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The RPS 100: our top PC games of all time (100-51)Our new annual countdown of our top 100 all-time Bestest Bests
Our new annual countdown of our top 100 all-time Bestest Bests
Welcome toThe RPS 100, our brand-new annual countdown of our favourite PC games of all time. We’ve wanted to do a big top 100 list like this for some time now. In fact, we first started compiling this list about a year ago, although for reasons that will forever remain a mystery, it’s taken us until now to actually wrangle it into shape. At long last, here we are.
The RPS 100
This isn’t a one-off thing, either. The RPS 100 is going to become a staple event in the RPS calendar, and we’ll be casting our votes all over again this time next year. After all, tastes change over time, team members come and go, and who knows, maybe 2022 will be a banner year for some incredible new PC games. For the most part, we’ve limited ourselves to one game per series in order to reflect the breadth and variety PC gaming has to offer - although I’ll hold my hands up now and say there is one exception to this rule that we just couldn’t bring ourselves to omit. The important thing, though, is that The RPS 100 reflects who we are as a team.
100. Microsoft Flight Simulator
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99. Hollow Knight
Image credit:Team Cherry
It’s anything but hollow. This is a subterranean world full of angry wasps and skull-faced beetles waiting to bite and sting. It sprawls out in every direction, a modern mash-up of Metroid andDark Souls. The insects of Hallownest are grim-faced, mysterious and adorable all at the same time. But within its cartoon gothic lies a tough game of death and rebirth, unlockable skills, boss battles with set patterns of attack, and the satisfying feeling of learning your way around a cavernous, dim world with its own bug-sized culture. Look atthis map, and tell me you aren’t intrigued.
98. Final Fantasy XIV
97. Resident Evil 2 (Remake)
96. Viscera Cleanup Detail
Image credit:RuneStorm
“Cleaning up after Doom guy” is not an elevator pitch many would pay heed to, until that elevator opens to a hall way dripping with gibs and a mop is thrust into their hands. Viscera Cleanup Detail is a simulation of janitor life for the everyday citizen of first-person shooters. You will clean blood, burns and bulletholes in an effort to make each level as sparkling as it was before Barnstorm McNuclear, or whoever, came in and trashed the place. If this sounds straightforward, be warned.Physics is against you(and sometimes, so is a partner, if you’replaying in co-op mode). Buckets will spill, mops will get too gore-soaked to use. You might scrub up your own bloody boot prints as you walk backwards out of the room, only to look up and see your workmate leaving their own trail across the pristine floor.
95. Forza Horizon 4
94. NieR: Automata
What kind of video game is this, I hear you ask. Well, obviously, it is a story-led character action bullet hell hack ‘n’ slash shoot ‘em up JRPG. That much is clear from the genre-churning opening hours. Please, do not make me explain it. One of the wonderful things about Nier: Automata is going into it as blind-folded as your protagonist - a sightless android sword warrior called 2B. This is a world where the words “machine”, “robot”, “drone”, and “android” are not necessarily synonyms. The war in which you are fighting makes less sense the more you fight it. Funny and touching, this is a game about humanity with nary a human in sight.
93. GeoGuessr
92. Devil Daggers
Never stop shooting. Never stop moving. The first-person principles of warfare are taken to their logical conclusion in a hellish time trial of reflex and spatial awareness. Horned beasts, floating skulls, boney leviathans, dark squid. The flow of polygonal terrors is as constant as the daggers spewing from your fingertips. You can fire them as a stream, or in a single shotgun-like blast. Either way, you’ll need your wits as well as a whip-like wrist to survive for 30 seconds. What more is there to do in Devil Daggers? Well, you try to survive for 31.
91. With Those We Love Alive
90. Chicory: A Colorful Tale
Chicory is a truly special game. Despite its big, chunky picture book veneer, this top-down adventure strikes hard at what it actually means to be creative, celebrating its joyous and fulfilling highs while also tackling its (sometimes literally) monstrous lows. When all the colour in the world suddenly disappears one day, your character comes into possession of the Wielder’s Brush, a magical tool you can drag and splodge across the screen to cover it in paint. As well as using it to bring some life back to this monochrome world, you’ll also be solving puzzles with it, and finding out exactly what’s causing mysterious black roots to appear around the map and why they’re giving off such bad vibes. An ode to self-expression, Chicory’s the kind of game that stays with you long after the end credits start to roll.
