarded in kind.

For PC Gamer's own 30th anniversary, we're journeying through three decades of PC gaming history, and we've finally arrived in the modern age of PC gaming. From the mid-2000s to now, we've seen some huge shifts in the landscape of the hobby, and some new classic titles ready to stand the test of time for many more decades to come. Let's kick off with just such a one, an RPG near and dear to the hearts of the PCG team...

📜 Part 1: 1993-2003 

📜 Part 2: 2004-2013

The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt (May 2015)

Open worlds on PC reached their zenith with CD Projekt's dark fantasy. The scale of this RPG was extraordinary, but what truly defined The Witcher 3 was the texture of its world. Its landscapes weren't just beautiful, they were wild and unkempt and hostile. Its story wasn't just dramatic, it was tender, nuanced, heartwarming and heartbreaking. The quality wasn't limited to the main plot, but virtually every side quest too. It may be a game about a mutant slaying monsters, but The Witcher 3 is one of the most human games ever produced by a big-budget studio.

Steam hardware (November 2015)

Valve first crossed the line from software developer to hardware designer with three devices: the Steam Link, Steam Controller, and Steam Machines. It was Valve's first stab at building a console-like experience around PC gaming, without actually making a console. Unsurprisingly, this half-measured approach didn't catch on, and Steam Machines had all but vanished from Steam by 2018. That said, the Steam Link was a genuinely neat piece of hardware, and Valve's hardware aspirations would see much greater success in the years to come.

PUBG: Battlegrounds (December 2017)

Perhaps the most recent game to cause a paradigm shift in how mainstream titles are designed, PlayerUnknown's Battlegrounds emerged from the inhumane chaos of DayZ, Bohemia Interactive's multiplayer zombie survival mod for ArmA 2. In DayZ's world, survival was the only goal, and in achieving this you could be as cruel and treacherous to other players as you liked.

PUBG basically took this idea and formalised it into a round-based scenario. The same large, post-military world, the same large number of players. But now players had to compete with one another in a gradually shrinking playspace until only one of them was left. And lo! The battle royale genre was born.

PUBG's impact was as enormous as it was rapid. In the battle royale formula, Epic saw an opportunity to turn around the ailing fortunes of its Minecraft-inspired survival game Fortnite, creating one of today's biggest blockbusters. Respawn applied its unrivalled FPS talents to the formula, producing arguably the best battle royale game in Apex Legends. Even Activision stood up and took notice, building the hugely successful, if variably good, Call of Duty: Warzone.

The success of battle royale lies in its balance of scale and accessibility. These games have the footprint of an MMO or a shared-world shooter, but don't demand the same commitment. They have events and seasonal changes, but don't require that you follow along with every step. Perhaps that's why battle royale has thrived in recent year, while so many looter-shooters and MMOs have struggled.

Geforce RTX 2080 (September 2018)

PC gaming has long been at the cutting-edge of graphics technology, but the rate at which visual fidelity increases has been flattening over the last decade. Back in the '90s, just four years took you from the 2.5D hellscape of Doom to the fully 3D, hardwareaccelerated sci-fi nightmare of Quake 2. Then it all went quiet.

Which is why the advent of ray tracing in 2018 felt like such a big deal. Here was a technology that seemed a genuine leap forward: true, pathtraced real-time lighting that accurately simulates how light bounces off surfaces to create shadows, reflections, and refractions. Games had become very good at faking these things, but here was a technology that did it for real.

In practice, the ray-tracing revolution has been more of a spirited argument. The improvements ray tracing brings can often be hard to discern. Moreover, the performance cost for often slight improvements was enormous, and on early RTX cards like the 2080 were often not worth the enhancements they provided.

Modern ray-tracing also raises other questions, such as whether or not an all-purpose lighting solution is always beneficial for how games look. Yes, putting real-time lighting into games like Quake 2 and Minecraft is a cool trick, but it also fundamentally compromises the aesthetic of those games. The recently released Counter-Strike 2 uses old-fashioned baked lighting, and not only does it look fantastic, it looks fantastic in the way a Source engine game should. As is always the case, good technology is nothing without good implementation. That said, when it is used correctly, like in Cyberpunk 2077, ray tracing can be absolutely mindblowing.

Disco Elysium (October 2019)

Role-playing games inherently involve experimenting with alternate personalities. But few are as fundamentally about personal identity as Disco Elysium. The detective RPG from Slovakian developer ZA/UM plunges so deeply into your sense of self that your inner thoughts have inner thoughts. Playing as an alcoholic cop who goes on a bender so extreme it wipes his entire memory, you must solve the murder of a man found hanging in a tree while also solving the mystery of who the heck you are.

Many RPGs have your character start out as a blank slate, but in Disco Elysium you are a shattered slate, your mind a million shards. Every character skill relates to a fragment of your disassembled self, and each of those has its own voice. Your logic skill, for example, will help you solve conundrums. Your electro-chemistry skill, by comparison, will go hog-wild whenever you spy drugs or alcohol, begging you to indulge. It's up to you which parts of your mind you listen to, and what kind of detective forms from that.

Disco Elysium combines this with a literary approach to narrative design that is both hilarious and achingly astute in its perception of its own dilapidated world. It's an expressly political affair. The game's central murder takes place in a city district living in the shadow of a failed communist revolution, the bones slowly being picked clean by corrupt unions and external capitalist interests. These politics play into your character too, with the game letting you affect various political stances and explore their ideologies, contradictions, and consequences.

It's a truly singular experience, although that description has gained more literal significance lately. The game's legacy has been marred by a split within ZA/UM between its creative director and the company's own directors and investors. That story is a messy one, but it ends with the sad truth that we're unlikely to see a sequel.

That makes Disco Elysium all the more unique, a reminder that good RPG design is about the paths you give a player to follow, not the amount of real-estate available to explore. If more recent events are anything to go by, it's an idea that might be catching on again.

The Covid-19 pandemic (January 2020)

Covid-19 affected virtually every individual and organisation on the planet, and the games industry was no different. But the effect of the virus and the ensuing lockdowns to help protect people from it was unusual in the case of games. Covid-19 caused serious disruption to game development schedules as studios adjusted to working from home. But it also caused a massive spike in sales of games and hardware, due to the millions of additional people passing time during lockdown by playing games.

The consequences of all this are still playing out today. The delays Covid caused meant fewer games being launched in the following two years, while 2023 has seen a bumper release calendar as all those delayed games finally reached completion. On the other hand, the massive spike in gaming revenue has also flattened, resulting in widespread layoffs as companies looking to exploit short term gains during the pandemic now seek to downsize their operations to maximise their profit. It's a sharp reminder that, while business has always partly driven gaming as an artform, for some, it is exclusively a money making machine.

One positive that emerged from the pandemic, however, is an increased awareness of the risk of exploitation on the part of game developers. The post-pandemic years have seen numerous unions created at developers like Blizzard and Raven Software, with the aim of protecting workers' rights. One of the less expected effects of the pandemic was to change how people view their relationship with work, and the game industry is still wrestling with what that means for the future.

Valheim (February 2021)

Any game that brings together the building and survival systems of Minecraft with the exploration and combat of Dark Souls always had a reasonable shot at being popular, but nobody expected Iron Gate's procedural Viking simulator to become the phenomenon that it has. As well as being the perfect capstone to the design ideas that drove the 2010s, Valheim's popularity derives from being such an excellent hangout space. Its atmospheric Viking world is highly rewarding to explore with other players, and while the game bills itself as a hardcore survival experience, for the most part the only pressure is that which you choose to take on.

Steam Deck (March 2022)

Valve's answer to the Nintendo Switch is a miniature marvel of engineering, a compact yet deceptively powerful handheld that combines the portability of a handheld with the flexibility of a PC.

The success of the Steam Deck was undoubtedly assisted by launching at an opportune moment. High-end games were scarce in 2022, making it an ideal time to reunite with old favourites and catch up with the hottest indie games. The Steam Deck also happened to release alongside the perfect gaming companion, Poncle's simple yet enormously compulsive Vampire Survivors. This year's calendar of wall-to-wall blockbusters has been less well suited to the Steam Deck, but it's still a fantastic bit of hardware, and a tinkerer's delight.

Baldur's Gate 3 (August 2023)

Receiving a whopping score of 97 from PC Gamer, Baldur's Gate 3 epitomises how the PC's most traditional genres can still surprise after 30 years. This magnificent CRPG blends world-class writing, acting, and storytelling with challenging turn-based combat that brilliantly adapts D&D's toolset. Not only is the game's central narrative preposterously flexible, the world is also highly responsive to your actions.

A stone cold all-timer, it's hard to know yet what impact Baldur's Gate 3 will have. But you can guarantee it's under the microscope of every major game developer.

Cyberpunk 2077 2.0 (September 2023)

CD Projekt has long held a reputation for improving its games post-release, but Cyberpunk seemed like an insurmountable task. Alongside a list of bugs and performance issues were more fundamental problems, like underwhelming progression and a gorgeous, but lifeless, city.

Yet CD Projekt was true to its rep, and while it took three years and a countless number of eddies, the studio really did fix Cyberpunk. It's now as entertaining mechanically as it is narratively, while the world feels more alive thanks to better crowds and a proper police system. The Phantom Liberty expansion provides further enhancements, alongside a new story that's a superb complement to the original.

As PC Gamer's 30th anniversary celebrations continue, we're taking a trip back through three decades of PC gaming. In part 1, we looked at the early days of 1993-2003; now, we step firmly into the mid-2000s, and discover a game that changed everything and launched the defining PC gaming platform...

📜 Part 1: 1993-2003

📜 Part 3: 2014-2023

Half-Life 2 (November 2004)

In history there are two games industries: the one that lived before Half-Life 2, and the one that woke up after it. Half-Life 2 was the sum of all the FPS' aspirations. A realistic, contiguous 3D environment that saw players travelling through a vast and elaborate cityscape. A revolutionary physics engine that turned every object in the game world into a potential weapon. An endlessly inventive adventure in which every chapter brought new twists. A story told by characters who moved, talked, and acted like real people.

Even at a time when shooters and first-person games were constantly breaking new ground, nobody had seen anything like Half-Life 2. It was so good that Valve, with all its collective brainpower, still hasn't figured out how to make a sequel to it.

The influence of Half-Life 2 stretches as wide as it does deep. Without Half-Life 2 there'd be no Garry's Mod, no Dear Esther, no Portal, and all the games those titles inspired. But by far Half-Life 2's most significant impact was to make Steam a going concern. PC gamers may have hated taking their medicine before they could play the best game on the planet, but the additional install base Half-Life 2 provided was the first major step in transforming Steam into the behemoth it is today, and by proxy, shunting the entire medium into a digital future. Not since Doom had there been a PC game that so fundamentally changed everything, and another wouldn't come along until Minecraft.

World of Warcraft (November 2004)

World of Warcraft is a bizarre videogame phenomenon, in that it both started and ended the MMO craze of the noughties. Every publisher wanted a piece of World of Warcraft's action, but hardly any would come close to Blizzard's success. World of Warcraft opened the gates to the MMO party, then kicked the arse of anyone who tried to touch the cake.

What's especially remarkable about this is, before World of Warcraft launched, all eyes were on Everquest 2. At that time, SOE's Everquest was the best MMO going, and the sequel looked set to provide a substantial upgrade, with improved visuals and less punishing progression.

Admittedly, Everquest 2 did all those things. World of Warcraft merely did them better. Blizzard took the lessons it learned from games like Diablo and StarCraft and used them to refine everything that made MMOs fussy and obscure. Its death penalty system was both lenient and imaginative, while its auction houses made trading items with other players a breeze. Alongside this was slicker storytelling and quest design, and state-of-the art PvP that divided players into two warring factions. You could even fly across the map on mounts like gryphons.

In the end, World of Warcraft just buried Everquest 2. And it would do the same for virtually every MMO that followed in its wake. While a few titles like Guild Wars and Lord of the Rings Online were innovative or illustrious enough to cobble together a reasonable following, so many more died quietly within a few years of launch. Only Final Fantasy 14 has proved anything like competitive, and that's after the game was competely redesigned.

All the while, World of Warcraft kept on succeeding, with each expansion building upon the game's foundation, or in the case of addons like Cataclysm or Shadowlands, overhauling it entirely. Indeed, the game has changed so much that Blizzard released the original version again as WoW Classic, for players who wanted to go back to its first iteration. World of Warcraft: so good they launched it twice.

Oblivion's horse armour (April 2006)

In 2006 Bethesda was the most exciting game studio around. Its new RPG Oblivion had blown players away with its vast, beautiful, and endlessly surprising fantasy world. But Bethesda's popularity soon took a dent when it launched Oblivion's first slice of additional content. This differed in two ways from previous expansions Bethesda had made, like Tribunal and Bloodmoon for its earlier title Morrowind. First, it was delivered entirely digitally. Second, it wasn't a new island to explore or adventure to tackle. No, it was a bit of armour for your horse.

The stink this caused was unbelievable. While players weren't against paying for additional game content, the idea of shelling out money specifically for one in-game item was ludicrous. One commenter on the website 1UP around the time of release wrote, "I am going to pay a 'premium' for a nifty hat?" unwittingly predicting Valve's entire business plan for the 2010s.

Looking back now, what's most remarkable is how mundane this all seems. Today, virtually every game has optional payable content, whether it's in the form of expansions, DLC, microtransactions, battle passes, season passes, or loot boxes. It's taken as read that most games, especially bigger titles, will be orbited by a ring of fragmentary extras. A paid item being entirely cosmetic is considered a good thing, as it means players aren't missing out on a potentially meaningful feature.

What changed? Well, partly this was normalised through sheer inundation, not just of payable DLC, but of games in general. As the volume and size of available games increased, the debate over smaller pieces of payable content seemed to matter less. When you've got three 80-hour open-world games on the go, plus 100 hours in a free-to-play shooter, the option to buy an extra suit in one of those games doesn't seem so offensive.

That said, paid extras can still be contentious. Loot boxes remain controversial due to the gambling element that plays into them. Star Wars: Battlefront (2017) was savaged for its cynical loot box implementation, a criticism that stained the game's reputation long after it was resolved. Which goes to show, you're only one shortsighted business decision away from becoming the next bit of horse armour.

Dwarf Fortress (August 2006)

Never has a game been so simultaneously behind and ahead of the times as Dwarf Fortress. Released in 2006, Dwarf Fortress was a preposterously complex management sim at a time when management sims were out of vogue. It was a game fronted by impenetrable ASCII graphics, at a time when the industry was moving toward increased visual fidelity and streamlined interfaces.

By all rights, Dwarf Fortress should had vanished into internet obscurity. At the same time, it's quite hard to ignore a game that generates an entire history of civilisation before you start to play. Notionally about building and managing a home for a colony of dwarves, Dwarf Fortress is really an impossibly complex story engine designed to factor in every possible eventuality. It's not just a game where your dwarves fight procedurally generated monsters in a procedurally generated land, but one where they have procedurally generated personalities and can write procedurally generated poetry.

Dwarf Fortress would go on to inspire other colony sims like Prison Architect and RimWorld. These games didn't have quite the same depth as DF, but were significantly easier to grapple with. All that changed late last year, however, when Bay12 released a new version of Dwarf Fortress sporting *gasp* hand-drawn graphics and *swoon* a user interface that supported a mouse. This made Dwarf Fortress significantly more accessible, and made Bay12's designers millionaires. All it took was 20 years building the most complex game ever made.

The Orange Box (October 2007)

Valve is a company that likes to solve problems, and in 2007 the problem was that none of its current projects—Team Fortress 2, Half-Life 2: Episode Two, and a weird experiment called Portal—really felt like a full game. But Valve realised each project filled in the gaps where the others fell short. So was born the greatest videogame anthology in history.

Before launch, the headline act was Episode Two. Although Episode One hadn't been quite up to the same standard as Half-Life 2, Episode Two promised terrifying new enemies, advanced vehicular mechanics, and some big story twists.

Ultimately though, Episode Two proved the least exciting part of the box. Team Fortress 2 brought a radical new aesthetic to Valve's Quake-mod-inspired shooter, one perfectly suited for the cartoonish chaos of a multiplayer FPS. But the most astonishing of the trio was Portal, which brought a genuinely revolutionary game mechanic to the table, packaged in a brilliantly brain-teasing puzzler overseen by one of gaming's greatest comic creations.

The legacy of The Orange Box isn't entirely without blemishes. Valve's handling of Team Fortress 2 has been questionable, and Half-Life 2 never did get a proper ending. Nonetheless, The Orange Box represents Valve at the height of its creative powers, and I'd give my little finger to see the company do something this bold again.

Plants vs Zombies (May 2009)

Like Peggle before it, Plants vs Zombies was instrumental in the normalising of 'casual' games on PC. Valve's inclusion of a demo version of Peggle in The Orange Box had countless PC gamers paying attention to what PopCap would do next.

Plants vs Zombies showed that games you'd normally find free on Newgrounds.com could compete with shooters and RPGs as premium mainstream titles. Then PopCap was acquired by EA, and Plants vs Zombies disappeared into mobile-land. But the original's significance as a PC landmark remains. It's also the second best game after Portal to finish on a song.

Recettear: An Item Shop's Tale (September 2010)

You might not be familiar with Recettear, in which you play a young girl in a magical shop who explores randomised dungeons. But it's notable for being the first Japanese game to release on Steam.

Prior to this, the PC was rarely a focus for Japanese publishers. You'd occasionally see a port of a Capcom or Sega game, but that was it. Yet Steam revealed the PC market was too big to ignore. Recettear was the first crack in the dam, leading to everything from Dark Souls to Yakuza, Persona to Nier Automata arriving on the platform. You can even play Shenmue on PC now. What an age we live in.

Minecraft (November 2011)

While Minecraft officially released in late 2011, it had already been a sensation for over a year. Its highly public alpha development is one of many reasons why Mojang's cubic omni-game was revolutionary, and there's a direct line from it to today's Early Access.

It also changed the types of games being made. Minecraft's groundbreaking survival mechanics paved the way for titles like DayZ, Subnautica, and Fortnite, while its block-based building system directly influenced the likes of Factorio and Satisfactory. It's wild just how much of today's gaming landscape was shaped by Minecraft.

The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim (November 2011)

Bethesda's finest hour. Skyrim combined the refinements of Oblivion with a less cod fantasy landscape inspired by Norse myth. The rugged mountains and misty valleys brought back some of the weirdness Bethesda had left behind in Morrowind. Also, it had dragons.

The result was a perfectly balanced RPG brew. Skyrim had just enough sharpness in its combat and intuitiveness in its systems to give it mass-market appeal, but it also had sufficient flexibility and, let's face it, inherent wonkiness to make it an internet sensation in the golden age of social media. Buckets on heads! Oaths to carry burdens! A certain projectile in a leg joint! It was the same weirdness that had been in Oblivion, but unlike in 2006, it was a lot easier to share.

Which is not to say everyone loves Skyrim purely because of the memes. So much of Skyrim's memetic potential derives from its openness, its willingness to let you bend and even break it. Nowhere is this more apparent than in Skyrim's unrivalled mod scene. From new inventories to enhanced survival systems, novel quests to entire unexplored areas. Forget waiting for The Elder Scrolls VI, you could probably assemble a sequel yourself just out of Skyrim mods.

Since Skyrim, Bethesda's games have lost some of that openness. Fallout 4 leaned far more heavily on its shooter credentials, while Starfield lacks a contiguous play-space capable of generating oddball moments. They're still decent adventures, but the sooner Bethesda gets back to The Elder Scrolls, the better.

XCOM: Enemy Unknown (October 2012)

Firaxis' reboot of Julian Gollop's 1994 game (known variously as X-COM: UFO Defense and UFO: Enemy Unknown) is another one of those great pivot moments of PC Gaming. Before XCOM, turn-based tactics was practically a forgotten genre. But Firaxis brought it screaming back, blending cinematic flair with ruthless tactical challenge to create a gripping, dynamic sci-fi drama. XCOM's tactical scenarios could deliver the kinds of shocking twists you'd normally experience in a TV show like Game of Thrones, only the characters being mercilessly slaughtered were ones you'd created, in situations you'd got them into.

XCOM also fit right into the 2010s' renewed appetite for uncompromising experiences, a more cerebral companion to the high-wire athleticism of Dark Souls. Its alien menace wasn't afraid to just beat you, but to humiliate you too, and even the best outcomes came with losses. As such, completing a mission in XCOM always felt like a huge achievement. And winning a campaign? Well, pat yourself right on the back.

In the wake of XCOM, turn-based tactics went from forgotten genre to arguably the dominant strategy mode for the next decade, inspiring everything from Gears Tactics to Invisible, Inc. Turn-based tactics even began infiltrating other genres. Role-playing games like Wasteland 2 and Baldur's Gate 3 owe as much to XCOM as they do the CRPGs of the '90s. Going forward, the 2010s would see a string of highly successful reboots, including Tomb Raider, Wolfenstein: The New Order and Doom, but none of them were as transformative as Firaxis' tactical masterpiece. Hurry up Commander, we need you back.

Steam Early Access starts (March 2013)

Although Minecraft first seeded the idea of paying for an incomplete game, it was Valve that formalised the concept. In March 2013, 12 games launched as part of Steam's Early Access programme, letting developers sell unfinished titles, using player funds and feedback to complete the project. The list included ArmA 3, Kerbal Space Program, and Prison Architect.

The idea of paying for unfinished games risked further fragmentation of games as a product, a process that had already begun with DLC and microtransactions. There was a fear developers might abuse the system to escape scrutiny, responding to criticism of flawed or poor design with "it's not finished", or simply taking the money and running.

And Steam Early Access has been misused on occasion. But, on the whole, has been a huge net positive for PC gaming. Of the 13 games that originally launched in Steam Early Access, three eventually ceased development, but ten saw full launches, and at least one, Kerbal Space Program, is among the greatest PC games ever made. That's not to mention all the brilliant games to emerge from Early Access since, like Slay the Spire, Vampire Survivors, and of course Baldur's Gate 3.

Rather than representing a threat to how games are made, Early Access acknowledges the highly iterative and collective nature of game development. Whether a game is finished or not comes down to one thing, the developer's choice, and Steam Early Access simply helped expand their options.

Oculus Rift DK1 (March 2013)

You could play a crude VR version of Half-Life 2 on the Oculus Developer's Kit 1. It was grainy, it was disorienting, and it made some feel sick. But the Combine soldiers were actually human-sized, the vertical drops made stomachs lurch, and the headcrabs leaping at your face were terrifying.

In 2013, it felt like virtual reality would take over the world. Physical and economic limitations have prevented a VR revolution, but the tech is nonetheless a well-established part of PC gaming today. If nothing else, VR brought us a whole new Half-Life game, Half-Life: Alyx, every bit as brilliant as the first two.

Head to part 3 for 2014 onwards.

If you haven't heard, PC Gamer turns 30 this month. But it wouldn't be right to celebrate our own anniversary without celebrating 30 years of PC gaming itself too. There's too much history to truly cover it all, so we've decided to focus in on some of the most pivotal moments—the games and software that defined each era, the hardware that let us run it, and the events and moments that made us look at them in new ways. Let's kick it off with the first decade, 1993-2003, and the game that started it all for so many of us...

📜 Part 2: 2004-2013

📜 Part 3: 2014-2023

Doom (December 1993)

Strictly speaking, PC gaming didn’t start with Doom. Spiritually though, it absolutely did. Doom embodies so much of what would define PC gaming across the next three decades. Its cutting-edge tech established the PC’s reputation as a premium gaming platform. Its immersive, satisfying gunplay made first-person shooters the PC’s mascot genre. Its emphasis on violence and horror expanded the medium’s reputation beyond a pastime for children. It even took the first steps toward online multiplayer.

Doom’s influence on PC gaming cannot be overstated. Yet what’s most remarkable about id Software’s landmark shooter is its sheer sticking power. Far from being a fondly remembered relic, Doom is one of the most widely playable games in existence, having been ported not just to every gaming platform, but every piece of technology with a screen. Its engine, made open source in a truly visionary move by John Carmack, birthed the PC’s unique, endlessly creative modding scene. Doom mods are still making waves today. There are even whole new games being made in Doom’s engine, like ambitious shooter Selaco, due out next year. 

While Doom’s cultural omnipresence is remarkable, it can make it easy to lose sight of the game at the centre of it all, which remains a fantastic experience today. Although visually primitive by modern standards, mechanically it retains its delicate balance of weight, flow, and reactivity. Its weapon roster is still the blueprint for most single-player shooters, while its shotgun remains the baseline for all videogame firearms, and its 3D mazes still have much to teach about level design. 

Moreover, for all the games that have imitated it, Doom’s distinctive atmosphere and pacing have proved oddly hard to replicate. Even its own follow-ups fell to either side of the original’s distinctive blend of action and horror. Thirty years on, there is still something elusive at the heart of Doom, which more than anything else is what defines it as a masterwork.

E3 begins (June 1995)

To understand the significance of E3’s arrival, you need to know how games were treated before E3, at other technology trade shows like CES. “In 1991, they put us in a tent,” said Sega America’s then CEO Tom Kalinske, “You had to walk past all the porn vendors to find us. That particular year it was pouring rain, and the rain leaked right over our new Genesis system. I was just furious with the way CES treated the videogame industry, and I felt we were a more important industry than they were giving us credit for.”

The first E3 was born as a response to this kind of treatment, a trade show designed to promote gaming’s growing commercial and cultural significance, rather than obscure it. Held from May 11-13 at the Los Angeles Convention Centre, the first E3 saw exhibitions by the likes of Sega, Nintendo, Sony, Activision, EA, Capcom, Microsoft, and LucasArts. Showcased PC games included Descent, Discworld, Wing Commander 3, and Syndicate Wars.

Although technically a trade show meant for industry professionals, E3’s cultural significance gradually broadened, gaining global public attention after the turn of the millennium. Simple game and console showcases morphed into extravagant stage presentations by big publishers. E3 could even affect how games were made, with huge amounts of developer resources being funnelled into making an E3 demo that would wow people. Having the public’s eyes on E3 was something its organisers were dubious about, and between 2008 and 2010 the show was closed to all but handful of professionals, with attendance dropping by 90 percent. 

While it's been largely dominated by console manufacturers, E3 has witnessed some explosive PC gaming moments, like the positively futuristic demo of Doom 3 in 2002, and the hugely anticipated showing of Half-Life 2 the following year. In 2015, the PC Gaming Show was launched in association with PC Gamer, bringing attention to all the fantastic PC games that don’t have a massive publisher behind them.

In 2020, E3 was cancelled for the first time due to the Covid pandemic, and with the exception of an online event the following year, the show hasn’t returned since. While there have been events in its place like Summer Games Fest, nothing has yet managed to replicate E3’s collective celebration of videogames. We can only hope that it returns someday.

Quake (June 1996)

While there are many shooters like Doom, there’s nothing quite like Quake. With its peculiar mix of gothic fantasy and industrial horror, id Software’s 1996 shooter remains a singular entity in the annals of the FPS. Even its own developer has never revisited the series’ original design, choosing instead to go down a more sci-fi route for the sequel.

Perhaps that’s because Quake was born from id Software’s tensions as much as its talent. With a lengthy (for the time) development cycle, Quake’s creation was plagued by multiple redesigns and personality conflicts, culminating in John Romero’s departure from the company. It’s one of the earliest insights into the mounting pressures upon blockbuster game developers, which would only increase as ambitions, budgets, and development cycles ballooned.

Nonetheless, Quake is still a landmark entry in the gaming canon. Its true 3D graphics engine represented a huge advance over Doom. It was also the first id game to feature mouselook, bringing added responsiveness and verticality to its gunplay. Special mention should be given to Trent Reznor’s buzzing, ominous soundtrack, which remains one of the most distinctive musical scores of any game.

Of course, Quake’s most significant contribution to the PC gaming landscapes was its multiplayer. John Carmack’s revolutionary netcode made Quake playable across dial-up internet connections, paving the way for everything from Counter-Strike to Call of Duty. Its fast-paced, competitive deathmatch also saw the earliest pro gamers rise to prominence, like Dennis 'Thresh' Fong and Stevie 'KillCreek' Case, laying the groundwork for today’s global esports scene

Ultima Online (September 1997)

Ultima Online was to MMOs what Doom was to first-person shooters. It may not be the original massively multiplayer game, but it was the first to demonstrate they could have global appeal. While Ultima takes place in a typical fantasy world, it’s closer in spirit—mechanically speaking—to EVE Online than World of Warcraft, a player-driven sandbox with a dynamic economy and persistent housing for its players. The game was also the scene of gaming’s most famous instance of griefing, when Origin co-founder Richard Garriot’s "Lord British" avatar was assassinated during a beta test. The more things change…

Fallout (October 1997)

When Fallout arrived in late 1997, the CRPG was dead. PC gaming was all about action and attitude in the '90s, and Fallout’s success came from channelling some of that attitude back into the RPG. Its satirical post-apocalypse and snappy branching narrative let players be a badass, a hardass, a dumbass, and every kind of ass in between. Fallout’s isometric perspective and adaptive quest design made it the template for the modern CRPG, and its legacy is still visible in games like Baldur’s Gate 3.

Voodoo2 (March 1998)

The Voodoo Graphics card from 3dfx introduced hardware acceleration in 1997, but it was the Voodoo2 that really showed what GPUs could do. Not only did it boost resolutions from 640x480 to 800x600, but you could pair two of them together to crank that up to 1024x768. The Voodoo2 also supported dual texturing per pixel, which made games like Quake 2 and Unreal look phenomenal. The Voodoo2 represented the most dramatic advancement in computer graphics since the advent of 3D, and catalysed the advancement of computer graphics across the next decade. Sadly, 3dfx wouldn’t survive to see it.

StarCraft (March 1998)

Today StarCraft is best known for two things: its national following in South Korea, and the resulting esports scene. But there’s a reason why StarCraft could capture the hearts of a nation: it’s the RTS honed to perfection. Blizzard took the fundamentals already refined in its WarCraft series, and transposed them into a vibrant sci-fi universe centred around three asymmetric factions. Mastering their particularities is what kept players coming back for the next decade, and what ultimately made StarCraft one of the keystones of the nascent esports scene. Even after the colossal success of StarCraft II, the original remains reasonably popular in its spiritual homeland

Thief: The Dark Project (December 1998)

Looking Glass’ gothic fantasy was a dedicated sneaking simulation. Its lighting system let players disappear into the shadows, while its advanced audio propagation meant every step you took had to be carefully considered. It also features some of the best 3D level design around. Missions like Assassins and The Sword have become key reference points in the level design handbook. Thief’s framework would filter through to pretty much any game where the screen goes slightly darker when you crouch. Yet while countless games include stealth in their toolset, Thief remains the best dedicated stealth adventure in existence

Age of Empires 2: The Age of Kings (September 1999)

Twenty years after its release, Age of Empires 2 is still getting expansions. That’s a testament to how universally beloved the historical RTS is. Age of Kings brought the series from the slightly stuffy classical era into the more popular Middle Ages, adding new features like advanced AI, improved isometric visuals, and the ability to build big-ass castles. In more recent years, Age of Kings has received not one but two overhauls. The HD edition launched in 2013, while a Definitive Edition released in 2019, introducing new playable factions and new campaigns. Few games have stood the test of time this well.

GameMaker releases (November 1999)

In the 1990s, there were two ways into game development. Either you learned to code, or you learned how to mod. Then, in 1999, a Dutch scientist named Mark Overmars released a simple graphics tool called Animo. The tool gathered some attention, and Overmars began adding new features like a particle system and networking. He also changed its name to GameMaker, which in time would become emblematic of the democratisation of game development. Since 2007, GameMaker has been developed by Dundee-based company YoYo Games, and has been used to make games like Hotline Miami, Gunpoint, and Undertale.

Deus Ex (June 2000)

Deus Ex represents the culmination of PC gaming’s innovations throughout the 1990s. Here was a game that gave you the shooting of Doom, the sneaking of Thief, the ability to talk your way around a problem à la Fallout, all in one astonishing package.

It was a long-awaited triumph for the immersive sim, an offshoot of the RPG that emphasised systems-driven worlds designed to facilitate player agency. Immersive sims had been pioneered by Looking Glass Studios throughout the 1990s in games like Ultima Underworld and System Shock. Yet while beloved by those in the know, their commercial success had been negligible.

Deus Ex boasted greater ambition and flexibility than those games, but it also took place in a more relatable world. A near-future cyberpunk dystopia where every conspiracy theory you can imagine was true, Deus Ex’s world was governed by shadowy organisations, fought over by rogue AIs, and ravaged by a pandemic. In an age of online misinformation, its perspective on conspiracy theories can seem a little quaint, but it’s also startlingly relevant in places. It has nuanced discussions about how power structures work, how government can slide into dictatorship, the problems of unregulated technology, the surveillance state, and so much more.

Sadly, Deus Ex’s success didn’t lead to a new golden age of immersive sims. Yet it was influential enough to keep the flame alight, leading to several excellent follow-ups (and Invisible War) while also influencing games like Dishonored and Cyberpunk 2077. But the original remains the genre’s best mix of intricate systems and insightful storytelling.

Windows XP (August 2001)

Microsoft’s Windows OS was transformative for PC gaming, offering a level of stability, compatibility, and accessibility that simply didn’t exist in the era of DOS. Gone were the days of typing text commands to install and boot games, getting it wrong several times, then throwing your keyboard out the window.

Although Windows 95 represents the key turning point from command lines to icons, Windows XP is Microsoft’s crowning achievement in OS design. Its UI replaced the unsightly grey boxes of old with a sleek, colourful, and above all intuitive design. It overhauled the Start menu introduced in Windows 95, adding the two-column layout. It also introduced a bunch of new features like taskbar window grouping and fast user switching.

But what made XP such a triumph was its reliability. At a time when every PC game came with the risk that it might Just Not Work, XP proved remarkably compatible. Even games that were years old by that point, like Quake and Half-Life, would generally run without complaint.

XP was the first truly modern PC OS, and its quality is evident in its longevity. Microsoft continued official support for XP until 2012. By comparison, Windows 95’s support ended just six years after its launch. XP’s reliability helped power Microsoft through the embarrassment that was Vista. Even when the much-improved Windows 7 released, many users stuck with XP until the death.

Battlefield 1942 (September 2002)

The turn of the millennium saw PC gaming ask itself two big questions. The first was “What if you could play multiplayer shooters in teams?” while the second was “What would it be like to fight in the Second World War?”.

Battlefield 1942 answered both these questions simultaneously. In doing so, it spawned one of gaming’s biggest franchises. Battlefield took the renewed interest in WWII spawned by Saving Private Ryan (and in the PC gaming sphere, Medal of Honor: Allied Assault) combined it with the PC’s rapidly advancing multiplayer capabilities that facilitated games like Unreal Tournament, Counter-Strike, and Team Fortress, and then massively blew out the scale.

Not only did it support whopping 64-player battles, but those players could traverse vast, open-ended maps in vehicles like tanks and planes. The result was an unprecedented virtual cauldron for brewing player-driven action. A match of Battlefield was a thousand tales written and told simultaneously by amorphous groups of players. That time you took out a Stuka with an AA gun, or when you coordinated an armoured assault on a control point with your mates, or when you held off the German advance at El Alamein. 

Battlefield has been a staple of PC gaming ever since, and while the quality of the individual games may vary, its core appeal has never diminished. Its influence is also undeniable: games like PUBG and Apex Legends owe an enormous debt to Battlefield’s open-ended multiplayer design, while even Call of Duty has taken a lesson or two from DICE in recent years.

EVE Online (May 2003)

Many games promise freedom, but EVE is one of the few that truly commits to it. Launched as a space MMO with a player-driven economy and an emphasis on PvP combat, what has come to define it are the shenanigans of its player-operated corporations. EVE Online’s virtual history is riddled with ambitious heists, daring assassinations, elaborate spy-games, and enormous space battles. There have even been times when its players have taken the fight directly to the developers. It’s a game built not just for the community, but around it, with developers CCP responding to players’ actions and treating them as part of the design.

Valve releases Steam (September 2003)

Valve's distribution service was never intended to be the gaming bazaar that it is today. It was made to solve a simple problem: how to patch Valve's multiplayer games in the most efficient manner possible.

The earliest version of Steam had no store, no community features, and certainly no trading cards. It was also roundly hated at a time when most homes still lacked internet connections, and was seen as a draconian anti-piracy measure, a threat to the freedom of PC gaming.

Eventually, Steam would completely change how PC games are purchased, owned, played, and even made. All largely because of a certain game that arrived the following year: Half-Life 2.

Call of Duty (October 2003)

Today Call of Duty is known for its world-conquering multiplayer. But in 2003 it was the cinematic campaign everyone was excited about. Hot off the heels of Medal of Honor: Allied Assault and its recreation of Saving Private Ryan’s Omaha Beach landing, designers Jason West and Vince Zampella created a new studio. Call of Duty cast Allied Assault’s filmic eye across three campaigns, fighting through the hedgerows of Normandy as the Americans, assaulting the bridges of Holland as the Brits, and enduring the carnage of Stalingrad as the Soviets. It was a thunderous airstrike of a game, and for better or worse, the FPS hasn’t been the same since.

Head to part 2 for 2004 onwards.

Baldur's Gate is, of course, beholden to an existing universe, one of the most familiar ones, so these mainstays are inevitable. But the world of Toril, where the Forgotten Realms are situated, is one of the least exciting locations in D&D, especially when compared to the wonderful mess of the planes or the void between worlds that plays host to Spelljammer campaigns. Gimme some of that cosmic fantasy.

That said, Larian deserves credit for still embracing the odder side of D&D. The focus on mind flayers and body horror, the introduction of characters like The Dark Urge and, of course, having sex with a druid using the Wild Shape spell ensure that Baldur's Gate 3 stands out. The studio is clearly having a lot of fun within this otherwise conventional setting and trying to push it in unusual directions. But we are still inundated with the overly familiar, where even the most celebrated of fantasy games feel obstinately conservative, ticking off a dizzying array of ancient tropes.

Traditional fantasy isn't inherently shit. I'm always going to be fond of dwarves, and not just because they're frequently presented as Scottish. It's just that so many games, films and books end up retelling the same stories—ones as old as Lord of the Rings, which itself owes a huge debt to folklore. Their impact has been dramatically lessened by oversaturation and an overzealous fixation on racial traits: elves are haughty, dwarves are taciturn and greedy, orcs are bad and dumb. This makes even new tales seem staid and predictable. 

