Must play pc games of all time

I can only wonder where his parents are and what kind of people they must be to let their son go romping around the wilderness like this.

Did prehistoric people not have child care services? The great thing about Bonk 3 is that you can invite your crush over and play two-player for twice the bonking action…. This PC Engine game is a remake of the original YS series for the Japanese PC console, and it proved incredibly popular with players all over the globe.

Have you noticed how vibrant and richly textured these games have been so far? Get ready for gargantuan plot lines, collectables hidden in every corner, and classic top-down RPG action filled with demons, magic, ghouls, and bad lads that your mother told you not to hang out with. Speaking of magic ghouls, and bad lads, this next title in our list of the best PC Engine games has lots of them!

Ripple mistakenly opens a magical book lets out six bosses and lots of other hellish stuff that you have to defeat. Ripple grabs two elf-star mates and tries to sort it all out.

The alternativeis being turned into a frog, and nobody wants that! Magical Chase is a side-scrolling shooter that is bright, colourful, and incredibly fun to play. O when when she collides with the roof or the floor of a level. Galaga 88 was the name of this game on the PC Engine.

Due to the insane amount of time it took for the game to be released on the Turbografx, the developers renamed it Galaga 90 in the US. Players control the Blast Fighter while battling Galaga forces in the heart of space.

Colliding with an enemy alien or their projectiles results in gamers losing a life, so keep your wits about you! Galaga 88 is a simple game to pick up and play, and the soundtrack was phenomenal. Bubble Bobble crops up in every best games list in some shape or form, and this list of the best PC Engine games is no exception!

The famous blue and green miniature dragons are back, this time in their human forms. It acts as a shield and can stun enemies. Plus, gamers also use it to capture droplets as weapons and for throwing bad guys off the edge of the game world. There are tonnes of vibrant levels to explore with many hidden features to uncover along the way. This title never reached arcades, though every other Bubble Bobble game made up for that fact.

Still, Parasol Stars was very much a star on the home console market and received lots of brilliant reviews from critics all over the world. Blazing Lazers takes the 9th spot on our list of the best PC Engine games ever made! Players start out with a weak ship and weak firepower and upgrade as they go. Staying alive is tougher than the Bee Gees professed in their hit song too. Ever imagined what a fusion of Gauntlet: Dark Legacy and Zelda might look like? PC Engine games seem to have a heavy alien theme to them.

Care to enlighten us, Mr or Mrs Hudson? My first time through I stuck to up-close-and-personal dwarf Bardin Goreksson, but lately I've played as battle mage Sienna, standing back and flamethrowing legions of low-level ratlings.

The equipment system still kinda feels like fluff, but I love that each character has three classes that play differently, and styles of weapons that add even more granularity. This is the co-op game to beat, even three years in. Steven: Caves of Qud is a near-perfect middle ground between the daunting complexity of classic roguelikes and the mind-boggling simulation of Dwarf Fortress.

It's also the weirdest RPG I've ever played. Sentient beanstalks, tinker bears, space-time paradoxes, fungal infections—it's almost impossible to describe Qud in a way that makes sense. Each time you start a new game, an entire world complete with its own cultures and history is generated for you to uncover. And within that space, you can play as anything from a desert nomad to a cybernetically enhanced half-man-half-tank. Just play it. Wes: I've still barely just dipped my toe in Caves of Quid during Early Access, but it really was staggering; it feels like someone took on the mad idea of cramming RPG-style writing into the open-ended structure of NetHack, and actually pulled it off.

Along with Disco Elysium, I think Caves of Qud is a modern reminder that good enough writing can make any game utterly captivating. Harry: What else is left to say about Skyrim? Nothing, really. A decade on The Elder Scrolls V is a fixture in the PC gaming consciousness despite looking janky and dated, even with a choice selection of mods. Skyrim slips down the Top again this year, but don't expect it to be forgotten anytime soon.

Speaking of, The Forgotten City, based on a Skyrim mod has just come out, so it remains to be seen if it makes next year's list. Jody: In my current playthrough I have my own museum, a chainsword, and fabulous hair.