89. Dead Cells
Something of a Frankenstein’s monster, Dead Cells is best described using other games (the lungs of Spelunky, liver of Bloodborne, skin of Castlevania). But all these organs come together to create a nearly flawless beast all its own. It is about killing with momentum. Storming across ramparts, through sewers and prisons, plucking up a new spear, a fancy shield, a ferocious grenade. Strike, kill, die, repeat. Every deathblow is another droplet into a beaker full of XP, unlocking more explosives, more traps, more abilities. For a game that likes to kill you with its undead pirate cannonballers and royal guardsmen, it is hugely generous, even as it smirks with every mortal blow. “Good,” it says, “now go again with this crossbow and the ability to smash the ground with your toecaps.”
88. RimWorld
87. Shadow Tactics: Blades Of The Shogun
Let the bodies hit the floor (and then pick them up and hide them in a bush). This here’s your top-down stealth game set in Edo Japan, featuring the usual cast of seasoned killers. You’ve got your silent ninja, your honourable samurai, your Geisha assassin, your urchin with a bear trap and a whistle, your old man with… a sniper rifle and a trained Tanuki? It imitates the Commandos games of old, presenting the level like a diorama of possible deaths, and asking the player to come up with a perfect sequence of backstabs, shurikens and environmental “accidents” so they can get through town, eavesdrop on soldiers, or assassinate their leaders. It might take some quicksaving and quickloading, but when the plan comes together it feels like a lethal puzzle well-solved.
86. Grand Theft Auto 5
85. Diablo II: Resurrected
84. FTL: Faster Than Light
Close the door, you are letting the heat out. Also: the oxygen. FTL is a spaceshipmanagement gamethat puts you in the astroboots of an off-brand Star Trek captain who does not know what they are doing, until they do. Your ship can leap from star to star but always with a mighty enemy armada on its tail. You just need your crew to stay alive long enough to beat the mothership at the end of the road. Open airlocks to douse fires or suffocate boarding parties. Keep all the ship’s systems running. And collect enough firepower to help in your final stand. All this is done while looking at your ship like it’s the floorplan of an apartment you’re thinking about renting. And as we all know, every apartment has a weak point.
83. Dragon Age 2
Image credit:EA
82. Celeste
Image credit:Maddy Makes Games
Platforming at its peak. You are Celeste, a climber making leaps on a mountain that is only as treacherous as you make it. With all its dashing and wall-jumping, this pixel-perfect platformer not only offers players a firm-fisted Meat Boy style challenge, it also sets the standard when it comes to accessibility options. It lets you crack open the case and grant yourself invincibility, or infinite stamina. It lets you skip whole levels. And when I said “pixel-perfect”? I was lying. Because asthe developer has pointed out, to make things so precise would, counter-intuitively, annoy the player. That’s why you are allowed to jump for an unnoticeable millisecond when your feet have already left a ledge (known in game maker circles as"coyote time"). It’s why you slip to one side of a wall if youbump your head on it. None of these are unique to Celeste, but it has applied all these microscopic wisdoms of game design with a fastidious hand to create a platformer that is both tough as toffee in cold weather, and as forgiving as the grandad who gave you said toffee.
81. Assassin’s Creed: Odyssey
Image credit:Rock Paper Shotgun/Ubisoft
Assassin’s Creed is anaction gameseries that has stabbed its way through history like an angry marlin. Here we join Kassandra or Alexios (your choice), a Spartan warrior dilly-dallying about in ancient Greece, home of theatre, myths, and a crap form of democracy. It’s as big a world as AssCreed gets, requiring plenty of sailing to get between islands, and often some warring when you do reach your destination. You might easily replace this entry with the newer Assassin’s Creed: Valhalla, set in Viking-era England. But then you couldn’t visit the Acropolis, the Parthenon, the Oracle at Delphi, the big statue of your boy Zeus at Olympia. And you wouldn’t have Kassandra.
