HomeFeatures
The RPS 100: our top PC games of all time (50-1)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 to Part Two ofThe RPS 100, our brand-new annual countdown of our favourite PC games of all time. Hopefully, you’ve just readPart One, where we counted down numbers 100-51. Here, we’re into the final stretch, ranking numbers 50 to our ultimate Bestest Best at number 1.
The RPS 100
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, as I mentioned in part one, there is one exception to this. See if you can spot it.
50. Fallout: New Vegas
49. Extreme Meatpunks Forever
Clamber into your meatsuit, friend. It’s time to kill some fascists. This is a visual novel about a group of gay messes served up with some top-down mech brawling. Oh, and the mechs are made of meat. Its story of a band of multicoloured friends united against hate-spewing neonazis is being told as a serial. At time of writing the gang is going on a quest to"steal the sun". The combat itself is a rough, crudely implemented Sumo battle where you have to push your enemy’s fleshmech into ditches and off cliff edges, using a big whiplike attack and managing your stamina. There’s not much else to it. You may ask yourself: neonazis, gore, queer rebels - isn’t it all a bit on the nose? Friend, the developer’s motto is"subtlety is for fuckers". You’re here to bash fash. Get in the damn meat suit.
48. Soma
Image credit:Frictional Games
Sci-fihorrorat the bottom of the sea, from the same developers as Amnesia, the first-person horror series about forgetting things and hiding in cupboards. In Soma, the horror is two-fold. There are the disturbing monsters that make your screen tremble and go bleary with fear, yes. But more importantly, there is the constant gnawing fear of its unravelling premise. You are an average Joe who goes for a fancy MRI scan and finds himself waking up in a deep sea facility 100 years in the future. That mysterious, but not totally frightening. But as you tramp through the zapping, messy remnants of a malfunctioning research station, you start to realise the facts. With each onward step the story cranks up the existential dread. This is an unsettling game about an identity crisis like no other, and it has the punchy endingBioShockwishes it had. A last-minute gamble that will leave you both satisfied and troubled at once.
47. The Binding Of Isaac: Rebirth
Yes, I know: poo. I understand Isaac’s edgy dressing repels many but I now barely notice the poo, the wee, the bibles, and the satans. As my naked dead child dodges aborted fetuses and weeps aggressively at jobbies, I mostly see enemy patterns, room layouts, item combinations, rules governing secrets, and ways to bend the odds in my favour. The roguelikelike dungeon-crawler is an awesome system to have slowly duplicated as a model running inside my head, a joy to know and still a joy to play after— let me check— 1344 hours. I still relish building ludicrously broken runs, or pulling off wins even when I pull straight trash. And, honestly, I quite like the repressed Christian childhell.
46. Wildermyth
Wildermythis a genuine marvel. On the surface, it’s a tactical turn-based RPG about shepherding a bunch of would-be adventurers around a fantastical world full of monsters. Its battles scratch all those lovely strategic itches you know and love - the flanking bonuses, the cover tiles, the adjacency-depending support skills - but it’s also one of the best story generators of the last decade. Thanks to the dozens upon dozens of scripted micro-stories that play out over the course of its story - all based on your characters' personality traits, skills, background, relationships and your own decisions, I might add - Wildermyth’s narrative ambitions put other RPGs to shame. You never play the same game twice in Wildermyth, and once you’ve experienced it, you’ll never want to go back to the humdrum tomes of other Tolkien-esque fantasies ever again.
45. Alien: Isolation
44. Thief 2: The Metal Age
Image credit:Eidos Interactive
This is a first-person sneak ‘em up about bonking guards in the back of the head and scuttling along the rafters, trying to get that bit closer to a treasured possession that belongs to mechanical weirdos or pagan street-fighters (two of the sects that inhabit the game’s Victorian-meets-Medieval city). Step on a loud wooden floor and a guard is likely to spin round and spot you. Better to lurk in shadows, tiptoe on soft carpets. The world has undergone a religious schism, and you might need to play the previous Thief to understand every detail of plot here. But if it is simply a gloomy creep around a canal you’re after, or a bank heist where you don’t need to kill a soul, know that Thief 2 drew up the blueprints for all heists afterwards.