It's one of the reasons I still cling to Morrowind, a land where people live inside carapaces in a volcanic desert, where wizards fall from the sky, and where public transport is dominated by large, adorable bugs. And it's proof that you don't need to toss out every single familiar element just to make a place feel alien. You've still got your prophecies, lots of lots of elves, schools of magic—but it never stops being delightfully weird. Mind you, getting rid of some of those things would still be welcome.

Unfortunately, Bethesda ended up going in the opposite direction. When it followed up Morrowind with Oblivion (a big European forest) and Skyrim (Scandinavia) I didn't suddenly kick the series to the curb, but my enthusiasm for exploring these locations never reached the heights of my journey through their predecessor. I'd seen the light, and generic fantasy ceased to float my boat. 

For those looking for a mix of classic fantasy and lots of novelties, Shadowrun has a lot to offer. This tabletop setting, which has inspired a variety of videogames, including the excellent Shadowrun: Dragonfall and Shadowrun: Hong Kong, splices urban fantasy with elves and orcs. Big corporations run the show, but they exist in a world where magic is very real and where they might be hacked by a cybernetically enhanced dwarf. This combination of cyberpunk and traditional fantasy results in a unique concoction with plenty of surprises bubbling to the surface.

Even more than sci-fi, fantasy allows creators to eschew the rules of reality, where anything can make sense if you give it enough context. But it often feels like developers want to make fantasy settings even more familiar, encapsulated by the trend of tackling issues affecting the real world, like how the plight of Dragon Age's elves mirrors real-world bigotry and colonialism.

Now, fantasy has always had something to say about real issues—like Lord of the Rings' critique of industrialisation—and that shouldn't stop. This kind of grounding can help us more easily make sense of these fictional places. But when it's combined with so many other tropes, it leaves me desperate for some escapism.

Failbetter's Fallen London setting, which spawned Sunless Sea and Sunless Skies, is perhaps my favourite example of a world that strikes the perfect balance between the familiar and the alien. It has all the trappings of Victorian London, but a Victorian London that was dragged beneath the ground by bats, which sits next door to Hell, where devils were once bees. It is, at all times, unhinged and surprising, now boasting multiple games full of indescribable horrors and oddities. And its brand of horror is novel, too, looking beyond the usual sources of inspiration.

At a time when Lovecraft is a touchstone for so many videogames, Failbetter instead looks to writers like China Mieville, whose weird tales are even more bizarre and unsettling, but without the pervasive racism. I was rereading Mieville's Perdido Street Station recently and there's still nothing like it. Instead of elves casting spells, you've got scarab-headed women making art out of fruit and saliva, murderous betentacled moths who can get you high from their excrement and a dog possessed by a sentient hand. With every chapter there's something new to wrap your head around, but rarely does it ever get too baffling.

That, I suspect, is a fear developers have when crafting a setting: "If we go too weird, will players just get confused?" For the likes of BioWare and Bethesda in particular, they're interested in something with a broad appeal. When you enter a world heavily inspired by old fantasy tropes, you immediately understand it. Instead of spending ages swotting up on esoteric lore, you can just start stabbing stuff with your enchanted sword. But I'm convinced developers can have their cake and eat it too.

Just look at the success of Elden Ring, a game where the narrative is anything but explicit and you make friends with a heroic jar full of blood/wine/whatever that is. Now it is baffling, but that didn't stop a vast number of people from becoming absolutely obsessed with it. There's not just space for the weird, there's a hunger for it.

It's not just more oddities that I desperately want, though. It's new experiences. At the very least, it's about time for more fantasy games to leave Europe behind. The well of European folklore has well and truly run dry. That's why I'm excited about The Wagadu Chronicles, an afrofantasy MMO inspired by African mythology. And it's intriguing beyond the setting, promising a world where players are fully in control, even playing the role of NPCs with emergent quests.

The Wagadu Chronicles is not alone in shining a light on the folklore of other places, but this task is mostly left to smaller, independent studios who don't have the budget to spend on huge marketing campaigns and probably won't ever get introduced on stage by the likes of Geoff Keighley. It's not enough that they're getting made; they also need more attention, more influence and the kind of success that will inspire risk-averse, larger studios to follow suit. 

In the meantime, I guess I'll just fire up Morrowind again. 

This mystery sailor remained shipwrecked in my brain, and after years of ignoring him, I finally dedicated myself to unraveling the mystery on a slow afternoon: His name was Johnny Castaway, and he wasn’t actually from a game at all, but instead a screensaver released in 1992 by Sierra On-Line.

Screensavers are nearly forgotten today. Older gamers may fondly remember flying toasters and tangled masses of colorful pipes, but modern displays have no need to prevent burn-in like now-obsolete plasma and CRT monitors. But Johnny Castaway didn’t share much in common with the typical '90s screensaver. 

When it was released in 1992, Johnny Castaway marketed itself as "the world’s first storytelling screensaver" and the description was apt. Stuck on a tiny desert island with a single coconut tree, Johnny was a bearded man in battered shorts and a sea captain's hat. Every time the screensaver would start, you would get a glimpse into Johnny’s ongoing predicament, watching as he climbed his tree for coconuts, tried to start a fire, and failed at fighting off a seagull.

Other screensavers had done something vaguely similar to what Johnny Castaway did, like the ‘Mystery’ module from the After Dark screensaver collection which showed various ‘spooky’ scenes at a haunted house. But no other screensaver came close to the narrative and presentation of Johnny Castaway, which blends smaller randomized scenes with larger story segments and a day/night cycle based on the system clock. Johnny’s stories were amusing and low stakes—falling in love with a mermaid, trying to build a raft, or sleeping through potential rescues—but they made me want to come back.

While I had no control over what Johnny would do, the way the storytelling was slowly fed to me morphed Johnny Castaway into a game in my young mind. I "played" it by finding ways to sneak in to catch what Johnny was up to on my dad’s state of the art Windows 3.1 laptop. I never knew how many scenes there were or what I'd missed, and that uncertainty sparked my imagination 

Johnny Castaway narrowly predated a whole swath of innovation in digital companions. Virtual (or desktop) pets grew to have proper gameplay and encompass a lot more than a lonely shipwrecked guy, with the Petz games releasing in 1995, followed by Tamagotchi becoming a massive fad in 1996 and 1997. The web-based Neopets followed. Quasi-spyware Bonzi Buddy, Clippy the Microsoft Office assistant, and The Sims franchise all have roots in the world of virtual pets. Most of them were far more complex than Sierra's, so why was the simpler Johnny Castaway stuck in my head?

Recommended daily shipwrecks

After finding my white whale, I discovered that Johnny Castaway was still surprisingly popular. I wanted to install this computing relic again to revisit it, but I figured a 16-bit screensaver released in 1992 had about as much chance of running on my modern 64-bit installation of Windows 10 as poor Johnny did of escaping his island. But fans have figured out a workaround, and Johnny Castaway has a preconfigured install that launches it inside DOSBox and lets you select it as a screensaver, even on 64-bit Windows. They rescued Johnny and then dumped him right back on the same island, but stranded in a more modern sea.

Below: Some other virtual pets from the '90s

Johnny Castaway’s producer Jeff Tunnell was asked about the screensaver's longevity in 2022 and posted the Q&A on his website, wherein even he seemed surprised. "I never expected Johnny Castaway to become the underground cult hit that it became," he wrote. "Of course, you always want a product to be successful, and JC was. The only surprise was how long it lasted."

In many ways, Johnny Castaway is a running gag with only one note. He tries to do something—whether fishing or escaping the island—and fails at it. But Johnny Castaway understands the secret to success of a running gag is not in the gag itself, but in the things that support it. 

Gilligan’s Island revolved around the difficulties in being stranded on a tiny island. For three seasons, the cast would try and fail to escape, and the humor was in the increasingly silly ways that their plans would fail and the absurd nature of their existence, right down to the coconut radios. The fact that Johnny never escaped was a core feature of his story, just like Gilligan and crew. 

My glimpses into Johnny’s world were always stolen: A few minutes while my dad played dominoes with his friends or while he went to get the mail. Once I showed it to some friends, and we gathered around the laptop screen, basking in the glow of the 16 standard Windows colors while a weird little digital man angrily stomped on his sand castle.

Johnny Castaway stuck with me because my mind was forced into creativity: I imagined a whole game, a whole world, around my shipwrecked pal. I must not be the only one, because the pioneering desktop companion is still alive, in that 64-bit port of the original screensaver, a disassembled version you can run in your browser, and even his very own Team Fortress 2 spray. Technology may have moved on, but Johnny's always right where he should be: on his island, trying to woo a mermaid onto shore for dinner.

The back cover blurb was no less pessimistic. "There is no time for Peace," it declared. "No respite, No forgiveness. There is only WAR."

Though frequently balanced by a tongue-in-cheek sense of the absurd, the various adaptations of Warhammer 40,000 that followed delighted in its grimness. In the board game Space Hulk, doomed space marines are beamed onto derelict craft in oversized power armor and then hunted by aliens through corridors they can barely turn around in. In the Eisenhorn novels, an Imperial Inquisitor who is so scarred by torture he loses the ability to smile makes compromise after compromise until he's indistinguishable from those he used to hunt. In the miniatures game Necromunda, the underclass at the bottom of the hive city live on food made from the recycled dead. You can practically hear the creators striving to outdo each other.

At their best, videogames have taken the same glee in depicting this baroque world, its cursed inhabitants, and their awful fates. At other times they seem more like the COOL ROBOT meme with power armor on. There are a lot of them; they can't all be winners.

The Criteria

Number of entries: 51. New and moved entries in the latest update are marked with a 💀.

What's included: Every Warhammer 40,000 game on PC, including those in the Horus Heresy setting, which rewinds the clock 10,000 years to depict the downfall of the Imperium and how it got so messed up.

What's not included: Games that were canceled before full release like the MOBA Dark Nexus Arena, which was briefly available in early access. Standalone expansions like Dawn of War: Dark Crusade and Inquisitor – Prophecy are considered as part of the original game, like regular expansions. Games in the Old World and Age of Sigmar settings are in a separate ranking of every Warhammer Fantasy game.

And now: Every Warhammer 40,000 game, ranked from worst to best.

51. Carnage Champions (2016) 

Roadhouse Games 

Carnage Champions was a sidescrolling autorunner, Canabalt with a thunder hammer and a heavy metal soundtrack. At some point the server was taken offline and now this game—this entirely singleplayer game, I should note—no longer runs whether you got the free-to-play mobile version or paid actual money for the now-delisted Steam version. This, obviously, sucks.

50. Kill Team (2014) 

Nomad Games/Sega

No relation to the tabletop game called Kill Team that lets you play 40K on a budget, this is a twin-stick shooter made with repackaged assets courtesy of Relic's far superior games Dawn of War 2 and Space Marine. The co-op is local only, which is a shame, and checkpoints before boss introductions instead of after them are always annoying, but what really sinks it is the camera consistently swinging into the worst positions. You'll be staring at some pipes and a gantry while 15 orks shout the same recycled "Waaagh!" and murder you somewhere in the blackness that's taken over the rest of your screen. 

49. Talisman: The Horus Heresy (2016) 

Nomad Games 

Games Workshop released the first version of Talisman: The Magical Quest Game in 1983. It was a race-to-the-center board game, half of which you spent finding a talisman to let you access the middle of the board, and the other half not letting someone else steal it from you. Even if the other players didn't drag you down, the luck of the cards and dice would. It was fantasy Snakes & Ladders with PvP. 

This videogame reskins it with The Horus Heresy, a prequel setting 10,000 years in 40K's past that's been the basis for a huge amount of novels, some of which are actually quite good. It's an even more desperate and serious version of Warhammer 40,000, completely at odds with a chaotic beer-and-pretzels game about chucking dice and laughing at your latest misfortune. In the original board game players got turned into toads on the regular. In Talisman: The Horus Heresy someone might find a card that gives them +1 to the Resource stat and consider it an exciting turn.

48. Space Hulk: Vengeance of the Blood Angels (1996)

Krisalis/Electronic Arts 

This was the second attempt at adapting the board game Space Hulk, and the worst. It's a first-person shooter where you control a squad, except the first six missions of the campaign don't actually let you. Once you're finally allowed to take command, you lead them by pausing to drop commands on the map, which is less innovative than its 1993 predecessor—which had a realtime/turn-based combo—and less satisfying than having full control over them would be. 

The big problem with Vengeance of the Blood Angels is that it came out when 3D graphics and CD audio were new and experimental and rarely any good. Everything's stuttery and enemies awkwardly pop into rendered CG when they're close enough for a melee animation. The marines are chatty, but their dialogue is stitched together from samples. The way they bark "SAPHON / search this area for / AN ARCHIVED RECORD" and "I haven't found / AN ARCHIVED RECORD" at each other will make you long for their death, especially when BETH-OR! shouts his name with the same cadence every time he's selected. It's entirely charmless, and not worth setting up the virtual machine you'll need to get it running today.

47. Space Wolf (2017) 

HeroCraft PC

40K + XCOM is such an obvious idea the Steam Workshop is full of mods for XCOM 2 that combine the two. Games that attempt the same have been a mixed bag. Space Wolf looks the part, even zooming in on dramatic attacks just like XCOM does, but it doesn't play the part nearly as well. 

The levels are tiny, which makes weapon ranges weird—a boltgun is only able to shoot four squares, and I've done vomits with longer reach than that—and when new enemies spawn they're immediately next to you. Plus, every character has a deck of cards and the only way to attack is to play one of the weapon cards you've randomly drawn. Some of them can be briefly equipped, but most of the time each marine can only shoot a plasma gun when he's drawn the card for it. Then he'll just forget it exists until you draw another plasma gun card. Depending on the luck of the draw, in the meantime he might suddenly have three different heavy weapons, somehow pulling them out of nowhere like the Imperium has started issuing bags of holding as standard. 

46. Storm of Vengeance (2014) 

Eutechnyx 

Storm of Vengeance is a lane defense game, sort of like Plants vs. Zombies only instead of spending sunshine to grow plants you're spending redemption points to make Dark Angels pop out of their drop pods. Actually, what it's more like is Ninja Cats vs Samurai Dogs, an earlier game from Eutechnyx. Storm of Vengeance is that, only with a progression tree so you can unlock frag grenades, a multiplayer mode, and 3D models of orks and space marines where the ninja cats and samurai dogs used to be.

45. Battle Sister (2020–2022)

Pixel Toys
Steam (2022) | Oculus Quest (2020) | Oculus Rift (2021)

The first VR-exclusive 40K game is a disappointment. Impressive as it is to have that sense of presence, whether you're poking around a starship or looking up at a space marine, Battle Sister remains a rudimentary corridor shooter. Plus, the physical controls for everything from throwing grenades to holstering weapons are unreliable, and when that gets you killed in one of the levels with a savepoint on the wrong side of a tutorial or an elevator ride? That's unforgivable.

44. Dawn of War 3 (2017) 

Relic/Sega
Steam

If you like the kind of RTS where you manufacture a huge amount of troops then drag them together in a glorious blob, the first Dawn of War is for you. If you prefer a handful of units and heroes with their own special abilities to carefully manage, that is Dawn of War 2's whole deal. Dawn of War 3 tries to split the difference, and it's an awkward compromise. Elites all have different things they can do and some of your units have an ability or two, but there are long stretches where it feels like you should be using those abilities yet there's nothing for you to do. 

In the story campaign you alternate between marines, orks, and eldar one mission at a time, never playing any one group for long enough to get comfortable with them. Almost every level feels like a reintroduction of abilities and tech it expects you to have forgotten, as if the tutorial never ends. While the first two games are divisive and there are plenty of passionate defenders of each, Dawn of War 3 didn't end up appealing to anyone.

43. Fire Warrior (2003) 

Kuju/Chilled Mouse
GOG

There are surprisingly few 40K games where you get to be the t'au, the mech-loving weebs of the setting. Fire Warrior isn't about mechs, however. It's a corridor shooter ported over from the PlayStation 2, a fine console that didn't have a single decent FPS to its name. (Red Faction fans, you're kidding yourselves.) 

You'll have to turn auto-aim on to fix the busted mouse controls in Fire Warrior, but nothing will fix the boring guns or unreactive enemies. Two things elevate it, however. One is that the first time you have to fight a space marine he seems borderline unstoppable in a way that feels right, and the second is that Tom Baker recorded some glorious narration for the intro.

42. Eisenhorn: Xenos (2016)

Pixel Hero Games 

The Eisenhorn novels are some of the better 40K books, hard-boiled Raymond Chandler detective stories about an inquisitor who finds himself questioning his principles while he hunts heretics and slowly comes to grips with the Inquisition's own corruption. This adaptation of the first book did one thing right by casting Mark Strong as Eisenhorn. He's perfect, but the voice direction is weak overall and every cutscene is full of characters at wildly different levels of intensity.  

Between the story bits is a mish-mash of third-person combat, collectible hunts, hacking minigames, that thing where you spin clues around to examine them—a bundle of features lifted from other games and artlessly glued together to fill the gaps. It feels like the kind of budget movie tie-in game that used to be commonplace, only this time it's a book tie-in.

41. The Horus Heresy: Betrayal at Calth (2020) 

Steel Wool Studios
Steam

There are plenty of turn-based 40K games about squads of space marines jogging from hex to hex, but what makes Betrayal at Calth different is its viewpoint. You command from the perspective of a servo-skull, a camera that swoops around the battlefield and lets you appreciate the architecture of the Horus Heresy era up close. You can even play in VR.

It's a cool idea. Unfortunately, you can tell where the money ran out. A limited number of unit barks repeat (often coming from a different direction to the unit that is actually acting), some weapons have animations while others don't, and the mission objectives occasionally leave out details you need to know. It started in early access and clearly didn't earn enough money to stay there until it was done. It's out now with a version number on it, but it doesn't feel finished.

40. Warhammer Combat Cards (2021) 

Well Played Games/The Phoenix Lighthouse
Steam | Microsoft Store

In 1998 Games Workshop released collectible cards with photos of Warhammer miniatures accompanied by stats so you could play a rudimentary Top Trumps kind of game with them. It went through several iterations, and the 2017 version became a free-to-play videogame with painted 40K miniatures on the cards.

Don't expect Magic: The Gathering. You build a deck of one warlord and a bundle of bodyguards, keeping three of them in play at any time, replacing bodyguards as they die. Each turn you choose whether to make a ranged, melee, or psychic attack and the relevant numbers get added up and damage exchanged. Tactical choice comes via buffs to whichever attacks you don't choose that turn, and deciding when to play your warlord (a powerful card whose death means you lose).

Oddly, the only PvP is within your clan and mostly you play against AI that uses other players' decks. Not that Warhammer Combat Cards tells you this, or much of anything else. Good luck trying to join a clan even after you've leveled-up the appropriate amount, thanks to a designed-for-mobile interface.

39. Inquisitor – Martyr (2018) 

NeocoreGames
Steam

Inquisitor – Martyr is being pulled in multiple directions at once. It's a game about being an Inquisitor, investigating the mysteries of the Caligari Sector, chief among them a ghost ship called the Martyr. It's also an action RPG, which means if it goes for more than five minutes without a fight something's wrong, and among the most important qualities your heretic-hunting space detective genius possesses are their bonus to crit damage and the quality of their loot.

The action RPG part is OK, Diablo with guns, but it doesn't mesh with the rest. Why would an Inquisitor spend so much time crafting new gear? Why do I need to collect all these different-colored shards? Every game wants me to collect shards of something and I'm just so tired.

38. Adeptus Titanicus: Dominus (2021) 

Membraine Studios

Scale is important in a setting where billions die and nobody blinks. Mechs can't just be mechs in 40K. They're titans, god-machines up to 100-feet tall that stomp through fancy gothic megacathedrals without slowing down.

Adeptus Titanicus: Dominus pits maniples of titans belonging to the Imperium and Chaos against each other in turn-based combat. You order a titan to move and a hologram appears at its end position; you choose who it's going to target and color-coded projections show which weapons will be in range. You commit and the titan spends 10 seconds stomping to its endpoint, firing continuously the entire time—just spaffing out barrages of missiles and lasers while walking through buildings.

You get a lot of odd-looking turns where most of the shooting is aimed at impenetrable rocks that happen to be between titans, which isn't helped by the AI's tendency to shoot when it has no chance of hitting, or the cinematic camera's tendency to clip inside mountains. Another oddity: you don't plot out moves but simply pick where to finish. Sometimes you'll select a position within the movement radius and the hologram will instead appear on the opposite side of where you started because apparently you need to go the long way round and don't have enough movement after all.

That's all a bit of a downer. So is the way some missions give you a fresh maniple, but partway through the campaign suddenly half the missions have to be completed with the titans that survived the previous one, a fact Dominus doesn't bother to tell you.

37. Chaos Gate (1998) 

Random Games/SSI
GOG

A squad tactics game reminiscent of Jagged Alliance or X-COM, but with less of a strategy layer. If the specific flavor of original X-COM is more to your liking than modern, hyphen-less XCOM, Chaos Gate may be your thing, but it does lack enemy variety. You're up against the forces of Chaos, which means Chaos Cultists, Traitor Marines, and half-a-dozen varieties of daemon. Meanwhile you're in charge of the Ultramarines, and while you can rename your troops and assign a limited number of heavy weapons per squad, after a while every battle feels the same. They drag on too, thanks to the Traitor Marines who litter most maps being able to survive multiple krak grenades and heavy bolter rounds. 

36. Sanctus Reach (2017) 

Straylight Entertainment/Slitherine
Steam | GOG

The classic hex-and-counter wargame Panzer General has inspired a lot of 40K games, and Sanctus Reach, which pits Space Wolves against orks, is certainly one of them. It's not bad, but it is basic. The objectives are often just capturing or defending victory points and only after three levels of those will you get something different like an escort mission, the story's a paragraph of text between maps, there's no strategy layer, and everything on the presentation side, from unit types to animation to level furniture, feels like the absolute minimum, where 40K should be all about maximalism. Other games do this identical thing better. 

35. Space Hulk: Deathwing (2016)

Streum On Studio/Focus Home Interactive
Steam | GOG | Microsoft Store

A multiplayer co-op FPS, Deathwing is Left 4 Dead with genestealers. Although it launched in a terribly buggy and unoptimized state, an enhanced edition rerelease fixed some of its worst problems. Now it's a competent claustrophobic multiplayer game where you can dress up your terminators real fancy. As a singleplayer experience it's let down by daft AI, and even with friends you'll have to overlook whiffy melee weapons and shooting that feels more like you're turning on a hose than opening up with a mark-two storm bolter.

34. Space Crusade (1992)

Gremlin Interactive 

Milton Bradley's follow-up to HeroQuest was a version of Warhammer 40,000 for ages 10 to adult, and Gremlin Interactive were once again responsible for the videogame. Like Gremlin's HeroQuest, it's a pretty direct replication—although for some reason the genestealers have been replaced by different aliens called "soulsuckers."

It's quite slow-paced and you have to choose between music or cheerfully rinky-dink sound effects because it can't do both at once, and of course it's lacking the board game's slick miniatures and card art. Nostalgia's a powerful thing though, and I adore these goofy pixel space marines.

💀33. Warpforge (2024)

Everguild
Steam

Now that Magic: The Gathering is doing crossovers, including one with Warhammer 40,000, it feels more redundant than ever for every media property to have its own Magic imitator. Warpforge is actually 40K's second following Horus Heresy: Legions, and comes from the same developer. The differences between the two are typically slight. In Warpforge each unit has a separate rating for ranged and melee attacks, there are some new keywords, and some of the effects work slightly differently. The campaigns are also different. Where Horus Heresy: Legions has narratives with rewarding snippets of story, what Warpforge calls campaigns are just a separate battle pass track for each faction.

32. Space Hulk (2013)

Full Control 

This was our first look into the particularly grim darkness of a near future where there are only PC ports of 40K games made for tablets. Space Hulk comes with all the limitations you'd expect from a game designed to run on an iPad Mini. This fine if unambitious version of the board game plays the same limited animations over and over, whether it's sprays of blood that appear sort of around genestealers as they're shot, or three red lines appearing in mid-air to mark a terminator falling to their claws. The way genestealers suddenly transform into a pair of bleeding leg-stumps when hit by an assault cannon is unintentionally hilarious. 

Thanks to some patched-in improvements, like the ability to speed up terminators so your turns don't take forever, this take on Space Hulk ended up OK if all you want is a version of the board game with a singleplayer mode where you're the space marines.

31. Gladius – Relics of War (2018) 

Proxy Studios/Slitherine
Steam | GOG | Epic

Take Civilization 5 (or maybe Warlock: The Exiled, or Age of Wonders), then remove the diplomacy so it's all about war. Add some inspiration from RTS base-building, with separate barracks for infantry and vehicles around your city, then add heroes who level up and gain some quite Warcraft 3-esque abilities on top of that. Gladius is an intriguing Frankenstein of a strategy game.

While it had some problems in its early days, like a saminess to each campaign thanks to the early turns being spent clearing the area around your city of endless bug monsters and dogs (even with the "wildlife" setting lowered), patches and DLC have improved things. Gladius has a lot more variety now, though there are still some annoyances like the way in hotseat games only the last player gets to see the AI's moves.

30. Space Hulk Ascension (2014) 

Full Control 

After the negative response to the PC version of their previous Space Hulk game, Full Control retooled it into Ascension, giving it a welcome visual upgrade and customizable marines. More divisively it plays less like a board game, with reduced randomness, an upgrade system based on experience points, and tweaks to the way weapons work. Storm bolters gain heat when fired and jam when it maxes out, and instead of just filling an entire room or corridor with fire, the flamer has multiple modes of spray. And to make it look less like a board game there's fog of war, rendering the map dark beyond a tiny zone of vision. Some of the changes are fussy and don't add much, but it's a slight improvement overall.

29. Dakka Squadron (2021)

Phosphor Game Studios
Steam | GOG

Not many 40K games focus on playing the aliens, but Dakka Squadron really embraces the idea of letting you be an ork. It's committed to the bit. This is arcade aerial combat if Star Fox was violently Cockney and everything was soundtracked by wailing deedly-deedly guitar and shouts of "Dakka dakka dakka!" 

It's maybe a bit too orky. Multiplayer is orks versus orks, and so is most of the singleplayer, though eventually you get to shoot down some Adeptus Mechanicus craft that look like flying boxes full of lasers, a few of the necrons' tin death croissants, and so on. Mostly though it's endless orks in World War II fighter jets with nose-mounted spikes laughing as they krump each other.

Missions drag on, with wave after wave of enemies and the same combat barks as you shoot them down, but fortunately a three-lives system was patched in so you don't have to re-do an entire mission because you got krumped at the end. I did have to turn down the guitars, though.

28. Shootas, Blood & Teef (2022)

Rogueside
Steam | GOG | Epic 

On the subject of orky games for orks, here's a sidescrolling action-platformer that's kind of like a high-speed, green Commander Keen, or maybe Metal Slug with squigs. These toothy fungal creatures are relatives of the orks, but also have a symbiotic relationship where they serve as pets, mounts, and tools for their green cousins. In Shootas, Blood & Teef the grenades you throw are squigs with dynamite strapped to their head like a barrister's wig, the mines are squigs bred to eat explosives until they're so full they can't walk, the health packs are edible squigs wearing surgical head mirrors, and your entire motivation for going to war is the fact someone stole the fuzzy squig you were wearing as a wig.

As you'd expect from all that nonsense, Shootas, Blood & Teef understands what orks are about. That means a hard-rock soundtrack and characters who use the word "WAAAAGH" like it's punctuation. It doesn't outstay its welcome, with a campaign that pits you against orks, the Imperium, and genestealers yet can be finished in under four hours. To extend things there's a co-op mode for four players and a cosmetics shop full of silly hats you can buy with its currency of "teef", but the brevity feels pretty apt. It's best as a goofy one-off, not a game you need to turn into a lifestyle.

Though it was a bit crashy at launch, a couple of patches have made Shootas, Blood & Teef more stable.

27. The Horus Heresy: Legions (2019) 

Everguild Ltd.
Steam

We're in the Horus Heresy era again, only this time via a free-to-play collectible card game. Though Legions plays a lot like them it's not as flashy as big names in the genre like Magic: The Gathering Arena, with the card art quality being all over the place. But if you've got the time or money it's a solid enough example of the form, and if you've read the books and the phrase "the Fall of Isstvan III" makes you feel like a 19th century French campaigner hearing the word "Waterloo," then there's a stirring singleplayer campaign that will let you experience that in card game form.

26. Freeblade (2017) 

Pixel Toys
Microsoft Store

I went into this with low expectations. A free-to-play adaptation of a mobile game, complete with loot boxes and multiple currencies and all that jazz? Freeblade scores points for letting you play an Imperial Knight, however, a mech that's bigger than a house, and letting you color and customize your walker like you're choosing paints and decals for a miniature. It's a simple rail shooter, basically a version of Time Crisis where you're the size of Godzilla, and better than I thought it would be.

25. Aeronautica Imperialis: Flight Command (2020) 

Binary Planets/Green Man Gaming Publishing
Steam

Flight Command is an aerial-combat simulator where you program your planes with maneuvers and then watch 10 seconds of dogfighting play out in real-time. It's somewhere between Sid Meier's Ace Combat and the simultaneous turns of Frozen Synapse. Those 10 seconds contain a bewildering amount of stuff, as one plane powerdives to avoid an attack from behind, another explodes, and one of your pilots pulls off a high-G turn then blacks out. Switching to theater mode, which lets you see all this at once rather than following each pilot in turn, makes it easier. That said, I could do with a simple way to scrub the timeline back and forth.

Planes can switch loadouts if you remove the default missiles, and pilots might gain skills if they shoot down enough enemies, but one fighter is much like another. When your ace pilots in Aeronautica Imperialis: Flight Command kick the bucket, shot down by ork fighters in rustbucket planes made out of scrap in a cave, a commander slides onto the between-mission screen. "Your pilot numbers are depleted," she says, "You may call on reserves." There's no judgment in this because every randomly generated pilot is entirely disposable. Even top guns are replaceable in 40K.

24. Legacy of Dorn: Herald of Oblivion (2015) 

Tin Man Games

Games Workshop published several pick-a-path gamebooks under the Path to Victory label, and this one was turned into a visual novel. If you ever read the kind of Fighting Fantasy/Lone Wolf/choose-your-own-adventure books that declared, "YOU can be the hero," that's what this is, only YOU are a lone space marine cut off from your squad on a space hulk, striving to find your battle-brothers.

Legacy of Dorn really gets across the oddness of a ship made out of the fused remains of multiple wrecks, and as you explore each section feels distinct, whether fungal and orkoid or sanctified by the Sisters of Battle. The turn-based combat is nothing to write home about, but the difficulty options include the ability to skip the boring fights and cheat as if you're leaving your fingers in the pages, as is only right.  

It's worth noting the mouse cursor vanishes if you play on higher resolutions.

23. Regicide (2015) 

Hammerfall

Chess, but make it 40K. That's Regicide, which you can play in classic mode using the boring rules of real Chess, or in Regicide mode, which adds an initiative phase after every turn where pawns shoot boltguns and queens launch psychic lightning. While taking a piece the usual way is an instakill, complete with gorey duels reminiscent of Battle Chess, attacks in the initiative phase chip away at the hit points of your target. At first it feels like regular Chess, but focus fire and combine the right abilities and you'll soon remove a bishop from across the board. It feels like cheating in the best way, like you have outsmarted the centuries-old game of Chess itself.

There's a story mode, but some of its puzzle matches can grind to annoying stalemate halts. Stick to skirmish play and Regicide does a better job with its ridiculous concept than you might think.

22. Eternal Crusade (2017) 

Behaviour Interactive Inc.

Initially billed as a Planetside-esque MMO with a persistent world for players to fight over, Eternal Crusade was scaled down in development. What eventually released was a lobby shooter that took the multiplayer combat from Relic's Space Marine and added vehicles, eldar and orks, as well as a co-operative PvE mode where four players take on tyranids. 

Players who'd bought in early were disappointed at the reduction, but here's the thing: Relic's Space Marine was great, and so was its multiplayer. Building on that with missions where you might be defending a fortress while other players tried to smash through its gate in Predator tanks, or hovering over victory points as an eldar swooping hawk made for some thrilling battles. Hardly anybody gave it a chance though, and even after being rereleased for free it was still almost empty. Finally, the servers were shut down. Here's hoping its handful of fans figure out a way to revive it, because Eternal Crusade is better than its reputation.

21. Deathwatch – Enhanced Edition (2015) 

Rodeo Games
Steam

The Deathwatch are elite alien-busting marines who draw their recruits from other chapters, and this turn-based tactics game gives you command of a squad of them. You can have a Space Wolf and a Blood Angel and an Ultramarine, all hunting tyranids side by side. 

Deathwatch was another game originally made for tablets, which you can tell by the way your new wargear and marines arrived in random packs with lootbox sparkle, even though they're earned through play rather than microtransactions. This Enhanced Edition for PC remastered the original graphics and gave it a mouse-and-keyboard UI, though it could have done with tooltips for the many buff icons each marine ended up with. For a budget version of a Firaxis-style XCOM with space marines, it's decent.

20. Necromunda: Underhive Wars (2020) 

Rogue Factor/Focus Home Interactive
Steam | Microsoft Store

Hive cities cram billions of people into illustrations of the class system someone drew winged skulls on. At the bottom of the hive, gangs who work for mid-level Houses fight over scavenger rights and who has the coolest mohawk. 

Underhive Wars is another turn-based tactics game that isn't content to copy XCOM and instead has to go and mess with success. Every map's covered in ziplines and elevators, and gangers have enough movement to whip up and down them. Seen in over-the-shoulder third-person, the AI's moves are often baffling. Gangers run past enemies they could attack, deploy buffs for opaque reasons, pick up mission objectives then end their turn exposed, sometimes just jogging on the spot for a bit.

And yet, if you ditch the story campaign after the intro missions and get stuck into the procedurally generated Operations mode, there's a fun game here. Though each gang has access to the same classes, gear, and only slightly different skills, over the course of an endless war of territorial pissing they come to feel like your own. Customization makes your leather-fetish wrestlers or leopard-print amazons look rad as hell, and successive injuries, bionic implants, and limb replacements turn them into individuals with stories.

19. Rogue Trader (2023)

Owlcat
Steam | GOG | Epic 

It's not uncommon for big RPGs to have an identity crisis. When games cater for any kind of character their players might cook up, they can end up feeling like they have something for everyone but nothing at their center, no unifying idea you can point at and say, "This is what it's about." Rogue Trader is one of the strongest examples of this phenomenon I've ever seen.

On a systems level, the messiness works in its favor. It's simultaneously a management sim about being an imperialist colony master, a text adventure about exploring haunted space like a version of Star Trek where every episode is "the weird one", and a ludicrously overcomplicated tactics game where every unit has dozens of miniscule buffs and debuffs to stack. Against the odds, it pulls off two-thirds of what it's trying to do mechanically.

Narratively, not so much. On this level, Rogue Trader tries to be a mystery about the betrayal of your boss, a morality play about The Inquisition, and a gladiator movie for people who are into leather. None of these elements gets satisfyingly resolved. The mystery is tied up in a throwaway conversation in chapter three then forgotten, and the final chapter feels like it comes out of nowhere, building as it does on side-content foreshadowing you may not have even seen. Though there are plenty of individual parts to enjoy—especially the deep dives into 40K lore—the whole struggles to cohere. 

Which isn't helped by the way Rogue Trader was released in a borderline unfinished state, and even after being patched remains a janky mess.

18. The Horus Heresy: Battle of Tallarn (2017)

HexWar Games 

HexWar Games has its own take on the Panzer General series called Tank Battle, with multiple iterations like Tank Battle: 1944 and Tank Battle: 1945. Battle of Tallarn reskins the WWII game to be about the largest tank confrontation of the Horus Heresy era. It's essentially Tank Battle: 30,000. 

Battle of Tallarn is a particularly rock-paper-scissors wargame, with tanks, infantry, fliers, walkers and titans as counters to each other in specific situations, and terrain that's either damaging, hard-stopping, crossable only by fliers, or cover but only for infantry. Like all the Horus Heresy games and books it demands a dedication to the fictional history of Warhammer 40,000 as passionate as any WWII nut to get the most out of it, but if that's you then you're  probably already familiar with Battle of Tallarn and are humming the bombastic technogoth theme tune right now. 

17. Armageddon (2014) 

Flashback Games/The Lordz Games Studio/Slitherine
Steam | GOG 

Another take on the Panzer General turn-based hexgrid wargame, Armageddon is set on a hive world so polluted it's all fire wastes, lava canyons, and acid rivers, which the armies of the Imperium have to defend from hordes of orks. Each scenario is a puzzle where you'll have to decide whether to split your battlegroups or unite them in a single wedge, lock down the bridges or move into the bombed-out buildings, scout ahead with walkers or fliers, and so on. 

There's DLC for various other conflicts that have played out on the well-named planet Armageddon, but skip the expandalone called Da Orks, which lets you experience the other side of the conflict. Instead of handing you control of a horde it makes you play a balanced force that feels like a green reskin of the humies.

16. Battlefleet Gothic: Armada (2016) 

Tindalos Interactive/Focus Home Interactive
Steam | GOG | Microsoft Store 

The Imperial spacecraft of Warhammer 40,000 are one of its most distinctive elements. Each one looks like someone painted Westminster Abbey black, put a prow on the end, and hooked it off into deep space. Battlefleet Gothic: Armada is an RTS where these stately, miles-long ships swing about on a 2D plane that emulates both a tabletop and the ocean. They do battle like it's the age of sail, complete with broadsides and boarding actions, though troops insert via torpedo rather than swinging over on a rope with knives between their teeth.

The other thing about Battlefleet Gothic: Armada that feels like the age of sail is the time scale. Even with the speed set to its fastest, getting into position at the start of an engagement takes a fair old while. And then by the time the fleets make contact, there's so much micromanagement it can feel overwhelming even slowed down. It's deliberately paced this way, tempting you into mistakes and collisions that will cost you a capital ship with the population of a city inside it.