The music's replaced by dark ambient and Nordic folk-metal, there are gallows and gibbets everywhere, and I have to periodically wash off blood and travel dirt. I'm accompanied by two characters from Vermintide, a blue khajiit, and the Skyrim Grandma. The Special Edition means Skyrim handles ridiculous mod loads without instability, and I can alt-tab as much as I want without it crashing.

It's better than ever. I'll be tired of Skyrim when I'm tired of life. Mollie: Skyrim is one of those games that's been there for me through a ton of high and low points in my life. Will I ever branch out and play anything other than a stealthy archer? Hell no, but I will spend hours exploring the same old dinky caves and loading up my house with an unnecessary number of stolen books.

Mollie: I've played my fair share of fighting games over the years, but few have kept me coming back in the way Tekken 7 does.

Every hit, block and sidestep feels so intensely satisfying to me. Couple that with a banging soundtrack, cinematic ultimate moves and a heart-pounding dramatic slow-mo cam, and every match feels like a full-blown theatrical performance. Though I still lament the lack of Christie Monteiro in the game, the roster is solid.

Tekken 7 is easily the best 3D fighter out there right now, and my favourite fighting game in recent memory. Also Yoshimitsu is an alien, I guess? Euro Truck Sim can take a breather. This son of a gun's packing Texas and Idaho, on the way to pick up Wyoming. You ever drive through through 'em? Vast, empty spaces. Buttes and scrub. Flimsy barbwire between state, federal, and private land. A couple mountain ranges in the western halves, Idaho panhandle too.

Feeling that small centers a person. Kanye West lives in Wyoming. A recent multiplayer update means you can drive by Kayne's yard with a friend. Nothing eases the weight of a heavy load, on the truck and the soul, like a convoy. Steady breath, eyes ahead. We'll get to where we're going. Andy K: ATS is great. But my heart belongs to Euro Truck Simulator 2. The larger map has a lot more variety, from the mountains of Norway to the vineyards of France, making for much more exciting road trips.

Fraser: Cities: Skylines continues its reign, with few urban city builders appearing to steal its crown. It remains undefeated in part because of the dearth of competition, but the many DLC additions and huge list of mods have ensured that even after five years it still has plenty to offer would-be mayors. There's even an expansion exclusively dedicated to parks.

And it turns out that flooding cities with poo doesn't get old. Sorry, citizens! Phil: The city building genre has had something of a resurgence thanks to games like Frostpunk and Anno offering up a different take on the basic formula.

But if you want the best game to actually build a city in, here it is. Katie: I don't think I'll ever get tired of creating vast intertwined city-scapes, ever more intricate intersections, and long-ass roundabouts… so many roundabouts they permeate my dreams.

Help, I'm traffic managing in my sleep. After the on-rails nonsense of the intro, it pretty much sets you free to be the ultimate spy in an amazing sandbox.

Rich: Simply one of the best games ever made, a unique take on open world design, and absolutely rammed with things to do. This feels like the game Metal Gear Solid was always building towards: ignore the nonsense about it being unfinished, and enjoy the finest game Kojima Productions ever made.

Phil: It's let down slightly by a handful of missions that force you to fight the Parasite Unit—tedious battles that ignore almost all of the established rules of the game. The rest of the time, though, MGS 5 drops you onto the map with a handful of gadgets and lets you figure things out for yourself. One of the most satisfying stealth sandboxes you can play.

Dave: Was having an absolute blast with MGS5's open world; it felt solid, real, and deliciously brutal. But as soon as it got fully into the bloated, ridiculous exposition it immediately pulled me out of the game world and that has meant I can't face going back ever again.

Fraser: Few management games have made me feel like such a monster, but that's what happens when you become a fascist to save a few lives and they freeze to death anyway. The cold and desperation makes you cold and desperate. Frostpunk is a challenging apocalyptic city builder with plenty of engaging systems, but it's the high stakes and brutal consequences of your decisions that makes it special.

And thanks to the DLC, you can also see what life was like just before the big freeze. Spoiler: it was miserable. Chris: I remember getting absolutely furious when my city was running well, I was keeping everyone warm and fed, and I had enough resources to survive, but my citizens were still miserable because they'd heard some rumor that tanked their morale. It seemed so unfair that I'd done everything right but people still hated me.