43. Eliza
For all that TV shows likeBlack Mirrorare mocked for boiling down to a simplistic, “What if technology… but too much?!”, that question is an interesting one to ask when you apply it well, and to interesting concepts. In Eliza, a challenging yet uplifting visual novel, you play as Evelyn, who now works as the human proxy for Eliza, an AI counselling programme that generates things for Evelyn to say to ‘clients’. At first you must pick from the list of Eliza-written responses, but later Evelyn has the option to go off-script, with all the potential effects that implies. Eliza is not only beautiful to look at, but compelling to play, and asks difficult questions - right down to your clients being clients, not patients. Is something better than nothing? Is it worse? What, as we have learned from The Good Place, do we owe to each other?
42. Company Of Heroes
41. Rocket League
It is car soccer. And the easiest video game to describe to your pals. Two to four players per team, each player in their own toylike rocket car, hoofing a ball around a stadium encased in transparent walls. The goal is goals. Rocket League is fun from the first minute. You can boost your car with a tank of refillable rocket juice, ping the ball with stylish flips, and soar through the air like an ascendant eagle looking for a header. There are plenty of skilled players out there (not to mention a lot of people passive-aggressively spamming the quickchat dialogue - “Wow! Nice save! Wow!"). But play with friends and it becomes the perfect waste of time. An idle kickabout for the modern world.
40. A Short Hike
Animal Crossing for people who don’t have the 900 hours to spare. A Short Hike puts you in the wings and beak of Claire, a birdwoman who is expecting a call from her mum. But the only place with good enough reception on her island is at the top of a mountain. So off you pop, hiking and gliding your way across the island. It isn’t a straight shot to the end, of course. You can pause to do a bit of fishing for a friendly gull, or chat to a turtle on the beach about island politics (she wants to be mayor). This is a small, friendly world to get totally lost in, but not hooked on.
39. Crusader Kings 3
38. Total War: Shogun 2
This biggo strategy game is not the newest in the Total War series of map-colourers. And it probably isn’t the most widely loved. But it does land squarely in the Goldilocks zone between the flashy hero-managing of the recent Three Kingdoms, and the simplistic geometric shape-pushing of much older games in the series like Total War: Medieval 2. You are in an ahistorical struggle for the Shogunate, fending off irksome Christian rebels with one sword, while threatening a rival feudal lord with the other (samurai warlords dual-wielded, right?) There is a grand map of parchment to turn into known, fully realised 3D land, and plenty of close-up clashes to fall into, both on land and off the shore of Japan’s ravaged coasts.
37. The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim
36. Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney Trilogy
Capcom’s courtroom lawyer ‘em up series of Phoenix Wright games are some of the best visual novels around - and the Ace Attorney Trilogy finally gives us definitive proof of that on PC. Bundling HD versions of the first three games of the series into one, finger-waving treat, the Ace Attorney Trilogy sees newbie lawyer Phoenix Wright fight for the lives of his clients, gathering clues to prove their innocence and finding flaws in witness testimony with a big bellowing cry of “OBJECTION!” All three games have devilishly good mysteries at the heart of them, and courtroom scenes are a real thrill from start to finish - especially when the climactic third game ties them all together. You could quite easily start with its more recent, flashier prequel, The Great Ace Attorney Chronicles, if you prefer - they both hold up as equally brilliant standalone experiences that don’t require any previous knowledge in order to enjoy - but for us, the Ace Attorney Trilogy shows Wright in his best and purest form. And that, my friends, is the honest to goddamn truth.