15. Boltgun (2023)

Auroch Digital/Focus Entertainment
Steam

Though at first glance it looks like a lost 40K Doom WAD, Boltgun is actually a blend of Doom (1993) and Doom (2016). The sprites, health pickups, and color-coded-keycard hunts are 1990s throwbacks, but those ingredients are mixed in a cocktail that's not as old fashioned as, say, an Old Fashioned.

The purge sections, where waves of cultists and plague toads with too much health teleport into an arena while you run ammo loops, are a modern touch, as are the chainsword dash and grenades being bound to their own keys. So are the thankfully rare first-person platforming challenges where sliding walls threaten to push you to your death, and the more annoying lack of a map.

My first hours with Boltgun were a blast. You feel like you've got a stompy heft despite being able to zip about like a greyhound on skates (I recommend toggling autorun in the settings), and the way it represents Chaos as both psychedelic oil-slick intrusions from an alien paradigm beyond understanding and gross little Nurglings who wiggle their butts at you is perfect. 

There's a deep understanding of Warhammer's appeal in details like the armor score being labeled "contempt", the way each Pink Horror splits into two Blue Horrors when killed, the inquisitor being voiced by Rachel Atkins (who voiced Cassia in Space Marine's audio logs), and the protagonist voiced by Ultramarines fanboy Rahul Kohli (you can press T to hear him taunt at any time). Even the menu music is a deep cut: it's D-Rok's album Oblivion, released on Games Workshop's short-lived heavy metal label in 1991. 

It's just a shame the amount of meandering through visually indistinct factories and brown rockscapes looking for keys, and then the locked door you couldn't open the first time you went past, detracts from those joys. The most 1990s thing about Boltgun is that it suffers from the Sonic the Hedgehog problem: it makes going fast super fun, then puts you in levels full of secrets and backtracking that demand you slow down.

💀14. Space Marine 2 (2024)

Saber Interactive/Focus Entertainment
Steam | Epic

The first Space Marine was a great singleplayer action game with a surprisingly decent tacked-on competitive multiplayer mode. It's an odd decision then to make the sequel first and foremost a co-op shooter, with the option to play solo feeling like the thing that's been tacked-on. From the moment the prologue ends you're saddled with two AI partners and your objectives are straight out of the co-op playbook. Prevent enemies from damaging structures while being attacked; hold down a button to activate a machine while being attacked; defend a square patch of ground while being attacked.

As an evocation of the setting Space Marine 2 is impressive. Grotesque cherubs flit around voidship interiors, rubric marines' armor clatters apart to reveal it was full of dust, and the climactic scene where you get to recreate the cover art of the wargame's first edition is a real fuck yeah moment. It's just a shame that if you try to play it by yourself it feels like the game's sneering at you the whole time for engaging with it in johnny got-no-friends mode. You don't even get to take down the tyranid hive tyrant threatening the Imperium personally unless you do the relevant operations mode co-op side mission, because the intended experience isn't the story — it's leveling up your wargear in endless co-op missions while unlocking shinier cosmetics for your shoulderpads.

13. Chaos Gate: Daemonhunters (2022)

Complex Games/Frontier Foundry
Steam | Epic

If the original Chaos Gate was 1994's X-COM with space marines, then Chaos Gate: Daemonhunters is 2016's XCOM 2 with space marines. It's not not shy about it either. As the days tick by on the map, one of your advisors (a tech-priest) builds things, and the other (an inquisitor) researches stuff. Three missions pop up and you choose the one with a reward you like (usually more servitors, who go missing like the tech-priest eats them or something), then your ship flies over to it. There's overwatch, half-cover and full-cover, enemies who activate in clusters, and a guy who shows up once a month to tell you how much you suck.

Where it differs is that your troops are Grey Knights, elite psychic powerhouses with better gear than God. They have powers that enhance attacks, boost armor, give each other extra action points, and let them teleport. Plus, they never miss. Daemonhunters ditches hit percentages, though it doesn't embrace determinism completely. It just hides the dice in other areas, like randomized crits, chances to trigger conditions, and requisition rewards. I played all the way to the last mission without seeing a paladin-class Grey Knight but wow did I get offered a lot of apothecaries.

Like Gears Tactics, Daemonhunters wants you to play boldly. Overwatch is garbage, even the weakest cult trooper can survive multiple storm bolter rounds, and I only bothered with incinerators after lucking out in the requisition lottery and finding an amazing one. Since the warp surge meter ticks up every turn, eventually setting off random debuffs and hazards, you want to be inserting blades into bad people fast. Stun an enemy and you can execute them, which gives your whole squad a bonus action point. Chain those together and you're laughing.

The run-teleport-stab speediness seems at odds with how long the levels get. That's one place where it resembles the original Chaos Gate—the mission types get samey and drag on a bit. Daemonhunters is no XCOM 2, but it's not bad either.

12. Necromunda: Hired Gun (2021)

Streum On Studio/Focus Home Interactive
Steam | GOG | Epic

A singleplayer FPS that's part looter-shooter, meaning you'll find a bolter and five minutes later swap it for a lasrifle because it's a higher rarity tier. Hired Gun is also a movement-shooter, with wall-running, dashing, sliding, a grapnel, and augmetics that let you double-jump, slow down time, and more. Even your dog has an upgrade tree. Each fight's a high-speed zip around a huge environment. 

That said, the animations frequently look garbage and there's a nonsense story that expects you to have read all the Kal Jerico comics (I have), and cared about them (I didn't). Side missions, which increase your rep with factions including genestealers and Chaos cults, are separated by difficulty grade—but some are always hard and others, where you can ignore the endlessly spawning enemies to zipline around completing objectives, are always easy. 

And yet, it's really fun? The combat's hectic, and you end up with so many abilities it's like Borderlands only you're every class at once. Each level is a perfect evocation of the setting, whether corpse-grinding factory or maglev megatrain, with dead-ass servitors controlling doors, cargo ships, and even the bounty board. One of the villains looks like Marie Antoinette gone Mad Max. If you like 40K enough to read this list, you'll probably like Hired Gun.

11. Rites of War (1999) 

DreamForge/SSI
GOG

There are other Panzer General-alikes with 40K trappings, but Rites of War one was straight-up made in the Panzer General 2 engine. It's got the tactical depth you want thanks to a collection of pixel units who all work slightly differently, with every turn a stream-of-consciousness where you're thinking things like, "If I attack this guy the heavy weapons will be able to support, but the jetbikes are in cover so they can make a pop-up attack, but then there's a unit who can attack and fall back in the same turn..."

The campaign lets you play as the eldar, colorful but stone-faced murder elves with psychic powers and a weapon that unspools a long monofilament wire inside your poor enemy's body to reduce their organs to soup. They can summon an incarnation of their war god inside a shell of superheated iron, and they charge into battle wearing harlequin pants. It's a crime more 40K games aren't about them instead of the same four chapters of space marines every time.

10. Battlesector (2021)

Black Lab Games/Slitherine
Steam | GOG | Epic

When I wrote about Sanctus Reach, I said other games do what it does better. That was before Battlesector came out, but it's a perfect example of what I meant. It's the same kind of mid-sized turn-based tactics game where you control squads and vehicles rather than a handful of individuals or massive armies, but what Battlesector gets right is that it gives troops personality. 

That's thanks to a momentum system that rewards you for playing to type, with bloodthirsty Blood Angels scoring points for killing enemies close enough to see the whites of their eyes, the swarming tyranids for staying within range of a hive leader, and the sadomasochistic Sisters of Battle for taking damage as well as dealing it. 

DLC has added necron and ork factions and expanded the Sisters of Battle from a handful of allies to a fully playable army of their own, while a free update patched in a horde mode against daemons. It would be even better with some kind of veterancy system for squads rather than just HQ units, but Battlesector really is a cut above.

9. Space Hulk (1993) 

Electronic Arts 

The first of many attempts to turn the Space Hulk board game into a videogame remains one of the best. An innovative freeze-time mechanic lets you transition into turn-based mode where you can move your five space marine terminators around like you're playing on a tabletop—but gives you a timer. When it runs out, you have to play in real-time, bouncing between their first-person perspectives and the map to keep your squad alive while genestealers boil out of the walls. Manage that for long enough and you earn more freeze-time. The relief of switching back is intense. 

The other thing it gets right is the atmosphere. Spinning wall fans chunk away, unknowable alien sounds echo down the corridors, and somewhere in the distance there's always a scream. When marines die their screen goes to static, fuzzing out one by one. Plenty of videogames have been inspired by Aliens, but few of them do the panicky "game over, man, game over" moment as well as this. It's brutally difficult, but that's because it's not really a strategy game—it's horror.

(You'll need DOSBox to play Space Hulk today and it doesn't like version 0.74 for some reason, so download DOSBox-0.73 instead.)

8. Battlefleet Gothic: Armada 2 (2019) 

Tindalos Interactive/Focus Home Interactive
Steam | GOG | Microsoft Store 

In the 40K universe faster-than-light travel is made possible by briefly hopping over to a universe next door called Warpspace where distances are contracted and time gets squiggly. The downside to Warpspace is that it's inhabited by the Ruinous Powers of Chaos, gods who represent and are fueled by the dark urges of mortals. Chaos wants to spill out of the Warp into realspace, and when they do you get places like the Eye of Terror, a hellish overlap at the edge of the galaxy. Near its edge is the Imperial world Cadia, a bastion that stood firm against multiple excursions led by the forces of Chaos—until the 13th Black Crusade, when Abaddon the Despoiler crashed a gigantic alien starfortress into it.

This happens several minutes into Battlefleet Gothic: Armada 2 while you're playing the prologue. It's a hell of a spectacle. This sequel improves various small things about the spacefleet RTS game, adds campaigns from the perspective of the insectile tyranids and Egyptian robot necrons, and leaves its core of 2D sailing ship combat intact. The one big thing it changes is that sense of spectacle, understanding what we want to see is entire worlds falling and a galaxy in flames.

7. Darktide (2022)

Fatshark
Steam | Windows Store

The Vermintide games have top-tier first-person melee, something a lot of games don't do well. Darktide takes that and adds top-tier shooting, with ripper guns that rip and tear, bolters that kick like an Olympic mule, and, in the Kantrael MGXII Infantry Lasgun, a lasrifle that that will put paid to all those jokes about them being glorified flashlights.

That combat is showcased in a game so 40K it shits grox. The hive city manages to be both cramped and too big to comprehend, the ogryns are loveable lummoxes, the music's an ominous chugalug, and even the drink bottles have purity seals like they've been inspected for freshness by the Adeptus Sanitatus. It's just a shame that Darktide's held back by its status as a live-service game.

After an immersive prologue in which your carefully designed haggard nobody makes it out of jail only to end up recruited as the lowliest las-catcher in the Inquisition, the story drops away almost completely. Instead, as you complete mission after mission, all you get are cutscenes where other members of the Inquisitorial crew tell you you're not good enough to be worth trusting, then send you off to level up your trust rank some more. It feels placeholder, like a stop-gap left by the need for future updates to seem significant. It's a good thing that actually playing those missions is an absolute blast.

6. Dawn of War 2 (2009) 

Relic Entertainment/THQ/Sega
Steam

Where the first Dawn of War is about masses of tanks and a screen full of lasers, Dawn of War 2 gives you just four badasses, maybe eight replaceable squadmates, and a bunch of special abilities. It's not about researching at your base until you've put together an unstoppable force—most missions begin with you falling out of the sky, sometimes squashing a few enemies, and then it's on. A typical battle involves parking the heavy weapons and sniper in cover, charging in with your commander, then telling the assault squad to jump-pack over the top. After that it's a matter of setting off abilities as they come off cool-down.

The boss fights can be chores, but maps where you're on the defensive, outnumbered by hordes of tyranids or whatever, are excellent—both in singleplayer and the Last Stand, a three-player mode with waves of enemies and unlockable wargear. In a fair and just universe the Last Stand was more popular than Defense of the Ancients and inspired a whole genre and MOBAs don't suck. 

The Top 5

5. Final Liberation: Epic 40,000 (1997) 

Holistic Design/SSI
GOG

"Epic" is right. Final Liberation is a strategy game that gets the scale of conflict in the 41st millennium spot on, with a mixed force of Imperial Guard and Ultramarines having to not only pool their forces, but then unearth an entire lost legion of titans to repel an ork invasion on a planetary scale. The orks are faster and brutishly hard to put down in hand-to-hand, but you have artillery on your side and, as the Tyrant of Badab said, "Big guns never tire." 

Every turn is a cautious advance, trying to keep the speed freeks away from your bombards while you flatten buildings with thudd guns just in case orks are about to pop out of them, and doing everything you can to stay the hell away from the gut buster mega-cannon obscenely jutting out of the gargant's undercarriage. 

The peak of 40K games in the 1990s, Final Liberation has two extremely 1990s things about it. The first is its heavy metal soundtrack, and the second its FMV cutscenes. Both are cheesy in exactly the right way, clearly being taken seriously by people unconcerned with the ridiculousness of what they're doing. 

4. Space Hulk Tactics (2018) 

Cyanide Studio | Focus Home Interactive
Steam | Microsoft Store

Criminally underrated because it came out after a string of middling games with the words Space Hulk in their names, Tactics is the best of them. It's an adaptation of the board game that understands what makes it fun—the asymmetry of five clunky walking tanks pitted against limitless numbers of speedy melee monsters—and also understands that it's even more fun if you can play either. Tactics has an entire genestealer campaign, and finally getting to be the aliens is a blast. It doesn't skimp on the marine side either, and the AI plays genestealers like a tabletop player would, lurking around corners until enough gribblies have gathered to charge an overwatching marine en masse, knowing his bolter's going to jam eventually.

Where Space Hulk Tactics makes additions to the board game's rules, like cards that give single-use bonuses, and a maze-like map of the hulk to explore, they're well-balanced and complement the base. In fact, they feel like they could be from one of Games Workshop's own expansions to the original. While you can control from first-person for that 1993 Space Hulk experience, played in isometric view this is finally the XCOM-but-with-space-marines everyone wanted.

3. Space Marine (2011) 

Relic/THQ/Sega
Steam

During the dark heyday of the third-person cover shooter, Space Marine was a revelation. Why would an armored superhuman need to crouch behind a waist-high wall? Space Marine isn't having a bar of that. You regain health by killing bad guys up close, charging forward with your chainsword or slamming down out of the sky thanks to the best jetpack ever. Each fight reminds you this is what you're genetically engineered to do, and early on there's a quiet moment where you enter an Imperial Guard base and wounded soldiers several feet shorter than you look up in awe. It nails the fantasy of being a space marine.

Specifically, of being Captain Titus of the Ultramarines (voiced by Mark Strong, a man born 39 millennia too early). The Ultramarines are the chapter of choice for 40K videogames because they stick to the book. They aren't like the Space Wolves with their fangs and Viking schtick, or the Blood Angels and their periodic descent into the Black Rage. You don't have to explain anything extra to an audience who don't know the setting with the Ultramarines. Because they're boring.

Space Marine lets them be boring so Titus has something to rebel against. His brothers follow tactics from ancient tomes. Titus jumps out of a spaceship to fight orks across the deck of a flying pirate ship—and that's the tutorial.

2. Mechanicus (2018) 

Bulwark Studios/Kasedo Games
Steam | GOG | Epic

What Space Marine did for the third-person shooter, Mechanicus does for turn-based squad tactics. Your band of Adeptus Mechanicus tech-priests don't need cover. They've got disposable cannon fodder instead, servitors and skitarii soldiers to soak up the necron lasers. Those predictable enemies will only attack the closest target, and that closest target should be a replaceable cyberzombie rather than one of your leveled-up tech-priests.

The psychologically abnormal scientists of the AdMech see everything as a learning opportunity, and while their subordinates are dying they're off examining the architecture and sending servo-skulls to inspect alien glyphs, all of which gives you cognition points. These can be spent on extra movement or activating special abilities, and when you defeat a necron you get more of them, with a bonus for reaching the corpse within a turn to stand over them creepily watching the light in their artificial eyes go out. For science.

(They're so creepy that Mechanicus's essential expansion, Heretek, makes a villain faction out of their twisted mirror images.)

Spend those cognition points right and you snowball, ending each turn in the right spot to earn more. Your robed worshippers of the Machine God zip around the necron tomb they're investigating with a force axe in one hand and a data tablet in the other, six spare Doctor Octopus cyberlimbs whipping around just for fun. The AdMech normally show up as support in other games, but here they're the stars and everything from the way the mechanics accentuate their oddity, to the droning music, to the mechanical garble that serves as their voices fits them perfectly.

1. Dawn of War (2004) 

Relic Entertainment/THQ
Steam | GOG

Because Dawn of War 2 ditched the base-building, its predecessor has become a standard bearer for fans of build orders who miss that particular flavor of RTS. The thing is, what made Dawn of War's base-building great was how downplayed it was compared to the RTS games that came before it. It's not about carefully managing walls and cranking out more gatherers than the other players so your economy can triumph. There's no gold, no spice, no vespene bloody gas. The main way to gather resources in Dawn of War is to kill for them.

Nodes are spread across the map and you might grab a couple peacefully in those early moments where everyone is scouting and constructing their first power plant, but sooner than you think it's going to kick off. Dawn of War is the RTS accelerated. Instead of marching individual soldiers out of the barracks one at a time and click-dragging them into control groups they come in ready-made squads, and if you want a squad to be bigger you can teleport more troops in while it's in the field. Same for reinforcements. Instead of constantly flicking back to the barracks to replace losses, you just fire up the teleporter and off they go. This squad needs a missile launcher because they saw an armored vehicle over the next hill? Teleporter goes brrr.

Dawn of War is fast enough that you'll soon hit the unit cap and be leading a massive force that includes vehicles and robotic dreadnoughts who pick up individual enemies to fling around. Zoomed-out it's a glorious mess of lasers and explosions, and zoomed-in you'll see sync kills where someone gets pinned to the ground with a spear or has their head lopped off by a daemon. There is Only War and honestly it rules.

The base game's story builds to something unexpected, while the Winter Assault expansion is very much for fans of the Imperial Guard, but where it's really at is the Dark Crusade expansion's campaign mode, which has eight factions fighting over persistent maps where you return to one of your territories under siege and find all the defenses you built last time waiting. If that's not enough, the Soulstorm expansion has received the most love from modders, who have taken away the unit cap and upped the scale even more. It's 40K in its final form, eating worlds and firing missiles from a tank shaped like a church organ.

Warhammer 40,000: What to read next

Playing all of those Warhammer 40K games could keep you busy for 40,000 hours. But if you want to read more about some of our favorites and the 40K universe, here are some more stories.

• The best Warhammer 40,000 novels
• Major events in the Warhammer 40,000 timeline
• Why Necromunda is a big deal
• Dawn of War's modders have turned it into the ultimate 40K game
• Great moments: Going on the defensive in Dawn of War 2
• Great moments: Conquering Kronus in Dawn of War—Dark Crusade
• What's your dream Warhammer 40k game?

But there have always been terrible sex games. My first experience of that came via Sex Games on the Commodore 64. That's literally what it was called: Sex Games. Published by Landisoft in 1985, it was about waggling a joystick back and forth while two bright pink cartoon people went at it like joyless jackhammers. It wasn't a great introduction to the idea sex was a worthwhile subject for videogames.

We've come a long way since then—quiet, you—but there are still plenty of games about sex that are just as bad in their own way. Those that aren't deserve to be celebrated, because sex is as worthy a theme for games to explore as anything else. Sex can be playful and funny and exciting, and those are all things videogames excel at.

Today, Patreon provides funding for a lot of independent developers making ambitious adult games. It encourages a state of perpetual development, influenced by subscriber suggestions. While they may be labeled "in development", they can be just as complete as many other games are at launch, if not more so.

It's worth noting that these are all "sex games" rather than "games that happen to have sex in them", if that distinction makes sense. The Witcher 3 is an RPG dozens of hours long that has some sex scenes in it, but it's not about sex in the same way as NSFWare or Summertime Saga.

The best free sex games

Love Sucks: Night One

Release date: 2021 | Developer: Art Witch Studios | itch.io, Steam

Love Sucks is Buffy if it was about hooking up with vampires and demons instead of slaying them. Actually, that already describes a lot of episodes of Buffy. Still, if you swapped Sunnydale for Crescent Valley, the Hellmouth for leylines, and made it a visual novel, you'd essentially have Love Sucks.

You play the local Xander equivalent—although a future update, which the creators plan to work on after finishing the sequel, will add a Girl Mode so you can play as a woman. Pursued by two lady monsters, all you have to do is live through the night. The story piles on supernatural twists and character comedy setpieces without going overboard—it's anime, but not too anime, if you know what I mean.

Read more: The best visual novels on PC

Sex Advice Succubus

Release date: 2023 | Developer: NomnomNami | itch.io

As wholesome a game about horizontal jogging as you're likely to find, Sex Advice Succubus suggests that demons who feed on sexual energy would actually make natural sex counselors. Succubi and incubi want everyone to be having more and better sex, and one way to facilitate that without having to drain anyone's life is by getting jobs as gurus of groping.

NomnomNami's game presents a single session in which you, a succubus with a frankly ideal work-from-home situation, choose how to advise a ghost who is about to meet her internet girlfriend IRL for the first time. You navigate this by choosing options you think will boost your nervous client’s comfort level, and hope for the best. Sex Advice Succubus is short and sweet, and feels like an ideal format to be expanded in a larger game some day.

Read more: Sex in games has finally become personal

Crush Crush / Blush Blush

Release date: 2016 / 2019 | Developer: Sad Panda | Steam, Nutaku / Steam, Nutaku

Honestly, who could have predicted Farmville-parody Cow Clicker would lead to a future in which there's an entire storefront dominated by incremental games where you click on cartoon boobs? They say idle hands are the devil's playthings, and it seems like idle games belong to the devil too.

Crush Crush and Blush Blush are a cut above the rest. They do contain the standard activity of clicking on anime ladies to make them like you more (or anime men, in Blush Blush), as well as the usual time-management math that buffs your stats and their affection meters. But while these are games about manipulating numbers so you can see more of a hottie, the characters are fun and so is their dialogue. A lost time traveler asks who the current God Emperor is, while a man cursed to be a pegasus decides he's actually better off this way. And of course there's Bearverly, who is a bear.

Read more: There's a sea of hentai junk games on Steam, and then there's Crush Crush

Radiator 2

Release date: 2016 | Developer: Robert Yang | itch.io, Steam

A collection of Robert Yang's minigames, Radiator 2 includes Stick Shift (which is about a dude driving a car he's way into), Succulent (which is about a dude eating a corndog he's way into), and Hurt Me Plenty (which is about spanking). While the third one straight-up simulates a sexual act, the first two are extended, unsubtle double entendres, and both are hilarious. They're interactive music videos in which your mouse-waggling builds the visuals toward an over-the-top crescendo.

Yang's games delight in taking 3D characters who look like they belong in a shooter—his early work included Half-Life 2 mods—then stretching and exaggerating them for effect. They're like sexed-up versions of an0nymoose's Source Filmmaker videos.

There's a bonus in that vein in Radiator 2, an extra game you unlock by clicking the condom on the menu screen. It gives you a sniper rifle that shoots prophylactics and sets you up across the street from a building full of men who need protection. A bizarre parody of modern military shooters follows. Sex can be funny, and Radiator 2 understands that like few other games do.

Read more: This public bathroom sim swaps wangs for guns to make a point about censorship

NSFWare

Release date: 2018 | Developer: Pierrec | itch.io

The WarioWare games are grab bags of Nintendo microgames a few seconds long. You're thrown into them at random, frantically trying to figure out the controls so you can land a hang-glider or saw through a tree or shave a mustache. It's like being trapped in a frantic Japanese game show. NSFWare is that, but with fucking.

Each microgame is a pixel-art trace of a scene from a porno, and you have mere seconds to figure out how to mash the arrow keys to, for example, spank someone in a pillory or successfully jerk off two guys in a fair and even-handed manner. The brightly colored pixel sex is absurd, the hectic microgames are unfair, and the combination makes for a perfect spectator sport. It's Sex Games on the Commodore 64 only fun, and it lets you do what Nintendon't.

You Must Be 18 or Older to Enter

Release date: 2017 | Developer: Seemingly Pointless | itch.io, Steam

Your parents are out, and the dial-up internet is waiting. A screechy modem is the gateway that connects you to AOL and all the slow-loading bitmaps of naked people you could want. You Must Be 18 or Older to Enter reimagines what it was like to be young in the 1990s when the internet was new, confusing, and kind of frightening. Then it casts you as a kid for whom sex is also new, confusing, and kind of frightening.

The pornography is all impressionistic ASCII art, the kind of porn I imagine characters looking at on those retro computers in Fallout. You explore it via increasingly debased categories while under time pressure, because every noise you hear could be your parents in the driveway.

You Must Be 18 or Older to Enter is a singular recreation of a specific moment in time, one that's not so far away from us and yet, with its domains like "fourecks.com" and quaint virus unblocker pop-ups, fascinatingly distant.

Read more: RIP, AIM: Remembering how we used to talk on the internet

Triad

Release date: 2018 | Developer: anna anthropy, Leon Arnott | itch.io

After the threesome an awkward conversation happens. How do three people share a bed when they're just trying to get to sleep? Triad is a puzzle game about arranging people with different sleeping habits on a single mattress, making sure the one who likes to roll around won't slip right onto the floor, and that nobody's face is next to the one who snores.

Then, once you've arranged everybody’s body to your liking, you press the button to send them to sleep and chaos breaks out. This one flips over with their feet on that one's head, the other ends up on the floor no matter how much room you gave them, and finally the cat jumps on someone to make the disorder complete.

Read more: Hypersexed Hypertext: Porpentine and the Twine text game revolution

Trials in Tainted Space

Release date: 2015 | Developer: Fenoxo | Website

Trials in Tainted Space (a name surely chosen for its acronym) gives you a spaceship and worlds to explore, but before it does that it puts you through a rigorous character creation process that includes detailing your genitalia in some quite specific ways. No matter what you choose, you end up playing the version of Captain Kirk who exists more in memes than actual Star Trek—the one who spends all his time banging green alien girls.

It's a text-heavy game, with small character illustrations in the corner of the screen. (In a nice touch, you can choose from several different artist's interpretations for many of the characters.) There's combat, grid maps of planetary locations to explore, and a storyline about racing a rival heir, but mostly there's a lot of sex with a variety of weird aliens. Like, really weird. Everything is somebody's fetish and there's stuff in Trials in Tainted Space will make you say, "Wow, somebody out there wants to fuck that?" The answer is always, "Yes, somebody out there wants to fuck that."

The same creators are also responsible for Corruption of Champions and its sequel, which are the same thing but in a fantasy setting. The Dragon Age to its Mass Effect, if you will.

Read more: Sexuality and gender in science fiction games

The best sex games that cost $$$

A heavily modded Skyrim

Release Date: 2011 | Developer: Bethesda | Steam, Nexus Mods, Lover's Lab

If you've played Arena and Daggerfall you know the earliest Elder Scrolls games had a fair bit of nudity in them. So in a sense mods like Highly Improved Male Body Overhaul (HIMBO), Caliente's Beautiful Bodies Enhancer, and Schlongs of Skyrim are just bringing Skyrim back to its roots. And so too is Maelstrom, an adult quest mod that's mostly a gigantic dungeon that just happens to have some naked monster ladies in it.

The adult Skyrim modding community is vast and mature enough to contain parodies of itself too, like The Erotic Adventures of Misty Skye and Cambria – Unarmed Brawler, versions of the ever-popular "scantily clad lady companion mod" that are written with the tone of a Carry On movie.

Read more: Inside the Skyrim sex modding community where almost no taboo is off limits

Love Sucks: Night Two

Release Date: 2024 | Developer: Art Witch Studios | itch.io, Steam

The Sucks saga continues in this second-date sequel, which challenges you to survive a double date at a carnival. Night Two really plays up the idea that your supernatural ladyfriends, a vampire and a succubus, are struggling to control their desire to kill and consume just as you, an entirely too normal college student, struggle to rein in your brainkilling horniness.

There's a lot of comedy in that contrast, but Night Two also finds fun in those archetypal "win a huge fluffy toy from a carny" scenes. It's less linear than Night One, letting you explore the Witching Woods Carnival at length and find the layer of spookiness behind its superficially normal facade—the bright lights of the midway only accentuate the darkness beyond it. (Darkness in which someone is probably getting it on.)

Read more: Love Sucks: Night Two is a horny game where the real fantasy isn't sex, it's enjoying a carnival without almost immediately getting tired and wanting to go home

Monster Girl Quest!

Release Date: 2011 | Developer: Torotoro Resistance

The "horny on main" era has got to the point where even a mainstream RPG podcast like Worlds Beyond Number will casually descend into a discussion of monsterfucking mid-episode. We've got a couple of things to blame for this phenomenon. One is the fact D&D's creators filled its monster manual with sexy lady monsters like succubi, nymphs, and lamias. The other is Monster Girl Encyclopedia and the videogame inspired by it: Monster Girl Quest!

A visual novel RPG parody, Monster Girl Quest! is set in a world where every single monster seems to have been contributed by a particularly horny game designer, though the goddess Ilias forbids men from having relations with them. When a hero devoted to Ilias sets off to defeat the Monster Lord, he's repeatedly confronted by monsters who don't seem that bad, and places where monsters and humans could get along if only they tried.

Mirror

Release date: 2018 | Developer: Kagami Works | Steam, itch.io

Tile-matching games and porn have been weirdly linked since the arcade release of Puzznic, Taito's 1989 post-Tetris puzzler where you slowly uncovered topless pixelated ladies, but Mirror owes more to Puzzle Quest's innovation of combining Bejeweled with Final Fantasy: Tactics. Lining up three or more symbols is how you power up spells and attacks and potions while engaged in duels with its sexy anime ladies, and, yes, there is a toggle to enable "clothing torns".

The matches aren't always fights, however. Each visual novel storyline introduces a new character, whether rival thief or Queen of pseudo-Egypt, and the matches are conflicts that separate chapters of her story. They might be mental duels between a demon and the nun he's trying to corrupt or playful arguments between a dragon knight and his mount who has been given human form. Some are better-written than others, with the best well aware of their own ludicrousness.

Completing the lot unlocks a challenge mode that's properly tough. It's not the kind of match-3 game where a time limit forces you to play frantically—instead there's a turn limit as well as a countdown showing how many moves before your opponent uses an ability that might chip away at your health, turn gems into beetles, or otherwise mess with the field. It's genuinely one of the better match-3 puzzlers since Bejeweled 3, but if it's the boobs you're here for you'll want the R18 patch (there's a patch for the DLC too).

Read more: Steam now has an endless supply of hentai puzzle games

Memoirs of a Battle Brothel

Release date: 2022 | Developer: A Memory of Eternity | Steam, itch.io

Equal parts Sin City and Shadowrun, Memoirs of a Battle Brothel is an RPG set in a cyberpunk-fantasy city called MoonFall that has lore so deep krakens could be swimming in it. As a facilitator for a branch of the MoonFall Courtesan's Guild, part of your job is managing and upgrading a brothel, but the majority of your job is negotiating with the city's many factions and occasional outbreaks of cosmic horror.

The Courtesan's Guild is a well-regarded diplomatic institution, the one organization that has dealings with every level of society from street gangs to corporations, as well as occult cults and crime syndicates. With your party of well-trained fuckwarriors, you navigate a dangerous political situation where earning the trust of any faction without losing another's is like walking an oiled tightrope.

Read more: I'm glad I looked past the name because Memoirs of a Battle Brothel is exactly what I want in an RPG

Ladykiller in a Bind 

Release date: 2017 | Developer: Love Conquers All Games | Steam

While a lot of saucy visual novels cast their protagonists as arrogant jerks or desperate losers, Ladykiller in a Bind puts you in the role of a suave lesbian womanizer who is confident and cool. Even if inhabiting that character isn't your fantasy, it's a fun space to explore and one that no other game does.

Though there's a complex plot involving a popularity competition worth five million dollars and the reason you’re disguised as a man, what Ladykiller in a Bind is actually about is being stuck on a cruise for a week with a ship full of horny young people. Horny, kinky young people.

While you can spend the days pursuing votes in the popularity competition while dodging suspicion to maintain your cover, you'll also be pursuing sex. No matter what happens during each day, when the sun goes down you choose one of two characters to share a room with—one dominant and the other submissive. Ladykiller in a Bind is an introduction to BDSM, and a great one. If you thought "subspace" was where Optimus Prime keeps his trailer you're gonna learn some stuff.

Read more: Ladykiller in a Bind review

Coming Out on Top 

Release date: 2014 | Developer: Obscurasoft | Website, Steam

Coming Out on Top takes the kind of subplots the gay sidekick gets in a sitcom, then expands them until they become the A-plots. That guy at the bar last night seemed so nice, then you go to college the next morning and your new lecturer is that same guy. DRAMATIC MUSICAL STING. The plots are full of twists, but usually resolved in fairly wholesome ways. There's no problem that can't be solved by three roommates talking about it while throwing around one-liners.

When I was on a date with a pop star who wanted to stay incognito because his fans didn't know he was gay, we went to a country & western bar then did karaoke. It was one of the most romantic things I've seen in any dating sim. Then afterwards we went back to his hotel room and it got real explicit.

I called Coming Out on Top "fairly wholesome" but it does feature actual raunch. It also gets dark and weird sometimes. I don't want to spoil it for you, but the stuff with the goldfish really goes some places.

One Night Stand

Release date: 2016 | Developer: Kinmoku | itch.io, Steam

One Night Stand is a visual novel that shares Ladykiller in a Bind's interest in negotiating what comes after sex. It's the morning after and you're working through the awkwardness of what happens between you and the woman you've woken up beside, walking an interpersonal minefield while hungover and basically at your worst.

Hardcoded

Release date: 2024 | Developer: Ghosthug Games | Steam, Patreon, itch.io (demo)

You're a semi-organic robot on the run in a cyberpunk dystopia who happens to fall in with a friendly group investigating a mystery that might be the fault of an evil corporation's experiments. Where does the sex come in? Well, the mystery being investigated is that everyone in the city has become inexplicably horny.

Each day you choose whether to pursue the main plot or one of your new friends, who are of course romanceable. You can also just wander around the city, busting up surveillance droids for valuable scrap, talking to people, and, yeah, getting down.

Hardcoded is so well-written, and has such a great pixel-art adventure game look that I'd recommend it even if it wasn't about sexbots who've just had their boobs upgraded and would quite like a chance to test them out.

Read more: The best cyberpunk games

The best sex games in development

Summertime Saga

Release date: 2015 | Developer: Kompas Productions | Patreon, itch.io

Summertime Saga takes the traditional dating sim and rethemes it as an American teen movie: Fast Times at Tokimeki High. As a young man in his final year of high school, you decide how to budget your time between study so you don't flunk any of your classes, hobbies that raise your stats, part-time jobs that fund your social life, and, of course, dating. You’ll have to take someone to prom, after all.

It wouldn't be a teen movie without complications, and Summertime Saga has plenty of those, from the local battle rappers and bullies to mobsters and hitmen chasing down your late father's debt.

Read more: The most popular adult game on Patreon is being made by someone who'd never played one before

On June 29, as employees at Lab Zero were still grappling with how to publicly and privately deal with the stream incident, two fighting game community cosplayers accused Zaimont of making uncomfortable sexual comments. By late August, several of Lab Zero's developers had quit the company, citing years of similarly inappropriate behavior internally.

"Almost every employee had a story where Mike abused his position of power," wrote senior animator Jonathan Kim in a tweet on August 24. Kim accused Zaimont of "frequently mentioning his genitals, forcing unwanted physical contact, making sexual comments about himself or about employee's bodies, insulting coworkers privately or openly in front of other coworkers, or using very personal details to threaten or demean coworkers when they didn't go along with what he wanted." By the end of the month, after more high profile departures, Zaimont—who had previously acquired sole ownership of the company after buying out the former CEO's shares—laid off all of Lab Zero's remaining staff.

Since then Zaimont has had little public presence online, but he hasn't left game development. For approximately the last two years, Zaimont has been a programmer on Diesel Legacy: The Brazen Age, a new 2v2 indie fighter from publisher Modus Games announced on Sunday. It's an exciting project: indie fighting games are rare, and rarer still are ones that try to do something notably different in the genre. In addition to its striking hand-drawn art, Diesel Legacy is marrying classic Street Fighter-style combos with a bit of the chaos of Super Smash Bros, with three 2D "lanes" for four players to fight in simultaneously.

I played an in-development build of Diesel Legacy, and even unfinished it ran impressively smoothly online—borderline miraculous when you consider that many 1v1 fighting games from bigger developers are only now adopting rollback netcode, the ideal networking style for low latency combat. Diesel Legacy seems to gracefully handle the addition of two more characters with its own rollback implementation, and I had fun immediately picking up some basic combos with the kinds of command inputs I'm familiar with from Street Fighter. I found it a bit awkward knowing which direction to be facing at a given time when pinched between two enemies, but the three "lanes" open up options for sidestepping and deeper movement options than 2D fighters typically have. Zaimont's expertise on Skullgirls, and in particular his experience with rollback netcode, led to his role on Diesel Legacy.

Before debuting Diesel Legacy, CEO of Modus (and also its parent company Maximum Entertainment) Christina Seelye spoke with me about hiring Zaimont to work on the game, despite the accusations of inappropriate behavior against him. "I am one of the few women that are CEOs and making games in this entire industry. In the couple years since I made that decision [to hire Mike], I'm one of two women CEOs that are running publicly listed companies in the whole industry, in the world. I did not take this decision lightly," Seelye said.

"That said, when I was talking to Mike and went through the process of figuring out where he was at—if you want to have an inclusive environment in the world, and you want to have diverse viewpoints, all of the things we want for DEI, you have to have a path for people to learn and improve. You have to create a way for them to show the world that they've changed and decided to do better. And I really got that from Mike. I got that he was committed to it and that he didn't want everything that went down to be the end of his story. He wanted the opportunity to have the redemptive arc that's in so many stories that we all love."

Multiple former Lab Zero developers I spoke with, however, expressed skepticism that Zaimont has changed—and also expressed frustration that he had been unwilling to do so in 2020.

"We did everything we could to help him come through this cleanly and improve himself as a person, and he refused every single thing we did to try to improve the situation," said one former coworker. "He refused it all, and only hardened and only became worse to everyone involved who was trying to help him. He hurt everybody at Lab Zero, and there was no reason for it. Things could've been a lot better if he'd just tried to be a good person.