80. Red Dead Redemption 2
79. Sunless Sea
78. Battletech
77. Six Ages: Ride Like The Wind
76. Nidhogg
75. Invisible, Inc.
Image credit:Klei Entertainment
XCOM for stealthy hackers. As squad leader of a group of well-dressed anti-corporate saboteurs, your job is to infiltrate randomly generated buildings and steal everything that is not locked away. And then you hack the locks and steal that too. It’s all on a tidy isometric grid that becomes uncovered as you go, peeping through doors and around corners to see the CCTV cameras, laser fences, and armoured security goons patrolling the place. Shh, they don’t know you’re there… yet. This is Invisible Inc’s best feature, a little “alarm level” wheel in the corner that ticks up with every turn. Stay in the building too long without stuffing all your team members into the exit elevator, and more cameras and drones and enemies will start to appear. That’s pure danger in a game where, once spotted, there is no fighting back. At some point, you’ve got to bug out. Even if that last room has precious loot calling out to you. It’s astrategy gameabout pushing your luck to breaking point, and coming away from a mission thinking “that was close, I won’t be so greedy next time.” But next time the “loot” might be one of your friends.
74. Post Void
Four guns, one hard guitar, and one shrivelled head of lifeforce that only refills if you blast a monster in its guts. Post Void is Doom with all the colours set to “what”. This is about getting fast and staying fast, shooting your way through feverish hotel corridors and bum-sliding your way both into and out of trouble. The upgrades you earn between levels are chaotically yet simply named. “BULLETS BOUNCE OFF WALLS” shouts one. “MORE SHOOTING LESS RELOADING” screams another. As one famous mascot of the games industry is wont to say: you should probably go fast.
73. OlliOlli 2: Welcome To Olliwood
72. Heaven’s Vault
Image credit:Inkle
This is not a mere gimmick. An entire language has been created especially for you to scratch your chin over. If that sounds hard, don’t worry. The game massages your guesswork if you are too far off the mark, but never so much that it takes the satisfaction away. It doesn’t just make you feel clever, like when detective stories guide you to a solution. It really lets you be clever. Discovering what makes one word a verb and another an adjective is just one early revelation waiting for those who go all in on this constructed fantasy language. There are so many other joyful discoveries. Every compound word is made of smaller components that come together in their own logical way. The word for “star” is literally “high bright light thing”. Tenses have their own defining symbols. And figuring out how the Ancients used to write big numbers is a particular head scratcher with a fascinating solution.
71. XCOM 2
Image credit:2K Games
70. Counter-Strike: Global Offensive
Do you want to shoot a man? Couter-strike. Do you want to be shot? Counter-strike. Do you want to go on a firearm shopping spree? Counter-strike. Do you want a quick blast of adrenaline? Counter-strike. Do you want a long night of simple gunfights with pals? Counter-strike. Do you want the feeling of getting slowly better at something pretty tough? Counter-strike. Do you want to defuse a bomb as your teammate valiantly fires AK-47 bullets into the haze of an exploding flashbang in a doomed attempt to keep you safe from the brute storming the room with a shotgun? Counter-strike.
69. Butterfly Soup
A visual novel about being gay and playing ball. There’s a lot of emotion stuffed into this two-hour talking simulator about a posse of girls from different Asian-American backgrounds, all handling their burgeoning queerness in their own way. Some funnel energy into baseball (even if a future in the sport seems to be forever yanked out of reach). Others struggle to understand their feelings, and what it might mean for the friend they fancy. All this is transmitted through dialogue choices in the mall, on the field, or within a poppy WhatsApp-style chat group. We do not get to see many characters written warmly in video games. They are usually too busy throwing grenades. Butterfly Soup offers something gentler, even everyday in its tone. If you want some new fictional friends to care about, they’re all here.
68. Opus Magnum
67. Star Traders: Frontiers
While mostspace simsare known for an impressive cockpit full of perfectly rendered hands and blinking lights, Star Traders goes for something more low-key - an economy that actually reacts and evolves beyond the idea that discounts on one planet can be sold for a high price on another. Black markets will emerge, blockades, warzones calling out for supplies from the willing profiteer. It’s a mash-up of a game, with bits of RPG, strategy, turn-based tactics, sim, and management all working together to form the interstellar equivalent of Mount and Blade’s medieval roamer. There is a certain fearfulness to be felt when looking at any menu-addled screenshot of it. But behind all those cards and statistics awaits a crew of fanciful space scoundrels, eager to make some money among the stars. And although “traders” is in the name, it’s more of a suggestion.