35. Spelunky 2
34. Planescape: Torment
Image credit:Beamdog
You have awoken in a morgue, and you have no idea about anything. It’s a standard enough beginning for video games. Amnesiac hero needs to find out who they are and what just happened. In this isometric RPG, doing that requires a little legwork through multiple dimensions. The Nameless One (as you soon discover your character is called) is an immortal being who is resurrected with a new body and personality with every death. If PST is revered for its characters, then ol’ Billy no-name is not the even the highlight. Take your pick: Morte, a floating skull. Ignus, a pyromaniac mage. Fall-From-Grace, a brothel matron with bat wings. As a good story to click through, it is getting on a bit. Buta remaster has given some spit shineto one of 1999’s many instaclassics.
33. Factorio
Henry Ford simulator without the union-busting. The principles behind the assembly line come to an untouched alien planet in thismanagementsim. You start as a wee man on the surface of this pristine world, but full automation is the aim. The human element must be stripped out (and the alien element also because sometimes the wildlife likes to attack). This is a mechanistic self-determined puzzle for efficiency freaks, where position, timing, speed and quantity all have to be weighed up as you plop down little conveyor belts and electricity pylons to keep your factories running smoothly. In some ways, it is the final form of Farmville, a seemingly endless procession of upgrades and new goods keeps you from ever truly “finishing” your factory. But the pyramid of products is only the result. The satisfaction comes from zooming out and appreciating the huge machine you’ve made. Just, uh, try not to think about all the deforestation you’ve done…
32. Half-Life: Alyx
This is how you do VR. Just as Valve revolutionised first-person shooter design with their original Half-Life games, so too have they shifted the goal posts for what’s possible in virtual reality with Half-Life: Alyx. There may be 13 years between this and their last foray into the world of Half-Life, but Alyx is clear, undeniable proof that Valve are still very much at the top of their game.
Set in City 17 five years before the events of Half-Life 2, you play as a younger Alyx Vance on a mission to rescue her father Eli from the shackles of the Combine. Shooting in VR remains as tense, taut and tactile as ever, and the screech of a head crab has never been more terrifying. After all, it’s not your monitor screen they’re leaping at any more, but your actual, literal face. Away from the fighting, though, it’s the little details that really make Alyx sing, from scribbling on window panes with in-game marker pens in real-time, to playing the piano and simply watching bottles of liquid slosh around in your hand thanks to their impeccable physics. And what hands they are, too. Clad in a nifty pair of gravity gloves, they not only let you reach out and grab whatever object the Combine haven’t nailed down, but they also double up as your health and ammo meters, elegantly removing the need for a traditional HUD. Is it worth buying an entire headset for? Maybe not, unless you have very deep pockets, but if you do have one, this is aboutas essential as it gets.
31. Dwarf Fortress
Sure, RimWorld is all right. But can you get drunk on mushrooms andbuild a subterranean zoo? Can you create a sept of bizarre and distinct heroes, each and every onenamed “Ulrist”? Can you break through the depths of stone tothe Underworld itself? These are rhetorical questions and if you attempt to answer them, you will be expelled from this article. Dwarf Fortress is a management game in name, and a big bag of stories in effect.
30. Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice
This is a single-player sword ‘em up, with an actual plot to go with it. As Wolf, the ashen-faced bodyguard of the child emperor, you must leap your way across rooftops and stealthkill legions of katana bros to bring some semblance of order to the warring states period. But bosses and minibosses will not make it easy for you. The only solution is to refine the art of deflecting strikes (don’t worry, there’s a button dedicated to it). Dark Souls teaches you how to defend. Bloodborne tells you to press the attack. But Sekiro’s wisdom is in applying both principles simultaneously. When you finally clock the patterns and timing of an enemy’s spear, or a forgotten mentor’s throwing knives, the resulting finale of clashing steel is more like a beautiful, choreographed routine than a scrappy fight to the death.