But then it's a society simulator, isn't it? No matter what you do, you can't make everyone happy, and a portion of any society is going to be filled with people who simply won't use logic or listen to reason.

A relevant lesson! Evan: Is Arma a tedious and complicated sim, or a peerless sandbox-playground for unscripted military antics? Years into its lifespan, the franchise's contradiction is potent: onboarding someone into the game means handing them a list of mods they 'absolutely' need to get started and a longer list of unusual keybinds double tap left Alt to freely swivel your neck independently of your weapon, duh.

But at the end of that not-so-basic training awaits a serious and often silly game about riding in a helicopter with a dozen of your closest Discord friends, one of whom crashes that helicopter into a tree after failing to correctly engage the auto-hover. Nat: Remember the first time you took a sledgehammer to a house in Red Faction Guerrilla? Teardown is that, but pushed to its best extreme. A destruction sandbox where breakable buildings aren't just a backdrop to mediocre gunfights, but instead used to prop up an incredible set of heist puzzles.

But oh, that smashing! Teardown may be voxelated, but everything breaks as you'd expect. Wood buckles under pressure. Plaster cracks to reveal underlying brickwork. Fire spreads as volumetric smoke billows through hallways, and a remarkably efficient approach to ray-tracing makes sure it all looks perfectly tactile. In most levels, you're free to explore and destroy the map as you see fit.

You'll have a set number of items to rob briefcases, safes, cars , and once you snag one, the timer starts. Carve an optimal route through the map, grab the goods, and make it out before the cops arrive. Simple, but nerve-wrackingly brilliant. Beyond that, though, Teardown's exploding mod scene has turned the voxel playground into a brand new Garry's Mod.

There's a workshop packed to the brim with new maps to smash up, and a wealth of toys ranging from GMod-style physics guns to miniguns akimbo. Teardown's puzzles are decent fun, but I'll be smashing my way through fan-made maps for a long time yet. A supernatural mystery, Unavowed throws you into an ancient society of magical problem solvers after a possession ruined your life. It's got big party-based RPG vibes, evoking BioWare games especially, complete with special origin stories and a branching plot that goes to some surprising places.

But this is still firmly a 2D point-and-click, where most of your time will be spent solving mysteries and puzzles. And what excellent mysteries and puzzles they are, forcing you to use both magic and your investigative chops to solve. What lingers, though, are the charming characters and Unavowed's vision of New York—a place simultaneously familiar and utterly alien.

Robin: Unavowed feels like a treatise on how the classic style of 2D adventure game can still feel relevant in the modern games industry. Dave: We finally made it, ma! As the finest long-term RPG on any platform, I'd argue it's a bit too far down the list, but there are still many who foolishly see it as some sort of glorified spreadsheet.

Football is obviously central to the game, which does put people off. But FM is a mix of a sporting version of The Sims, marshalling and developing your little computer people to kick a ball about better than other little computer people, and a heart-wrenching RPG about success, failure, heroism, the fragility of youth, lost potential, and the inevitable decay of our own corporeal forms.

Fraser: Finally! I've been trying to get CoH2 in here for years. The RTS sequel is perhaps a controversial choice, and is certainly more divisive than its predecessor, but the first game has had its time in the sun and on this list. There are plenty of reasons to recommend the sequel, too, especially if you're tired of the Western Front. One of the main reasons I've been fighting for the swap is the fantastic Ardennes Assault expansion, which features a dynamic turn-based campaign—something Relic is taking even further in the upcoming Company of Heroes 3.

Dave: Still think the original is better, but that's probably because I got proper obsessed with the Commando units from the Opposing Fronts expandalone. Cars are cool and hot and Horizon 4 knows it. Play it as a racing simulation or turn on all the assists and play it like Lego Racer. Or just deck out a van with a Dragonball Z livery and drive it off cliff sides, capturing the poetic footage as it tumbles. Nat: Forza lets me tear down my own backyard in the big daft Halo jeep, which makes it the best racing game ever made as far as I'm concerned.

Fraser: I drove around digital Edinburgh with a friend and pointed out all the places I'd thrown up when I was at university. Perfect game. Jacob: With a decent racing wheel, this game makes you feel like you're the world rally champion and F1 drivers champion all at the same time.