"I know that sounds insane, but if he'd just tried to work with us and improve, we were all there for it."

Ground zero

In recent weeks I've spoken with four former Lab Zero developers, who all asked to be quoted anonymously when speaking about Zaimont. They independently corroborated the major events that led up to their departure from the studio, including:  

• Employees discussing Zaimont's behavior and realizing that he had a history of making sexual, cruel, or otherwise inappropriate comments in their private interactions
• More than one conversation with Zaimont after the George Floyd joke where he was given the chance to commit to addressing behavioral issues, which he did not do, before he was asked to leave the company
• Zaimont failing to follow through on a plan to turn Lab Zero into an employee-owned company with all employees receiving equity, which he had "held over [them] like a carrot"

Lab Zero's implosion still looms over two people in particular: former creative director Mariel Cartwright and former CEO Francesca Esquenazi, both of whom were also on Lab Zero's board of directors. In April 2021, the pair sued the company—now solely owned by Zaimont—over wrongful termination and retaliation. Zaimont then counter-sued, claiming a lengthy list of infractions including "breach of implied covenant of good faith and fair dealing," "misappropriation of trade secrets" and "intentional interference with contractual relations." Both suits remain unresolved.

Three of the people I spoke with had strong words about the contents of Mike's cross-complaint: "deranged" and "full of ad hominem attacks" said one. Another characterized it as full of "super off-the-rails stuff and philosophical screeds."

Where two of the former coworkers I interviewed described team conversations with Zaimont where they offered to help him change his behavior after the George Floyd joke, Zaimont's lawsuit characterizes those conversations very differently. "During the second meeting that included me, Mariel and Francesca encouraged all employees to bash me in front of each other and thereby fostered hatred and negativity toward me. Mariel and Francesca repeatedly admonished me to be quiet and yelled at me. I started to cry during the meeting and was forced to explain my Autism Spectrum Disorder to the entire company," Zaimont states in the suit.

Two of the former employees were particularly bothered by the way Mike invoked Autism Spectrum Disorder in his lawsuit. 

"He uses his autism as a defense of his behavior, which I think is particularly insidious—I personally know plenty of people on the spectrum who don't behave like creeps, and it's insulting that he would throw an entire community under the bus to make himself look helpless and unaware of his actions," one told me.

Both lawsuits paint a picture of a messy dissolution and hurt feelings for all parties, but many of the conversations Zaimont cites seem to be attempts to justify his behavior as appropriate rather than deny it.

Cartwright and Esquenazi allege in the lawsuit that "Zaimont engaged in a pervasive campaign of sexual harassment through generalized sexual and harassing comments" including "frequent unwanted touching" and "unprompted, unwelcome, and inappropriate comments about Ms. Cartwright and Ms. Esquenazi’s bodies, dress, and sexuality."

In his cross-complaint, Zaimont claims that Cartwright "routinely facilitated written and oral conversations with me relating to sex, sexual orientation, urination, menstruation, porn, plastic surgery, body image, etc… Based on these conversations, Mariel gave me the impression that no topic was off limits, but rather that these topics were welcomed and ordinary in the course of our friendship."

In the first example he cites of one such sexual conversation, Cartwright is complaining over Slack about her past experiences being "hit on, leered at, touched and grabbed."

"If ANY of that kinda shit happens when I'm around you tell me," Zaimont responded.

"He has never stopped pursuing Mariel and Francesca in court. This basically makes it clear he has never repented for anything he's ever done," one former employee said. "I think I, and most of the team, would be willing and understanding that people are allowed second chances and allowed to move forward with their lives, but only when they understand what's happened and are willing to put in the work. He has in fact worked in the opposite direction this whole time." 

Diesel Legacy

Outside the complaints of harassment, the former Lab Zero developers characterized Zaimont as difficult to work with—unwilling to compromise on design, bad at managing his time, and prone to retaliate against coworkers who made decisions he disagreed with, though he was obviously a skilled programmer. A couple of Zaimont's former coworkers invoked the "genius" stereotype of a skilled developer whose problems with teamwork end up making things worse for everyone else around them.

"I looked up to him as a game developer, and admired his dedication to his work, which I now look back on as a pretty toxic crunch mentality," one said of the fraught development of Lab Zero's last game, Indivisible. That aligned with another developer's description of Zaimont crunching overnight and then being upset with another employee for working the nine-to-five schedule they were paid for.

In speaking about Zaimont's work on Diesel Legacy, Christina Seelye said that in her opinion, Zaimont had learned that being in a leadership role where he had to design, make big decisions and guide a team "was not his skill set." He's focused on the online rollback netcode, and has no direct reports on the team. Seelye also used the word genius to describe his work on the netcode and called it an "amazing technical feat," but said that she'd been clear during the hiring process that she "was not willing to trade bad behavior for genius." 

"This is not a scenario where he's difficult to work with and making people on the team mad, and we're saying 'oh it's okay because he's so amazing at what he does.' No assholes. Just a straight, no assholes policy," she said. "So I don't believe, today, that I am trading genius for bad behavior. I think that what we're doing is, people have strengths and weaknesses, and they have the ability to do really good work and they have the ability to not do great work if they're in a bad situation."

Diesel Legacy art director Giancarlo Montalbano also praised Zaimont when I reached out to him privately. "We couldn’t have done what we've done on Diesel Legacy if there wasn’t a great working relationship, in my opinion," he said over email. "This team has been creatively firing on all cylinders from day one, and that has to do with conduct as much as it does proficiency. This kind of game is notoriously complex in its execution, requiring an almost perfect handshake between design and art/animation production. ANY poor relationships or conduct on the team would be detrimental to what we are trying to do here. Mike consistently outpaces almost everyone on the team in his general levity and attentiveness to people’s creative needs. The entire team has successfully created strong, productive, and professional working relationships, in my observance. I will tell you that, in my career, this is some of the best team synergy I've ever experienced."

One of the former Lab Zero developers I spoke with told me that they warned Modus Games that hiring Zaimont would be a red flag to other indie developers. Two others expressed that they hoped he had changed, and did think he had a right to make a living doing what he does best. "If he treats the other team members better than how he treated us, good on him, good on them," said one.

The fourth former coworker strongly disagreed.

"When I heard that Modus were going to work with him, I was like: that is disgusting. They are disgusting. It's disgusting they'd work with him because they clearly don't care about female game developers—the public record was there of his continued harassment of two ex-coworkers."

Seelye knew that in announcing Diesel Legacy, the studio would be under scrutiny for Zaimont's involvement, and went back and forth on how to address it. Ultimately, she said, they decided to "lead with the truth and hope that works."

"I'm not sure it's appropriate to say who has changed and who hasn't changed," said Seelye. "I can only talk about my experience with him, and the team's experience with him. There's a team of 30 people who have all been working together for the past couple years, and those guys have worked very effectively together. We have not seen any of the behavior that caused a lot of the problems that he had previously in his career. Has he changed? Has he not changed? I don't know. And I don't know if you can say that about somebody else.

"But what I can say is the behavior that everyone is experiencing with him is fundamentally different, phenomenally different, than what was happening. By his own admission—he would say he's completely changed how he deals with issues, how he deals with pressure, his team member interaction. By his own admission, and by me seeing it."

Zaimont has remained out of the public spotlight since 2020, and the lawsuit over the fate of Lab Zero continues to crawl through the legal system, with a hearing scheduled for August. The outcome may eventually provide some closure for the the three people directly involved, but it can't answer the question of how the games industry deals with preventing abuse, and reckoning with who gets forgiveness.

It's too late to run. Running from The Cradle is like running from the air around you. People bandy the word "immersive" around when discussing videogames, but miss the subtext of what they're really talking about. To be immersed is to be surrounded and submerged, thrust into a new context. If The Cradle is about anything, it's immersion. Your head pushed beneath murky waters until you choke and drown.

The Cradle is the penultimate level in Thief: Deadly Shadows. It's what's known in television parlance as a "format breaker"—something that subverts many of the set expectations of the show to stir the critical palette into new life. While The Cradle is based on Thief's shadow-stalking mandate, and a clear extrapolation from the first Thief's seminal Return to the Haunted Cathedral, it has amplified its source material to become something quite different. It's probably the scariest level ever made, an experiment in non-linear storytelling methods that pays off handsomely and a towering achievement for games.

Like anyone who plays The Cradle, I was anxious before I even arrived. Perhaps more than most; in a passing email, Thief's project lead, Randy Smith, had mentioned a "haunted house" level which was a deliberate extrapolation from the theories he laid out in a Fear feature in Gamer's prehistory. I was expecting something special, so waited until the witching hour and played the game on a wall projector in front of a group of unnerved peers. Even in Garrett's introductory speech, he doesn't sound his usual cocksure self. For the first time, he sounds anxious. The level starts and... there it is.

The Shalebridge Cradle. An ornate gothic façade on a dilapidated mansion. The starting view is angled so that you're looking up and it's looming over you like a furious parent about to discipline a child. In this first moment, The Cradle's themes are set—the relationship between those with power and those without, authority and the oppressed.

The level's genius is that it never explicitly states its purpose. The truth is only approached tangentially, in the non-linear method of storytelling entirely unique to games. That is, through immersion. The level doesn't tell you a story. It gives you clues, and you tell the story to yourself. It's this process of realisation that provides some of the most disturbing moments in The Cradle. You're told from the start that it used to be a madhouse. You're told that before that it was an orphanage. It's only when you're inside, reading a child's scribbled note, that you realise The Cradle served both purposes at the same time.

It's a horrific idea. A few years ago, one of my friends was sectioned, believing he was either the Anti-Christ, the Son of God or Muad'Dib from the Dune books. The cliché's true: you have to laugh, or else you cry. But when I visited him, in halls that stunk of disinfectant, full of people who only looked at you through drugged eyes, laughter was impossible. Madness is the most frightening thing in the world, and an asylum its church. The idea of the criminally insane intermixed with the stray children of a city is a horrendous concept, pure melodrama. If it was just told to you, you might have rejected it as simply that. But since the idea was hinted, and you made the dreadful leap of logic yourself, you accept.

Now, I've played The Cradle a half-dozen times preparing this feature, and while the initial trip is still the one that squats in the back of my mind glaring, it's never a comfortable place to be. Some of its torture-blades dull when the surprise is spent and you know what's happening, others remain permanently whetted. They're the incisions which attack your guts through mood and timbre: that is, what the place sounds like and what it looks like. That sound and images can disturb has long been known: the Roman Catholic Church expressly forbade the creation of church music featuring chords including a diminished fifth ("The Devil's interval") due to its profound effect upon the psyche.

Sound-man Eric Brosius? He'd have been burned as a witch. His Thief and System Shock 2 credits make as fine a resumé for horror as anyone in the business, but The Cradle is absolute career-best work. Mostly a drunken miasma of sound is smeared across your speakers, making you uneasy until an unexpected noise splits asunder. Distant sounds rise up, suggesting the scuttling of unknown things moving elsewhere, up to no good. Moments of plot-revelation are provided a chilling counterpoint by an apposite ghostly sound effect—find the ashes of a baby, still in a crib, and expect to be haunted by its cry from beyond the grave. The flickering of lights wouldn't be the same without the tiny crackle. And, most memorably, as you inch up towards the attic, the sounds of room-shaking violence that either petrify you or send you running back the way you came.

On the visual side, things are just as deliberately wrong. After all—there are visual tricks as disturbing as the Devil's Interval to apply. Take the Cradle's inhabitants—the puppets, whose movements are carefully judged to appear unnatural. They don't move like people. They move as if their insides are about to split or their bones have been broken and set at off-angles. The art here is to not be wrong (as in not correct) but Wrong (as in so close to being normal... but not quite). No matter how long you stay, there's always another detail to shake you when you're getting too comfy, like realising the lights in the building pulse, as if they were slowly breathing, or... Well, when mapping a section for this feature, I physically screamed when one of the inmates pulled himself from the ground unexpectedly and lurched to attack.

And these touches unnerve on every journey into The Cradle. The first time you walk down the steps into its basement, when you know nothing, it's devastating. The masterstroke is that the first half of the level is empty. Nothing's there, so you spend almost the first half of the visit inching around darkened corridors, trying to work out what went wrong while jumping at shadows. You hate the darkness, as you know it could be concealing anything. And then, once you've reactivated the generators, complete with the sort of rattling mechanical scream that you just know will have alerted anything with something vaguely analogous to ears within a square mile, the electric lights twitch back into life and you'd do anything to have a good darkened alcove to crouch in again. Masterful psychology: make you hate one thing, then take it away in a way which makes you wish for its speedy return.

It's this manner of mind game that forms the foundation on which the whole Cradle is built. Insecurity is reinstated by changing the rules just as you've grown familiar with them. As you explore the Outer Cradle, it is only your own fear that twists the knife. By the time you realise you're being manipulated, you've entered the Inner Cradle. Here the corkscrewing of your guts has been externalised in the form of the inmates' impossibly convulsing bodies. When you grasp that particular problem, the Cradle twists again and transports you from its current ruined state into its memories of earlier times, to be chased through a pallid, fish-eye world by the black silhouettes of long-dead staff—literally faceless authority figures.

Ah. The Cradle's memories. It's by this point you've realised that Shalebridge isn't made of bricks and mortar, but something more. The years of brutality and institutionalised torture sublimed into some shapeless intelligence that wants nothing better than to keep you here forever. While you simply view the place as a building at first, by the time you leave it's clearly an adversary—its personality expressed in the world you've fearfully sneaked your way through. It never speaks directly to you. There's none of the obvious taunting of an entity like SHODAN in System Shock 2, but when your every action is thwarted it's painfully obvious that something wants to keep you, in the way a stomach keeps a snack.

There are moments where you think, against all logic, it could actually do that. The Cradle is the longest level in the game. Before the close, I had an eye-of-the-storm moment when I wondered if there was in fact any way out of this place, or whether the real end of Thief 3 is to be batted around like a mouse in the diseased paws of some malevolent feline, forever.

But, yes, eventually you do escape. Except that isn’t really true. Yes, the level ends. You do escape The Cradle. But, because you've been there, it lives on in your mind in dirty little fragments of memory... and so it escapes in you.

The Cradle's in me. If you've played it, it's in you. Even if you haven't, by reading this, a shadow of my dread is cast on your mind. So we're all carrying it with us, like a dark little secret or black twitching egg, waiting to hatch and let its brood stretch your skin to breaking point and fall twitching into the light.

It's too late to run. But don't let that stop you. Run.

Abandon all hope

While most films specifically feed you the story on a drip, the best games put you in a context which you explore. The Cradle is full of clues—in its sounds, in text, in graphics, in the action of its inhabitants—which you piece together inside your head then perform an act of closure upon to fill-in the gaps. You aren't told the story; a world exists, and you transform it into a coherent image through the power of your mind. In other words, exactly the way you gather diverse information from the real world. Any game can do this. Many have. The Cradle does it particularly well, so makes a fine example for us to examine more closely.

On the following annotated maps are marked the more significant clues you find when playing The Cradle, along with some notes on their possible significance. After that is an attempt to transform them into a linear narrative. If you've played The Cradle, take it as a guide to the place. If you haven't... essentially this is a videogame murder mystery, transformed to paper. We show the clues and provide what we think is a likely and entertaining solution.

Previously: before entering the Cradle you know little about the place. You come because Hammerite Inspector Drept saw the Gray Lady here when he was a child, as she killed his friend Lauryl. It's your only possible link to catching up with this mysterious figure and uncovering what horrors she plans for the City.

The Outer Cradle

A) Note: "It was better before. Too many rules to remember. Don't go here. Don't touch that. Don't talk to the patients. The Doctors are just as scary as the patients. Miss Arthur says orphans shouldn't complain." The moment you realise Shalebridge was an orphanage and asylum simultaneously.

B) Lauryl's portrait: The second you touch this, you become aware of Lauryl's ghost and able to communicate with her. Once you free Lauryl, she disappears from the frame—The Cradle no longer has any hold on her. Relevant question: who painted it?

C) Lauryl's ghost: Still haunts the location of her murder in the attic, blood stains still visible. Despite its ovoid shape, this bubble of light casts a human shadow. It's a fantastic effect due to its impossibility being more tangible than it would be in another medium, such as film. Look closely and you can see the soft outline of Lauryl's face on its surface. She acts as the voice-in-your-head plot guide for most of the game. Point of interest for fans of System Shock 2—the same voice actress, Thief writer Terri Brosius, also played SHODAN, who fulfilled a similar, if more aggressive role.

D) Lauryl's blood: In a vial. Still warm. Yuk.

E) Case study: Examines one C Pins, the patient in room 7. Claims he's decorated his cell like "The Murder Scene". Discusses his obsession with birds. Foreshadowing of in-mate viciousness and disturbing obsessions.

F) Case study: This one's of F Topper, in room 6, who was found carrying an urn filled with ashes which she claims is her child. She treats it exactly like a baby. Recommended experimental Hanscomb's therapy. Foreshadowing of the brutality of the regime. Listen to the sound effect of a baby crying after you read this, for a first example of sound used to reinforce the impact of your discovery.

G) The staircase: Rattling noise as you head up the stairs, provides one of the biggest scares. Something's going on up there. Best guess: the ghostly echoes of the murder.

H) The pauper's ward: Low security ward. Note its location—it's not behind the heavy security gates. A note describes someone collecting gold teeth from the morgue for profit, perhaps implying workers here too.

I) Note: "I didn't want to have my picture painted, but I was too scared to say no. I guess I did it right because he said I sat good and still." A note, probably written by Lauryl, since hers is the only unmutilated portrait in the building.

J) The lobby: Apart from looking beautiful, noteworthy for a book that gives a feel for the institution's policy on lobotomy: "more can be learned from a surgery performed incorrectly, so we'll keep the training to a minimum." Nice. Also claims that this may solve the problem of an "uprising" at The Cradle.

K) Treasurer's office: Useful to a thief for the money it contains, but plot relevant due to the notes on Dr Hanscomb's experimental heat therapy to dry the "excessive humours" which are, he believes, a cause of madness. "The heat must be of the dry variety" he urges, and "hot elements must be laid directly onto the skin."

L) The staff tower: Lauryl warns you that no one is allowed to go up there. In the "real" time period, it's destroyed and in rubble, making exploration impossible. When you first venture into the past, it exists again. When explored again after using the Cage to transport yourself into the past—that is, to a later period than the first—the entire place is emitting ghostly smoke, as if on fire.

M) The chair: Only present when visiting the latter of the two time periods, it faces the Staff Tower, casting a dramatic shadow. Suggests that someone was watching it during this period.

N) The doors: Heavy metal doors, only capable of being operated from the outside. Implies that the dangerous stuff is beyond this point.

O) The cage: Where they kept new prisoners entering The Cradle. Lauryl urges you not to go in, for fear of The Cradle noticing you. Eventually you're forced into doing so, in order to enter the past for your escape—which brings you to an entirely different period to previous trips. Interestingly, you can also use the cage before you've been told you can.

P) The generator: All lights are off and access to the Inner Cradle barred until you replace its fuse. This implies that the doors to the Inner Cradle have been shut for a considerable length of time, and you're possibly its first visitor.

The Inner Cradle

A) The lounge: Contains a particularly blackened fireplace. Interesting, that.

B) The hall of records: The centre of the Inner Cradle, most important for its listing of the patients, their treatments and their privileges. Especially relevant is the patient in room 9, who was allowed to light the fire in the lounge if she continued to behave. For this purpose, she was allowed to keep her tinderbox.

C) The observatory: Here you'll find an inmate, presumably the one from Cell 5. The room is full of portraits, each defaced with a bloody smear over the face. Jewels are positioned where their eyes should be. The inmate, until disturbed, perpetually moves between them, making sure each is positioned correctly. This implies perfectionism was a main trait.

D) The nursery tower: In the present day, burnt down and inaccessible. Once you travel into the past, you can locate Lauryl's diary in the main ward. Information also comes to light on the Gray Lady: the report on Lauryl's death which claims that one of the patients must have killed the girl, because this Gray Lady idea is clearly ludicrous. "The staff blamed him for what happened to me," Lauryl reveals after you've read it. "They were wrong." Who is "him"? There's also a note to the effect that rules to keep patients and orphans separate must be followed.

E) Ghostly staff: The Cradle only animates the staff when you are in the past, and even then, only as spectral memories in silhouette. Since The Cradle is quite capable of animating the actual corpses of the patients, you have to ask where the bodies of the staff went to prevent it from doing this to them. That this is how The Cradle "remembers" people also tells you something about its perspective on the world.

F) Treatment room A: Home of the asylum's electric shock and wet-heat treatment room. "I saw a man all wrapped up in wet bandages," Lauryl informs you as you enter, "I think he wanted me to help him, but I was too afraid." Tells us that orphans and patients mixed to some degree. Also note a wax mask resting on the electric chair: someone discarded it here.

G) Treatment room B: The lobotomy theatre, containing Dr Ranker's specially made silver tools. Includes a note congratulating Ranker on his report on the "botched" lobotomy, speculating that "in the future they'll call the procedure the Ranker Lobotomy and use it on the most difficult cases."

H) The white hall: Nine cells, in a circular formation around a central meal hall. Each is decorated according to the style of its occupant, only the most notable of which are referenced here. This whole section is heavily locked down, with heavy steel gates preventing access to the area outside. Lockpicking is required to get anywhere. People other than Garrett would need keys.

I) Seclusion chamber: Home of King No One—a play on words of "Number 1" or "No. One", his patient number. Comprises an elevator, ascending to an isolated cell. You hear the King's manic laugh on the way up. Only at the top do you realise it's because there's no button for sending the elevator back down.

J) Cell 5: A telescope is positioned, watching a portrait with the face cut out. Clear links to what you find in the observatory. The cell has a false back wall where, once dismantled, you find Lauryl's blood-stained dress. If it's the Gray Lady who killed Lauryl, this patient must have come into possession of it shortly afterwards.

K) Cell 6: Foreshadowed in the Outer Cradle, belonging to F Topper. Tiny baby clothes hanging above a crib. As you inch closer, it becomes obvious that it's an urn not a child that rests there.

L) Cell 7: Home of C Pins, the Birdman of Shalebridge, foreshadowed in the Outer Cradle. Contains what is presumably his re-animated form, standing, perpetually admiring his array of birds, nailed into the brickwork. A row of skulls rest on the desk.

M) Cell 9: A relatively bare cell. It takes a second to realise that it's because the entire place is burnt out, especially towards the far side. A tinderbox lies nearby. Someone clearly likes lighting fires.

N) The inmates: Physical puppets of The Cradle's will, in the "real" material plane. While they can be taken down with a physical blow, they will only get up again. The only way to permanently disable them is through flashbombs and holy water. Notice the unearthly, jerky movement cribbed from Jacob's Ladder.

The Shalebridge Cradle: Folklore

The City is used to strangeness. The bizarre is the mortar that holds it together. Its people are a hardy sort. In a world where the dead won't stay buried, they have to be. It hardly counts as superstition when you know what's out there, in the dark, waiting for a chance to make you join it. Still, even in the City, no-one loiters too long in the shadow of one particular building, which hangs off the east side of the Old Quarter like some facial canker. Shalebridge Cradle. "If there's a way to cram more misery into one building's history," Master Thief Garrett once said, "I can’t think of it."

The Cradle doesn't have history. It has a scream, stretched out through time. 

It's said Shalebridge used to be that sad institute for lost children: an orphanage. It's also said that it was that sad institution for lost adults: an asylum. What most don't realise is that, during its latter days, it was both at once. While safer inmates were kept in the pauper's ward towards the front of the building, the murderously insane—of which, at The Cradle's demise, there were nine—were kept in the White Hall ward, towards the rear, with heavy metal, lock-down doors between them and civilisation. Near them, the orphans, high in the Nursery tower. At the building's heart, looking over all, was the Staff Tower, the stronghold of the lawmakers. Children and the insane, under the lock and key of nurses and doctors. Authority and oppression, bound together. 

The tale of Shalebridge rests on two children—a boy and a girl. The boy, Drept, ran away, grew up, found redemption in the order of the Hammer and became known as a fanatical hunter of shadows. The girl, Lauryl, didn't get the chance to grow up at all. 

The head doctors—Dr Sandbridge, Dr Ranker, and Dr Hanscomb—had strict rules which Matron Miss Arthur was to follow. Obvious rules: such as homicidal patients and the children weren’t to mix. But rules in a madhouse tend to err, so it came to pass that Lauryl found herself sitting while having her portrait painted by the patient in Room 5, known as The Watcher. He was brought to Shalebridge after slaughtering his previous sitters because "they moved". He then smeared his victim's blood over each portrait's face, in frustration at the lack of life in the final work. Lauryl was a good girl. Lauryl didn't move at all. So, Lauryl lived and The Watcher made the one perfect picture of his life. 

No one is that lucky twice. 

The Gray Lady of myth and nightmare came to Shalebridge to find a body to use for her devilish purposes. Someone discarded already. Someone no-one would miss. That is, an orphan. If Lauryl and Drept weren't playing in the attic that day, maybe the Gray Lady would have chosen a different victim. Would The Cradle's cry have been stifled early? Perhaps, perhaps not. We can only speculate as to the reasons why The Watcher was close enough to the murder scene to take Lauryl's bloody, tattered dress as a keepsake before anyone else arrived. Perhaps the murder he would eventually carry the blame for would have occurred anyway? The Cradle's birth is rife with such sick irony. 

Despite Drept's testimony that some hag-like creature butchered his little friend, the material evidence pointed at the man locked in cell 5. Extreme measures were called for: lobotomy. Or rather, all too common measures. The staff of Shalebridge—when not experimenting with their weirder theories such as applying red hot bars to bare skin or testing the outer limits of electrocution—turned to Dr Ranker's custom silver knives that could transmute a pest into a vegetable. The "result" could be stored cheaply with the other trash in the pauper's ward rather than the expensive White Hall. News spread that whatever made The Watcher himself would be sliced away in Treatment Room 2. 

These words eventually reached the man who hid his shattered features behind a wax mask, Patient Number 1—or "King No One" as he was known among the inmates thanks to the script on his door. The fact that he was contained in the isolation chamber, at the top of an elevator shaft in the White Hall, wasn't enough to separate him from the other patients. His poisonous whispers leaked out, fanning the flames of dissatisfaction. The Watcher was a popular madman. His fraternity owed him an attempt to stop this. After all, they could be next. Dissent sparked into a fiery riot. Before anything could be done, the keys were with the patients. They were all free. The gates were sealed, but most of the children and the staff were inside, trapped and barricaded in their towers. At least the lucky ones were—those on the ground floor proved wet and scarlet sport for the rampaging White Hall inmates. 

The midwife to The Cradle's true birth was the patient in cell nine, The Moth. A pyromaniac, she was allowed to keep her tinderbox as part of her therapy. Now free, she had all the fuel she could wish for. She lit the matches which reduced Shalebridge to the skeleton of a building it is now. First, in her room. Then, under the cover of the riot and urged on by King No One, the fires at the base of the Staff tower. 

While the King discarded his wax mask, finally revealing his molten face, and led the dismemberment of the remaining staff, The Moth pulled up her chair at the foot of the staircase and stared into the inferno as men and women were reduced to soot and screams. 

Flames swept up. The Nursery tower joined its sister in misery. The voices of boys and girls merged in an unholy choir, a shriek to empty skies. The smoke arose to the heavens, blacking them out, forming a cloud of the remains of authority. Anything elevated was destroyed. All that remained was the base material. 

The tortured voices were The Cradle's birthing cry. The rising smoke was its first breath. Born of torture, oppression, authority, murder and a history of weeping, the place was alive. 

It pressed down upon the remaining inmates, who ruled the remains of the asylum under King No One's malevolence. His Kingdom couldn't last, in earthly terms. The doors were shut. There was no way out. The inmates sickened, withered and died. 

It wasn't the end. 

The inmates rose from death, becoming puppets of The Cradle's will and twitching in meaningless echoes of their past existence. The bodies animated in a closed, spasming loop for 50 years, waiting for someone else to enter, to catch The Cradle's attention, and so join its eternal, macabre dance. 

They say its doors will open before you. They'll seal behind you. And as long as you're alive, it'll never let you leave. 

Even in the City, no-one loiters too long in the shadow of one particular building, which hangs off the east side of the Old Quarter like some facial canker. Shalebridge Cradle. "If there's a way to cram more misery into one building's history," Master Thief Garrett once said, "I can't think of it."

Interview: Return to the Cradle

The Cradle designer Jordan Thomas speaks candidly about the making of fear.

PCG Where did the conceit of The Cradle come from? 

The Thief games are—in the abstract—largely about exploring unfamiliar, hostile spaces. It seemed an elegant sort of conceit to take that concept literally, and simply feed Garrett (the ultimate trespasser) to a vast building which harbours a sort of monstrous sentience, along with a perverse appetite. We knew that our "haunted house" (the internal title) would be one of the latter entries in the story arc, and that it would pit the player against the undead, in some form. 

I had a series of design discussions with Randy Smith (project director on Deadly Shadows) about our intent for the space during its infancy. We quickly concluded that our core objective was to devise the single most terrifying first-person game experience ever constructed. I'll leave it up to the fan base to decide whether or not we achieved it. Fear is inherently subjective, after all. At the very least, no one can claim that we were devoid of ambition! 

PCG So what do you actually count as terror? 

In terms of the aforementioned terror, we weren't bent on eliciting constant panic, per se. Our point-of-origin was the word "dread". I like to define it as that quintessential "threshold" sensation which whispers rather than shouts, warning you that you're seven steps from the unspeakable. 

With that emotional shape in mind, I began to draft the design equivalent of the level's "blueprints". Suffice it to say, I took the process seriously. It's probably obvious by now that the subtle manipulation of a player's darker emotions (most notably, fear) is an abiding interest of mine. Which is a fancy way of saying that I'm on a mad little crusade to improve the quality and range of games in the horror genre. 

PCG Where do you think horror in games goes wrong? 

We've got a deficit there, and it's far from exclusive to gaming; horror in general tends to ooze along the path of least resistance. Think back—in your entire life, how many movies have drawn you in deeply enough to make your guts go cold in genuine fright? They probably number less than 10, if you're reasonably hardy. With games, I suspect you could count them on one hand. 

Fear is regarded as one of the easiest emotions to stimulate with any audio-visual medium. It is trivial to frighten a reasonably receptive audience. You need only shout, "boo!" at the optimal moment, and your victims will find themselves clinging to the ceiling, quivering and hissing expletives. 

Our reptile brains instantly respond, ready to brandish the adrenals at the drop of a hat. But will the memories last? Typically, no. They are warning signs, written in a very basic language. As the mind rights itself, these messages fade away, leaving it largely unblemished.

I want my scares to leave scars. 

PCG Well, there's the pull-out quote. So how do you think of The Cradle?

Unsurprisingly then, I regarded The Cradle as a kind of meta-project in addition to a game level. It was to be a multi-layered experiment in interactive horror, using players as hapless test subjects. I suppose that's not entirely without irony, given the kind of "science" fictionally practised within its walls. 

The intent was to frighten, disturb, thrill, or startle as wide an audience as possible within the parameters I'd been given. And, if possible, to leave a few of those "scars". The jaded user would, hopefully, appreciate the grim narrative and physical tension. The highly imaginative or impressionable players would find themselves inching along through a simulated nightmare, trying not to breathe. 

And, of course, I hoped to execute all of this without sacrificing the key intrinsic strengths of Thief gameplay. Stealth is inherently conducive to a feeling of vulnerability, but typically not quite this pronounced. The Cradle was, all in all, a holistic effort in game horror and stealth level design, intended to communicate the feeling of dread in several complementary languages. 

PCG What do you mean when you talk about holistic level design? 

The term "holistic level design" isn't a buzzphrase so much as a well-established creative philosophy that is often put into practice across various industries, but is rarely put into words. In plain terms, it refers to the evaluation of any self-contained game segment as an integrated whole. The total package, as it were. It often manifests as a series of questions, some of which look like these:

• Are all the mission's systemic elements gracefully woven into each other?
• Does the space feel believably occupied by living, imperfect beings?
• How well does it fit into the experiential topography of the entire game?
• Does the end result offer the player a seamless, unforgettable experience?

I attempted to effectively answer dozens of queries along these lines with The Cradle. In hindsight, I can see plenty of room for improvement, but that’s exactly how a developer expands the list. 

PCG So—what rewards do a more holistic approach give the developer? 

The expected reward for this (rather fastidious) series of trials can be summed up by one word: "resonance". All of The Cradle's actors, from the malfunctioning lights to the shambling undead themselves are tied into a central choreographer object. It's a kind of invisible "puppet master" that tells them how to behave in the real world, and in the world beyond (which is comprised of the asylum's fragmented dreams of its former days). 

And, although The Cradle has its share of entirely linear scripted sequences meant to induce the right mood, it is the purely circumstantial moments that took the most planning. Each object family has a special relationship to the rest, which can manifest during gameplay when they happen to collide with each other. I can't predict exactly what kind of horrific moments will be generated by that ecosystem, which is ideal. 

PCG I'm going to say the word "emergence" now. Thank you. 

Life, which we broadly emulate—and typically, embellish upon—in games, is the result of an unfathomable number of systems interacting with each other in a kind of eternal dance. That's pretty easy to understand, subconsciously or otherwise.

Humans are accustomed to the transparent feeling of "rightness" that results from being swaddled in such a dazzling, orchestral synthesis at all times. The mental recordings we make of all this data carry some inherent resonance, simply because of their unfiltered perfection. Simulations (like videogames) do not nearly make the grade yet, and we regard them with inevitable scepticism. They simply cannot directly compete for territory with memories of the real world. 

That said, by focusing on a specific type of target experience, and leaning heavily on the human instinct to fill the gaps, we are able to cheat a bit... We invite players to convince themselves that a sequence is "real enough" or "tight enough" to be drawn into, by carefully integrating all the level and game components. Gamers have a discerning eye, but they want to become immersed. 

PCG All fiction's reliant on a leap of faith in that way, really. 

The more appropriate the systems that are already at work in a given level, and the more elegantly they appear to "plug into" each other, the easier it is for a human to become a willing participant in the suspension of their own disbelief. Or, for that matter, in the suppression of their aesthetic scepticism. This provides a kind of indirect springboard into that notion of "rightness". 

Because, in that tiny microcosm of supported behaviour choices (say, stalking through an abandoned building and trying not to die), the network of simulated possibilities is dense enough that you cease poking holes in the world-fabric, and begin actively filling them yourself! Your imagination becomes inextricably intertwined with the content you're consuming, and you become a partial architect of your own reactions.

The game is then far more likely to resonate with you, carving out a permanent niche among your long-term memories. And that, of course, is the honour for which we developers strive. 

PCG How much reference work did you make when preparing The Cradle?

The Cradle is the synthetic offspring of dozens of actual, existing Victorian hospitals and reputedly haunted buildings. All the misery, malpractice and dementia that have been ascribed to those places are seen here through a proportionally exaggerated lens. 

I read reams of patient and staff interviews, scoured countless articles on historical mental-health treatment practises, compiled a huge reference archive of photographs taken by urban explorers who regularly break into abandoned asylums, and even visited a few locations myself. 

PCG Any particular incidents stuck in your memory from your research? 

One story involved a patient who managed to escape into the storage wings of the asylum, and because of her eroded state-of-mind, she became lost and succumbed to starvation. The place was such a teeming "snake pit" that she wasn’t missed, and the stain from her body seeped permanently into the wood. 

Another involved a man who was committed as a toddler. Decades later, when asked to sign his own name, he drew a rough silhouette of the hospital. The place was so omnipresent and dominant a force in his life that it eclipsed his identity. The Cradle was built out of that sort of cheery material. 

PCG And, finally, what fictional influences shaped The Cradle? 

Among the films that helped inspire it were Jacob's Ladder, Session 9, and The Devil's Backbone. Books included From Hell, House of Leaves, and The Shining. 

My game influences are innumerable, but two most prominent were the Silent Hill series and the System Shock series, to which The Cradle owes a great deal.

Okay, not quite everyone, but negativity predominates far more than it should. For every one cheerful post about how much fun someone's having with a game, there'll be ten complaining about buffs and nerfs, whipping up conspiracy theories about the developers, chiding other players for their behaviour, or claiming the game was better at some unspecified point in the past. Almost every game community across the internet is like this. With one notable exception.

For years now, in my stormy feed of Call of Duty players screaming about the latest gun and Hearthstone players declaring the meta dead for good this time, there's been this one consistent bright spot—a bunch of dwarf miners cheerfully shouting "Rock and stone!". Through thick and thin, the community around co-op shooter Deep Rock Galactic has been a haven of positivity. Sure, they have their problems with updates and balance changes sometimes, but on the whole they spend their time sharing memes, offering advice to "Greenbeards" (newcomers), telling funny stories of their experiences in the game, and posting screenshots of vaguely phallic ore formations. 

The question is: why? What makes Deep Rock Galactic fans so cheerful? Is it a magic that can be replicated?

Working together

The most obvious answer is, it's a co-op game—working together in harmony is the goal of the whole experience, and that has certainly helped foster a friendly community. "It doesn't hurt, the fact that the players never have a reason to antagonise each other," says Mikhail Akopyan, lead game designer at Deep Rock Galactic developer Ghost Ship Games. "The game never, at any point, says somebody is better than someone else."

For those unfamiliar, Deep Rock Galactic is a game about space dwarves extracting ore and resources from a planet infested with alien bugs. Surviving a mission means keeping swarms of enemies at bay, but also manipulating the environment and finding novel solutions to obstacles. Characters can dig through the earth, create platforms, set up ziplines, and more to create paths to their goals, and because environments are procedurally generated, there's no established solution to any problem, forcing creative thinking. Those abilities are spread between the different classes, so it's only by working together that you can succeed—naturally fostering a sense of teamwork and cooperation. 

But, of course, there has to be more than just that—five minutes on the Darktide subreddit will quickly disabuse anyone of the notion that the co-op genre inherently creates friendly communities, and we've all had the experience of getting yelled at in a game like this for getting something wrong or not following agreed-upon strategies. 

Rock and stone! 

I suspect the other key part of Deep Rock Galactic's friendliness formula is the dwarves themselves. Not because they're nice, positive characters—they aren't, really. They're grumps who spend most of their time complaining about their work or hurling insults at each other or their robotic assistants. But they're relatable—they may be in space, fighting alien bugs, but at the end of the day they're blue collar workers with a job to do. 