29. Team Fortress 2
The hero shooter for people who don’t want to learn the names of thirty weirdoes. Here you’ve got nine simple roles. A spy, a soldier, a heavy weapons man, a flamethrower trooper, a sniper, a demolitions man, an engineer, a medic, and a scout. Their goal: to capture the enemy team’s briefcase of paperwork. It’s a fast-pacedmultiplayershooter, yes. You will get shot in the bonce from across the map. But the chaos is manageable. There is nobody called “Wanda Wildcard” with 5 distinct powers and 2 ultimate abilities that fill the arena with one of the 12 coloured attacks currently turning a ballroom into total havoc. Team Fortress 2 calls a spy a Spy. Yes, it has evolved since its 2007 debut. It has gone free-to-play, for example. There are new maps and modes and choices of weapon. But at its core, this is still that solid, funny shooter of attack, defence and fashionable headwear.
28. The Sims 4
27. Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain
Okay, let me lay it all out for you. 60 years ago Big Boss, aka Naked Snake, was sent to Russia on a mission to… actually, let me start again. At the turn of the century, the Shadow Moses Island Incident shook the US establishment when… no, that’s not a good place to start either. Okay. In 2014, the shadow organisation known as The Patriots had extended their influence to… Ach, this is not working. Look, there’s a lot going on in the Metal Gear Solid series, and to pick through the conspiratorial world history of this trivia-obsessed universe is a mission even the most leathery of special ops agents would refuse.
26. BioShock
Image credit:2K
First-person shooter with a story that is the twisted collision of Jules Verne and Ayn Rand. You are the survivor of a plane crash, washed up at a remote lighthouse in the middle of the Atlantic. Soon, you find yourself deep beneath the waves with a big wrench and a shotgun. C’est la vie. You should probably blast those shouty mutants crawling on the ceiling. For all its schlocky shootiness, BioShock suffers the indignity of being one of the most discussed games in writer circles. Journalists and game designers have pored over every detail to back up their readings of the game’s polemic. This is the “here’s my take” game of a whole generation of critics.
But dive in with hands-up willingness, knowing nothing but its subaquatic setting, and you are not going to be thinking about any of that. You’ll be too busy hacking helicopter drones and setting oil on fire and getting both heebies AND jeebies from the excellent horror-flavoured set pieces. If BioShock is a theme park ride of animatronic story-telling, then it is a really good ghost train. You should leave your skepticism on the grass outside and embrace the nervous scares (hell, bring it with you and appreciate how good the props look). It is only fair that a game with such a strong opening (and one infamous moment in the mid-game) be cursed with a limp finale. You can’t have everything.
25. Divinity: Original Sin 2 - Definitive Edition
Image credit:Larian Studios
If you ever wanted to play Dungeons and Dragons but are too socially anxious to play-act the role of a stuck-up lizard prince, perhaps Original Sin 2 is the game for you. This is a fantasy role-playing game that throws you onto a prison ship with a band of scoundrels destined to become the “loveable” kind of rogue at some point. The combat is an isometric turn-based affair that encourages you to mess with the environment. Set oil slicks ablaze, electrocute soaking enemies, turn that corpse into a bloated bag of flesh and force it to fight for you. Just magic things. It’s also, er, quite big. There is a central tale about the gods and the fickle games they play with this gang of potential chosen ones. But there are also enough off-beat sidequests and hidden storylines to inspire, oh I don’t know,82 episodes of a “good cop, bad cop” style Let’s Play series. It’s a huge, chunky RPG that will keep you enraptured for weeks, possibly months, is what I’m saying. And that is before you get into the open-endedco-opor the custom adventure creator that lets you design your own stories to take friends through as a benevolent (malevolent?) gamesmaster.