James: A game that bends the rules of space also exists outside of time. Portal 2 is still one of the funniest games ever made.

Even if the portal puzzles get easier to parse with every run, I'm always finding new routes and accidentally developing speedrun strats, buoyed by good humor, great performances, and excellent tunes throughout. If you've yet to play the co-op campaign, do it now. Spec out incredibly complex solutions to simple problems, together. Harry: If you like jokes, games, and puzzles, Portal 2 is essential. It's not a looker by today's standards, of course, but it doesn't need to be.

Cleverness, invention, and laughs win over graphics any day. Plus, it'll probably run nicely on your Steam Deck. It's outrageous that Portal 2 has puzzles that make you feel so smart while you're solving them and monologues so funny they make you cackle the whole time you're doing it. True galaxy brain stuff. Phil: Ubisoft's trade-focused city builder has grown into something remarkable. Over a handful of DLC seasons it's doubled down on the satisfaction of seeing a territory grow by adding a handful of new regions with specific quirks to overcome.

In Africa, you'll create canal systems to irrigate the land. In the Arctic, you'll build airships to circumnavigate imposing glaciers. And back in Europe, you'll expand your docks into a global hub supporting your ever-expanding trade empire.

The sheer joy of turning these disparate regions into a fully-autonomous machine of growth and profit is hard to beat, at least until you move to the next tier of technology, and balk at the exponential effort required to get it up and running.

A return to form for the series. Nat: Tony Hawk might've introduced me to skateboarding, but Session understands why I've come to love it. There are no time limits and no high scores: just you, your board, and an urban sandbox to destroy. Session manages to make the simple act of rolling around on your skateboard feel incredible. Controls can be tweaked to be as easy or tough as possible, and it's rare that a game can make the humble ollie feel satisfying.

Challenges that'd be trivial in THPS become hour-long battles as you try to nail a nollie heelflip into a lipslide off the sidewalk. Admittedly, Session is still extremely work-in-progress. Character models are a bit jank, animations bug out, and the physics are often hilariously broken. But each new update brings a new way to express your skating style, whether it's the introduction of freestyle primo and casper tricks, or a new city block featuring iconic skate spots.

James: Normally, I'd hold back on recommending an early access game, but Session's impressive growth and momentum easily make up for the jank. We've already had a total physics overhaul and an animation overhaul is on the way. New trick systems and levels show up every couple months, and with new publisher Nacon on board, we might see Session pick up even more speed on the way to 1.

Harry: Don't be put off by Loop Hero's impenetrable-seeming aesthetic; It's one of the most accessible games I've played in Its nostalgic style belies an absorbing adventure that's wonderfully simple to start, but brutal to master.

You decide the difficulty of your nameless knight's journey by adding monster tiles for more gear and resources, or helpful boons, colouring in the blackness with often surprising results.

Take your resources or try for one more loop? For much of I've struggled to choose. Evan: As you said, it's steeped in nostalgia, starting with that CRT "curved screen" filter you can enable in the main menu. And yet it's so different from many of the outwardly nostalgia-based games we see. Loop Hero isn't a recreation of an old style of game like Stardew Valley. Instead it resurrects the spiritual aspects from the late '80s VGA era, the subtler sense of mystery found in some games from that era.

It's most fun if you avoid Googling your way to victory with wikis. Instead, try engaging in the kinds of school lunchroom rumors with a friend who's also playing it, trading stories about how you can summon harpies into the map by building a mountain, or the ridiculous thing you have to do to get a secret boss to spawn.

Fraser: I started playing Loop Hero because I thought it would be a distillation of RPG adventures that took only a wee while to play through.

Morgan: Paradise Killer takes the most classically compelling premise in literary history there's been a murder, you have to solve it and places it in one of the strangest, most interesting videogame worlds I've ever explored.

Piecing together timelines and motives while interrogating characters named Doctor Doom Jazz or Lydia Day Break never gets old. It's a visual novel for people that don't think they'd be into visual novels. A true sleeper hit. Andy K: What makes it really special for me is its openness. This is a detective game where you can find evidence in any order and construct your case at your own pace. The order you find these clues in—and the conclusions you draw from them—can totally reshape your perception of the crime and who did it, including pinning the crime on an innocent person and having to live with your shoddy detective work.