"These are not super soldiers or galactic badasses," says Akopyan. "They're tough but… they're tough the way a miner might be tough, or an oil rig worker." Taking the setting and characters out of the militarised realm most videogame heroes operate in has a fundamental impact on the atmosphere of the game, emphasising a kind of camaraderie in the face of a tough job. This is a game where before a mission, you can buy the team a round of beers to gain buffs. The stakes feel important, yet mundane—it's not life or death (well, mostly), and it's more important that the job get done than that it get done with exacting strategy.

That's embodied most perfectly in Deep Rock Galactic's rallying cry: "Rock and stone!". This all-purpose salute has a dedicated key in the game—when pressed, your dwarf raises their pick in the air and enthusiastically yells the phrase. What does it mean? On the face of it, not a lot, but context gives it function. When you're all huddled around the oil rig's starter button, "Rock and stone!" means "Are we ready to start?", and called back in response it means "Yes, let's go!". When you're scouting ahead of the group, it can mean "Come over here, I've found something"; when using an ammo pod, it can mean "I'm restocked and ready to push on". 

But most importantly, it's a celebration—a way to cheer a victory, congratulate someone on a job well done, or express glee at a fortuitous discovery. In that form, it quickly spread beyond the game—in all of Deep Rock Galactic's online communities, it's used as a fun response to almost anything, and in other game's communities, it's a way for Deep Rock Galactic fans to find each other and share an in-joke. 

The salute arose early in the game's development, a very deliberate design choice. "Okay, this is a co-op game, and you're not necessarily going to be talking on the mic," says Akopyan. "But it's very important to be able to acknowledge somebody, the way you might in real life with a nod or just some body language, which you can't do in the game, right? It was made to be a rallying cry, for the players but also it makes sense in the game world that the dwarfs would say something like this to support each other in this weird universe they've got stuck in." You can actually read about the complete origin of the phrase in a great blog post by the team. 

On the frontlines

A positive community can't be built and maintained purely through a game's design, however. Over Deep Rock Galactic's five years of life so far, Ghost Ship Games has taken an active hand in its many online groups—starting from when they were just a small gang of players in the first alpha, all the way to the increasingly growing fanbase of today. Log in to the official Discord, or the Facebook page, or the Steam forums, and you'll find members of the team participating in the conversation—and the studio also moderates its own subreddit.

"I have seen people complain about it," says community manager Jacob Herold. "They say developers shouldn't run their own subreddit, that they'll censor stuff. But I think we are very lax on the moderation there. People can be unhappy with things, as long as they're civil. But one of the advantages of running it ourselves is I can go there, give feedback to a post or just show my face, and pin my post to the top of the replies. It makes me visible, and it makes people feel that we're there." 

Community managers are usually on the frontlines of what can feel like a war with fans. Their job is often to take the brunt of a fanbase's toxicity and abuse. But for Herold, that visibility leads to a far more positive relationship—one that can be seen very literally through Reddit upvotes. "I was one of the top 1% contributors on Reddit based on karma in 2022," says Herold—the reaction is typically so positive that other members of the team ask to get to post things too, so they can share in the love. You won't find many other games where developers are volunteering for the frontlines. 

Fierce feedback

Things aren't 100% rosy, by Herold's own admission—as the community has grown, inevitably "more toxicity is appearing", he says, "but I'm not seeing any levels like in other games." There's criticism, of course—Deep Rock Galactic is not a perfect game, and like any live service game some updates are received better than others—but that feedback is more often than not respectful, and even at its most extreme it seems to be more reflective of passion for the game than pure negativity. 

"I got sent a document that was 32 pages long, of literally explaining what's wrong with the various weapons and proposed solutions to them," says Akopyan. "That was some fierce feedback right there! We get plenty of 'Hey this is not working, this is not okay'. But I think it's also a relationship that we have developed with our player base, that there is a place for them to give this feedback."

As I talk with the two, the genuine affection they have for their players shines through. It's clear that, large as the fanbase has grown, they're thought of by the studio as a community, not just numbers. And that feeling seems to be allowed to lead the way at Ghost Ship Games.

"From my experience working here… I haven't experienced any pressure from above," says Herold. "I know people in the same position [at other developers] that have to deliver numbers, campaigns, reach certain goals. The entire time here it's just been, like, we're doing what we want, what we think will feel good... If you support the community, if you're open and accepting of feedback, the growth will come." 

It's not a situation the studio takes for granted. Far from being smug about the game's success, both Herold and Akopyan are keen to stress how fortunate the position they're in is. "It's very easy to talk about and have space for this stuff right now, because things are going really well," says Akopyan. "But it's important to keep in mind that when we launched, it was like 'If we can sell 250,000 copies then we're okay. That's where we're coming from." In the end it sold 500,000, and has since climbed to 5.5 million. 

"So, of course, things have been going well, and that makes it easy to not set targets, and not claw onto [the numbers]. But games development is hard. We have this luxury of saying, 'Let's just keep trying to make this the best game we can make it,' and that seems to be working. But I think that is a luxury not every developer has. It's not a luxury I've had before." 

In other words, there's no easy or obvious path to a positive community. To my mind, that makes it all the more important for both developers and players to cherish them where they find them. 

In their own words 

I'd be remiss if I didn't finish by letting the Deep Rock Galactic community speak for itself. I headed to the subreddit and asked them directly: Why are you all so positive?

Many were keen to give credit to Ghost Ship Games. "I think a major part is played by the devs being so active in the community," says HissyHazza. "They play their own game and understand a lot of what the playerbase wants. That doesn't mean they give the playerbase everything they ask for, if anything they maintain a very clear vision for where they want their game to go, but it does mean the community feels like part of the game's growth." 

Some had more niche theories: "I think people who enjoy dwarves and identify with them are a certain breed who work well together and get along,"  says NecroCowboy. Someone should run a study on this. 

But most of them just wanted to share how much they enjoy playing with their fellow dwarves, and the friendliness they experience from each other every time they log in. "For the most part it doesn't matter if you're account level 1 or 1000, there is something for you to do and people will join you," says That_CDN_guy. "In the 300+ hours I've played, I can count on one hand how many negative experiences I've had with the community. Really, who wants to be a jerk in a game where you're a space dwarf that gets to drink beer, dig holes, and shoot bugs?"

Although the term "cozy game" doesn't have just one set definition, the consensus is that the experience offers everything from soft visuals to gameplay that doesn't demand too much. Because of this, lots of cozy game recommendations echo the Stardew Valley farming formula, but there are hundreds of games that fall into the cozy game category that stray from yard work and raising livestock. But, if you do want something that replicates the farming experience, we've got a list of the best games like Stardew Valley too.

If you're looking for a new bunch to shake up the old favorites, we've pulled together a list of equal parts cute and chill games that won't have you tilling the soil until the sun comes up. If you want something driven by narrative, simple puzzles that put your mind at ease, or pastel-colored rhythm games, we've got something that is bound to suit you.

Infinity Nikki

Release Date: 2024 | Developer: Infold Games | Epic Games

At last there's a big-budget dress-up game to rally around on PC: the latest game in the Nikki series. It's a gacha game (freemium, essentially) which may or may not harsh your cozy vibes, but the world and clothes and story are all the exact high production value coziness I'd been craving. It's an open world adventure with a voice-acted main story quest to pursue all about wishes and memories. Combat is pretty light, focusing more on platforming challenges and style battles as you explore the world. The clothing and hair physics are drool-worthy, as well they should be in a game all about collecting and styling clothes.

Tiny Glade

Release Date: 2024 | Developer: Pounce Light | Steam

Sit back and doodle castles, cottages, and landscapes until your heart is content in Tiny Glade. There's no pressure to unlock tools or skills, and no need to prepare for combat. Instead, you're just encouraged to let your creativity run wild with whatever you fancy building. Whether you're creating something entirely new or trying to recreate a scene from your favorite Studio Ghibli movie, Tiny Glade makes it incredibly easy for you to slip hours into without realizing it.

Station to Station 

Release Date: 2023 | Developer: Galaxy Grove | Steam

All you have to do is connect railways and watch the world bloom around you. What's more relaxing than that? Station to Station is an incredibly peaceful experience and even though there are a few restrictions on which moves require a little more thought than usual, the pacing of the game and the ability to undo any move you've made helps to take the pressure off.

Sticky Business 

Release Date: 2023 | Developer: Spellgarden Games | Steam

We've all had the dream of creating our own Etsy shop, but the stress of getting set up, creating stock, and shipping products is daunting. Fortunately, Sticky Business emulates the experience without the additional stresses or need for storage space. While you make your own unique sticker designs, you'll also unfold a story with each customer and develop relationships through your business.

Jusant

Release Date: 2023 | Developer: Don't Nod | Steam

Jusant is all about climbing to the top of a world that was once underwater with your tiny magical companion. It's hyper-focused on the rock-climbing system that Don't Nod developed but it's not nearly as intense as that makes it sound. This is akin to a puzzle platformer where you're always trying to figure out how to access the next area by combining the maneuvers you've been taught: belay climbing, swinging, using magical plants or wind to your advantage, and more. This is one that just feels so physical as you grip the left and right triggers on your controller (which Don't Nod recommends, as do I) to move your left and right hands steadily up to each new handhold.

Chants of Sennaar

Release Date: 2023 | Developer: Rundisc | Steam

Chants of Sennaar is an adventure game about learning languages and it was my personal favorite game of 2023. Each area of the tower you're ascending is occupied by a different group of people with their own language. By talking to people around you, examining murals and shop signs, and all the other clues hidden in the environment, you begin to piece together the meanings of each word. Taking notes in your sketchbook is a great record of how your thought process changes as you puzzle each language out while you uncover the truth about the tower and how all these people stopped communicating.

Mineko's Night Market

Release Date: 2023 | Developer: Meowza Games | Steam

If you want a new way to explore Japanese culture cutely, then Mineko's Night Market will appeal. This narrative-driven social sim will ask you to craft various enchanting items to sell at the night market and befriend a cadre of cats to help you on the journey. You'll also have to complete various quests and challenges which help add a little more structure to the game but maintain the relaxing atmosphere.

Summerhouse 

Release Date: 2024 | Developer: Friedemann | Steam

Summerhouse is the epitome of channeling creativity through cozy gaming. It's a small-scale building game that asks you to create a neighbourhood of beautiful homes in various settings, but with no rules or restrictions, so you are free to let your imagination run wild. We all know that the best part of games like The Sims is building the house, and fortunately this game is just all about free building.

Journey

Release Date: 2012 (2020 on PC) | Developer: Thatgamecompany | Steam

Journey is an old classic that predates the cozy game trend but it holds up incredibly well after getting ported to PC. It's a wordless adventure from a desert up to the top of a mountain accompanied by an incredible soundtrack that was the first from a videogame to ever be nominated for a Grammy Award. Journey will make you experience the full spectrum of emotions with a silent protagonist as you sand surf through ruins, fly with magic carpet whales, and eventually brave the snowy peaks.

Toem

Release Date: 2021 | Developer: Something We Made | Steam

For a game all in black and white, Toem has so much personality. This is an adventure game where you solve puzzles and riddles by using your camera to photograph things around you. The stamp book challenges are really nice classic adventure game stuff that force you to pay attention to all the world's surroundings. It's also a pretty short game which you can complete in three or four hours.

Donut County

Release Date: 2018 | Developer: Ben Esposito | Steam

Donut County is colorful, funny, and just a joy to play. It's like Katamari Damacy in reverse: Instead of rolling increasingly large objects into a ball, you swallow increasingly large objects into a mysterious hole in the ground that grows ever bigger as it devours the town. Each level has its little part of the story as Mira and her raccoon pal BK try to control the hole.

Book of Travels 

Release Date: 2021 (early access) | Developer: Might and Delight | Steam

This super beautiful RPG is actually the tiny version of an MMO with servers of just seven players. You'll create a character sheet and begin exploring the Braided Shore where magic is done by brewing teas and tying knots. Spend your time fishing and trading, buying spells that create fireworks or turn you into a deer, and engage in a spot of semi-turn-based combat if you're feeling brave. It's an exceptionally chill online game where you communicate with others by emotes only, a truly lovely world with an equally cozy soundtrack. Still, in early access, Book of Travels is planning more areas of the map to continue its very subtle story.

Melatonin 

Release Date: 2022 | Developer: Half Asleep | Steam

Rhythm games don't really have a reputation for being chill, but Melatonin is definitely low key and cozy. With its muted colors and lo-fi beats, Melatonin is nearly as relaxing as its name implies. Instead of throwing bars of beats at you, you'll play along via visual cues that help you complete the beat in each of its levels.

A Short Hike 

Release Date: 2019 | Developer: adamgryu | Steam

For those that want a cozy game that won't consume 100+ hours, this super cute adventure can be completed in around four hours. Explore an island mountain park while helping out the folks around you and uncovering small secrets on your journey to the peak. The park is lovely enough from the ground, but your main character can fly down too, so don't forget to hunt for hidden areas and unseen new friends.

Lil Gator Game 

Release Date: 2022 | Developer: MegaWobble | Steam

If you want a game that scratches an almost nostalgic itch, Lil Gator Game is worth picking up. Inspired by The Legend of Zelda, you will quite literally create your own adventure through arts, crafts, and an overactive imagination alongside your animal friends hiding around the map. But even though it wears its Nintendo inspirations on its sleeve, the dry humour and adorable characters that accompany the adventure as you try to get your sibling to play with you make this an incredibly easy game to lose yourself in.

Dorfromantik

Release Date: 2022 | Developer: Toukana Interactive | Steam

Strategy games don't normally strike me as cozy, but Dorfomantik really lets you take the pressure off. I lost an entire weekend to this hex-based tile game the first time I tried it. In its standard mode, you'll use a deck of hex tiles to match up stretches of fields, cities, waterways, and railroads to complete quests and grow your deck until you run out of tiles. For even less stress, creative mode lets you just build a lovely stretch of tiles any way you like from a neverending deck.

Beacon Pines 

Release Date: 2022 | Developer: Hiding Spot | Steam

Another cozy game that will only ask several hours of you, Beacon Pines is an adventure inside a story book with a super chill narrator. You'll earn new words as you explore the town, allowing you to unlock new branches on the story tree in a Mad Libs-like puzzle. This is one I'd consider cozy horror: a mystery about an old factory town where folks are going missing. There aren't jump scares though, just a creeping sense of dread as young pals Luka and Rolo dig themselves deeper and deeper into the town's history.

Snufkin: Melody of Moomin Valley

Release Date: 2024 | Developer: Hyper Games | Steam

In an attempt to restore peace to Moominvalley, you will have to help the citizens of the valley complete short but sweet requests like helping a frightened dog evade a spider and helping creatures get around the valley. For those familiar with the Moomin series, the characters you meet will be instantly recognisable which gives it a cozy, nostalgic atmosphere. For those who aren’t, this is a fantastic way to get familiar with its eclectic cast in a beautiful watercolour art style.

Unpacking 

Release Date: 2021 | Developer: Witch Beam | Steam

Moving house is stressful, but Unpacking is a very chill, light puzzling experience. You'll start small, organizing toys in a bright kids' bedroom, later unpacking multiple rooms worth of possessions as the implied main character grows up and the things they've kept over the years accumulate or change. That pink stuffed pig deserves your loyalty, to make sure to put it someplace prominent.

A Little to the Left 

Release Date: 2022 | Developer: Max Inferno | Steam

Is your house too overwhelming? Has the junk drawer in your kitchen been bogging you down for months? Great, A Little to the Left can help you continue to ignore all these real life issues while still providing you with the satisfaction and pride of cleaning up your space. This puzzle game takes you through cupboards, drawers, sewing kits, and every other nook and cranny to restore peace to your virtual abode in the most simple format.

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Just a few weeks later, at the 2023 Game Developers Conference, I assembled a group of five RPG designers with decades of experience between them—including Dragon Age lead Mike Laidlaw and Cyberpunk 2077 lead Paweł Sasko, whose games heavily featured in that editorial—and lobbed the headline out like a live grenade to start the conversation.

Thankfully no one caught any shrapnel.

"I know this article very well, because we've been discussing it at [CD Projekt Red] quite a bit," Sasko said, jumping in first. "We mostly agree, actually. At least when it comes to triple-A, we're running at a fucking wall, and we're gonna crash on that wall really soon."  You can read more from that bit of the conversation right here.

From there we roleplayed brilliant conversationalists for more than an hour, touching on:

• How games are on the cusp of a procedural narrative breakthrough
• What players expect from RPGs today
• How their personal experiences playing RPGs have informed their games
• Writing characters that really resonate with players

We also talked about the making of The Witcher 3's Bloody Baron quest, great tabletop systems that videogames should poach ideas from, and the impact of Elden Ring. 

You can listen to the full 80 minute conversation above (or find it on the PC Gamer Chat Log podcast feed in your podcast app of choice) and read highlights of the conversation here on the site.

In 2017, Breath of the Wild modders started with funny model replacements like Mario and GTA's CJ before moving to more ambitious projects, replacing full shrines with custom environments. By 2021 they were doing so much more.

"Initially Second Wind was meant to be an 'update' mod that added the ability to dye and upgrade all armours, do some minor rebalancing and feature a visually updated set of shrines," says mod dev lead CEObrainz. After some modding breakthroughs, Second Wind's original name—Breath of the Wild 2.0—no longer fit. "Things only changed once we learned how to add new objects to the game without replacing existing ones, as well as how to add new quests. With the realization that these things were possible the mod quickly grew."

Second Wind is just one of a few wildly impressive projects that transform or dramatically remix Breath of the Wild:

• Linkle 3.0, which completely replaces Link with female alter-ego Linkle, with custom animation, armor, and sound effects
• Dark Army Resurrection, a combat-focused mod that makes enemies tougher and spawns new breeds of skeletal baddies. Link gets a new skill system to compensate
• BOTW Randomizer, a comprehensive remix of enemies and items with a whole host of other random options, like suddenly changing the time of day or warping you across Hyrule
• Relics of the Past, a "super hard" mod that adds challenges across the map, revamps AI, loads you down with equipment and scales enemies alongside you
• Dangerous To Go Alone, a dizzyingly expansive (though still very unfinished) overhaul that aims to make combat feel like a Souls game, and also adds items from older Zelda games 

There are rebalance mods, mods that let you play as Zelda, and, of course, mods that eliminate weapon durability. Some of these mods are built to work on original hardware, if you want to go through the effort of loading them onto a homebrewed console. But most are built for Cemu, the Wii U emulator that shot to widespread attention around the release of the game in 2017. Before helping birth a thriving mod scene, the volunteer developers behind Cemu had a more daunting challenge—just getting the game to work on PCs. 

Hy(rule) stakes

"What makes Breath of the Wild tricky to emulate vs most other games is that it offloads some non-graphics tasks onto the GPU," says Cemu creator Exzap. "Having this kind of CPU <-> GPU interaction is hard to emulate correctly and most of the issues that you can see in the video, like Link sinking into the ground or water and grass not being rendered, were caused by it." 

The video above (also on Streamable) is from a build of Cemu released on Patreon on March 10, 2017, just one week after Breath of the Wild debuted. After just a couple days of bugfixing, Exzap and other Cemu developers got Breath of the Wild to boot past the main menu without crashing. It still wasn't really playable, but that would soon change, and at a lightning pace. The interest from PC players was intense. 

In January 2017, the Patreon for Cemu was worth around $4,000 monthly. By early April, it was pulling in $40,000, briefly making it the third biggest on the platform. That came with pressure to show progress in Breath of the Wild, and fast.

"We tried to make it understood that pledging was seen as a donation more than a promise to get anything in return," says Exzap. "Although we did have exclusive access to new releases a week in advance at that time. I am gracious for all the support we got, and still get, but there definitely was also a darker side to it when you have thousands of people impatiently complaining about the next update taking too long, especially since I take feedback a little bit too personal sometimes."

Exzap says that people tend to think of Cemu as the "Breath of the Wild emulator," and that association highlights the tricky position Cemu found itself in. Proper emulator development can't just focus on one game—that approach is likely to break compatibility with another. Exzap admits they prioritized BotW over other games "a little bit," but says after the first month or so of targeted bugfixes they were mostly focused on improving performance across Cemu.

"Unlike regular game development, it's really hard to predict what kind of progress you will be making and thus promises are hard to keep," they said. "Even worse, seemingly simple emulation bugs can turn into rabbit holes that take months to fix, which is in stark contrast to everyone wanting a bug fix or higher framerates as fast as possible."

Videos of Breath of the Wild's rapid improvement in Cemu made headlines in spring 2017, showing the game running (albeit slowly, or with glitches) at 4K. The breakthrough many were waiting for came in August, when a member of the Cemu community released a hack called FPS++ that unlocked the 30 fps frame limit. Optimizations eventually made it possible to run the game at 60 fps on PC, a night and day improvement over its erratic console framerate.

The arrival of a Vulkan driver brought with it a solution for notorious shader cache stutter, eliminating one of the last major issues. As the PC became a viable way to actually play Breath of the Wild rather than simply mess around with it, mods started rolling in. Exzap doesn't claim credit for the mod scene, though. Cemu didn't have support for game-specific game patches and graphics packs until a community-made plugin called Cemuhook arrived.

"The entire modding scene builds on this feature, although I have to say that this scene mostly emerged independent of us," Exzap says. "We tried to provide a framework for integrating mods into Cemu and the community found ways to make really cool stuff with it."

Link to the future

Prominent modder Waikuteru, who's made hundreds of videos on the game in addition to creating the BotW Randomizer, had no experience modding games until he tried some early Breath of the Wild mods and decided to create his own. He credits HailtoDodongo, who we first wrote about back in 2019, for breaking open map modding. Waikuteru's The Lost Records is one of several mods to add an entirely new shrine to Hyrule. 

Even after five years, the mod scene isn't yet mature. Just a few months ago a modder released U-King Mod Manager, a replacement for an aging tool that helped players merge multiple mod installs without crashing their games. Another member of the community has been working on a decompilation project to fully decipher the game's code, which will likely take years if it's ever completed—we've only recently seen decompilations for the decades-old Mario 64 and Ocarina of Time.

Waikuteru, as well as CEObrainz, the lead modder behind Second Wind, say their work doesn't really require the insight from that decompilation. But there are still real challenges with modding the game, mostly as a result of the Wii U's weak hardware.

"We've had the absolute fortune of running into every type of limitation that exists when it comes to modding BotW," says CEObrainz. "Often, we are forced to completely rethink and redesign aspects of the mod to work around these limitations."

One of the most onerous is the "Panic Blood Moon," a phenomenon where Breath of the Wild essentially resets the world state when it runs out of memory. Adding too many unique items (like Second Wind's entirely new village) can trigger this overload.

Waikuteru says that the Panic Blood Moon "happens more often on the Wii U version, because the Wii U has worse components, such as only 2GB of RAM." The Switch, by comparison, has 4GB of RAM and far more CPU and GPU power. Second Wind, Waikuteru's mods, and a growing number of others are being released for both the Wii U and Switch versions of Breath of the Wild. In 2017 the Switch was too new to be emulated on PC, but a lot's changed in five years—Switch emulator Yuzu has caught up fast.

"BotW is fully playable on Yuzu, and there are only a few minor graphical issues that we're still working to resolve," says emulator lead Bunnei. "Compared to Yuzu, Cemu is generally faster and renders more accurately due to the maturity of the emulator and the lower specifications of the Wii U compared to the Switch. Additionally, Cemu boasts a more developed modding scene for BotW, including graphics packs that can significantly enhance the gameplay experience with features such as dynamic FPS, extended draw distances, and more."

Still, Yuzu is able to run Breath of the Wild at its native 30 fps on reasonable hardware: the emulator devs recommend a 10th gen Intel Core i5 or Ryzen 5 3600 and a GTX 1650 or Radeon RX 6500 graphics card. Hitting 60 fps requires top-of-the-line hardware, though, and if you drop frames the game will run in slow motion; FPS++ on Cemu delivers a better experience. But on Switch, things will only get better: Bunnei says they're currently "addressing some of the known graphical and performance issues that may affect BotW on Yuzu."

Every fan-made mod and line of emulator code written to make Breath of the Wild a better-looking, better-running, more interesting game on PC is, of course, done under Nintendo's disapproving gaze.

CEObrainz says the Second Wind team "adheres to strict guidelines" to only distribute mods as patches (rather than distributing any of Nintendo's code), avoiding piracy discussions in their Discord, and ensuring the mods can't be misconstrued as "official DLC."

Nintendo hasn't gone after popular modding sites like GameBanana to take down mods—the company could certainly make the case that the screenshots used to promote the mods are copyright infringing, but mod code itself is thornier. Mods shouldn't include any of Nintendo's proprietary code, but likely still violate the EULA (you know, that absurdly long document that says what you can and can't do with the software you just bought). Would a EULA saying "no mods plz" actually hold up in court, though? Hard to say. The answer will change from country-to-country, and Nintendo lost that battle once before in a 1992 case against the Game Genie.

Today, Nintendo's opting for the easier path—going after YouTubers to take down mod videos when they get too much attention. But with Switch emulation getting faster and Tears of the Kingdom on the horizon, it's hard to imagine those cases being more than a bump in the road for Zelda modders. There's about to be a whole new Hyrule to take apart and put back together. Or, in the words of Carl Johnson:  

The games below are the ones that earn a recommendation despite taking an absurdly long time to enjoy. There are some caveats, though. You won't find games here that are designed to be played endlessly, which means MMOs, idle games, and live service games are out. There are exceptions to this, of course, but unlike those games, this list can't become my hobby.

Singleplayer story games are easy to include, but strategy and sim games can fit here too. Gaining the mental strength to pry open the many, many systems of Dwarf Fortress is different from logging into Genshin Impact to stay on top of your dailies. And weird challenge runs that extend a game's length don't count either.

The hour counts on these games are obviously extremely relative to how you play, but I've also chosen games where it's recommended to do almost everything in them. Take a deep breath. Try not to think about how these hours could be applied elsewhere in your life, and follow me as we find the longest games that are actually worth playing.

Divinity: Original Sin 2 

How long? ~100+ hours

Every Divinity: Original Sin 2 player talks about the party-based RPG like it's the best recreation of playing a tabletop RPG in videogames. It's packed with characters and quests and has turn-based combat that is truly open-ended. Our review praised its intricacy and commitment to a truly dynamic world where your actions come into play more so than many other RPGs. And on Steam, the game has over 100,000 reviews, which has earned it an "overwhelmingly positive" rating. 

The kicker is that this game is extremely long, even more so if you decide to play it in co-op. It has a slow start and can be overwhelming in its opening hours, but once you find a groove, the hour count fades into the background. Divinity: Original Sin 2, by all accounts, is exceptional, and worth every minute.

Crusader Kings 3

How long? ~160 hours

It can be tricky to gauge the length of strategy games. A campaign can take up a single day or weeks, depending on how deep you want to go. Crusader Kings 3, and, frankly, both games before it, takes the lead on the strategy game that can become as time-consuming as a day job.

The pitch for getting into a Crusader Kings game has mostly remained the same: start in Ireland and see what unfolds from there. It can be a little worrying to hear such open-ended advice, but the joy of Crusader Kings is to watch your dynasty progress through the years and to see the drama that happens all around you. It's a game that can create the most outlandish stories of rogue royalty, desperate assassinations, and surprise sieges. It just requires you to accept that you won't know how everything works right away and to embrace whatever fascinating events take place.

Persona 5 Royal

How long? ~100 hours

The Persona series taunt JRPG-curious players with how ridiculously long each one takes to complete. Persona 5 is the quintessential JRPG, taking lessons learned from the genre's history and incorporating modernized tactics. It exudes style, has an outstanding soundtrack, and a weird, but charming cast of characters. But to see all of that, you have to commit over 100 hours of your life to it.

"It might not be what you'd expect from quite possibly the longest JRPG you'll ever play, but each of those many hours is filled to the brim with inventiveness that—quite frankly—can make it hard to go back to other games in the genre," Oscar Taylor-Kent wrote in our review of Persona 5.

It also has surprisingly dynamic turn-based combat that tasks you with keeping momentum to clean out your enemies efficiently, which rewards clever tactics and sharp knowledge of your characters. And outside the combat, you get to explore both the mundane hallways of the main character's high school and the warped labyrinths in its dream-like dungeons. Persona 5 is a long journey, but a journey that's worth it.

Dwarf Fortress

How long? ~100 hours

Much like Crusader Kings 3, Dwarf Fortress is a game that needs you to meet it halfway. There are people who have been playing it for years now and still find new features and stories to share. It's a game that continues to give you new ideas and things to play with as you put more and more time into playing it.

There just isn't another game that can create legendary scenarios like Dwarf Fortress. Your crew of dwarves are subject to an endless list of procedurally generated adventures and dangers. There are factions and wars and history and prophecies that all come into play as you poke through its systems to try to survive. Despite its nearly endless length, Dwarf Fortress spends every minute building an experience you won't get in any other game.

The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt

How long? ~100 hours

Maybe this one is a given considering you're reading the website that runs an annual Twitch stream with bathtub Geralt, but let me just say it: The Witcher 3 isn't a minute too long. This dark fantasy epic is a brilliant RPG with a stunning open world.

Its combat might feel loose at the start, but it has all kinds of depth if you want to really dig into it. There are tons of quests to do and many of them have a level of writing that you'd typically see in the main quest of another game. The Witcher 3 is so cohesive that it's easy to lose hundreds of hours in it exploring places like Novigrad and Skellige, slaying monsters and fixing problems along the way. Few other games ask you to spend this much time in them and then go out of their way to pay off that commitment by the end of your playthrough.

XCOM 2 The Long War mod

How long? ~120 hours

The Long War 2 mod for XCOM 2 is a little bit of a cheat for a list like this, but this mod is absolutely unparalleled. It takes Firaxis' solid tactics game and folds in complexity to give it much more weight than the base game.

The single caveat to The Long War 2 mod is that it's primarily aimed at people who are already experienced with XCOM 2. The mod doesn't go out of its way to explain itself, so you'll have to rely on existing knowledge of the base game. But the tweaks it makes to units, enemies, and the overall structure of each mission, forces you to approach it with an all-new strategy.

Missions come in various degrees of severity and you have to juggle your squads to survive them. There are far more dice rolls, but, as Tom Senior wrote in his piece on the mod, it retains the excitement of chance by flooding the game with smaller, but still impactful decisions. And each mission requires you to build out a resistance camp in each area by gaining intel and defending it from aliens. That's right, they injected a little 4X into XCOM.

If you missed XCOM 2, play XCOM 2. But if you find it's not enough for your strategy-hungry brain, install The Long War 2 and start your campaign. It's worth it.

Elden Ring

How long? ~133 hours

I remember playing Elden Ring for review before all the walkthroughs and guides were out there. I was around 60 or so hours in and had reached an area that had been teased for most of the game. The boss of the area took a number of tries, but when he fell, I was certain it was over.

There might as well have been a late title card because I soon discovered that more than half of the game was still in front of me. But I didn't react to that discovery with distress, I was thrilled to see what else was tucked away in this monumental open world action RPG.

Elden Ring was our 2022 game of the year for a reason. It takes the weighty combat of the Dark Souls series and has you face off against the sometimes beautiful and sometimes horrific beasts of the Lands Between. You explore dungeons and caves and cities and speak to a cast of wise and absurd characters. It has almost everything you'd want in a dark fantasy RPG.

Depending on your desire to explore and your skill at its punishing combat, Elden Ring can take hundreds of hours to thoroughly complete. The more time you spend in it, the more you start to run into the deep, forbidden parts of the world that genuinely feel like you shouldn't be allowed there. Elden Ring routinely rewards the effort you put into it with beautiful landscapes and items that can completely change how you interact with the game. Elden Ring is an invitation to one of the greatest, most creative fantasy worlds in games.

Stardew Valley 

How long? ~150 hours

It's safe to call Stardew Valley a classic at this point. It's the ultimate life sim game that will consume your life. And that's even before you get into modding.

Stardew Valley is a charming pixel-art game where you grow a farm, meet people, and help rebuild a town. It's flexible in that you can choose to play it leisurely or go hard and whip through its challenges at a fast pace. But at its heart, it's a game meant for you to luxuriate in and work through over the course of many, many hours. 

There are plenty of other games like Stardew Valley on Steam, but few of them manage to make their activities not feel like boring chores the way Stardew does. The joy is seeing the progress you've made and slowly branching out to new projects, and the pacing keeps it just shy of monotonous. So, don't let the hour count intimidate you, Stardew Valley is the perfect game to play if you want all your efforts to be reflected in a meaningful way. 

Pathfinder: Wrath of the Righteous 

How long? 130+ hours

Party-based RPGs in the Baldur's Gate tradition tend to go long, and Divinity: Original Sin 2 is a perfect example. The Pathfinder games know how to rack up the hours too, with leveling systems that expect you to min-max a growing band of wildly different characters and management systems that bolt an entire separate game on top.

In Wrath of the Righteous that management tier has you command a crusade across a demon-infested land as you work toward your ultimate goal of sealing the Worldwound. You decide what to build in liberated settlements, respond to the requests of their citizens, and send out armies who do battle in a completely different combat system than the one you have to master as the hero leading a party of adventurers.

Fortunately there are a lot of settings to tweak if you're not into the crusade management side of things, and there's no shame in turning the difficulty down. That'll let you concentrate on the other side of Wrath of the Righteous, where you slowly become a Mythic Hero with godlike powers, choosing between paths that might let you become an angel, liche, cosmic time judge, fairy-powered superhero, or something even stranger.

• Jody Macgregor, Weekend Editor
• Lauren Aitken, Guides Editor
• Robert Jones, Magazine Editor
• Ted Lichfield, Associate Editor
• Fraser Brown, Online Editor
• Andy Chalk, News Lead

To arrive at this master tier list, I first asked each expert to create their own Geralt tier list, explaining their choices. I then compared their lists, considered their arguments, and used the scientific "ehh, that seems about right" method to sort the witchers from S-tier (the best) to F-tier (barely even a Geralt).

Without further ado, here is our definitive Geralt tier list:

S-Tier

Tub Geralt

We didn't have to explain the value of this Geralt when we started posting him on Twitter several years ago: It was intuitively understood then, and should remain so now. It's Geralt, and he's in a tub. What more do you need to know?

Witcher 3 Geralt (not in a tub)

We all agreed that, even when he's not in a tub, The Witcher 3's Geralt is a top-tier Geralt, even better than the Geralt he's based on. Andy called him "mature" and "dignified," and Jody said he's voice actor Doug Cockle's "best performance, coherent whether steered by the player to be generous and forgiving or a gruff haggler who cares only for Gwent."

Good job, Witcher 3 Geralt: You're the best Geralt, both in and out of the tub.

A-Tier

Book Geralt

The Geralt that started it all. "Headband wearer, philosopher, man who likes to have his say whenever the authorial voice takes a break from describing every nearby woman's boobs," said Jody.

Henry Cavill Geralt

A gruff, muscley softy with a wig that improves over time. "Toss him a coin, he was better than you expected," Andy said.

Lauren Aitken's Geralt Tattoo

Lauren was the only one to rank this majestic Geralt, who happens to live on Lauren.

Maul Geralt from that NSFW cosplay calendar

"I got the calendar, thanks," said Lauren, who was also the only one to rank this Geralt. It is a very accurate cosplay.

B-Tier

Witcher 2 Geralt

I like this Geralt because he looks mean. "Probably the fiercest-looking Geralt," said Robert. "A proper weapon. But lacking a bit in character at times."

Big Geralt

This is a Geralt we found in the image gallery for a mod called Finger Lickin' Geraldo. We like him because he's large.

Soul Calibur 6 Geralt

Robert reckons that this is the "most handsome Geralt," and argues that he's a better fighter than Witcher 3 Geralt, who tends to twirl about a bit too much. Improved swordsmanship has earned him a respectable B grade.

Geralt from that Polish TV series

Jody thinks the Geralt who appeared in early-2000s Polish TV show Wiedźmin (which was also condensed into a movie) is underrated. He's "explicitly a younger version of Geralt, only starting his career, and with a bit more idealism thanks to that," Jody said. 

Jody also had praise for the show's Jaskier, but we are not rating Jaskiers until someone says in a meeting, "Let's rank Jaskiers."

Massage therapist Geralt

@alexdrastal

♬ Holding out for a Hero (from "Footloose") - Bonnie Tyler

This Geralt probably would've ranked higher if any of us had personally received a Geralt massage, but alas, we have not experienced the firm but mindful touch of the witcher.

C-Tier

Witcher 1 Geralt

This Geralt really tested my "ehh, that seems about right" system. "So horny I couldn't even convince a lady to give me lessons in the elvish language without the game immediately cutting to an awkward sex scene," said Jody, who put Witcher 1 Geralt in the D-tier (you just can't escape his horniness). Andy, however, put this Geralt in the A-tier for the very same reason, noting only that he's a "non-stop sex machine." Two others gave this Geralt a B. 

In the end, I concluded that, ehh, C-tier seems about right for this Geralt, who hadn't mastered facial expressions yet.

Gewalf of Wivia

Geralt earns his knighthood as Gewalf of Wivia in Gwent spin-off Thronebreaker: The Witcher Tales. An A-tier moment, but Geralt is only in the game for about five minutes, dragging this cameo down to C-tier.

Manga Geralt

No one had a strong opinion about this Geralt, so I put him here in the C-tier: a passing grade with no strong feelings for or against. It's the 7 out of 10 of tiers.

Canceled '90s tank control game Geralt

"He chunky," said Ted, who also praised this Geralt for his PS1 horror game vibes.

Nendoroid Geralt

This big-headed figurine borrows some S-tier glory by transforming into Tub Geralt.

Monster Hunter Geralt

Robert called this Geralt "Chipmunk Geralt" because of his wide jaw. He's not otherwise very notable since he only sticks around for one hunt, but he is voiced by Doug Cockle, which helps.

D-Tier

McFarlane Geralt

Despite the face being "slightly off," Robert likes this "faithful and strong" Geralt and placed him in the B-tier. Lauren, however, gave this Geralt's wonky face a D, and Lauren has a Geralt tattoo, so I'm going with her.

Lost Ark Geralt

"It's not his fault Lost Ark's Witcher crossover was underwhelming, but I still can't even look at him," lamented Jody.