24. Undertale
You could describe Undertale as the plucky underdog of the RPG scene. But that would be ignoring the hundreds of thousands of fans standing behind it with bats and clubs and socks full of snooker balls. Undertale is a plucky, pixelly story about a silent kid who falls into a world of comedy skeletons and sinister flowers. It pokes gentle fun at outdated JRPG tropes, like turn-based battle menus and tileset floor puzzles. But you don’t need to be an alumni of Final Fantasy or Pokémon to enjoy the sheer density of its absurdo comedy. There are boney knights who pride themselves on being monstrous, even though they really just want to be friends. There are cute, wordless dogs whose necks stretch to the heavens and back. This is a sweet, well-meaning journey through a world whose only real darkness comes from its traditional black JRPG void. Unless, of course, you ignore the message of the game entirely…
23. Slay The Spire
Basically spawned an entire genre overnight. Slay The Spire is a card game about cutting your way through a surreal dungeon world to stab the giant, pumping heart at its centre. The basics of damage and defence come from other card games before it, like Hearthstone. But this is not a competitive game of collectible minions. It’s a taut, single player roguelike where you grow and trim your deck according to the random cards you win between fights. Every death brings you back to the starting deck of plain attacks and standard defences. This all sounds quite simple but, as easy as it is to drop and drag a pummeling bash of a mace onto an enemy birdman, reaching the end of the game is a challenge. You must be economical with your cards, strip away the bloat, gather bonus-granting artifacts, lean into risky strategies that leave you hurting or vulnerable. Fights will feel fierce, sometimes even unbeatable. But behind those armoured brutes and thorny beings of abstract shape lies some perfect, unseen arithmetic. This is an elegantly designed icon and it will probably eat your life.
22. Subnautica
21. Hotline Miami
20. Apex Legends
19. Psychonauts 2
The original Psychonauts became a cult classic for good reason, and the more recent sequel Psychonauts 2 took the established premise and ran, leapt and jumped with it. Raz, everyone’s favourite psychic secret agent, is back helping the Psychonauts to defeat an old enemy who’s about to return. To do this, you jump into the minds of people around you, exploring their weird and colourful subconscious where trauma is processed as beautiful visual metaphors. A flooded town made entirely of hair. Sensory overload via a psychedelic 60s music festival. An office full of teeth and gums. It’s absolutely astounding.
18. Kerbal Space Program
17. Half-Life 2
Welcome to position 17. Half-Life 2 is the first-person shooter equivalent of Solitaire. Everyone has it installed. The ubiquitous shooter of crowbar-wielding fame sees its hero, unspeaking physicist and MIT graduate Gordon Freeman, appearing in the oppressed City 17. It doesn’t take long for the game to shunt you along its rollercoaster and into the arms of a resistance movement trying to overthrow the quisling overseer of the city and his croaking gunmen. As a shooter, it is a plain thing. There are no special powers or abilities. No wall-running, no backstab animations, no slow-motion bullet-dodging or fancy teleportation (at least none you can control). Yet the appeal of Half-Life 2 is in the momentum of Gordon’s tireless stride. It is one long journey from railway track to sewer to secret base to abandoned neighbourhood to beach to prison to city streets, travelling without blinking from one setting to another, like a war movie made from a single long shot. Half-Life 2 may have aged since it zapped into existence in 2004. But it still has some of the best pacing of any shooter you can load up today.
16. Mass Effect 2
Image credit:Rock Paper Shotgun/EA
Go to space, punch a reporter. Mass Effect 2 covers all the major power fantasies in one intergalactic third-person sci-fi RPG of guns and conversation. The galaxy is under threat from the Reapers, a dormant anti-civilisation made of country-sized squidcraft and conveniently soldier-sized ground troops. It is up to you and a posse of specialists to stop them. The problem: you don’t have the posse yet. So off you pop on a round-the-spiral-arms trip to collect and convince some old friends and new buddies to join a suicide mission that will (hopefully) save all sentient life.