Fraser: Chivalry 2 lets you chop off someone's limbs, pick them up, and then use them to beat someone else to death—all while you're screaming, they're screaming, everyone just won't stop screaming.

They're really screams of joy, though, because this multiplayer medieval combat romp is just so damn fun. Tyler: It's great. I love the balance of serious sword combat and silliness, where swing selection and mouse technique are being carefully considered just a few feet away from players who are smashing the 'yell' key repeatedly and chucking objects into the fray like Philadelphia sports fans.

In places, Chiv 2 really delivers on the full medieval warfare experience it promises. Climbing up a ladder and over the edge of a rampart is always thrilling. I can't wait for the horse update. Evan: It's the closest thing to a toxicity-proof competitive game I've played. The slapstick dark comedy of severed limbs and fish-as-weapons is part of it—that stuff makes Chivalry 2 feel lighthearted—but I also think that, unlike the serious, methodical, 5v5 formats in games like CS:GO, you sort of accept that a fray of dozens of people swinging their variously-long metal dicks around is going to be a messy affair.

Balance isn't the point. It's the calamity and fun of facing down three knights in an "unfair" fight and somehow walking away, and then laughing it off when a ballista pegs your body against the castle wall. More competitive multiplayer games could learn from that. Wes: GTA Online's heists are still some of the most intricate co-op gaming you can do today. Rockstar's online infrastructure is terrible, though. Unfortunately, so will all the hackers and griefers that tried to ruin our fun.

Phil: GTA Online tends to get all the attention these days, but there's a quality campaign here too—huge in scope, albeit saddled with some of Rockstar's most cynical writing to-date.

The mod scene is wild , too. Steven: It's still wild to me that Genshin Impact basically came out of nowhere and rocked the gaming world.

Player housing, new territories, and a bunch of new characters—it's crazy how good this free game is. Morgan: Technically free, yea. Its gacha money making tactics were overbearing enough to turn me off, and I'm the lucky type that's not compelled to keep spending money. Steven: I mean, it doesn't gate your progress in any way. You only have to spend the money if you want to, and there's no banners or pop-ups pestering you either. Mollie: I get you Morgan, gacha games can be off-putting with their monetisation.

But I view Genshin Impact like a monthly MMO subscription—a little bit of money each month for some currency or extra goodies is no more than what I'd pay to play Final Fantasy I hadn't actually played Genshin for a few months when we made this list, but I recently got back into it with the release of 2. Just like Steven said, I can't believe this is a game that you can technically play free of charge. Teyvat is a gorgeous world, with each region bringing its own unique flavour and culture.

Combat is seriously satisfying, too—combining the different elemental abilities of characters and firing off all manner of reactions never stops being fun. Sure it's a little grindy sometimes, but what live service game isn't these days? James: I bounced off Prey a couple of times, but once I accepted that you're always on the back foot it clicked.

This is Resident Evil in space, but you choose what kind of key you want to unlock the next door with: hacking, secret vent pathways, or turning into a banana and sliding through a tiny hole in the wall. Jody: Prey's space station being a contiguous space, one you explore inside and out so thoroughly it's ridiculous, makes it the System Shock 3 of my dreams.

You can hop into space, jetting around in zero-gravity to find alternate routes. There's so much detail, so much to learn. You can shoot a NERF crossbow through a window to hit a computer screen to read an email in a locked room.

Why isn't this higher? Phil: It's no Dishonored 2, but I really have to praise the craft Arkane put into creating Prey's space station—a seamlessly connected environment full of secrets to unlock.

It's just a shame the combat outstays its welcome. For years it's been evolving and spitting out experiments, beckoning me back time and time again to slaughter hordes of monsters and obsess over loot and builds.

The main progression system is the pinnacle of ARPG character building, and one that's kept me tinkering away for the better part of a decade. I suspect only the in-development sequel will be able to tear me away. Wes: I don't want to start a debate about game difficulty, but overcoming Sekiro's challenge was a thrill I haven't gotten from an action game since God Hand. It demands you play on its terms. The moment you parry a boss's final hit and counter with a deathblow you'll realize you've felt dead inside for years.