66. Pyre
65. S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Call of Pripyat
64. Civilization VI
Image credit:2K
63. Into The Breach
As close to the perfection of chess as a strategy game about giant robots is likely to get. While not exactly “minimalist”, this dollop of turn-based tactics from the makers of FTL still gets a lot done in a tight space. You command a trio of mechs fighting off swarms of giganto-insects on a 8 x 8 board of tiles. The megabugs are out to topple any buildings on the board, and if too many buildings crumble (or all your pilots are killed) it’s game over. What results is a cavalcade of punching, hopping, vapourising, smoke-bombing, and mech-sacrificing that turns a straightforward game of abstract repositioning into a brainy battle for supremacy betwixt humanity and beast.
62. Zero Escape: The Nonary Games
Image credit:Spike Chunsoft
Technically two games in one, Zero Escape: The Nonary Games sees the excellent visual novels 999: Nine Hours, Nine Persons, Nine Doors and Virtue’s Last Reward come together in a grisly, murderous double-pack. With their fiendish puzzles and mind-bending plots, the Zero Escape games are hands down one of the best visual series you can play on PC right now. To say too much about the story would only spoil its many surprises, but each game’s respective melting pot of fraught personalities, bitter betrayal and tentative alliances is thrilling, gripping stuff. What’s truly brilliant about Zero Escape, however, is the way it turns that classic visual novel trope of multiple playthroughs on its head, as the idea of jumping back in time and making different decisions based on what you’ve just experienced is built straight into the game’s story. And it doesn’t always play out like you might expect, either. If you like games that give you plenty to chew over long after the credits have rolled, Zero Escape is the thing for you.
61. Bernband
Image credit:Tom van den Boogaart
Take a walk through the streets of another world. Bernband is all about atmosphere. It’s a walking simulator in the best possible sense (you have visible hands but you won’t be using them). But also a full-body transplant into the clattering frame of an extraterrestrial in a pixelly alien city. A ringed planet hangs in the sky, hovercars zip through the air below, alien rockers headbang in a dank club. There are plenty of other secrets to discover, and alleyways to canter down (take a good look around that seemingly abandoned underground car park) but I’ll say no more. Bernband is best enjoyed in a quiet, unpressed moment. It’sfree as well. Anda follow-up is in the works.
60. System Shock 2
59. Doom II
Image credit:id Software
58. Call of Duty: Warzone
Lots ofbattle royale gamesnowadays feature faff. There’s a lot of sticking attachments on your guns and rifling through your inventory and stopping and starting and stopping. God, it’s exhausting. Call Of Duty: Warzone, doesn’t have any of this clunk. This is as smooth as an FPS battle royale game gets, with a focus on getting you into the action as quickly as possible. You hoover loot up, movement is quick, the guns feel meaty. Warzone’s map is paced wonderfully too, with just enough down time to get your act together, but plenty of firefights breaking out around you to keep things engaging. And did I mention that it’s free-to-play with regular updates? Worth a shot, I reckon.
57. Night In The Woods
Trash fires of the world unite. This is a story about Mae, an anthropomorphic cat who owns another, smaller cat. Do not linger on the implications of this. You’ve got other problems. Returning to your hometown after a long time away, you spend the game reuniting with old friends. Going to the mall, hanging out with “the band”, drinking too many beers in the wilderness. As a literal cat lady, you can leap on buildings and tightrope walk on telephone wires, but this is as close to a platformer as things get. There are other gamey bits - some rhythm action and lightbulb smashing - but really you are here for the characters. It is a pretty cartoon that you can play. Mae is, in essence, a self-absorbed waster. And her friends react to the return of this hot mess of a feline in different ways. It probably has more in common with Bojack Horseman or Tuca and Bertie than any game. But even that makes it special.
56. Destiny 2
Emotes, shoots, and leaves. Destiny 2 is the first-person shooter for the following people: Parents whose children just got put to bed. Retail workers too tired after a shift to go out on Friday. Teens with buds. Teens with no buds. Teens who will make buds and join a clan in Destiny 2. It’s good, clean, alien-shootin’ fun is what I’m saying. You can smash the ground with your fist every once in a while, and wipe out a whole squad of robots, or take out a big, blunt sword and batter an insectoid miniboss to death. Everything is laid out for you on a platter - objective, reward, bonuses. Asmultiplayer gamesgo, this is one of the cleanest and most approachable. Until it’s time to do a raid, that is. A raid is this sci-fi world’s tough dungeon dive and it requires solid teamwork amongst a bunch of geared-up pals. It’s a commitment, but one that Destopals often call a rewarding struggle. People often talk about Bungie’s30 seconds of funphilosophy, but Destiny 2 is more like a full 15 minutes. Or an hour. Maybe two hours…
55. NEO Scavenger
We all like to think we’d be the rugged survivor in a post-apocalyptic scenario (the resourceful rangers of Wasteland, the courier of Fallout: New Vegas). But in NEO Scavenger, your character is as underprepared for the collapse of civilisation as you are right now, sitting in your pants eating another bowl of cereal. It’s mostly a game about managing what’s in your pockets, and navigating across tiles on a world map to escape a strange beast that is on your trail. You’re not sure what has happened to the world you’ve woken up in. But the only way to survive is to stuff as many bottles as possible into a plastic carrier bag and keep moving. If you find a shoe, that’s terrific. A second shoe? Unbelievable luck. There are many ways to die in this terrible place (food poisoning, starvation, hypothermia) but none as clumsy, dramatic and pitiful as getting intoa chaotic fist fight with a random stranger. The results of these fights are described to you in lines of text, but it remains one of the most vivid, eyebrow-bursting experiences you can have in a video game.