Fortnite Geralt

He looks like Geralt, but he's got that plastic skin all Fortnite characters have. Smooth Geralt just doesn't do it for us like Big Geralt does.

F-Tier

Funko Geralt

Can't even pose him. Useless.

 Gerlat

"Gerlat" is a misspelling of "Geralt" that I frequently type by accident. I did it several times while working on this article, and I do it so often that he's become a distinct type of off-brand Geralt to me. The image above is a drawing I did of what I think Gerlat looks like.

Unranked

Liam Hemsworth Geralt

This is an unproven Geralt and thus he cannot be ranked yet. His tier will be determined after he takes over for Henry Cavill, if any of us still remember that we made this list.

Gerald of the Riviera

A guy named Gerald appears in a game called Arcade Paradise as your dad, and he's in the Riviera. Is he truly a Geralt? He is voiced by Doug Cockle, which is a very Geralt-like thing to be, but Geralt is from Rivia, not the Riviera, so I'm going to say no. Does it make sense that I ranked a typo, but not this? I'm going to say... yes. It makes sense, and isn't just because someone mentioned this game after I'd already settled on 22 Geralts.

First impressions last year were glowing. Halo players new and old almost universally loved the new multiplayer in its beta tests, a balance developer 343 has been chasing since 2012's Halo 4. Infinite nailed it in a way I honestly didn't believe was possible. The first blow to that enthusiasm came in August 2021, months before the game was even out. It would end up taking a full year for Infinite to pull out of its downward spiral.

Bad year, month 1 (November): Infinite launches without core Halo features

Halo Infinite's decline over 2022 was death by a thousand cuts and a couple gaping wounds.

In an August 2021 video update, 343 delivered the news that both campaign co-op and the Forge mapmaking mode would miss launch and arrive in 2022. The goal was for campaign co-op to arrive about three months later (reality: 12 months) and for Forge to ship in six months (reality: 12 months, in beta).

Nevertheless, the mood was still good when multiplayer surprise launched in November, on Halo: Combat Evolved's 20th anniversary. Infinite was just… fun! Halo was good again! It was relevant. It was… a flaming dumpster fire within a month.

So much went wrong with Infinite's multiplayer launch and its support throughout 2022, but the rot began here, with this decision to launch without Forge or campaign co-op. It was a practical, necessary decision to make it possible to release the game by the end of 2021, a date that was already one year later than planned. It was also wrong. 

This choice set Infinite up to fail in two ways: 

1. It magnified Infinite's missing features vs. the classic Halo games

Every single Halo launched with co-op. Halo 3, Reach, and 4 all launched with Forge. After it seemed like 343 had finally nailed the essence of Halo's arena gunplay, not having these two core features was a bitter chaser.

There are reasonable justifications. Modern game development is expensive, in both people and time. Infinite's campaign was a series-first open world sandbox. Halo 3's Forge was vastly simpler; character models and maps and lighting were all far less detailed; the old games had to run on a single console, instead of across two consoles and PCs, with dedicated servers and a network system that can seamlessly interlink between Steam and the Xbox backend. There are doubtless far more insidious complexities to do with Halo Infinite's engine and design that I don't understand.

None of that matters, because that's not what players see or touch. What they see is a game missing things they've expected for a decade. Two decades. And when launch arrived, the lack of Forge and co-op formed the core of a snowball that picked up more and more criticisms of absent features, like:

• You couldn't replay campaign missions.
• There was no SWAT playlist, a perennial favorite and simple mode to implement.
• Thanks to the F2P progression and customization system, you could no longer pick a simple color for your Spartan the way you'd been able to do since 2001. As summarized by a player on Reddit: "You have to pay for the color blue."
• No way to earn most armor customization simply for playing.

2. MIA Forge exacerbated Infinite's greatest failing: the content drought throughout 2022 

The above ignited the firestorm at launch, but Forge's absence did Infinite far more damage over time. It took six months for Infinite to get two new maps and game modes. A year in this remains Infinite's biggest problem, but the recent arrival of Forge has already proven to be what the game needed all along.

If Infinite had launched with Forge, 343 would've had its pick of community maps to highlight; even if only the best of the best made it into matchmaking, there'd have been a constant flow of new stuff to see. Instead, players logged in week after week to a dry riverbed.

Bad year, month 2 (December): Warning signs of the slow year ahead

By the time campaign landed in December (to overall quite positive reviews) the mood on the F2P multiplayer had turned venomous, based on a crappy battle pass, a narrow map selection and limited playlists. 343 announced that the first season would drag on six months, cementing the dread that Infinite's core multiplayer issues were a long, long way from being solved. The reality turned out to be worse than the fear.

Issues that players felt needed to be addressed immediately were clearly way down the roadmap. However complex they were from a development standpoint, they seemed frustratingly simple to players. For example, Infinite launched with a progression system based around daily and weekly challenges. But everyone hated them: 

• Many required specific gametypes that players just had to hope to get into via matchmaking
• Others required using certain weapons or playing in a specific way, like a melee hit to the back
• Simply playing the game rewarded no XP until 343 hastily patched in challenges that rewarded playing your first few matches
• It took a year, until November 2022, for Infinite to reward match XP for playing and performing well on your team

The battle pass was littered with "challenge swaps" that let you replace one challenge with another, a band-aid for an obviously bad system. The trickle of armor you unlocked felt particularly meager. The season's first special event had its own free battle pass, which 343 had to alter because it, too, was loaded with challenge swaps and XP filler.

343's former head of design, Jerry Hook, talked openly about those issues in a December 15 livestream, but also said something that I think encapsulated Infinite's first painful year: "One of the biggest challenges we knew we'd have, no matter what we did, was that changing Halo's 20 years of boxed product models to a free-to-play model is not going to be inherently satisfying for most of our players. We get that. However, we don't think we have to continue to follow normal tropes of the industry to make that effective. We think we can do some things better for our players and better for the game experience, to push that edge a little bit. So we're taking a look at that across the board."

Other than Infinite's good idea to never have battle passes expire, its progression system and cosmetics seemed sparse compared to other F2P games, not innovative. While Halo players were grinding for shoulderpads, Fortnite was literally being turned upside down and adding Spider-Man. Fortnite is in a class of its own, but Infinite was meant to be Halo's grand comeback, the start of a "10 year platform" fueled by Microsoft's bottomless pockets and years of development time.

How did it take until launch to see how poorly it stacked up to other F2P games?

In hindsight, Infinite's 2020 delay set the wrong expectations

Microsoft and 343 Industries absolutely needed to delay Halo Infinite after its first poor showing at E3. It was originally meant to be out by the end of 2020, and an extra year of development time made many players think that Infinite would arrive robust, extra polished, with a bulked-out multiplayer and more maps lined up to debut at a rapid clip. What's the point of a live service game without constantly feeding grist into the content mill, right?

Yet the "10 year platform," which had seemingly gotten a generous extra year in the oven, looked thin even next to the older games in the series that promised no such longevity and launched into far less competitive multiplayer environments. 

Halo multiplayer map history

Halo 2

• Launch day: 11 maps
• 5 months later: 2 free maps, 2 paid maps ($5), made free 2 months later
• 7 months later: 5 paid maps ($12), made free 2 months later
• 2 years, 6 months later: 2 paid maps ($4), made free 3 months later

Halo 3 

• Launch day: 11 maps, Forge
• 3 months later: 3 paid maps ($10), made free 3 months later
• 7 months later: 3 paid maps ($10), reduced price later
• 10 months later: 1 free map
• 1 year 7 months later: 3 new maps ($10), reduced price later
• 2 years later: 3 new maps ($10)

Halo Infinite 

• Launch day: 10 maps (6 exclusive to Arena, 4 exclusive to Big Team)
• 6 months later: 2 new free maps
• 1 year later: 2 new free maps (built in Forge), Forge mode
• 1 year, 1 month later: 1 new free map (built in Forge)

One year in, Halo 2 had 20 maps. Halo 3 had 18 maps. Halo Infinite had 14, divided more strictly between game modes.

That was never going to go over well with longtime players or wow new ones.

Looking back, perhaps a radical degree of transparency about Infinite's fraught development, instead of repeating the upbeat mantra "this is just the beginning," could've set a different expectation: that it was a freaking miracle Infinite shipped in a playable state at all, and that 2022 would be a year defined by playing catch-up. 

Bad year, month 3 (January): Big Team Battle woes

In December, it became clear that Infinite's Big Team Battle matchmaking was having serious issues, especially when trying to play with groups. Due to the holidays, it took until January 19 for a patch aimed to fix the issue. It did not succeed.

A limited time event introduces a new mode which is mostly well-received, but players remain frustrated by the challenge system used for progression.

Bad year, month 4 (March): Quiet period

Big Team Battle matchmaking is finally fixed. 

In a post on Halo Waypoint, 343 writes that its priorities are addressing issues, completing season 2, and working on co-op, Forge and season 3 while also balancing "team health, with an emphasis on getting ourselves into a sustainable development rhythm so that we can deliver great experiences to all of you while keeping a healthy work/life balance… Frankly, these last few months have been slower than we expected, and we sincerely thank you for your patience." 

The post highlighted major issues still being worked on, including anti-cheat vulnerabilities and the progression system. The update breaks the news that campaign co-op will not be available at the start of season 2 in May, and that only two maps will be added in season 2.

Bad year, month 5 (April): Season 2 stretches to November

"We would all like to have more things happening at a faster pace," says Halo community lead Brian Jarrard on a livestream before the launch of season 2, which is turns out will also last for six months, instead of the expected three.

Here's something I don't think 343 gets enough respect for: they know they're going to get booed, and they get up on stage anyway. They put out lengthy blog posts and video updates about their goals and their shortcomings while the crowd pelts them with rotten cabbage and human shit. They're far more open than most development studios. Unfortunately, admitting that they're unhappy with the pace of updates internally can't mollify fans who don't understand why the updates take as long as they do, when other games seem more capable of meaty, rapid-fire additions. 

Bad year, month 7 (June): Frustration mounts over lingering problems

343 consistently worked to fix technical issues Halo Infinite launched with, improving anti-cheat, smoothing out incorrect animations, rebalancing the sound mix, squashing bugs and crashes. This work does not alter player perception that Infinite remains flawed in some key areas, including network performance impacting accurate shot registration. Dozens of threads about lag and "desync" dot Halo Waypoint and Reddit, intensifying over the summer.

A 343 post in late June says that it's high on the priority list, but explains that "the devs that would work on these fixes have been allocated to other Infinite work." Some of that work has indirectly helped desync issues, but not in the most important cases "around melee and 'around the wall' shots." It took 343 until the December 2022 update to specifically target these issues. 

Bad year, month 10 (September): Local co-op gets cut, and an updated timeline does not go over well

In a community update video, Joseph Staten announces that splitscreen co-op is being scrapped. Digital Foundry gains access to an unfinished version of splitscreen co-op and found that it was actually quite playable, even on a 2013 Xbox One.

In the same update video, new head of live service Sean Baron strikes a nerve by saying that Halo's DNA is a "highly competitive game," which some players construe as prioritizing ranked/esports-esque competitive play over the sillier social side of Halo. This is, I think a bit unfairly, used as more ammunition for the argument that 343 is out of touch with its players. 

Other things Baron says in the stream are candid and good to hear, like: "We want players to expect a smooth quality experience with very few technical issues, and we've really fallen down there, from a PC perspective. We can do better." But 343's objective of improving on all of its core pillars by the end of 2023 highlights how little seemed to get done in 2022. After months and months of the same refrain, it becomes increasingly hard to believe.

Forge is delayed two months from a planned release in September.

Bad year, month 12 (November): The update everyone was waiting for

The end of Halo Infinite's very bad year is, at long last, a very good month. On November 8, 343 launches online co-op and the ability to replay missions. I've played it, and it works as well as I'd hoped.

Forge mode launches (still in beta form, but solid) and immediately brings a sense of hope that the year-long content drought is over.

An overhauled progression system arrives, delivering XP just for playing Halo (what a concept). A free battle pass offers players a slew of new cosmetics. The winter update also includes a brand new game mode and two maps, weapon balance changes, and many bug fixes.

The mood, for the first time in a year, is resoundingly positive. 

Forward unto dawn

In early December, 343 moved up its planned release of a custom game browser by several months, making it possible for players to join games played on custom Forge maps with ease. It also added a remake of popular Halo 3 map The Pit made in Forge. 

In a reversal of the heavily criticized cosmetic options available at launch, 343 made all of the Spartan armor cores (key pieces of the customization system) free to all players, alongside 10 color options.

I wish this had been the game Halo Infinite launched as. Imagine a version of this comeback story where Infinite launched with Forge and a progression system that prioritizes just playing Halo, and one month later players got an early version of a custom game browser to play community maps. Sure, the six month wait to the second season would still annoy some people—but the rest of us could've hopped into some classic CTF on a fan-made Blood Gulch to pass the time.

Building a smoothly updating, constantly engaging live service game is like climbing a mountain. Despite 343 Industries' best efforts, Halo Infinite spent much of its first year burrowing down instead, losing players who expected much more, and much faster. Now after 13 months Halo's finally returned to level ground, with a tailwind of enthusiasm from Forge and an accumulation of improvements big and small. It still feels far, far behind other live service games, and it's going to take a long time to get there. But if 343 can deliver on its goals by the end of next year, we might have finally reached a vantage point from which 10 years of Halo Infinite looks like an exciting journey.

1. Ghosts ‘n Goblins (1987)

Capcom / Pacific Dataworks International | DOS

Many have heard of the infamous PC version of Mega Man and the janky port of Street Fighter 2. Compared to Capcom’s DOS port of brutally tough arcade platformer Ghosts ‘n Goblins, they are works of art.

Ported by the long-defunct Pacific Dataworks International, this is an EGA assault on the senses, with no scrolling, projectile sprites thrown backwards, stuttery movement and an ear-piercing rendition of the game’s theme belted out through the PC speaker. It could be considered a small mercy that this version also doesn’t have the game’s infamous second loop, shrinking an entire playthrough to under 10 minutes if you’re not making too many mistakes. That's only nine and a half minutes longer than you'll want to give it.

2. Panzer Dragoon, Virtua FIghter Remix & More (1995)

Sega | Windows 95

Back in the mid ‘90s, a handful of Sega’s best Saturn games arrived on PC and in fine form. It’s a pity that nobody played them, as they were exclusive to a single GPU chipset; the NV1, the debut product from a plucky up-and-coming tech firm named Nvidia.

The best known NV1 card was the Diamond Edge 3D, one of the best-featured and most expensive graphics cards of the time. It boasted a pair of Saturn controller ports and a built-in sound card. While the six NV1 ports were excellent (even mimicking the Saturn’s weird non-polygon rendering), most figured that buying a regular GPU and a Saturn was cheaper. 

3. Cursed Mountain (2010)

Deep Silver / Sproing Interactive | Windows

Sometimes a game is just sent out into the cold to die. Cursed Mountain was a middling survival horror game for the Wii with a Tibetan mountaineering theme, and publisher Deep Silver also rolled out a PC version. Tragically, it was released with no fanfare, no promotion and little hope of survival.

As well as being a barebones port that ran at a locked (and frankly bizarre) 33fps, some of its Wii controller gimmicks didn’t map gracefully to mouse and keyboard. The last nail in its coffin was that it never made it to Steam. It was only digitally available on Gamersgate, but has since been delisted.

4. Hundred Swords (2001)

Sega / Smilebit | Windows

There are plenty of questionable ports of PC strategy games to consoles, but few that came the other way. Hundred Swords was an obscure enough game on the Dreamcast, despite coming from Jet Set Radio studio Smilebit. The PC version is almost entirely unknown, fated to linger in obscurity.

It was a quirky, faster-paced take on standard RTS design, with players commanding squads rather than micromanaging individual units. Smart, given that it was streamlined for a controller with few buttons and just one analogue stick. Hundred Swords was relatively well reviewed, despite a meandering soundtrack and a forgettable steampunk fantasy setting.

5. Hologram Time Traveler (1991)

Virtual Image Productions | Windows

Even on its home turf in arcades, running on custom hardware, Hologram Time Traveler was never good. Starring a cowboy shooting questionable stereotypes through time, it was a Dragon’s Lair-style FMV reaction test with the gimmick of running on a holographic projection screen, which mostly just made it blurrier and harder to play.

The PC port obviously lacked that gimmick, but went one worse: Red/Blue 3D glasses! Only the effect didn’t really work and gave people headaches. PC Gamer even reviewed this one back in the day, giving it a scathing 7% score. Best exiled to a land that time forgot.

6. Dementium 2 (2013)

Memetic Games / Missing Link Games | 2013

Sometimes, less is more. At home on the Nintendo DS, Dementium 2 (originally by Renegade Kid) was a middling survival horror FPS that looked and ran surprisingly great considering the handheld system it was crammed onto. About 70% cliches by weight, it featured spooky mental hospitals and a rusted, decaying ‘otherworld’ to fight through.

The PC port by Memetic Games is closer to a remake, with a wildly different aesthetic and controls. While perhaps a bit easier to play, the grungy, decaying Silent Hill-esque environments of the DS original have been utterly stripped of personality. It’s available on Steam, but not recommended. 

7. The Simpsons Arcade (1991)

Novotrade International / Konami | DOS

In the early ‘90s, every cartoon property got tie-in games, no matter how inappropriate. One of the most baffling is Konami’s side-scrolling brawler take on The Simpsons, both for its very existence, and the fact that it was excellent. Marge battering her way through Springfield with a vacuum cleaner was a joy.

Weirder still is that it never made it to consoles, but landed on the Commodore 64 and DOS. Both versions are surprisingly good, featuring full two-player co-op and most of the features of the game respectably downscaled. While missing the vocal samples from the arcade version, the PC’s soundtrack wasn’t bad either.

8. Thunder Blade (1989)

Sega | DOS

 Here’s one I have horrifying childhood memories of. In the arcades of the time, Thunder Blade was a technical marvel: a perspective switching third-person/overhead helicopter shooter with silky smooth pseudo-3D sprite scaling graphics. Amazing for 1987, and possibly cooler than After Burner.

Unsurprisingly, the PC adaptation I played was completely rudderless, which is a bad situation for a helicopter to be in. A stuttering, almost uncontrollable mess with hideous graphics, almost unrecognizable enemy sprites and some of the worst noises to ever come out of a PC speaker. The off-key victory jingles if you managed to survive a stage were the best part.

9. RayStorm (2001)

Taito | Windows

I’ve a special place in my heart for Taito’s Ray series of shmups. Great music, cool mechanical boss designs, and a great sense of being in the middle of a massive galactic war. While these games got decent console adaptations, they were always better in arcades, with one odd exception.

Released quietly in Japan and even more confusingly as ‘Operation: Raystorm 2291’ in Europe, the PC version of RayStorm is a direct port of the original arcade edition, featuring better audio, higher-resolution graphics and much faster loading times than console editions. Unfortunately it never made it to digital stores, and the 2010 remaster, RayStorm HD, remains console exclusive.

10. Captain Quazar (1997)

Cyclone Studios / 3DO | Windows

You can’t get much more obscure than the ill-fated 3DO Interactive Multiplayer, a console that failed to find an audience. Captain Quazar was one of its flagships, a ‘wacky’ isometric shooter about a square-jawed space cop fighting space crime in space. It’s a bit like Desert Strike, but more obnoxious.

Just one year after release on the 3DO, it unceremoniously turned up on PC. Perhaps 3DO foresaw the end for their console and jettisoned this game, Superman-like, to a strange new world in hopes of it finding a new home. Unfortunately, nobody cared. PC Gamer UK awarded it a generous 40% score, and the only footage of the PC edition on YouTube is the clip you see above.

11. Genso Suikoden (1998)

One of the best-known JRPG franchises of the ‘90s came to PC before even the Sega Saturn, and unlike most console ports of the time, Konami really put some effort into adapting this one to Windows. The console UI has been completely excised, replaced with a clean (if generic) windowed layout, with separate mouse-friendly panels for the game view, dialogue, character stats and inventory.

As YouTube channel Import Gaming FTW breaks down in the video above, It’s not quite as pretty or nice-sounding as the PlayStation original, but for its time, a shockingly good port. Sadly, this one never made it outside of Japan, but those of us wanting to play Suikoden at its best won’t have to wait much longer. The first two games are getting gorgeous-looking remasters, and they’re coming direct to Steam in 2023. 

Most of them were fresh art school grads, and studio leadership was only a little older. When the game debuted in 1998, the narrative-driven horror market was already filled with Gabriel Knight: Sins of the Fathers, Phantasmagoria, and The 7th Guest. Sanitarium was a little different. It was still within the familiar, tried-and-true adventure genre that DreamForge already had experience working in (Veil of Darkness had been first other big horror hit), but with a psychological peg.

Sanitarium was one of the first point-and-click adventures I'd played that felt like a natural extension of '80s and early '90s pop culture—a real product of its time that paid homage to everything from classic science fiction to old Zippy the Pinhead comics. 

The journey begins with a jarring opening cinematic of a man in a terrifying car accident (it was originally synced to Metallica's "Welcome Home (Sanitarium)" in hopes that the team could get the rights to the song, which very sadly didn't happen). Max wakes up in the sanitarium—a distinctive, labyrinthine round tower that drew me in the second I started playing—with his head wrapped in bandages. He has no idea who he is, and after yet another accident, finds himself tumbling down a rabbit hole of fantastical "episodes" or realms where he must struggle to make sense of his identity, his trauma, and figure out how to escape.

The problem is, Max isn't quite sure what's real, and what isn't.

After the game shipped, a new DreamForge staffer approached writer/artist/designer Mike Nicholson to tell him how much they appreciated the circular room design and its relationship to psychological theory. "As much as I wanted to accept the compliment, unfortunately, I had to explain that the only reason why the opening area was circular was that when we first started to design the space, it was rectangular," says Nicholson. "Our boss saw it and said the square play space looks too antiquated/traditional to isometric adventure games. To placate him I redesigned the area to be a big circle instead."

According to Nicholson, Sanitarium was truly a case of a bunch of young devs with little-to-no experience determined to make a fun game that they wanted to play themselves. Back then there weren't really standard playtesting practices, so they also relied on each other to fine-tune the game.

"My entry into game development was a case of being in the right place at the right time," says Nicholson, who, in 1994, was working at a small ad agency in Pittsburgh. While job-hunting in the classifieds, his then-girlfriend spotted an ad from a local computer game developer. "They were looking for a fantasy artist to make video game art. No experience necessary," he says. "I went to the interview with my sketchbook and a lot of enthusiasm. Thankfully that was enough back then for me to get my foot in the door. It felt like I had found a winning lottery ticket, and in many ways, I still feel like I did."

Meeting after work hours, the fledgling Sanitarium team discussed shared interests to figure out what kind of game they wanted to make. They loved the "episodic and wildly creative aspects of the classic Twilight Zone" and "creepy movies like Jacob's Ladder." Eventually they landed on the idea of a hub-based narrative so they could really branch out with the themes and locations.

And branch out they did—my favorite chapter of the game was The Hive, an far-future alien landscape full of fleshy organic gristle and insectoid cybernetics (where there are bugs, of course, there is also the obligate Starship Troopers quote). There's an almost claymation-style quality to the characters here, with one of the most gorgeous puzzles adventure gaming has ever seen. It began as one of Nicholson's ink drawings before the art team translated it into 3D. "I wanted to design a puzzle that fits into the area, and I was fond of the idea of having light pass through the insect wings to reveal patterns," he says. 

Dreamforge at the time was in the town of Jeanette, Pennsylvania, just outside Pittsburgh, home to a well-known glass factory whose abandoned ruins became a driving inspiration behind some of the game's scenes. The fictional decaying town full of mutant children is named Genet, which sounds almost biblical. In Nicholson's words, Jeannette was a "depressed small town" with the enormous ruined specter of the Jeannette Glass Factory looming over it—a mood that also affected the team's work commute.

On one of his dark drives home, Nicholson finally came up with the cross-section dollhouse diorama concept for the Mansion chapter of the game—a chapter that got one of the devs, someone Nicholson considered a stoic sort of fellow, teary-eyed and choked up.

"Inspiration can hit at any time I suppose, and for reasons I honestly can't recall, it was that late evening drive that did it," he says. "The next day I brought the idea to the team, and they loved it with almost no changes to the idea. It's been my experience in game development that this situation doesn't happen very often and that's probably why I still remember it to this day."

Sanitarium doesn't consistently hit those highs; it isn't exactly a bastion of realism when it comes to ancient Aztec culture and some of the finer points of mental health. The games industry of 1998 was still relatively fresh and experimenting with evolving visual technology, evolving practices, and storytelling methods. All of this makes Sanitarium a genuinely engaging time capsule of the very distinct cluster of interests and influences that went into it.

"Our research was, to put it plainly—fairly shallow," Nicholson admits with a laugh. He also remembers the difficulty of finding a publisher who was open to having what was essentially a "faceless" protagonist. "At one point the feedback we received was that players wouldn't be able to identify with the main character of Max because his head was wrapped in bandages and they suggested we remove them. Considering the story and the huge reveal at the end of the game with Max's bandages coming off, you can imagine our response to that."

When I ask Nicholson about what  he could have done differently, the first thing he says is that he would have gotten himself some real management training. "I made so many dreadful mistakes it's truly a miracle the game made it across the finish line," he says. "I benefited from an otherworldly and arguably undeserved amount of patience from my team and studio leadership, and for that, I will be eternally grateful." 

On the creative side of things, he would've liked to go deeper.

"My design sense was based almost entirely on my life experiences up to that point, and at age 28 when we started, it was admittedly not all that much," he says. "Were Sanitarium to be designed today I'd like to think narratively it would have a broader scope and more depth to the characterization." Nicholson went on to focus on UI/UX work—he spent 14 years at Blizzard working on the Diablo 3 UI and art for other games. He still keeps up to date with adventure games.

"I enjoyed the narrative design and presentation of games such as The Vanishing of Ethan Carter and What Remains of Edith Finch," he says. "If we were ever afforded the opportunity to pursue a sequel to Sanitarium, I'd like to think it would take a similar approach." In the meantime, Sanitarium exists as an unparalleled example of late '90s game art that wasn't afraid to get weird and raise the aesthetic bar for the adventure genre as a whole.

The Hive scene where antagonist Gromna is giving a "televised" speech, complete with fascist rally footage flanking a giant, semi-translucent wasp torso, is the good stuff.

In the town of Genet, each mutant child's portrait was a labor of love.

And those writhing maggot beds. The fleshy door-lock puzzle studded with clear mucus pods. 

Revisiting this strange, messy realm—almost a visual anthology with the way you move through different themes and styles—is a breath of refreshingly putrid air, and if you too have never felt like photorealism was the path to better game worlds, it's well worth remembering. 

Best of the best

Elden Ring

Released: 2022 | Developer: FromSoftware | Steam

Elden Ring isn't just a fantastic open world game, it was the defining game of 2022—so much so that we gave it our Game of the Year award. Equal parts beautiful and repulsive, inviting and deadly, it's a real vision for what an open world can be. Without a quest log, map markers, or a collectibles list, the focus is purely on your own organic exploration of the world, and its sense of true discovery is absolutely enthralling.

Following in the spirit of FromSoftware's famously brutal Dark Souls games, it's a game that pulls no punches—before you step foot in its sprawling kingdom, you've got to be ready to die, die, and die again. But that also makes your adventure wonderfully rewarding. It's an open world full of trials and challenges that you'll feel like a true hero for overcoming.

Since the release of the Shadow of the Erdtree expansion, there's now a whole new map to explore in the Land of Shadow, complete with secret areas and hidden dungeons. Elden Ring: Nightreign—a co-op focused spin-off—was also announced at the 2024 game awards.

Read more: Elden Ring: Nightreign hands on: 6 hours with FromSoftware's wild new co-op roguelike action RPG mix

Assassin's Creed Valhalla

Released: 2020 | Developer: Ubisoft | Steam

Assassin's Creed Valhalla's open world is an astonishing technical achievement. It's become fashionable to dunk on Ubisoft for the sometimes formulaic approach it takes to its flagship games, but it deserves credit where its due—the sheer scale and detail of Valhalla's rendering of medieval England is something to behold.

As an angry (and occasionally stealthy) viking, you're given free roam of a huge chunk of the country—not to mention Iceland and other realms I won't spoil. Taking its cues as much from The Witcher 3 as previous AC games, Valhalla is a grand action-RPG, sending you out to find quests and treasure in its historical setting.

If you're craving an open world that feels truly endless, Valhalla is a fantastically rich and accessible adventure to dive into. Just don't expect to finish it before at least the 100 hour mark.

Read more: Assassin's Creed Shadows is delayed to 2025, will launch on Steam on day one

Death Stranding

Released: 2020 | Developer: Kojima Productions | Steam

Kojima's first game after leaving Konami, Death Stranding is set in a post-death reality where the concept of the afterlife has been blown open. Your goal as Sam Porter Bridges is to rebuild America by walking across the country and linking up cities, preppers, and waystations to, uh, the Time Internet? It makes next to no sense, but that's OK. Death Stranding is an indulgent mood piece first and an excellent hiking and delivery game second.

Andy Kelly puts it nicely in his review: "Some jobs seem impossible. Standing at the foot of a mountain, snow whipping at its peaks, fragile cargo stuck to every inch of your suit, you wonder how you'll ever get over it. But you power on, one step at a time, patiently placing ladders and climbing ropes, edging closer to your destination. Along the way you might have to slip into Metal Gear mode and sneak past BTs, or deal with extreme weather such as disorientating blizzards. You might even get knocked out by terrorists and have your cargo stolen, forcing you to sneak into their camp and take it back. But after all that, you make it, and it feels incredible."

Read more: Death Stranding 2: On the Beach isn't coming until 2025

Red Dead Redemption 2

Released: 2019 | Developer: Rockstar Games | Steam

Rockstar's historical open world series finally hit the PC with Red Dead Redemption 2, a monumental ode to the fading American frontier. RDR2 is rife with detail, overstuffed with little touches: animal corpses persist and decay, the protagonist Arthur has commentary for nearly every location and character, and random world events make the world feel lived in, be it sucking on a man's snakebite wound or getting ambushed by hillbillies.

It's all layered into an excellent story that'll take you as long as the complete Deadwood series to get through, and that's if you're rushing. And on top of it all, Red Dead Online brings a Day Z adjacent quality to the open world, invoking everything from serious roleplay to ridiculous, surreal shenanigans. It's also one of the prettiest games you can play on the PC today. Now with a huge library of mods, RDR2 is set to feel fresh and alive for years more to come.

Read more: Red Dead Redemption may still look like a 14-year old game, but it's absolutely brilliant on handheld gaming PCs

Tchia

Released: 2023 | Developer: Awaceb | Steam

This colourful indie game isn't as big as the other games on this list, but it's packed with charm and creativity. As a young girl named Tchia, you set out on an adventure across an archipelago based on the real-world nation of New Caledonia. You're aided in your quest by the magical power to possess almost any creature or object you can find, allowing you to soar as a seagull, roll down hills as a boulder, and swim as a fish.

In his review, Chris Livingston praised its "lush, startling beauty" and called the island "a playground for acrobatic travel". As you explore you can do everything from jamming out on the ukulele, to carving totems, to taking photos with "one of the most enjoyable in-game cameras and photo modes I've ever seen". It's a delightful experience, and a wonderful window into the culture and traditions of the region.

Read more: Best Open World 2023: Tchia

Grand Theft Auto 5

Released: 2015 | Developer: Rockstar Games | Steam

This is what money is for: creating a kind of pastiche of a real-world location that’s so staggeringly accurate in atmosphere and details that it’s actually better than being in the real thing. GTA 5's Los Santos represents the meticulous approach Rockstar gave to the compact Liberty City in GTA 4, brought to the scale of 2004’s San Andreas—and the result is an open world of such a high standard that it’ll only likely be topped by Rockstar itself in the upcoming GTA 6. Between the strong multi-protagonist campaign and the mad playground of GTA Online, there’s well over 100 hours of chases and gunfights across land, air and sea for those who want it here.

You can even turn GTA 5's open world playground more to your will with GTA 5 cheats and the best GTA 5 mods.

Read more: Grand Theft Auto 6 is still on track for fall 2025, and there's still no sign of a PC version

The Elder Scrolls 5: Skyrim Special Edition

Release: 2022 | Developer: Bethesda | Steam

Over a decade on from its original release, Skyrim remains the definitive open world RPG. Its grand, wintery landscape must be one of the most widely visited locations in videogame history—and it's popular for a reason. It's still an adventure of absolutely breath-taking scale and variety, letting you not only travel wherever you want across an enormous map, but also letting you be whoever you want to be—from a petty thief to the head of a wizard's guild.

These days, an endlessly growing library of user-made mods allow you to tailor the experience exactly to your liking, as well as adding even more to its already enormous open world. Whether you want to turn it into a realistic survival simulation, a ridiculous super-powered sandbox, or a battle to the death against Thomas the Tank Engine, the power is in your hands.

Read more: The Elder Scrolls 6: everything we know about the next return to Tamriel

Dying Light 2

Release: 2022 | Developer: Techland | Steam

Combining zombie survival with first-person parkour, Dying Light 2 is a post-apocalyptic playground. Its huge city, partly controlled by survivors and partly home to roaming bandits and undead, is a joy to traverse—as you progress, you gradually unlock more and more tools, until you're wall-running, grappling, zip-lining, and gliding around to your heart's content.

And when night falls, you find yourself very grateful for that agility. As the sun sets in this open world, the scariest, fastest undead nasties come out to play—get caught outside of a safe house, and you'll find yourself fleeing for your life across the rooftops in thrilling freeform parkour chases. The day-night cycle gives the city its own life (or unlife?) that makes Dying Light 2's open world wonderfully unique.

Read more: Dying Light 2 tips to outrun the zombie apocalypse

Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2

Release: 2025 | Developer: Warhorse Studios | Steam

Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2 is undoubtedly one of 2025's most successful RPGs, building on the foundation of what made the first game great, but avoiding its unfortunate bugginess and graphical woes.

In the sequel you return to the role of Henry, the bastard son of a noble still searching for revenge after his village of Skalitz was burned to the ground by a band of mercenaries. This time Henry is helping Sir Hans Capon—who you might remember from the first game—to deliver a message to the League of Lords in hopes of ending the war and bringing stability back to the country.

All doesn't go to plan, however, and soon Henry finds himself on the run in medieval Bohemia. A big part of what makes Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2 so brilliant is its historical setting, allowing you to explore small picturesque villages, stately castles, and uncover secrets in its wooded ravines and hidden caves. It's an open world like few others—if you enjoy medieval settings and completing quests for oddball peasants it's well worth a look.

Read more: Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2's March patch brings zoomer haircuts for Henry and the return of hardcore mode

Forza Horizon 5

Released: 2021| Developer: Playground Games | Steam

PC Gamer gave Forza Horizon 5 the honour of our Best Open World award in 2021, which means it naturally deserves a spot on this list. Forza 4's interpretation of Great Britain was good, but Mexico's natural diversity makes for a much more diverse playground. Instead of endless fields and hills, you get to race through ancient temples (a bit disrespectful, sure, but immensely fun), deserts, rainforests and sandy beaches. It's a vibrant setting that's the perfect spot for some four-wheeled digital tourism.

The weather and time of day can also have a transformative effect, and while the sunshine is lovely, races are considerably more thrilling when you're in the middle of a storm or being chased by a wall of sand. Weather is local and affected by the changing seasons, too, making this a world always in flux.

It even manages to avoid map icon fatigue, as each promises another fun activity—and with its post-release support, that now even includes some surreal Hot Wheels tracks. It might be one of the best racing games around, but it could also teach most open world games a thing or two.

Read more: Forza Horizon 5 developers are working on a 'premium open-world game' at their new studio

The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt

Released: 2015 | Developer: CD Projekt RED | Steam

It's not just the scale of The Witcher 3's enormous open world that's so impressive—it's the richness of it. This is a landscape bursting with stories. Everywhere you go, you discover deep, captivating quests to distract you away from wherever you were originally travelling, encouraging wonderfully meandering journeys across its grim fantasy world.

Eight years on from its release, it still stands out from the crowd as a truly incredible feat of game development. Its open world is so lavish and meticulously crafted that it feels like a miracle it exists at all. Which only makes it all the more impressive that its two DLCs, Hearts of Stone and Blood and Wine, push the bar even higher.

And all of it is elevated by the presence of starring hero Geralt himself—surely one of gaming's best ever travelling companions. His rough charms and heart of gold make him the perfect hero for the game's rugged landscape, and a character you'll be more than pleased to spend 100+ hours with.

Read more: The Witcher 4 got a surprise reveal at The Game Awards, and this one is all about Ciri

Recently reviewed

Since many character designers, writers, and voice actors cross wires between anime and video games, it makes a lot of sense for there to be a slight overlap. Plus, there are plenty of game designers who grew up with things like Ghost in the Shell, or Pokémon, which has in turn influenced a lot of their work.

Gargantuan JRPGs, absurdly over-the-top fighters, crime-solving visual novels—take your pick. There's been some excellent releases in 2024 which you can find below, but also some great classics from the years prior. If you're looking for an interactive anime fix, read on for our faves. There's a bit of something for everyone.

The best anime fighting games

Dragon Ball FighterZ

Release date: 2018 | Developer: Arc System Works | Steam

No other games look like games made by Arc System Works. They've perfected the combination of 2D and 3D animation in flashy fighting games like Guilty Gear and Blazblue, but the best example is Dragon Ball FighterZ. It turns brawls into proper anime battles, making sure you always see the best angle when you pull off a ridiculous move.

Not only is it beginner-friendly, DBFZ also makes you feel as powerful as no other fighting game, thanks to the anime factor—in Dragon Ball, throwing a foe into space or hitting them hard enough to take out most of the surrounding landscape are regular occurrences. With Arc's stunning animation, FighterZ looks just like—if not better—than the original.

Read more: The charming story behind Dragon Ball's first PC fangame

Tekken 8

Release date: 2024 | Developer: Bandai Namco Studios | Steam

Tekken 8's Arcade Quest mode lets you make a chibi avatar and put them through a story mode that introduces both Tekken 8's mechanics (including the new Heat system), and the fighting game community. It's a bit power-of-friendship, but if you weren't into that kind of storytelling, well, this whole list probably isn't for you.