Morgan: Come on James, Chivalry 2 is right over there. Sekiro is hands-down my favorite From game yet. By reining in its combat options and focusing on a single weapon, they ended up with combat so good that Star Wars copied it.

Fraser: Yes, it's more Assassin's Creed, with a vast open world filled with stuff to climb, people to murder and crap to collect. While much is unchanged, I still found myself spending something like hours playing. As a Scot I hate to say it, but England is a pretty nice place to explore. It's a stunning open world, and one jam-packed with some of the series' most charismatic denizens, not least of which is Eivor, a terse but charming protagonist whose growls and sighs speak volumes.

She's my favourite assassin, even over the superb Kassandra. Sarah: I absolutely adored Eivor, and her horse who I named Horace. We both spent far too much time exploring England to compare places I've visited with their in-game counterparts. Steven: I'm such a big fan of this new direction Assassin's Creed has taken—even if it sometimes still feels a little too big for its own good.

Shifting to become an RPG with a branching narrative is just such a fun way to intimately explore a romanticized version of different historical periods, and Valhalla makes some really strong improvements in the narrative department, especially in the complex relationship between Eivor and her brother.

Phil: Gonna be honest: I'm still too burned out from completing Odyssey—which, to be clear, I loved—to even consider starting this yet. Nat: For a long time, Black Mesa was a joke. An over-ambitious attempt to completely remake Half-Life from the ground up as a standalone mod. But lo and behold, it's finally finished—and bloody hell, if it isn't a stunning thing.

Black Mesa deftly reimagines Valve's debut, trimming the more tedious parts of Half-Life while remaking Xen Half-Life's notoriously flawed final chapters from the ground up. I wouldn't say it replaces the seminal shooter outright, but it's a damn fine way to experience it from a brand new angle. Wes: A factory building game so perfectly named I defy anyone to talk about it without using the word "satisfying.

My first 'factory' was a messy series of conveyor belts on a forest floor that was ugly and inefficient, so I tore it down and rebuilt. And again. My multiplayer crew is now building towering skyscraper factories linked by automated sky trains.

Some people lose a year building castles in Minecraft; I lost one building iron rods in Satisfactory, and I don't regret a second of it. Phil: Build rockets and send them into space. Or, just as likely, fail to send them into space because of a disastrous flaw with your design. Kerbal Space Program takes all of the complicated maths needed to successfully hurl functional machines out of a planet's atmosphere and presents them in a way that celebrates creativity, expression and fun.

There's still nothing quite like Kerbal. Dave: The rescue missions Kerbal's 'career mode' spits up are some of the greatest space-based experiences you can have on a PC. Forget Elite: Dangerous, forget Homeworld, forget the Outer Wilds, when you've got Kerbward Woodward stranded, orbiting a distant planet with vast amounts of precious 'science' accumulated from a daring mission to Duna you've just got to figure out a way to get him home safe.

Especially because it's your fault for him being stuck way out there because you forgot to add a few solar extra solar cells back in the lab. From creating the rescue craft, intercepting the stranded craft, and finally getting everyone home safe… there are few more satisfying feelings in PC gaming.

Evan: Depth, literally and figuratively. Creator Derek Yu calls it "spiky", a label that describes many of the things you can impale yourself upon as well as the emotional highs and lows that its teeming, subterranean lunar universe produces in players.

A great spectator game, Spelunky 2's streaming and YouTube community is another dimension of experimentation and unbelievable feats. Family gatherings, drunken parties, or lunchtime in the office—it does it all. Morgan: Party Pack 7 is a particular banger, too. Champ'd up did the impossible task of surpassing the best ever Jackbox game before it: Tee KO.

Jackbox is a great way to get the party started or serve as a fun, accessible time when you're not quite ready for the night to end. I can't even begin to count how many in-jokes between me and my pals have been born as a result of Jackbox. Rich: A triumphant reimagining of Capcom's already-excellent series that looks gorgeous and delivers some of the best co-op times you'll ever have. Incredible combat with huge depth, spectacular monsters and environments, and there's so much of it.