This is developer BioWare at the peak of their powers. The game is structured almost like a series of Star Trek. Everyone on your crew has their own problems and, at the heart of their troubles, a loyalty mission. Each one is an episode fully dedicated to that character, and every one unique. Whether that’s dealing with Jacob’s daddy issues. Or Miranda’s daddy issues. Or… Tali’s… daddy issues… Okay, so that’s 3 out of 12 loyalty missions about dads but the rest are quite varied. You can help your war-hungry Krogan crewmate get through his brutal Rite of Passage. Or aid Mordin the Salarian in a quest to find his scientific protege. The outcome of these sidequests is important too, because depending on how your relationship with your crew has developed the final mission of the game might go awry for any number of them, leading to their deaths. So you better do Thane’s personal quest. He is looking for his son and… hey, this is another mission about dads!
15. Kentucky Route Zero
Good things come to those who wait, and it took seven years for all five acts of the strange, wonderful journey of Kentucky Route Zero to come out. Wrapping up with the final act just last year, you play as Conway, a truck driver making his last delivery via the titular Route Zero, a mysterious and secret Kentuckian highway. The focus here isn’t on challenges or puzzles, but on storytelling - on the people Conway meets and the magical realist adventures he has, in a world that sometimes looks like a play or supernatural shadow puppet show. It’s melancholic, otherworldly, but sweet and thoughtful all the same. One of the best stories yet told in games, Kentucky Route Zero is proof positive that the road less travelled is worth taking.
14. Hitman 3
13. Disco Elysium
Image credit:ZA/UM
Take your need for combat and leave it at the door, friend. Disco Elysium is an isometric RPG without the gunfights or speelcasting. It is set in the crumbling fictional city of Revachol, where people are nasty, violent and broken, but rarely want things to come to blows. At least, not with a police detective as stinking of booze and desperation as you. How are you ever going to solve the murder behind your hotel with such a thundering hangover? Storytelling in games rarely focuses on character development, preferring the broad strokes of baddie vs goodie to give you sufficient reason to gun down the next hundred boys in balaclavas. This role-playing game is all characterisation, all the time. And I’m not just talking about the sweary kid throwing stones at the corpse that you need to examine, or the programmer testing soundwaves in the crumbling church across the canal.
12. Overwatch
The hero shooter for those who thrive in cartoonish chaos. Overwatch is on the office dartboard of every other competitive multiplayer shooter, mostly out of envy. Six heroes, each with their own handful of abilities, go to smallwar against an opposing group of six on the other side of a scientifically perfect map. Sometimes the goal is to capture and hold a point. Sometimes you’ve got to push a hoverwagon full of explosives into the opposing team’s spawning area. Either way, you are going to be pressing a lot of buttons in a panic.
11. 80 Days
Image credit:Inkle
10. Yakuza 0
The adventures of Tokyo’s best agony uncle. This is an action brawler in the same way Die Hard is a “Christmas movie”. Yes, the brawling is everywhere, but it also is the least important thing about this story-heavy third-person runaround. You play Kiryu Kazama, a low-ranking member of the Dojima crime family in the seedy demi-fictional city district of Kamurocho. Your superpower is fists, feet and thoughtfulness. There is a twisting, melodramatic plot with all the characters and tropes of Yakuza movies or long-running TV dramas. And Kiryu is in the centre of it all, implicated in a murder he didn’t commit (he only beat the guy up, promise) and determined to unravel the mystery.
9. Minecraft
8. Portal 2
Image credit:Valve
For a medium that prides itself on the manifestation of bizarre physical impossibilities, video games often simply recreate the phenomenon we know from reality, and then give it a fantasy name. An interstellar tempest in Stellaris is just a really high storm. The gravity gun of Half-Life 2 is a big magnet. In first-person puzzler Portal 2, you shoot a couple of separate walls with a weird gun and thin doorways appear connecting one wall to another in what has become the most wonderful magic trick ever performed in games. It feels like a true phenomenon.