The main story mode focuses on the conflict between father and son Jin Kazama and Kazuya Mishima, but manages to tie together a huge amount of Tekken's cast, both past and present, in a way that's pure catnip for fans. Tekken 8 also features the return of Tekken Ball, the beach-episode mode where everyone unleashes their bone-breaking specials on beach balls instead of each other, and for that alone should be heralded as a triumph.

Read more: Tekken 8 should absolutely be the fighting game you play in 2024

The best anime JRPGs

Metaphor: ReFantazio

Release date: 2024 | Developer: Atlus | Steam

Atlus continues to cement itself as a real powerhouse when it comes to JRPGs, with Metaphor: ReFantazio being one of their greatest creations to date.

If you're a Persona enjoyer, this game essentially takes that formula and swaps out high school for high fantasy. That means you're getting a more mature story with a slightly older cast set in a gorgeous fantasy kingdom, still largely following the narrative structure of its teenage brethren, with all the fun social sim stuff that comes on the side.

As you'd expect from an Atlus game, it's super-stylish with some utterly riveting combat. The Archetype system opens up tons of opportunities to experiment with team compositions and cross-classing skills over between them. It's got a cracking story to boot, one which kept me on the edge of my seat throughout the entirety of my 158-hour playthrough. A must-play if you're a fan of the developer's other games, or even a JRPG enjoyer in general.

Read more: Our 95% review of Metaphor: ReFantazio

Tales of Vesperia – Definitive Edition

Release date: 2019 | Developer: Bandai Namco | Steam

Bandai Namco's Tales series has introduced us to plenty of worlds that need saving since 1995's Tales of Phantasia, but Tales of Vesperia, originally released as an Xbox 360 exclusive in 2008, stands out thanks to the way it hits that old school JRPG sweet spot. Its protagonists are a group of lovable misfits who for the most part just happen across each other, the battle system is a mix between turn-based and real-time, and there's a traditional kaleidoscopic fantasy world to explore.

Tales of Vesperia also features fairly classic 2D visuals, with characters designed by mangaka Kousuke Fujishima and cutscenes by popular animation studio Production I.G. But more than just the visuals, it's the feeling of a grand adventure in faraway lands complete with everything from pirates to dragons and mysterious magical forces that makes Tales of Vesperia such a great JRPG.

Read more: What makes a great anime game

Ni no Kuni: Wrath of the White Witch

Release date: 2019 | Developer: Level-5 | Steam

With Ni No Kuni: Wrath of the White Witch a game finally captured the trademark charm of Studio Ghibli. The makers of such beloved movies as My Neighbor Totoro and Spirited Away were involved in Ni No Kuni's creation, producing its animated cutscenes. And while Ni No Kuni wasn't written by anyone at Ghibli, Akihiro Hino, who worked on games such as Dark Cloud, Dragon Quest 8 and 9, and the Professor Layton series, managed to hit the same heartwarming notes.

Ni No Kuni works for both children and adults in exactly the same way as many Studio Ghibli movies, telling fairytales in which young heroes gain the power to save multiple worlds—mostly by cramming loads of food into their mouths, capturing weird critters, and then rushing off into peril.

When you're done with Ni No Kuni: Wrath of the White Witch you can move on to Ni No Kuni 2: Revenant Kingdom. Although Studio Ghibli wasn't involved in creating the sequel it retains the distinctive animation style.

Read more: I regret to inform you Ni No Kuni's cute new MMO has blockchain crap up its sleeve

Final Fantasy 7 Remake Intergrade

Release date: 2021 (PC) | Developer: Square Enix | Steam, Epic

Sure, recent years have buried us in remakes. Don't let that put you off Final Fantasy 7 Remake, though. It may look like a retelling of disc one's cyberpunk fable of a stratified city only with a more action-y combat system and some Akira-style motorbike chases thrown in, but the way it plays with your expectations and twists the story it knows you're anticipating is cleverer than you'd think. The combat's not the pure action it looks like either. The combos are just something you do to build up bars you need to cast spells and use abilities, dropping the world into slow-motion as you dig through menus for the attacks that do more than just chip damage.

We're now also blessed with the sequel, Rebirth, though our reviewer wasn't as keen on its "poor pacing and a story with nowhere to go."

Think of Remake more like a verb than a noun. FF7R is about a struggle to remake the city of Midgar, the slum-protecting ecoterrorists of Avalanche trying to get rid of its reliance on the planet's lifestream for power and the Shinra Corporation trying to manipulate Midgar into a war they can profit from. Meanwhile, another force is out there trying to remake the familiar plot playing out against this backdrop. It's got layers, man. Just like the city.

While you're looking at fantasy of the final variety, don't go past Final Fantasy 12: The Zodiac Age. Its gambit system gives it some of the best combat the series has ever had, and the PC remaster comes with improvements like a fast-forward button to double or even quadruple the speed to help you get through the slower bits.

Read more: Why the hell do they have mouths: a Final Fantasy 7 PC retrospective

Persona 4 Golden

Release date: 2020 | Developer: Atlus | Steam

The Persona series is both a deep dive into the human mind and capital A-anime, where high schoolers develop supernatural powers to save people from certain death. In Persona 4 Golden you're the new kid in town, and to make things more complicated, you discover a strange parallel TV world where the dark parts of the human psyche roam free. When not exploring this weird place, you have to engage in living a normal daily life—go to school, meet friends, read, or take a part-time job.

The disparity between leading a normal life during the day and becoming a superhero at night is at the heart of a lot of anime (and plenty of western coming-of-age stories) but Persona 4's daily activities are just as much fun as the monster-hunting is. They give you an opportunity to really get to know your surroundings and deepen your relationships with other characters. It's a system that exemplifies an important theme common to many anime—the time you spend with your friends is precious.

Of course, once you're done with Persona 4 Golden you should absolutely check out Persona 5 Royal. They're not direct sequels to each other, rather taking the Final Fantasy approach of sharing themes across their games, but both are well worth undertaking.

Read more: Every JRPG needs Persona 4 Golden's difficulty options

The best open world anime games

Nier: Automata

Release date: 2017 | Developer: PlatinumGames | Steam

If you see the protagonist of Nier Automata out of context you might take her for one of the sexy body-pillow babes that give anime and its fans a bit of a bad rap (sometimes deservedly so, but that's a different story). But how many anime babes do you know who transform into fighter jets? How many of them efficiently hack and slash their way through hordes of enemies? OK, actually quite a few, but how many of those are also grappling with the fact they're machines built for a never-ending war?

Nier Automata isn't just a hack-and-slash. It's also a deep dive into what it means to have free will, about the meaning of war and whether ignorance can help us stay sane. It's heavy stuff, masterfully showing the other side of anime. It's not all bright colors and cute girls. Sometimes it's about the horrors of war… and cute girls.

If you want to go back to the start of the series, The 2010 original was remastered and finally released on PC as Nier Replicant ver.1.22474487139… in 2021.

Read more: Why people love Nier so damn much

Code Vein

Release date: 2019 | Developer: Bandai Namco Studios | Steam

Sometimes more really is more, and Bandai Namco's soulslike Code Vein is a great example of that. Its world has fallen prey to vampire-like monsters that can emit a deadly miasma, and you're among a group of young, stylish, superpowered people trying to get the monster population under control using massively oversized weapons. As is so often the case with anime games, a simple description of the things that happen doesn't make much sense. That's part of Code Vein's charm.

While it wants to be compared with the Souls games, Code Vein is a lot more approachable, as well as being different stylistically. Unlike the quiet, dark atmosphere of Dark Souls, it feels like a shonen anime—the kind where characters solve a lot of problems via fast-paced, acrobatic combat.

Read more: Code Vein is a surprisingly fun soulslike with giant anime swords

The best anime visual novels

Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney Trilogy

Release date: 2019 | Developer: Capcom | Steam

As Phoenix Wright, it's your job to prove your client's innocence in the courtroom, which you'll need to do by cross-examining witnesses and searching crime scenes for clues. You know, like a regular lawyer definitely does.

There's drama and there's murder, but Ace Attorney is rarely grim. These are games where anything is possible—and things never turn out the way you expect them to. When you put on your bright blue suit you've got to be ready to interrogate the witness's pet parrot if it turns out to be necessary. (It will turn out to be necessary.)

Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney Trilogy collects the first three games in the series, while The Great Ace Attorney Chronicles bundles together two prequels set in the Victorian era starring an ancestor of Phoenix Wright who teams up with the great detective 'Herlock Sholmes'.

Read more: Why I love Miles Edgeworth in Ace Attorney

Danganronpa: Trigger Happy Havoc

Release date: 2016 | Developer: Spike Chunsoft | Steam

If the psychics, ghosts, and sexy clowns of the Phoenix Wright games are just too staid and serious for you, Danganronpa: Trigger Happy Havoc takes the formula and makes it even more ridiculous. The setting is a school for exceptional students where the latest intake of talented young people wake to find they've been trapped in the sealed-up academy with a talking robot bear.

Said bear explains that they're all taking part in what sounds like a social experiment, and will only be allowed to leave if they kill each other and get away with it. If one student murders another there's an investigation-by-trial, and if the killer isn't uncovered the murderer goes free while everyone else is executed. If the killer is uncovered, they're the one executed and the other students remain trapped. Until the next murder happens, when it all plays out again.

Some of the mysteries are better than others, but they're always tense thanks to a system that sees clues you gather during the investigation phase transformed into "truth bullets" to shoot at statements those clues contradict. There are other minigames involved in the trials too, and like the mysteries some are better than others. (You can always tweak the difficulty if you don't get on with them.) What elevates Danganronpa is its characters and atmosphere: exaggerated, colorful, and weird as anything.

Though it tells a standalone story, Trigger Happy Havoc has had follow-ups. They're not worth it, however, falling immediately into fanservice and cliché while leaning even more on minigames. You're better off sticking with the original.

Read more: What the hell is Danganronpa?

Zero Escape: The Nonary Games

Release date: 2017 | Developer: Spike Chunsoft | Steam

Another option for watching outrageous characters fight and outwit each other in order to survive is the Zero Escape series. Originally handheld puzzlers, the first two games in the series (Nine Hours, Nine Persons, Nine Doors and Virtue's Last Reward) were combined together as Zero Escape: The Nonary Games and finally ported to PC in 2017, getting a graphical update over the DS original and some other new features.

The Nonary Games are two of the best anime thrillers you can play; tense and tricky escape room puzzles combined with a story that ruthlessly pits protagonists against each other. A combination of visual novel and first-person puzzle, you truly won't see what’s coming, and you should really experience it for yourself.

Read more: The best visual novels on PC

The best free anime games

Yu-Gi-Oh! Duel Links

Release date: 2017 | Developer: Konami | Steam

This free-to-play card game is a fun way to relive the times you dueled friends—and the time you invested all that money in pricey cards. The Yu-Gi-Oh! anime was basically just an exciting, half-hour ad for an expensive card game, but don't worry, this time it won't cost you quite as much.

The Duel Links community is a big, competitive place, with regular events and seasons. There's also a story mode making this a full-fledged game. There are microtransactions, but you can earn plenty of rewards without having to spend money. More importantly, the presentation is really good, with simple but effective animations and the original voice actors.

As well as Yu-Gi-Oh! Duel Links, there's also Yu-Gi-Oh! Master Duel, which is a more faithful adaptation of the original card game. That means the turn times are longer and there are more counters and combos. Duel Links uses the speed duel format, and feels like the game they played when you were watching the show.

Read more: These 9 card games are better than Hearthstone

Crush Crush

Release date: 2016 | Developer: Sad Panda | Steam, Nutaku

Crush Crush and Hush Hush, its counterpart on the masculine side, turn dating sims into idle games. (Several of the developers worked on the hugely successful AdVenture Capitalist before turning their hands to smut.) You meet a cast of cuties and win their hearts with moonlight strolls, showers of gifts, and outrageous flirting while managing a limited number of time blocks to work multiple jobs and build your skills. Those cuties include a mecha pilot, a time traveler, a holographic vocaloid, and a bear named 'Bearverley', because why not?

Read more: There's a sea of hentai junk games on Steam, and then there's Crush Crush

The best anime games with character creation

Black Desert

Release date: 2017 | Developer: Pearl Abyss | Steam

This popular fantasy MMO has one of the most in-depth selections of sliders around. Whether you want to adjust your hair's length or curl strength, or tamper with the intensity of your tattoos, Black Desert Online has you covered. It's easy to use too, breaking your face and body up into a topographic map of adjustable sections and letting you change your hair by clicking and dragging

You can also look through the Beauty Album to see what looks other players are creating for their corsairs, berserkers, and dark knights, then filter them by categories like Good Looks, Celebrity, and Ugly. You can either adopt someone else's character design wholesale or tweak it to your preference. Tweaking is best, because if you hit the 'Apply Most Popular' button on a female character there's a strong chance you'll end up looking like a goth clown with gigantic boobs.

Read more: Black Desert Online isn’t a great MMO, but it is a great sandbox RPG

Lost Ark

Release date: 2022 | Developer: Smilegate RPG | Steam

Though it doesn't have quite as powerful a set of options as Black Desert, and you can only alter your face rather than your body, Lost Ark still has a lot of options for personalizing your character. For instance, it lets you alter your iris size, color, and opacity separately from your eye color and pupil shape, and then do it all differently for the other eye.

When you finally make it out of the character creator and past the typically slow opening hours almost every MMO seems required to have, it's a much better game. The over-the-top action-RPG combat is some of the best around, and the storylines get progressively stranger until you find yourself taking part in dwarf musicals in between fighting on top of colossal demons.

Read more: There is so, so much weird shit in Lost Ark

The best anime VR games

VRChat

Release date: 2017 | Developer: VRChat Inc. | Steam, Oculus

In theory you can look like whoever or whatever your heart desires in the shared digital world of VRChat. In practice, there's a reason every single article about someone's experience in VRChat includes the phrase "anime girls". Heck, even the official mascot Box Cat (a cat with a cardboard box on its head) has been sidelined in favor of a variety of big-eyed avatars in the official art.

Though it does struggle with lag, VRChat has become the place to live out your anime second life. Perhaps in the waffle house on the moon.

Read more: VRChat's surge in popularity has created a bizarre scene

VRoid Studio

Release date: 2020 | Developer: pixiv Inc. | Steam, Oculus

Of course, before moving your social life to VRChat full-time you'll need the perfect avatar. Or maybe you want to become a Vtuber without having to pay thousands of dollars? VRoid Studio is the free alternative, a suite of 3D character creation tools designed for people without 3D modeling experience. If you want more assets than the preset options provide, others are available.

Read more: The best VR games

The best anime music games

Hatsune Miku: Project Diva MegaMix+

Release date: 2022 | Developer: SEGA | Steam

It took a long time, but Hatsune Miku finally came to PC with MegaMix+. It's the most comprehensive Project Diva game to date, with a huge song list from Vocaloids like Miku, Rin and Len Kagamine, Luka Megurine, Kaito, and Meiko. If you're a fan of autotuned beats and anything from pop to rock, there's bound to be something here you'll like. It's super approachable for newbies to the genre too, while providing a challenge for those a little better versed in rhythm game ongoings.

Read more: The best rhythm game finally came to PC this year and took over my life

DJMAX Respect V

Release date: 2020 | Developer: NEOWIZ | Steam

We're perhaps stretching the definition of anime a bit here, but DJMax Respect V is too good to not list. A Korean rhythm game that has sprinkles of anime throughout its music videos and theme presentations, DJMax can play similarly to Dance Dance Revolution with a four-button layout, all the way up to a staggeringly difficult eight-button layout. There are also songs from other anime games on here, like Break a Spell and Marionette from Guilty Gear. There's even a ranked online mode for those who like a bit of competitive energy in their games.

A lot of the great songs are tucked away in its expansion packs, which you'll wanna pick up on sale. Clazziquai, Black Square, and V Extension 3 in particular are ones that are definitely worth your wallet.

Read more: I've become deeply invested in this rhythm game with virgin, relationship-sabotaging Power Rangers

Muse Dash

Release date: 2019 | Developer: peropero | Steam

Muse Dash takes a slightly different approach to how it plays out, instead looking more like a 2D runner than notes flying all over the screen. It's a lot simpler to get into than Project Diva and DJMax, but the harder note charts still provide a big challenge. It's a gorgeous game to boot, with dazzlingly pretty visuals and a host of characters who provide different buffs to gameplay.

The base game is dirt cheap too and regularly ends up under one dollar in Steam sales. Unfortunately, its DLC isn't quite the bargain it used to be: It switched to a subscription service rather than the lifetime season pass it used to be, and with most of the songlist locked behind this expansion it's a bit of a shame.

Still, it's well worth picking up if you love anime and rhythm games.

Imagine laying down the foundation that every other actor who took on the high profile role would base their own performances on—the deep laugh, the cool-headed attitude, the enjoyably over-the-top acting.

Now imagine not realising you'd done any of that.

One man on earth doesn't have to imagine what that feels like: Pablo Kuntz, the original voice of everyone's favourite sunglasses-wearing and virtually unkillable Resident Evil antagonist, Albert Wesker. He just forgot about the job. The work, which he describes as "a wonderful experience," was just one of a string of freelance gigs he took while living in Japan in the late '90s, in addition to various modelling and acting jobs.

One of several voice acting gigs completed well over two decades ago does seem unlikely to rank as a vivid memory. I like imagining key Capcom staff agonising over every minor detail of the game that would go on to coin the term "survival horror," but the reality seems to be there was simply a job that needed doing, and Pablo was the person who got it done.

"We were not coached when we did the lines and truthfully I barely remember understanding that this was to be a game. It was all so new," he says. "I was a young 24-year-old adventurer at the time and just did the best I could."

The original Resident Evil's campy acting and dialogue make sense in that context. But even without much direction and even less awareness of what he was acting in, Kuntz still gave it his all and delivered a memorable performance.

"I do remember having a little snicker on my face when delivering many of the lines, that’s natural for me. I wasn’t trying to ‘put on’ a voice per se. In truth, I was pretty much being me. I think people can hear/feel a genuine authenticity with RE1 Wesker."

That authenticity has helped keep his lines fresh in fans' minds all this time—even if he wasn't personally aware of it. Kuntz only found out how and where his work was used a few years ago.

"You can only imagine my surprise when I became reacquainted with it all," he says.

As surprises go, finding out you were the original villain in a series that's sold some 115 million copies is a pretty big one. The character he voiced is so popular not even his in-game death has been enough to keep Wesker from popping up in everything from Marvel vs. Capcom 3 to Teppen. It seems inevitable he'll somehow turn back up in Resident Evil at some point.

Fans have been eager to share that success with every member of the largely unknown original voice cast for a long time now, but they've been notoriously difficult to track down. Capcom only credited the English voice actors in Resident Evil with first names if they were credited at all—Pablo wasn't. At least the effort to reach out has been well worth it for everyone on both sides of the fan/actor divide, and Pablo has clearly been having fun discovering just how fondly his work is thought of in Resident Evil circles. The catalyst was one simple comment on an unrelated video about Japanese swords, which has since spiralled into an outpouring of love for his most famous work.

"Reconnecting with fans has quite honestly been a life-changer," he says. "It’s been a huge blessing, meeting a large number of great people that are supportive, kind, and witty. …It may have been a bit surprising at first, the incredible affection that people have for the game, but I don’t feel that way now. I (we) get it!"

The "we" he's referring to is his son Lexonal: the pair formed a rather sweet father-son survival horror double act on YouTube last year. The first game they tackled was of course the original Resident Evil, with Lexonal playing, Pablo sprinkling the action with a mix of general commentary and personal anecdotes, and fans offering a steady stream of positive encouragement and practical assistance in the comments below each video. These sessions also happened to be the first time Pablo had seen his voice acting in its original context, and it turned out to be an unexpectedly emotional experience.

"It was very trippy watching your own son play the game and actually hearing one’s voice from the game. That opening mansion scene was unforgettable. Even though I had seen the clip on YouTube, when we actually played the game, it all hit me like a freight train. Recording the voice, my overall time in Japan (I lived there for 18 years or so), just all these memories came flooding back."

These cozy playthroughs have even led to a growing personal appreciation of the series—and perhaps best of all, a personal appreciation of Pablo's own much-memed work.

"The dialogue, the puzzles, the laughs, the frustrations, the overall challenge of it all… I know the acting was slightly over-the-top, but you know, the more we played RE1, the more the voices seemed to harmonize with everything the gameplay offered," he says

As all kids are about their parent's achievements, Lexonal was initially not quite as outwardly impressed about his dad's old job. "I think I got a 'that’s cool' in his unique deadpan kind-of-way once when he found out about Wesker," Kuntz says. But in spite of this Lexonal has embraced playing the series, and their shared playthroughs have become something special for both of them.

"As a dad, I know this is a brilliant chapter in time that I won’t ever forget. I honestly cherish every episode we do together and try to encourage him along the way as we encounter what’s behind those doors!"

When Pablo's not helping (or "helping," as he does during this memorable scene from Resident Evil 2) his son survive the games, fans have encouraged him to work on fresh redubs of classic Wesker scenes he didn't get to voice the first time around. It's a challenge he's been happy to take on, in part to satisfy his own curiosity and also to bring "a certain consistency [read: Canadianness!] to the voice" that had been getting conspicuously more British as the series went on. His work on these videos is impressive even without considering the fact that he's been away from the role for 25 years, and his restrained take on Wesker speaking with Jill in the first game's remake show he cares about nailing his evil alter ego's characterisation and isn't simply dialling up the cheese for an easy laugh.

"I suppose there’s evil lurking in all of us, and voicing Wesker must be therapeutic on some rather dark level," he says. Even the villainous laughs come naturally. "My personality tends to laugh a lot in general and so when I saw the chuckling being called upon in Code Veronica I was genuinely excited to throw myself into it—pretty much as I would in real life."

Kuntz says he's enjoyed redubbing Code Veronica the most so far, but he has no intention of stopping there (I can't wait until he finally reaches Resident Evil 5's deliberately overcooked "COMPLETE. GLOBAL.SATURATION." speech).

These voluntary dubbing sessions all have to fit around his day job, which may not deal in bioweapons but does involve—as Kuntz's own dad affectionately refers to his chosen profession—being a different sort of "arms dealer," selling beautiful antique samurai swords online. "It’s a big passion of mine and I am fortunate to have clients from around the world that share the same enthusiasm for collecting these rare and meaningful objects of art," he says.

But how does anyone go from voice acting horror games to selling high-end examples of traditional Japanese craftsmanship?

"All I can say to those reading as quasi-life advice, is listen to what feels right in your bones, have faith in that feeling as it's remarkably powerful. And pursue that while keeping your eyes and ears open to adjustments along the way because you’ll need to. It all starts with commitment, being truthful and taking responsibility. Then enjoy the ride that comes as a result! And don’t play the blame game, ever."

That's not the sort of positive encouragement you'd expect to hear from Wesker, but then again Pablo is no ordinary Wesker—he's the original.

He just happened to forget that, for a few decades.

You can catch Pablo and Lexonal on YouTube, where they're currently working their way through Resident Evil 3. 

The best survival horror games

Silent Hill 2 Remake

Release date: 2024 | Developer: Bloober Team | Steam

There was some understandable trepidation about another studio taking on the beloved horror classic, Silent Hill 2, before Bloober Team's remake released. But also, James Sunderland's wacky wife adventure has been effectively locked on PlayStation 2 for over 20 years.

A combination of emulation issues and non-CRT displays means the fog just never looks quite right, and the less said about the official PS3 "remaster," the better. Despite a cavalcade of hour-plus YouTube essays inspiring new waves of interest, it's been challenging for new players to see what all the hubbub was about.

But, miraculously, Bloober Team did the thing. The Silent Hill 2 Remake has thoroughly impressed all the Silent Hill 2-likers on our team, making this one of the best, and certainly the most accessible way of experiencing Silent Hill 2.

Read More: Bloober's Silent Hill 2 was more remix than remake, and that's why it was great

Resident Evil 4 Remake

Release date: 2023 | Developer: Capcom | Steam

Okay look, Resident Evil 4's never been the scariest entry in its series, but it is essential. Between it's attaché case inventory management and frantic crowd control, it's an extremely tense experience while also offering some truly standout horror set pieces in its middle and later portions. The remake's take on the Garrador enemy especially is inspired. Act 2's castle remains one of the most atmospheric locations in gaming, its sumptuous, decaying 17th century interiors given new life on the RE Engine. Other entries on this list may be spookier, but there's a reason the genre hasn't been able to get over Resident Evil 4 in 18 years.

Read more: Resident Evil 4's knife parry is the best thing to happen to the series in 18 years

Alan Wake 2

Release date: 2023 | Developer: Remedy Entertainment | Epic

The first Alan Wake was more spooky than scary, but its long-awaited sequel is genuinely frightening. Half-survival horror, half-spiral into surreal nightmare, Remedy's latest is a bold, ambitious storytelling experiment that's also full of tense and thrilling battles against the shadow-possessed Taken. Playing as both FBI agent Saga Anderson, investigating a series of ritual murders, and Alan Wake, a writer desperately trying to escape an ever-looping dream dimension, you delve through an adventure where a dark fiction is twisting reality in knots. Bold, brilliant, and bizarre.

Read more: One of Alan Wake 2's expansions sounds like it's going to take us back to Control

Scorn

Release date: 2022 | Developer: Ebb Software | Steam

Scorn's like a gross Myst, Myst with guns and body horror. This first person adventure sees you crawling through the guts of a fallen civilization, one where everyone else went to the rapture a long time ago, leaving you to puzzle at their remains. Are you an unlucky member of its citizenry left behind when everyone else peaced out? More likely you're the grist for their biological mills, somehow spared that awful fate and now waking up into a different, possibly more awful fate.

The combat is challenging and has the same cadence as an old, tank-controlled PS1 survival horror game. While there may be a case that Scorn would have been stronger focusing purely on exploration and puzzle solving, The combat does have a certain delicious tension and demands the same movement mastery as juking Crimson Heads in the Resident Evil Remake. Ebb quickly patched the game's initial rough checkpoint system after launch, making Scorn a hands-down horror slam dunk.

Read more: Scorn is a guided tour of a forsaken civilization from its grim brown bowels to the heights of its lilac capital city

The best multiplayer horror games

Left 4 Dead 2

Release date: 2009 | Developer: Valve | Steam

A horde of great four-player co-op shooters followed in the wake of Left 4 Dead, much like the hordes of zombies follow its protagonists. Some of those co-op shooters are great, and you'll find them over on our list of best FPS games, but Left 4 Dead 2 remains one of those games that's still worth keeping installed for whenever you and up to three friends feel like working together to push across a slice of zombie-infested America.

The rhythm of Left 4 Dead means it always tells a story. Both quiet moments and swarming attacks are punctuated by special enemies with attacks that force you to work together, and Left 4 Dead 2's survivors—Coach, Rochelle, Nick, and Ellis, as well as the returning characters from the original game—chat and banter with each other like a functioning unit in a way that encourages you to do the same.

Of course, you may well be playing with mods that replace those survivors with Hatsune Miku, Deadpool, Master Chief, and Juliet Starling from Lollipop Chainsaw, all fighting across Silent Hill or Helm's Deep. That's just another reason Left 4 Dead 2 keeps bringing us back 4 more.

Read more: Great moments in PC gaming: 'Don't startle the witch'

The Outlast Trials

Release date: 2023 | Developer: Red Barrels | Steam

Co-op horror is a tough row to hoe: Killing Floor and Left 4 Dead could just as easily be described as "horror-themed action games," and while they can produce moments of panic and suspense, true horror is hard to maintain when you have friends around to ease the tension.

That's what makes The Outlast Trials so intriguing. It's a full-send effort to translate the previously single player series' trademark sense of abject horror and degradation into a co-op stealth experience, and it largely succeeds. Come for the sickening '50s Jolly West-alikes trying to get in your head, stay to be menaced by lumbering, malformed, slasher film creatures while your friends try and fail to help you.

Read more: The Outlast Trials makes me sick to my stomach, but that's just because it's one of the best co-op horror games

Killing Floor 2

Release date: 2016 | Developer: Tripwire Interactive | Steam

Killing Floor 2 offers a similar sort of high-zombie count, frantic survival as Left 4 Dead but with more of an emphasis on stationary wave survival than proceeding through linear levels. It also, quite crucially, has the advantage of being a live, well-supported game. Left 4 Dead will live on by sheer quality and reputation, but Tripwire is on that grind keeping Killing Floor players awash in new maps and cosmetics. A perfect "catch up with your friend from high school for a few hours on a weeknight" game if there ever was one.

Read more: Killing Floor 2 is a polished, fun co-op horde shooter with a healthy server browser

The best indie horror games

Faith: The Unholy Trinity

Release date: 2022 | Developer: Airdorf Games | Steam

Basically think "The Exorcist, but on the Commodore 64." Faith primarily renders in bright pixels on dark black backgrounds, with absolutely phenomenal rotoscoped cutscenes. It's like if the eerie, primeval games from non-IBM PC compatibles of the 1980s were given the Shovel Knight treatment: 8-bit computing "as you remember it." Airdorf is able to mine a lot of surprising horror and depth out of this art style, and the Faith trilogy is a substantial supernatural horror experience.

Iron Lung

Release date: 2022 | Developer: David Szymanski| Steam

Iron Lung is an absolute must-play, a pound-for-pound shocker of a game. Six bucks and 90 minutes for something unforgettable. You play as the single crew member of a makeshift submarine lowered into an ocean of blood on an alien moon. The doors and windows are welded shut against the pressure, and you have to use X and Y coordinates and a blurry chart of the sea floor to navigate its pitch-dark chasms. Your goal is to take pictures of the unnerving things at the bottom of this faraway sea, but something else stirs in the deep. I first started Iron Lung at 1:45 AM with everyone else in the house asleep, and its imaginative premise, impeccable atmosphere, and knockout audio design had me so stressed I went running back to Super Mario Land 2 for comfort.

Read more: YouTuber Markiplier is adapting Iron Lung into a movie

Fear & Hunger

Release date: 2018 | Developer: Miro Haverinen | Steam

A word of warning: Fear & Hunger is easily the most "content warning" game on this list, even more than the Outlast series. It includes shocking depictions of gore and sexual violence, though I would argue it approaches these ideas with a maturity and thoughtfulness that justifies their inclusion: It's transgressive, but not tawdry.

Taking inspiration from Berserk, Silent Hill, Nethack, and more, Fear & Hunger is a JRPG-style game where you plumb the depths of a mysterious, seemingly endless dungeon in search of a charismatic military leader who descended below. Each of the four playable characters has their own reason for wanting to find the guy, and the plot spirals out of control into the realm of esoteric, cosmic horror—what is the meaning of human thought and progress in a world this cruel?

But Fear & Hunger's crushing difficulty and visceral brutality remain a constant amid its loftier storytelling ambitions: Combat is exceptionally difficult, resources scarce, and rewards few and far between. With permanent character death and maiming, F&H has an almost roguelike structure, and a "game over" often entails a fate worse than death, one you might glimpse in the fleeting moments before a fade-to-black.

I hear the sequel, Fear & Hunger 2: Termina, is a bit more accessible on the difficulty front, though no less horrific and affecting than the original game. It presents the WWII era of F&H's bespoke fantasy world, a story set during a mysterious festival over the course of several days, boasting a more nonlinear structure reminiscent of Pathologic or Majora's Mask.

The best psychological horror games

Signalis

Release date: 2022 | Developer: Rose Engine | Steam

Signalis came out of nowhere to be one of the standout games of 2022, an incredibly rich survival horror experience that demands your attention and contemplation. Signalis' closest mechanical cousin is classic Resident Evil. It's fixed camera horror at its best, demanding that you manage your limited inventory space and resources carefully as you crisscross back and forth through a highly dangerous, god-forsaken pit of a research facility.

Narratively, Signalis is sublime, casting you as a Blade Runner-style replicated human searching for their fully human commanding officer and secret lover. The tension between protagonist Elster's desires, needs, and essential nature as a constructed, enslaved being leave a haunting impression, and we all know that no fragile psychology survives first contact with Lovecraftian horrors. It all takes place in a crunchy analogue future straight out of the 1970s under the auspices of, wouldn't you know it, an evil despotic government playing with forces it doesn't comprehend.

Read more: Signalis is a new genre classic, one of the best psychological sci-fi chillers in years.

Soma

Release date: 2015 | Developer: Frictional Games | Steam

Frictional's underwater sci fi horror masterpiece blows its previous work on Amnesia out of the water for me. In Soma, you've got the same hide-and-seek horror with an oppressive atmosphere, but the kicker is its high-concept sci-fi plot. Its twisty yarn calls to mind the works of Philip K. Dick or Harlan Ellison: a rumination on how much the human spirit can bend before it is irreversibly broken, our own capacity for violating everything good and decent about ourselves. Don't read anything else about it before you load in (except maybe our review), and thank me later.

Read more: A masterpiece of audio and visual design, SOMA is atmospheric, cerebral, and occasionally frustrating

The best RPG horror games

Skald: Against the Black Priory

Release date: 2024 | Developer: High North Studios | Steam, GOG

Prior to actually playing Skald, I'd say I had a "polite interest" in the DOS/Commodore-era throwback RPG. The Ultima and Gold Box games it harkens back to visually were before my time, and while I thought the indie project was neat, I didn't know if it was for me.

Under its primeval interior beats the heart of a late '90s CRPG—the vibe is Interplay, Troika, OG Fallout and Baldur's Gate, but delivered with its gorgeous, "as you remember it" '80s pixel art. This is an RPG with skill checks galore, well-balanced classes, and a decidedly modern, approachable, yet still deep and complex sensibility.

But that doesn't make it a horror game, what does is its utterly, shockingly good cosmic horror writing. Compared to Bloodborne or Scorn, Skald does this amazing thing where it goes to all the trouble of constructing a quite nice, normal-seeming fantasy setting with likable, interesting characters, then tears it all up over the course of the game as the unknowable horrors take hold and everything goes off the rails. I managed to spoil the ending for myself, and it still left me speechless.

Read More: The best thing about Skald is that I keep forgetting it's actually Lovecraftian horror

Vampire: The Masquerade – Bloodlines

Release date: 2004 | Developer: Troika Games | Steam, GOG

Still the unchallenged prince of vampire games, Bloodlines was confident enough to give you free rein to use your vampiric abilities. You can pluck NPCs off the street to feed on, clamber over the environments as freely as you can in an immersive sim, throw burrowing beetles into your enemies' bodies, and overheat their blood until they explode. It lets vampires be cool, not just through their powers but also by making them witty, sexy, or mysterious, which makes it plain why people want to become one of them.

That's how it gets you, of course. Going right back to the original 1990s tabletop RPG, Vampire: The Masquerade has always said it's a game of personal horror. It's only after you give in to the mystique, start to think about how great it is to be a part of the bloodsucking elite, that it turns around, opens up, and shows you the cost and the consequence of that.

While infamously buggy at launch, today the problems with Bloodlines are easily fixed.

Read more: Vampire: The Masquerade - Bloodlines has aged like fine wine

Dread Delusion

Release date: 2022 (early access) | Developer: Lovely Hellplace | Steam

Much like Resident Evil 4 or Vampire: The Masquerade - Bloodlines, we're straying so far from heartland horror as to almost break away, but just like with those two games, Dread Delusion's atmosphere and subject matter leaves it essential to any horror fan. In this game you're on the hunt for a dangerous criminal in a militantly atheist society bent on killing the last gods, all while human civilization clings to the asteroids winging around "Neuron Stars." The setting calls to mind classic, weird D&D lines like Spelljammer, Planescape, or Dark Sun, and it has the sensibility of classic American sci-fi.

One side quest manages to nail the most chilling, flashlight-under-chin, spooky ghost yarn with the absolute minimum of development resources, while another offers the most truly vexing moral choice I've ever felt in a game over the synthetic human meat substitute farmed by a race of cannibalistic, yet sentient zombies. Dread Delusion whips.

Read More: This dreamlike indie RPG is a dense, perfectly refined bite of Elder Scrolls

The best stealth horror games

Amnesia: The Bunker

Release date: 2023 | Developer: Frictional Games | Steam, GOG, Epic

One of the best horror games I've ever played, Amnesia: The Bunker is pure, condensed stress from beginning to end. You awake as the last living enlisted man in a WWI French bunker, and there is something in the walls.

The Bunker expands on Amnesia's run and hide gameplay with the ability to fight back against your pursuer (in extremely limited fashion) with flares and a plinky old time revolver, but you also need to conserver resources to deal with environmental hazards like mutated rats and padlocked doors.

Through it all, you're juggling two primary resources: a brutally limited, classic Resident Evil-style inventory, and fuel to keep a generator (and the Bunker's lights) on. The plot doesn't get as "out there" as previous Frictional games Soma or Amnesia: Rebirth, but it's still a great, bite-sized tale of woe for the Amnesia-verse.

Read More: One of the best parts of Amnesia: The Bunker doesn't even involve its gruesome new monster

Alien Isolation

Release date: 2014 | Developer: Creative Assembly | Steam, GOG, Epic

The best Alien game ever, by a long way, Alien Isolation stars the smartest, scariest enemy in any game. The xenomorph's killer instinct is matched only by its curiosity. It learns more about the space station Sevastopol's nooks and crannies as it hunts you over the course of 12 hours, ripping doors off closets and peering under tables in search of its prey. Which is you.

The motion tracker can help you avoid the xenomorph's grasp, but the alien can hear the sound, and even see the gentle green light of its screen, making every glance at the device a risk. That's pretty scary, but when you're forced into the vents and can hear the creature in there with you, that's when Alien Isolation becomes one of the scariest games ever made.

Read more: The making of horror masterpiece Alien: Isolation: 'It was a giddy, exhausting, intense time'

Gloomwood

Release date: 2022 (early access) | Developer: Dillon Rogers| Steam

A thief-inspired stealth-em-up from New Blood developer Dillon Rogers, Gloomwood leans into that series' horror elements for this survival horror-infused steampunk adventure. You get the return of Thief's excellent audio design, and a revamp/reinterpretation of its distinctive visuals, as well as a novel solution to the "Quicksave problem" so many immersive sims face: no quicksaves, only checkpoints. Gloomwood also, blessedly, features another instance of the best inventory screen in gaming, a grid-based attaché case where size and weight of items matters (see also: Resident Evil 4, Neverwinter Nights). The only caveat is that there's still a lot more Gloomwood left to be made, and immersive sim might be a bit of a rougher fit for revisiting in the early access model than your standard shooter.