You never want this game to end, and it feels like it never does. Wes: expansion Iceborne adds an endgame zone you can spend months in and a vastly streamlined gathering hub for multiplayer. It's everything I didn't know I needed in the base game. Mollie: Monster Hunter: World has been winding down for a while, with the final content update releasing in October last year and the release of Rise on the Nintendo Switch not too long ago.

I'm basically waiting for that to hit PC now, but Monster Hunter: World will still remain an excellent game. It really nailed the balance between the series' traditionally tough gameplay while being super friendly to newcomers. Also, the hunting horn absolutely whips. Doot bro for life. Chris: One of the few blockbuster games built from the ground up for VR, and certainly the best and most beautiful. Whatever Valve did under the hood with the game's locomotion, it's easily the most comfortable VR game, one that I could play for hours at a time without feeling the nausea or headaches VR usually gives me after about 40 minutes.

Plus, it cleverly rewrote some Half-Life lore that's been in the books for a decade, priming us for whatever comes next. Dave: Easily the best VR game ever made. It's also one of the finest Half-Life games too, and damn, is it ever creepy. Stalking through broken down infested zones of City 17 to avoid the zombies, or bursting out into the streets for a firefight with the Combine, Alyx is an absolute must for Half-Life fans.

And, oh my god, those liquid physics. I could spend hours just shaking vodka bottles. Rachel: First released back in February , Devotion was available on Steam for only six days before it was hit with its infamous review-bombing controversy. Determined to re-release the game, Red Candle put it back up for sale this year, letting players finally experience its superb suburban horror.

Sharing many similarities to Konami's claustrophobic house in PT, Devotion is a story about a family living in a small s apartment in Taiwan, each member having their own personal demons dragged out into the house's stark fluorescent lighting. Everything kicks off after the daughter contracts a mysterious illness, which causes the desperate father to tumble into a spiral of paranoia and misplaced spiritualism.

What's great about Devotion is that there are no literal monsters, the game is more interested in how the troubled headspaces of a family can seep into the physical space of a home.

It's not often we get to see the exploration of a person's religious faith and seeing how Red Candle has used that to create an insidious story of family tragedy is like no other horror game I've played.

It's a horror tale that actually cares about its characters, and together with artful sequences and spine-chilling moments, it's truly one of the best horror stories of all time. A game that was well worth the wait. James: Resident Evil Village is so much more than the tall vampire woman. I mean, Lady Dimitrescu certainly makes a lasting impression, but she's just one chapter of this excellent cosmic horror anthology.

This is Resident Evil doing its best A24 horror impression, moving from a frozen village overrun with lycans, through a classic game of cat and mouse in a lavish castle, and later arriving at color-drained industrial body horror—something like Hellraiser meets Saw. Village goes from goofy action to the scariest setpieces in the series' history, embracing everything I identify with Resident Evil: locked doors, ridiculous keys, and goofy characters. This is Resident Evil at its most self aware, at its scariest, and its most surprising.

Alan: The latest Resident Evil has some great stand-out moments, with a giddy number of villains and game genres checked off as you explore its chilling environs. The highlight for me was hiding beneath a bed bereft of weapons while an oversized nightmare wailed horribly while searching for our hero.

It's got to be one of its most chilling moments it has to offer—I don't think I've completed a level so quickly in my life. Jacob: Resident Evil Village isn't afraid to hand you a big gun and lots of ammo. Sure, there are moments that make you want to throw your mouse in the bin and never come back to your PC, but most of the time it's an extremely well-paced and entertaining gore flick. Mollie: I have a lot of love for The Sims 4. It had a rocky launch and issues that still persist years later, but it's the first game I boot up whenever I get that creative itch.

The build mode is genuinely fantastic, and I feel like Maxis is finally getting the hang of making consistently excellent expansion packs. The gameplay is still a little vapid compared to earlier entries, but it's a hell of a lot better than it used to be. The biggest bummer, and the reason for its steep drop this year, is how high the financial barrier to entry has become. The base game is painfully barren, with simple additions like seasons and pets essentially locked behind paywalls.