54. The Last Express
Image credit:DotEmu
The Last Express is a 90s classic, but was remade and re-released on Steam only a few short years ago. Think of it as a kind of neo-Christic video games' answer to Murder On The Orient Express (and it does indeed take place on The Orient Express in 1914, and, err, murder occurs). The Last Express is a hell of a ride, notable for the highly-scripted yet non-linear story - which the player can have a large effect on. Oh, we could talk about the dramatic, unbelievable plot - you, an American doctor suspected for murder on the run from international police forces, only to be embroiled almost immediately inmore murderinvolving an arms dealer, an anarchist, and the start of the First World War. Or the unique rotoscoped art style to create an art nouveau effect. Or you could just play it and see for yourself.
53. Cities: Skylines
Image credit:Paradox Interactive
What is the best method of urban waste disposal? Perhaps a single, centralised landfill site with garbage truck routes spreading out like tendrils. Or maybe multiple smaller rubbish heaps in a secluded zone of each suburb. No. The correct answer is to dedicate an entire offshore strip of land to your city’s trash and call it “Stink Island”. Cities Skylines presents you with more than the problem of smelly litter. How far should your business district be from housing? What is the most efficient way to get electricity to the retail hub? How many roundabouts is too many roundabouts? At its cosmopolitan heart, this is a management game about making people happy en masse (or at least vaguely satisfied). It is the best building game for the municipal-minded and it staunchly refuses to guide your planning. This is your sandbox, so build some castles. Or, uh, some incinerators.
52. Terraria
Image credit:Re-Logic
Minecraft without the fussy third dimension. You can craft your way to a stunning cabin in the wilds of Terraria’s lushest forests. Or you can dig a nice troglodyte’s hole in the ground and make it just as cosy. This is all about homemaking, and I don’t mean in the traditional “cook dinner and do some sewing sense”. No, it’s about literally creating yourself a home, a place to call your own among the zombies and creepy things that lurk in the ground beneath. Oh, you’ll be going down there, make no mistake. You didn’t think you’d be crafting without the mining, did you? Don’t worry. The randomly generated 2D world can be as forgiving or nasty as you want to set it. The game gotits final updatein 2020. But for anything you think is missing, there exist countlessTerraria mods.
51. Star Wars: Knights Of The Old Republic
The more recent lightsaber ‘em up, Fallen Order, might put you in the shoes of a Jedi. But Knights Of The Old Republic puts you in the waistcoat, gloves, beard and brain. This is a chance to roleplay a person in the Star Wars universe, not just pull triggers or wave around a fancy sword. You awake in the middle of an attack, and are thrust into a Jedi vs Sith civil war taking place thousands of years prior to anything from the movies. You will pilot a rustbucket from system to system, you will fill that rustbucket with strange, alien companions, you will talk morality and interstellar politics with robots, you’ll turn to the dark side and convince people to kill their friends with spacebuddhist brainwaves, or you’ll calmly put aside passion and stick to the lightside. And you know what? You don’t need to be a boring starpriest all the time. Pick up a blaster. Throw a thermal detonator once in a while. Your choice of weapon is less important than the other choices you’ll make along the way. Granted, the Mass Effect games have far more sheen to them in terms of spacey roleplaying, but they are just not Star Wars. Until someone makes a spiritual successor (and rumours suggest this may happen) KOTOR is the best adventure through Jedi history you can get.
To see what games made it in our top 50, come back tomorrow for Part Two.