Read More: Gloomwood is too good to play unfinished

Thief: The Black Parade

Release date: 2023 | Developer: Feuillade Industries | ModDB

You'll need a copy of Thief Gold (most easily found on GOG) to play The Black Parade, but the mega mod itself is free, a fantastic bargain. This fan-made prequel is the product of some of the finest talents in Thief's eclectic fan mission community, including Romain Barrilliot, a level designer at Arkane Lyon.

The Thief series is full of great horror-focused levels like Down in the Bonehoard, Trail of Blood, and Robbing the Cradle. But in addition to upping the ante on the thievery front with some mind bogglingly huge levels, The Black Parade delivers some of the finest spooky ambience and stealth/avoidance-focused horror to grace the Dark Engine.

The levels Death's Dominion, The Brand, and Jaws of Darkness stand out for their explicit horror/undead focus, but even a more traditional heist mission like Where Old Faces Fade can boast some unexpectedly surreal and unsettling elements. So not only is this free mod one of the finest immersive sims I've played in some time, it's one of the scariest, too.

It's a genre known for its violence, yet that's not always the reason we're drawn to the FPS. We celebrate the immersive potential of the first-person camera, and how that point-of-view challenges our physical and emotional responses to problems thrown directly in our faces. They are often intense tests of reflex, but also foundations for engrossing worlds and realistic simulations of survival, battle, and play. We feel a closer, truer connection to games when we're literally seeing it through our character's eyes.

Below you'll find a list of the best FPS games you can play right now. It's not a list of the most historically significant FPS games, but rather ones that we'd recommend today, right now, to PC gamers exploring the genre. This is also a living list, so expect updates in the future.

The best singleplayer FPS games

Stalker 2: Heart of Chornobyl

Release: 2024 | Developer: GSC Game World | Steam

Brash, unwavering, thrilling, contemplative, and undeniably janky. Stalker 2 delivered the immersive return to the Zone fans wanted for years, with an execution that was faithful in ways both refreshing and controversial. Stalker 2 is not so much a "modern" take on Stalker with 2020s expectations in mind, but a direct follow-up to the original run of hardcore, quirky survival shooters. Our review called it a "welcome return for one of PC gaming's greatest and most eccentric series."

Read more: Stalker 2: Heart of Chornobyl has almost single-handedly saved 2024 from being an absolutely rubbish year for gaming

Doom Eternal

Release date: 2020 | Developer: id Software | Steam

id got to sit down and reimagine what Doom is in the modern age, and it came up with a buttery smooth, highly acrobatic FPS that celebrates gratuitous indulgence while demanding discipline through HP-recovering glory kills. Eternal brings more verticality, greater enemy variety, and an enthralling campaign that never seems to end (boosted by two great DLC campaigns). It's never just run 'n gun and it's definitely not a cover-shooter. This is what the Doom clone would've become if modern military shooters hadn't taken over the world. Let the latest run of Doom games be a strong kick to the pants gaming execs: the singleplayer FPS is stronger than ever, and there should be more of them.

Read more: Doom Eternal has ruined all other shooters for me

System Shock (2023)

Release date: 2023 | Developer: Nightdive Studios | Steam

2023 was a great year for remakes, but the underappreciated star of the bunch was Nightdive's loving recreation of one of the most influential videogames of all time. The System Shock remake somehow succeeds at the nigh impossible task of modernizing System Shock while also maintaining its '90s charm and quirks. Its reimagined guns look, sound, and animate beautifully, and they're all useful too—even the mini-pistol, the relative peashooter of the bunch, feels like a substantial piece of hardware once it's got a couple of mods attached. Purists will insist that System Shock is an immersive sim (I am, and it is) but it also plays beautifully as a straight-up shooter. Want to heft an assault rifle or a railgun or a magnum pistol that kicks like a mule and just blast the holy hell out of everything you see? Go for it—you might get lost now and then in Citadel Station's twisting corridors, but I can guarantee you're going to have a good time.

Read more: System Shock review

Neon White

Release date: 2022 | Developer: Angel Matrix | Steam

The most exciting shooter of recent history, ironically, doesn't really have guns. In Neon White, an FPS speedrunning platformer, guns are represented by cards with secondary movement abilities like a leap, dash, or slam. Beneath its visual novel interludes and anime art, Neon White is a pure distillation of athletic FPS action. Levels often last less than a minute, but you can easily spend an hour perfecting a route until satisfied with your spot on the leaderboard. Perhaps Neon White's most genius design choice is built-in shortcut markers hinting at faster routes that require clever application of your kit.

Read more: Steam reviewers love Neon White despite its horny anime nonsense, or very much because of it

Titanfall 2

Release date: 2016 | Developer: Respawn Entertainment | Steam

Years later, Titanfall 2's campaign still stands out for its inventive levels and comfortable linearity. You can tell the minds behind Call of Duty's most memorable campaigns had their hands in it—you're never far from an eye-pleasing set piece, but unlike Call of Duty, Titanfall 2 has more to offer than horizontal firefights behind chest-high cover. The flow of firefights depends entirely on the shape of the room and your ability to wallrun, double jump, or slide across it while shooting. And then, every once in a while, Titanfall becomes a pretty good mech game, too. It's the kind of delicious junk food game (uncomplicated, but beautiful) that's easy to forget about and pick up every few years to remember why it's so good.

Read more: Northstar didn't just save Titanfall 2, it completely transformed it

Metro Exodus

Release date: 2019 | Developer: 4A Games | Steam, GOG, Epic

4A Games' Metro trilogy came to a gratifying end with its most ambitious game to date. Metro Exodus packs a lot of game into modestly-sized open worlds, focusing its efforts on making every interaction meaningful. Guns are ultra lethal and ammo is scarce, meaning you'll almost never be shooting your precious AK-47 full-auto. Weapons can be modified anytime with transformative attachments or receivers capable of turning an SMG into a shotgun. Though the same gun will also jam if you don't take care of it. If you love diegetic design, Exodus is a feast. Every little gizmo and widget on Artyom's bracer has a purpose (the small piece of real estate holds a stealth indicator, a compass, a radiation meter, and a watch) and the map is a real-world object that Artyom holds.

Read more: Metro Exodus Enhanced Edition brings new light to old darkness

Doom and Doom 2

Release date: 1993, 1994 | Developer: id Software | Steam, GOG, Epic

Throwback shooters are great and all, but if you want a reminder of where all great FPSes ultimately came from, the original Doom and Doom 2 are still excellent games in their own rights. Maybe what stands out most about OG Doom nowadays are its gigantic maze-like maps rich with secrets and, of course, the inability to move your camera on the Z axis. Both games actually received a nice update in 2024: Bethesda surprised fans with the "Doom + Doom 2" collection (free to existing owners) that adds cross-platform multiplayer and mod support.

Read more: The story of Doom and how it changed everything—as told by co-creator John Romero

Turbo Overkill

Release date: 2023 | Developer: Trigger Happy Interactive | Steam

If you thought Doom Eternal was too tame in its gratuitous ambitions, Turbo Overkill should be your next stop. It may look like a conventional throwback shooter, but Turbo is packing modern FPS sensibilities like wallrunning, sliding, weapon upgrades, and vertically massive levels. The guns and their alternate fire modes are the stars of this one: dual magnums that are also Smart Guns, a minigun that uncorks into a flamethrower, a System Shock-like shotgun that can overpump for extra damage are just a few favorites. Turbo Overkill released out of early access in 2023 with the completion of its campaign, solidifying it as one of the best singleplayer FPS offerings around.

Read more: The FPS that gives you an instagib chainsaw leg just keeps getting better

Black Mesa

Release date: 2020 | Developer: Crowbar Collective | Steam

Black Mesa drags Half-Life into a shower and washes all that '90s stank off it. It's a slick, often beautiful recreation of Half-Life with revamped sounds, animations, and an entirely new Xen section that turns the worst part of original Half-Life into maybe the best. Black Mesa's largest changes center around Xen, but it also remixes some old areas and adds completely new puzzles in others. Being built on the base of Half-Life 2, it also benefits from better physics interactions (but don't expect a gravity gun). This isn't a 1:1 remake, so it's not a perfect replacement for experiencing the original, but it is the best way to play a version of Half-Life in 2023.

Read more: Half-Life Xen vs. Black Mesa Xen: a video comparison

Ultrakill

Release date: 2020 (early access) | Developer: Arsi "Hakita" Patala | Steam, GOG

This absurdist retelling of Dante's Inferno stars a murderous robot fueled by human blood, or, as the game helpfully puts it, "Mankind is dead. Blood is fuel. Hell is full." Ultrakill's mega-grimdark existentialist nightmare is helpfully offset by a gleefully dark sense of humor, and its vision of hell is truly creative and unique. My favorite layer, Greed, consists of a vast desert of gold dust punctuated by Egyptian pyramids. More than any other shooter, Utlrakill is just fast. You're constantly bouncing around, swapping weapons, countering resistances, and trying to keep a Devil May Cry-esque style ranking high. It manages that Neon White thing where even low-skill play feels thrilling and masterful, while high-skill play looks impossible. Acts one and two have landed in early access so far, and their ample secrets and built-in replayability with the ranking system offer plenty of options to keep you busy.

Read more: How a remake of an obscure 1995 FPS led to a retro shooter revival

The best co-op FPS games

Echo Point Nova

Release: 2024 | Developer: Greylock Studio | Steam

A sprawling open-world FPS for trickshot sickos. Co-op Doom for friends who'd spend entire nights trying to do cool stuff in Tony Hawk or Skate. Echo Point Nova comes from a reality where Tribes sliding became the pinnacle of FPS design. After a brief intro, Echo Point takes its hands off the wheel, letting you and up to three friends explore at your own pace, honing your movement skills, unlocking guns, and learning how to put those two elements together in frantic firefights that demand precision and constant evasion.

And it keeps getting better. Since launch, Greylock has added stickers to slap on your hoverboard, new guns, islands, Steam Workshop support, and a wave-based "Rogue" mode.

Read more: The best FPS of 2024 so far is Echo Point Nova, a $25 hyper mobile co-op shooter I can't put down

Borderlands 2

Release date: 2012 | Developer: Gearbox Software | Steam, Epic

Borderlands invented the looter-shooter, and Borderlands 2 had more fun with it than anyone else. While there are a gajillion guns—shout-out to the self-healing Grog Nozzle, and the shotgun that shoots swords that explode—that's not what makes it great. The same more-is-more approach to weapon design is applied to its colorful, over-the-top sci-fi setting, full of unconventional enemies. Masked bandits deliver speeches from their sniper perches or wail nonsense while running right at you, goliaths subvert years of FPS training, counter-intuitively going into Hulk Mode when you headshot them, mutated pests swoop, leap, burrow, and shield their vulnerable spots. Still the best in the series, Borderlands 2 is polished, playful, and a gleefully silly antidote to military shooters that take themselves too seriously.

Read more: Borderlands 2 was ahead of its time

Deep Rock Galactic

Release date: 2020 | Developer: Ghost Ship Games | Steam

We're enjoying a resurgence of the co-op FPS and Deep Rock is a golden example. Ghost Ship Games got just about everything right—you wouldn't guess by its low-poly look that Deep Rock is packing some of the best FPS combat out there. I'll never get tired of hearing alien bug carapaces crunch under the weight of a shotgun blast. Four classes with wildly different capabilities and progression trees make its procedurally generated missions highly replayable. Because missions are just as much about mining as shooting, the best co-op moments are usually a combination of fending off bug baddies and placing a clutch zipline or platform to reach a precariously-positioned ore vein.

Read more: Meet one of the last positive communities left in gaming

Destiny 2

Release date: 2017 | Developer: Bungie | Steam, Epic

Bungie made an FPS MMO that millions of players have actually stuck with. It's a testament to the Halo creators' knack for designing great-feeling guns that Destiny 2 players happily repeat the same missions over and over again to get the best stuff on offer. It can be hard for new players to catch up with veterans, but at the end of the road are raids—expansive six-player missions that test aim, timing, and communication all at the same time. There's truly nothing like Destiny 2, and yet, its future is uncertain at the moment. Bungie won back fans with The Final Shape, an excellent expansion that closed the book on a story that began 10 years earlier. But Bungie later revealed that the expansion didn't perform as well as it hoped, and now it's not clear exactly what shape Destiny 2's ongoing support will take going forward.

Read more: Quiz: Destiny exotic or craft beer?

Warhammer 40,000: Darktide

Release date: 2022 | Developer: Fatshark | Steam

It was an easy guess that Fatshark's followup to Vermintide 2 would be a great co-op slaughterfest, but I didn't expect Darktide's newly emphasized gun combat to be so excellent. The Kantrael MGXII Infantry Lasgun sizzles through infested elites like a precision cooker and autoguns topple hordes into tenderized ragdoll piles. It's a gorgeous and challenging co-op experience (far less zen than Deep Rock). It's not as rich with mission variety as games that have been out longer, but a major 2023 update added new progression trees for every class and mission modifiers that help keep things interesting, and in early 2025, it got the Mortis Trials, a wave-based mode with new powerups for each class.

Read more: 'I don't think players expect this': Warhammer 40K: Darktide is adding RPG-style skill trees full of new abilities to its 4 classes

Halo: The Master Chief Collection

Release date: 2019 | Developer: 343 Industries | Steam

Did you know every Halo game from Combat Evolved to Reach is bundled together in one big mega videogame complete with crossplay co-op, multiplayer, and Forge? I smile just thinking about it. There was a time when The Master Chief Collection was considered a disaster, but today, the entirety of it is playable on PC with minimal bugs. Even if you're not ready to go toe-to-toe with sweaty Halo 3 players who've been practicing half of their lives, MCC is still an amazing package for co-op. There are fewer gaming memories I cherish more than running through Halo's campaigns with a friend.

Read more: While Halo Infinite struggles for a win, Master Chief Collection is the gift that keeps on giving

The best competitive FPS games

Hunt: Showdown 1896

Release date: 2019 | Developer: Crytek | Steam

Our favorite of the extraction shooter genre, Hunt: Showdown 1896 ditches battle royale circles in favor of a PvPvE format that pits hunters against zombies, bug assassins, aquatic tentacle monsters, and each other. Its 19th century American setting is distinct, and compliments its unexpected arsenal of early firearms. It's not only the best cowboy FPS we've played, but one of the greatest multiplayer games around right now. Last year, the FPS got its largest update yet: the "1896" update ushered in a new era of Hunt with an upgraded engine, a new map, and significant rule changes that prove Crytek plans for Hunt to stick around for a long time.

Read more: The future of battle royale is here, and there's no circle

FragPunk

Release: 2025 | Developer: Bad Guitar Studio | Steam

Somebody finally figured out casual Counter-Strike. FragPunk takes Valve's tried, true, and maybe a tad stale bomb format and spices things up with Shard Cards: rule-breaking modifers players can activate between rounds. Some are simple buffs like "more health," others are change the course the whole round, like Big Head Mode or, my personal favorite, a card that deletes all guns and triggers a melee-only round. It's fast, vibrant, and surprisingly chill.

Read more: The latest big game on Steam is Fragpunk, or as I like to call it, 'kitchen-sink Counter-Strike'

Straftat

Release: 2024 | Developer: Lemaitre Bros | Steam

The only competitive FPS of the bunch that could also be described as a party game. Straftat is a shooter dedicated to the 1v1—letting you challenge friends and strangers to frantic shootouts across 70+ maps with dozens of absurd weapons. Straftat doesn't just coast on novelty or goofs—there's a core of quality networking, great gunfeel, and excellent map design at play here. Rounds can last anywhere from a few seconds to multiple minutes, with short match times inspiring strong "I got next" reactions from a spectating Discord server. The base game is free and there's an optional $5 expansion.

Read more: Best FPS 2024: STRAFTAT

Battlefield 2042

Release date: 2022 | Developer: DICE | Steam, Epic

DICE has put in the work on Battlefield 2042. Years after its tumultuous launch, 2042 runs better, feels better, and is finally packing enough great maps to mean that when you jump in you'll always have fun. A lot is owed to DICE's reintroduction of proper Battlefield classes, which added much-needed structure and role-specific responsibilities to 2042's unique specialists. Six seasons of new specialists and maps have rounded out a package that felt a little light at launch. That, and its frequently discounted price, makes it an easy recommendation.

Read more: Here's the thing: Battlefield 2042 is really good now

Halo Infinite

Release date: 2021 | Developer: 343 Industries | Steam

As 343 Industries is hard at work on new Halo projects, Halo Infinite has finally reached a good place. The game experienced a streak of popular updates in 2023 bolstered by better customization options, the addition of AI in Forge, and the co-op Firefight mode. Multiplayer is full of playlist options, map variety is finally acceptable, the challenge system is borderline good, and Infinite's combat remains excellent. Player numbers are up too, suggesting it's not just me playing a few matches of Big Team Battle as an after-work ritual. The community still has lots of valid complaints, but a buttery smooth Halo game with problems still rates pretty high.

Read more: Halo Infinite Season 5 has the makings of an honest-to-god comeback

Counter-Strike 2

Release date: 2023 | Developer: Valve | Steam

Counter-Strike is back, and it never left. Valve has papered over CS:GO with Counter-Strike rebuilt on the Source 2 engine. While the headline features of CS2 won't immediately blow your socks off—volumetric smoke grenades, prettier lighting, "sub tick" servers—it sounds like this is only the beginning for Valve. Last year, the studio told PC Gamer that, yes, it plans to add more weapons to CS2.

Read more: Exclusive interview: Valve on the future of Counter-Strike 2

The Finals

Release date: 2023 | Developer: Embark Studios | Steam

I didn't love The Finals when it first dropped. All of its launch modes were a bit too sweaty for me, and it felt like it was missing a landing pad for players to chill out, experiment with wildly varied loadouts, and goof around with the destruction tech without the pressure of a three-person squad. The 5v5 tug-of-war mode Power Shift, introduced in Season 2, is that landing pad. Having a full team behind in what feels more like a casual, Battlefield-like environment has opened my eyes to The Finals' best qualities: excellent shooting, wild weapon choices, and an unmatched sense of speed in modern arena shooters.

Overwatch 2

Release date: 2022 | Developer: Blizzard | Steam, Battle.net

Overwatch 2 might be a failed idea, but deep down it's still the one-of-a-kind FPS that we fell in love with years ago. Overwatch 2's legacy will likely always be defined by what it failed to deliver (a campaign, co-op missions, a sense of a larger world), but PvP continues to be Overwatch's strength as it regularly expands its roster with creative new heroes you can't find in any other game.

In 2025, Overwatch 2 is getting experimental. All heroes now have perks unlocked throughout the match, and next season it gets Stadium, a brand new mode with a MOBA-like store to upgrade heroes each round.

Read more: Overwatch 2's long-awaited story missions are delicious junk food for diehard fans and unsatisfying crumbs for everyone else

Rainbow Six Siege

Release date: 2015 | Developer: Ubisoft Montreal | Steam

The G.I. Joe of competitive shooters. Rainbow Six Siege has changed dramatically over eight years, but it's still a tremendous tactical FPS that's not afraid to take risks. The roster of 70+ operators continues to grow, adding new (and increasingly unbelievable) gadgets that build on its lethal firefights with intel gathering drones, laser tripwires, and a dozen different ways to blow up a wall. I'm continually impressed with Siege's willingness to break its own rules and rewrite major parts of its meta.

Soon, Rainbow Six Siege will become Rainbow Six Siege X, Ubisoft's "not quite a sequel" revamp that introduces a new 6v6 mode called Dual Front.

Read more: Rainbow Six Siege keeps reinventing itself in ways other games are too scared to try

The bots owned TF2. It was really, really, bad. Fed up after years of neglect, the community finally decided to do something about it.

And they might just have #SavedTF2.

One of the most influential shooters of all time, Team Fortress 2 has a long and storied history. Developed over nine years from the bones of an old Quake mod, it was one of the first class-based FPS games and remains one of the most popular. Released in 2007 with Half-Life 2 and surprise hit Portal in the legendary Orange Box, it's a big part of the reason Steam has become the juggernaut it is. TF2 is still a regular on Steam's most-played charts, even though it's been five years since its last content update.

It wasn't just a lack of updates that turned TF2 into a bot-infested wasteland. In April of 2020, Valve confirmed that the source code for TF2 and CS:GO had been leaked. Despite a post from the official Twitter account for Team Fortress reassuring players that they had nothing to worry about, almost immediately players started noticing a disturbing trend. While cheating had long been an issue in TF2, it tended to be the kind that plagues many online shooters—wall hacks, aimbots, and the like. But this was different. Automated bots choosing the sniper class would join games, guns pointed toward the sky, and start killing everyone.

It didn't end there. The bots became more and more toxic. Not content with killing everyone on the map, they started evolving. They spammed horrible static over comms. They posted links to all kinds of questionable nonsense in the chat. They changed their names to match actual players', banded together and votekicked real humans who joined the game. They made the game literally unplayable.

Frustrated, players took to social media and posted video after video about the situation. Unable to play on Valve's official lobbies, players migrated to community servers like Uncle Dane's Uncletopia and hunkered down for what would end up being a long, long winter. Gone were the good times of the Jungle Inferno update (a glorious month for Pyro mains), gone were easy breezy 2Fort sniper fests, gone were demomen sticky jumping off cliffs. What had once been Valve's greatest multiplayer game was adrift, and no update arrived to right the ship.

Dedicated members of the community tried to make the best of it. Even during the worst of the crisis, TF2's average players per month never dipped below 65,000—although there is some question of just how many of these were, well, the bots. Resilient fans did find ways to keep playing, patiently waiting for some kind of an update from Valve. A tweet, a blog post, a patch. Anything. But the players got no updates in 2020 or 2021, and were left instead with a burning question:

Why?

Call to arms

Why were these bots so prevalent? Why wasn't Valve doing something about it? What was in it for these sociopathic bot wranglers that saw fit to ruin everyone's fun?  In a video posted in February 2020 that now has over a million views, YouTuber Toofty interviewed a number of cheaters to answer those questions. "It's not some conspiracy theory," he told me. "It's kind of quite mundane at the end of the day. They would come into the comments section on my YouTube channel and talk about cheating quite openly. It didn't take long before I found some good leads I could follow."

The cheaters gave a number of reasons, none of them very satisfactory, that ultimately boiled down to one thing: They thought it was fun. Some claimed to have a grudge against certain developers, or to only use hacks to fight certain strategies, but most just thought it was funny to get a rise out of people. "I was hoping for some crazed, genius hacker with an agenda, but instead I just found some bored and sometimes lonely kids messing about."

Annoying, to be sure. But in most cases, people like this are a minor irritation—they mess up a game or two, ruin the occasional server, then end up getting banned or bored. Valve's negligence, however, was letting them run rampant.

Over two years after the source code leak, an idea began to crystallize. On May 7th, 2022 a YouTuber named SquimJim posted a video calling on the community to reach out to Valve via email, even supplying a form letter. A group of content creators collectively known as Chucklenuts (after the legendary Scout voice line, or perhaps his adorable squirrel?) saw this and decided to take it one step further. They put their heads together and came up with an idea for a peaceful protest—an outcry from the community that loved the game so much. They would get together every video maker, every fan on Twitter, every Heavy with a minigun and an email account to raise their voice.

#SaveTF2 was born.

I asked ElMaxo, one of the founding members, about the process. "SquimJim made a video, and we ended up adding him to a Discord to talk to him about it, and it kind of birthed out of that. Weezy had the idea of starting it, and we were all really on board. The worst we were doing was trying." The YouTubers called on their audiences to reach out to Valve respectfully and ask them to address the situation, to post positive things to Reddit, to tweet with the hashtag.

On May 7th, 2022 they posted their call to action, released a bunch of heartwarming videos, and got #SaveTF2 trending at #1, breaking 400,000 tweets. They didn't have to wait long for the universe to answer them. 

Two days later, in the first tweet from the official account since 2020, Valve said "TF2 community, we hear you! We love this game and know you do, too. We see how large this issue has become and are working to improve things."

Action followed soon after. In June and July, Valve pushed a number of updates to Team Fortress 2. It fixed an exploit where players could use cheats on secure servers. It fixed the Ap-Sap and its godsforsaken noise spam. It changed it so both teams could have a kick vote running simultaneously, which helped clear out bots players were able to identify. Slowly bots became less frequent, to the point that in researching this story I didn't once have a game ruined by them (just by my inability to hit the broad side of a barn).

Then the final domino, at least for now, fell. On August 19th, Valve took the TF2 servers offline. The server message read "The item and matchmaking servers will be unavailable for approximately five minutes due to reasons." Players started reporting VAC bans targeting bots, and it looked like thousands of accounts had been banned in one great purge. The crisis had finally ended.

I asked Maxo how it felt. "It's insane," he said. "Just the whole movement that emerged out of a 15-year-old game. It was beautiful seeing the community rally that well, people who haven't played in years. It was really beautiful to be honest. If you ask anyone about #SaveTF2 they will credit ShorK for organizing it really well. He made all the posters and got everyone together, did so much of the work behind the scenes to make it all function. It was really special." 

Since the updates started in June, Team Fortress 2's concurrent users have skyrocketed. From 68,000 in May to 130,000 in September, fans of rocket jumps, sticky traps, and knives in the backs of snipers have flocked back. There is still a bit of uncertainty—players still see a few bots in games, but not nearly the number there were before. The fight against cheaters in games seems to be one of the constants of the world, along with taxes and me missing headshots.

Things are stable for now, but the community is still holding its breath. They've been burned before. Hopefully this marks a new beginning for TF2, though. Maxo, at least, believes it will. "I think TF2 is gonna have a renaissance. I think it's gonna spike even higher. It's gonna be big again!"

I'm a little ashamed to admit Elm Knight, a 1992 Japanese PC-98 action-RPG, caught my eye for the shallowest of reasons: a really cool title screen. Yeah, I know—absolutely disgraceful behaviour. In my defence, the title screen honestly is that good.

The image that grabbed me and refused to let go is a portrait of an inscrutable face, drenched in shadows. It's got a threatening but not necessarily aggressive aura to it, the figure staring out of the screen sculpted in that unmistakably '90s anime "bio-armour" style. It has a person-ish body that's not quite machine, but also definitely not birthed.

Even when I stop overthinking  it, that single static image remains a great piece of pixel art, and I saw it as a guarantee that whatever I was about to dive into was going to look pretty good even if the rest of the game amounted to a miserable pile of nothing.

"Look pretty good" is something of a massive understatement for this 30-year-old game. Elm Knight is an astonishing 10-disk epic where magical "Irregulars" fight against the fearsome might of a tech-loving Empire, a game that opens with a lengthy animated cutscene and isn't shy about sprinkling the adventure that follows with even more. The frequency of these painstakingly hand-animated scenes is astonishing—no wonder the back of the box boasts about having two and a half hours of them.

The time and effort poured into these sequences shines through in every frame. Every single second of the intro is constructed in real-time using a combination of enormous action-packed sprites and scrolling background images. It displays animated cut-ins on top of continuously animated cutscenes without slowing to a crawl, a serious technical flex at the time—the steady stream of intensely detailed (and again, animated) mechanical designs make it feel like I'm witnessing a secret artist's battle, everyone on the team determined to out-do one another.

Somehow Elm Knight's artwork only gets better as the game goes on, casually introducing flourishes that few pixel art games would have for decades. There are animated "transparent" monitors and moving shadows that distort as they travel up and across other objects—handled manually by an artist's eye, rather than calculated by a graphics card.

Of course loads of computer games in the '90s had impressive cutscenes—I fondly recall sitting quietly in front of my Amiga as some moody chiptunes accompanied the finest pixel art Europe had to offer. But those cutscenes tended to make the rest of the game look a bit, well, boring. "Stage 1: START!"... and suddenly you'd be controlling some little guy who looked like their running animation had been outsourced to a deep sea fish who'd only had someone describe the concept of "running" to them over the phone.

That's not true here, and if anything the parts of Elm Knight where I'm in control are where the real magic lies, thanks to Micro Cabin's "Space Graphic Structure" system (the fancy name for their proprietary 3D engine) used to bring real time first-person exploration and action-based battles to an old computer designed for neither.

Other games of the era like The Eye of the Beholder faked the effect, but Elm Knight has true seamless transitions from one "tile" to the next. Objects naturally grow larger as I step forwards or shift realistically (as far as a landscape made of scaled sprites can be "realistic") to the side as I turn or strafe.

Of course there's always a catch with early '90s 3D, and in this case it's the enormous 2D overlay covering a large portion of the screen, used to disguise the reduced size of the playfield and keep the game running at more than four fps. Again Elm Knight is quick to do something clever and artistic: That's not a restricted field of vision, that's my character's point of view. In every mech-controlling segment of the game—and there's plenty of them—the pixeled frame is a cockpit, complete with functional instrument panels tracking enemy movement, ammo counts, energy levels, and more.

The cramped nature of this screen actually makes every piece of the cockpit feel even bigger than it would have if I'd had a wider viewport and a tidier interface. Elm Knight's presentation convincingly puts me in the shoes of a human pilot operating a towering bipedal war machine, rather than a player directly controlling a metal mech.

There's not a lot of time to soak in the scenery anyway, as during these segments I have to literally step out of the way of missiles fired at me by enemy mechs. Relatively open areas are designed around dodging, strafing, and sneaking in a cheeky shot before ducking back to safety (movement is handled via the number pad, because this was pre-WASD times). Ammo is generally in short supply, which means long shots at enemies facing the other way are a risky proposition rather than the safest and most sensible option. There are no cannon fodder enemies in Elm Knights.

I realise that in 2022 this all sounds about as "amazing" as voice actors speaking dialogue or a new FPS releasing with online matchmaking, but this was happening in the same year Wolfenstein 3D arrived on English PCs. At the time Elm Knight's 3D world would have been considered a huge technical achievement simply for existing, so it's especially remarkable to see Micro Cabin not only make it happen, but also do something worthwhile with its incredible graphics system once it was up and running. The end result is a game that plays like an exciting evolution of dungeon crawlers just a few years older than it—it essentially bridges the gap between the '80s Wizardry and the '90s Doom.

There's a tendency for games with this sort of technical prowess to adopt an overly simmy "no fun allowed" ethos—or maybe it's just especially rare for programming wizardry and imaginative design to go hand-in-hand.. But Elm Knight is silly from the jump, with its main characters often throwing light-hearted verbal jabs and comically goofy expressions at each other. A short conversation with an early NPC hammers the point home:

• "Hey! You'd better not be an Imperial spy!"
• "What? Of course I'm not a spy!"
• "That's something a spy would say."

It's a dumb joke, but it's also the perfect demonstration of Elm Knight's willful silliness, which sets up its more dramatic scenes to have a real impact.

Elm Knight is the complete package. Age has not diminished its achievements nor dulled its show-stopping moments, and beyond hoping for an English translation (official or otherwise) there is no real need for any alterations to what's already in there. It should be better known for its killer art and raw ambition coming together to create a technical showpiece.

Clearly I'll have to play games with cool title screens more often.

It never happened. The Prosperity Project was corrupt, and quickly devolved into squalor and violence. The people it was meant to serve were dehumanized as indigent lowlifes who couldn’t change their nature. It’s a universal truth that things can always get worse, but for those in the Walled City, life became a neverending series of unsettling new miseries. 

This sounds par for the course under real-world hypercapitalism, but it’s a chapter of in-game history from Shadowrun: Hong Kong, one of the finest cyberpunk games ever made (the real Kowloon Walled City was demolished in 1993). Harebrained Schemes’ turn-based RPG Shadowrun Trilogy came out on consoles on June 21, so I reinstalled my favorite of the three, eager to get back into the series’ hybrid cyberpunk/fantasy Sixth World where shamanic spells and drone warfare go hand in hand. My return hit me like an armored truck full of orks. 

Playing the game today is a strikingly different psychological and emotional experience, particularly in light of what Hong Kong has endured in the last few years. It was first released in 2015, a year after the student-led Hong Kong Umbrella Movement protested China’s attempts to influence election processes for the top political office of Chief Executive of Hong Kong. In 2019, a proposed Chinese extradition law reignited the pro-democracy movement, and led to a world-changing wave of protests that were ultimately brutally crushed by authorities.

As of 2020, Hong Kong lives under a draconian national security law that flies in the face of the "one country, two systems" approach that doesn't formally expire until 2047. 

Walking through the game’s vividly realized depiction of the city (it’s 2056 in the free enterprise zone), Hong Kong’s existing corpocratic tendencies have been dialed up to 11 on the dystopia meter. The ruling Executive Council is a cabal of corporate billionaires who run the city, own the police, and control the news, which isn’t terribly far off from its current incarnation. When my freshly-rolled dwarf decker arrives at Victoria Harbour, I meet my estranged foster brother, Duncan, who hasn’t forgiven me for leaving home years ago. We’re a couple of dysfunctional Seattle orphans here to find our adoptive father—a born-and-bred Hongkonger—after receiving a cryptic message for help.

Our search leads us into the Walled City, often immortalized in western cyberpunk for its immense dystopian vibes. Tens of thousands of people are packed together in impossible, squalid conditions, making do as best as they could.

A winning part of this particular Shadowrun game is the powerful synergy between its legendary setting and the irascible Hongkongness of its ensemble characters. Hong Kong has always belonged to its people, and Shadowrun knows this. All over the city, revisiting these slice-of-life stories is often frustrating, bittersweet, and deeply moving—painful memories, awkward conversations, reminders that my character’s Cantonese is shamefully rusty.

There’s a simple exchange at the beginning of the game where Duncan reminds my character to speak Cantonese—always Cantonese—and as a Southeast Asian who had an archteypically cantankerous Hongkonger grandmother, this familiar refrain hits hard in all the right places.

The simple linguistic reminder drives home the fact that despite my heritage, I’m in a strange land. And while neon lights and nighttime rain have become tedious visual shorthands in the cyberpunk genre, Hong Kong is one of the cities that built that myth. Moving away from the docks and into the shadowrunner haven of Heoi, it’s hard not to feel like the genre is truly home.

Cyberpunk is usually about current realities rather than distant futures, but reentering the Shadowrun world prompts a bitter swell of nostalgia. It’s been over a year since the world watched ordinary Hongkongers resist the growing yoke of mainland authoritarianism (followed by the ongoing pandemic), and it’s still painful and even a little dreamlike. My brain is actively fusing my sentimental memories of the game with the painful reality of Hong Kong’s present, and the flesh-and-blood Hongkongers I know who believed they could prevail. 

Shadowrun: Hong Kong is so absorbing because it reflects the reality of the city’s demographics: there are obvious western expats (a euphemism for white immigrants), but the game is acutely conscious of the intersection between Hong Kong’s multicultural identity and its working class. I talk to Rosario "Cherry Pink" Ignacio, a Filipina ex-nanny who fled her dangerous employer, who reminisces about her days off with the other domestic workers sitting on bits of cardboard in parks and under bridges, gossiping and eating lumpia. The fact that the developers did the bare minimum to include these important pieces of cultural worldbuilding tells me two things: 

• Real Hongkongers had input on the story—both Hong Kong and Singapore have a substantial domestic worker population that includes live-in maids (a societal standard that is often exploitative and abusive).
• That it is absolutely possible for white American developers to work with cultural experts to get to this level, something too many other cyberpunk games have failed to do.

There are few other cyberpunk games of Shadowrun: Hong Kong's caliber that wholeheartedly engage with the inherent orientalism and intra-Asian cultures and communities that make up Hong Kong’s rich cultural identity. It’s because of this narrative commitment to getting Hong Kong right that Shadowrun still hits hard today, and proof that western developers—Harebrained is a Seattle studio run by white men—are capable of producing culturally diverse games without defaulting to racism and appropriation.

The depth and care put into the writing means that the team actually valued and acted on the input from their consultants: a team of seven including game designer Norma Tu, who helped to identify language and cultural inaccuracies. (A story did emerge in 2018, however, that Harebrained designer Tyler Carpenter was guilty of persistent sexual misconduct and harassment, which affected fellow S:HK writer Elan Stimmel.)

Cherry Pink is part of the city’s robust Pinoy community that bonds over food online, with users posturing over pancit (noodle) and dinuguan (pork and pig blood stew). In different neighborhoods, I meet more immigrants—an Irish monster hunter who hangs out in a Whampoan arcade, a Japanese dango seller obsessed with soap operas, an ex-anarchist Berliner who can compartmentalize memories. I bump into a Chinese-Irish hacker at a decker convention who witheringly informs me that there are, in fact, Asian people in Ireland.

Eccentric American expats keep a low profile in the shadows. I learn about the pan-African enclave in Chungking Mansions and how my fellow decker, is0bel, lived in a poor man’s version of the Mansions in the Walled City. Nearly every NPC is a fully-fledged person—a tiny part of a city brimming with personality. Reliable Matthew, a used drone salesman, is so evocatively pathetic that I almost want to hand the guy a few bucks through the screen.

At one point in the Walled City I come across an injured student from Hong Kong University, desperately trying to finish her research on feng shui in the slums. Feng shui isn’t just about organizing furniture to attract good qi (气 - in simple terms, dynamic life force/energy). The study of manipulating harmony and auspiciousness in human environments has been part of history for centuries across the world's cultures. Even the tiniest changes can make a difference between everyday bad luck and catastrophe. And in the game, feng shui isn’t just a philosophical system—it’s real magic. 

I never learn the student’s name. Her work seems small, but it is important. She needs my help to make adjustments to the qi flow in the slums. It's a metaphysical band-aid in the face of the growing rot at the city’s core, but enough to help its people survive a little longer.

Meeting this determined young woman amid the fictional chaos and suffering now has a miserable new layer of meaning. Over the past few years, Hong Kong’s youth bore the brunt of the authorities’ crackdown on pro-democracy protests. HKU was famously home to the Pillar of Shame, a monument to the victims of the Tiananmen massacre in 1989, as well as the Democracy Wall, a place for protest posters and messages. Both were removed after last year’s protests, as if nothing had ever been there.

The idea of shadowrunners—hackers, fixers, and jack-of-all-trades mercenaries—coolly defying Hong Kong’s cops and elite politicians isn’t the same escapist fantasy anymore. It’s hard to forget the raw, very real images of the Hong Kong Police Force beating the shit out of kids and old people, claims of torture, and protester suicides that many suspect were murders. Cyberpunk escapism as pure indulgence doesn’t have quite the same potency.