But here, a distinctive approach to city building in which major structures like specialized districts and Wonders are placed on their own tiles gives it a distinctive flavor, and the newly added climate change mechanics add new long-term environmental considerations throughout and hazards that manifest in the late game.

Think of Diablo 3 not for its infamous launch, but for the incredible action-RPG it evolved into in the years afterward. While its early existence was plagued by plenty of problems including a real-money auction house that was ultimately entirely removed and burned to the ground , Blizzard managed to reshape this revival of a classic series into an excellent and infinitely replayable co-op, demon-slaying party.

Diablo 3 is still lovely to look at, full of interesting choices and class synergies, and specially designed to keep you interested far, far past when the credits roll. The series' next mainline entry, Diablo 4, will likely be released in or later. Its sprawling caves open up and offer multiple paths to you at any given time, but no matter which way you go there are exciting bosses to fight and significant power-ups to make you stronger. And even though it was already a massive game, Hollow Knight has only gotten bigger since its launch in early Developer Team Cherry released multiple free updates with new areas and bosses, each harder than the last.

But whether you just want to get to the credits, find the true ending, or push even farther than that, Hallownest is a world worth exploring. With its distinctive Old West-tinged approach to the post-nuclear wasteland, game-changing decisions, and flexible ways to complete its quests, Fallout: New Vegas carved out a spot as not just the best game of the Fallout series, but one of the best RPGs ever made.

And the fact that you, a nameless nobody courier, get to rise up from nothing and become the person who decides the fate of the region, gives you a real sense of control and power. Just a few years ago, the Doom series was, for all intents and purposes, dead. A legend in a grave. Twelve years passed between Doom 3 — which would prove to be the final Doom from the original id Software team — and the Doom reboot in But against the odds, the new generation of id developers did it: they reimagined Doom as a fast-action modern-day demon-slaying experience while still respecting the satisfying feel of the classic originals.

Glory kills, aggressive monster mobs, big weapon and ability upgrades, and speed, speed, speed define the new Doom. Play this game first and then run straight for Doom Eternal , which evolves the formula in very smart, very fun ways you won't soon forget. Into the Breach is a puzzle game masquerading in turn-based tactics clothing. Each mission presents you with overwhelming odds and limited options — a seemingly impossible task. Each turn becomes a puzzle for you to solve, using your limited actions for maximum effect.

Into the Breach made our updated list of the 10 best roguelikes. Few games will make you fear for your life upon encountering the most mundane of inanimate objects the way Prey does — and fewer still will then give you the power to become those objects yourself. Developer Arkane Austin is now working on Redfall , an open-world, co-op vampire shooter.

No game simulates the feeling of being in command of a starship flying by the seat of your pants like FTL: Faster Than Light. It's a game you shouldn't expect to survive — more likely, you'll be blasted out of the sky by a vastly superior enemy ship or boarded by a death squad of giant killer insects who massacre your crew.

Maybe your life-support system will be hacked and everyone will suffocate. Its tactical combat never gets old, tons of loot and random events keep every game feeling unpredictable, and unlockable ships force you to change up your strategies on subsequent runs. And every so often, you might even win.

MOBAs have earned a reputation for being dense and difficult to learn, but immensely strategic for those who put in the time. Because every second matters, matches are always exciting even when they seem slow.

Are you farming gold? Are you scouting the enemy? Or crossing the map to help out a teammate? Or heading back to base to heal? Its complexity can scare players off, but those who stick through it will be rewarded with some of the most strategic gameplay around.

Microsoft Flight Simulator is the closest thing we've had to a near-perfect recreation of the real world in the virtual space. Using real-time Bing data to allow you to fly to and from any place on the entire planet has raised the bar for simulations to heights never seen before.

Accessible to anyone, or as realistic as you want, this is open-world at its most literal. Free-flying around the globe, participating in landing challenges at some of the world's most famously difficult airports, or just sightseeing, Microsoft Flight Simulator is an unparalleled achievement.

Don't forget to grab one of the best PC joysticks to make this flight-sim experience that more immersive. The marvelous PC port overhauled and further enhanced the gorgeous wild western atmosphere of Rockstar's most recent open-world adventure and added even more activities, unlockables, and impossibly fine details to its expansive map.