Give either Portal game to someone for the first time and they all react with the disbelief ofthat baboon who sees the paper disappear. They will create an infinite hall of mirrors to walk down, they will put portals on the floor and ceiling to make an endless tunnel to fall through. Eventually they will do the game’s actual puzzles, rooms of three-dimensional thinkiness that will earn your grudging respect. The sequel offers all the wonder and comedy of the first game with added slip-slidey goo and bouncey floors, not to mention a couple of jolly co-op robots who will give you and a close friend some of those severe trust issues you’ve heard so much about.
7. Hades
Escape hell, annoy your dad. As the little-known Greek god Zagreus, you’ve got to stab and dash your way out of the underworld, death after death serving as a reset button for the isometric roguelike combat. Of course nobody can escape Hades, don’t be foolish. But why would you want to when so many interesting people live down here? The popular joke is that every character in this realm is as hot as the spicy green fire that licks around the edges of the screen. They are all fully voiced thirst traps, who will offer different lines of dialogue depending ona frightening number of variables, somehow keeping the traditional repetition of a roguelike from turning its accompanying storyline stale.
Not all deities and demi-gods want to help you out either. Others might require a random dice roll of providence to soundly beat with a particularly good spear or bow. Whatever the case, you’ll probably find yourself clashing with your old flames time and time again, dashing back and forth across the room to avoid a literal bullrush from Asterius the Minotaur, or dodging a barrage of pink spit from a bony Hydra’s head. Get it wrong and its another clamber out of the blood pool at the start of the game. Another disapproving glare from dad.
6. The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt
5. Dishonored 2
Dishonored 2 is a first-person stealther that has you explore the splintered, sunny region of Karnaca in search of some high-profile baddies to assassinate. What separates this game from any other stealth adventure is its Arkane heritage. These devsreallyknow how to make an immersive sim, and they’ve crafted some masterful levels for you to unpick with your supernatural powers. A Crack In The Slab and The Clockwork Mansion are frighteningly clever missions that bend to your blade as much as they boggle the mind.
If anything, Dishonored 2 is a masterclass in design. Not only do you feel like your stalking targets, you feel like you’re creeping through an architect’s showroom. You can choose to leave everyone alive if you wish or you can opt for a more chaotic approach. Whichever you’d prefer, I mean, you’re in control here. Whatever methods you opt for, the outcome is the same: delight. Is this stealth perfected? Quite possibly.
4. Dark Souls: Remastered
3. Stardew Valley
2. Return Of The Obra Dinn
The best game about an insurance man ever made. Obra Dinn is a first-person detective sim set aboard a ship in the 1800s that has been found mysteriously emptied of its crew (the skeletal remains of the captain and a few other notable corpses notwithstanding). You have a magical pocketwatch that allows you to see the deaths of all those on board in flashback-o-vision. The problem: you don’t know their names. So begins a 60-person murder mystery that requires all the logical deduction of a maritime Miss Marple. To say any more would be to spoil its many secrets, which are best left discovered for yourself. The less you know about Obra Dinn going in, the better.
1. Outer Wilds
Image credit:Annapurna Interactive
A homebrew NASA mission in a spaceboat made of wood, and certainly the PC game that’s left the deepest mark on our memories in recent years. You are an explorer from an alien world who has noticed something funny about your sun - it seems to be exploding every 20 minutes. With each explosion you are flung back in time with another brief window to sojourn around the solar system and discover secrets. It’s Groundhog Day in space. Russian Doll without the hangover.
We didn’t think Outer Wilds could possibly get any better, either. Then developers Mobius Digital released theirsensational expansion Echoes Of The Eyeat the end of September, and well… we almost threw ourselves into the sun out of sheer disbelief. This is a game of rare imagination, and one that captures that sense of awe and wide-eyed adventure like few others. We won’t say anymore for fear of spoiling its many secrets, but know this. Outer Wilds has firmly planted its flag on the quantum moon of our collective hivemind, and that’s why it thoroughly deserves its place as our ultimate Bestest Best of all time.
