10 best PC games to play right now
The PC gaming scene boasts unparalleled graphics and a lively modding community, but what we love most about it is the games themselves. Console libraries look tiny compared to the sheer volume of games you can pick up on PC: AAA blockbusters sit alongside breakout indies and tiny passion projects made my a lone developers. You’ll find games from every genre, and the best PC games are often cheaper than their PS4, Xbox One or Switch versions.
With hundreds of thousands to choose from, how do you know which to invest in? You’ve come to the right place, because this list showcases only the best of the best PC games. If you’re a newcomer – welcome! – then these are the PC games you should buy right away. And if you’re a long-time PC gamer, read this list to make sure you haven’t missed out. Note that these are the best PC games you can play today, not the most important PC games ever made: as much as we love old-school classics like System Shock 2 and Half-Life, you won’t find them on this list. Equally, if an older game crops up, you can be assured that it’s still worth downloading.
If you need to upgrade your PC to run some of these best PC games, check out our high-end gaming PC build guide. Alternatively, if you need a pre-built machine, here are the best gaming PCs of 2019, and the best gaming laptops.
Without further ado, here are the 30 best PC games.
Planet Zoo
Management games rarely make you care about the people and creatures within them, but in Planet Zoo you get to know every one of the bears, snakes and centipedes you place in your enclosures. It feels almost educational, with constant facts and tidbits about each species and the importance of their conservation, placing a deep simulation game on top. You can construct your zoo in exactly the way you want, and the details matter here, right down to what food and drink bowl you give your animals.
It gets the balancing act between progression and challenge just right: you acquire new items and buildings at a fair clip, but to do so you have to take risks, sometimes introducing animals you’re not yet fully prepared to care for. It’s tough to understand at times, but getting over the early learning hump is worth it to watch your camels, tigers and leopards wander around their perfectly manicured pens.
Six Ages: Ride Like the Wind
A spiritual sequel to PC cult classic King of Dragon Pass, Six Ages is part town manager, part visual novel, and packed with Bronze Age weirdness. As you guide your clan to prosperity, every member of your inner circle – who you’ve hand-picked from the general populace – will have something amusing, sarcastic or downright evil to say about the decision at hand. The situations from which those decisions arise are constantly surprising, and each play out as a series of choose-your-own-adventure screens. You’ll meet unexpected visitors from foreign lands, weigh up alliances, capture herds of horses, make religious sacrifices and discover water elves rising from the sea.
Six Ages’ moral compass points whichever way you want it to, based on your clan’s founding principles. It wants you to stick to your beliefs and listen to the counsel of your advisors, however twisted they are. That throws up constant opportunities to role play, and creates a sense of place and history for your clan in the world.
Manifold Garden
A gravity-shifting puzzle game – yeah one of those – that sets itself apart with an infinitely-looping world and a clean, crisp, art style full of repeating shapes. Jump off an edge and you’ll land where you were just standing. Sprint up flights of stairs and you’ll eventually realise you’re going down them. It’s properly mind-bending, and its puzzles make you feel smart.
To solve them, you have to flip gravity by turning walls into floors at the press of your space bar. By shifting what’s up and what’s down, you’re able to move cubes around to place them on buttons. Because that interaction is so simple and consistent, Manifold Garden can get away with mystical, unknowable environments and tough, multi-part puzzles without ever overwhelming you. Its chilled music and pleasing straight lines stop you getting stressed, even if you’re stuck.
Play it now:
Epic Games Store
Star Wars Jedi: Fallen Order
After a string of rubbish Star Wars games, we finally have one worthy of the franchise. Star Wars Jedi: Fallen Order doesn’t have many original ideas, but it borrows the best bits from greats: the melee combat of Dark Souls (don’t worry, it’s not as difficult), the branching, looping world of Metroidvanias, and the environmental puzzles of Tomb Raider. It put all these bits together in a believable Star Wars world, full of exotic locations and some standout characters such BD-1, your adorable droid psychic.
The jumping and sliding is standard action-game fare, but it’s elevated by the structure of each world you visit. While they initially seem small, they unlock in stages, gated behind abilities that you must unlock. You’ll soon discover that each section goes deeper than you suspected, connecting to other locations in interesting ways, and it gives you reason to explore every possible avenue before moving on. The performance is patchy and the story won’t linger in your memory, but Fallen Order remains that rarest of things: a Star Wars game well worth playing.
Play it now:
Steam
Origin
Humble Store
Shenmue 3
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The long-awaited Shenmue 3 is completely faithful to the games that preceded it – for better and for worse. Some things haven’t moved on since 2001’s Shenmue 2: you’ll still find quick time events, occasionally wonky visuals, dull minigames and plenty of grinding. But scratch the surface and you’ll find a rich world to dive into, full of believable characters and meaningful conversations. Every mechanic layers into one another, so even the mindless tasks — collecting capsule toys — have a purpose, and can help improve protagonist Ryo’s martial arts skills.
The story is plodding, but each beat has impact because of how invested you get in the world. Even after you’ve spent hours exploring the streets of Bailu Village, talking to shopkeepers, fishing and visiting the dojo, Shenmue 3 opens up a whole new, city-esque region, filled with its own vibrancy and charm. No one element of Shenmue 3 is great, but taken in its entirety it’s a charming walk down memory lane.
Play it now:
Epic Games Store
Football Manager 2020
If you faithfully follow Football Manager then you’re probably already playing 2020’s version, or you’ve earmarked it for your Christmas list. But if you’ve long-abandoned the series, why should you care about the latest edition? The new Club Vision system is the biggest draw, and it’s perfect for players seeking an extended, in-depth managerial career. You get a specific set of both short and long-term goals at every club: maybe this year you have to sign a load of youth players, and your five-year goal is promotion, or perhaps you need to focus on your finances for a couple of seasons. These objectives, negotiated every year, give structure to each session, and mean you need to pay as much attention to what’s happening off the pitch as on it.
The new Development Centre also caters for enthusiasts, giving you everything you need to know about your youth prospects in one spot, including their happiness, stat growth, and how close they are to a first-team spot.
While Football Manager 2020 isn’t our favorite entry in the series — the Gegenpress tactic remains overpowered and strikers consistently miss one-on-ones — it is a solid one, and worth picking up if you’re looking for a detailed management sim.
Play it now:
Steam
Humble Store
Lost Ember
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Lost Ember is a blissful four hours spent among nature: you get to see stunning mountain passes and meandering rivers through the eyes of the animals that live in these spaces, swapping to a hummingbird when you need to fly, or a fish when you need to swim. Most of the time you control a wolf, and a spirit of a long-lost people is asking for your help. The story, while not exactly surprising, is emotional and rich, pulling you through the linear world, and the cutscenes say a lot with few works.
It’s a charming game that delights in little interactions, like swapping to a wombat to eat berries, or trying to fly as a duckling only to stay suspended in the air for a few fleeting seconds. You can play most of Lost Ember as the wolf, but swapping between animals is so easy, and so rewarding, that you can’t help but do it. Soar through valleys as a bird — then swap to a wombat to sniff out secrets, all to the backing of a soothing soundtrack.
Play it now:
Steam
GOG
Humble Store
Unity of Command 2
A damn good wargame, for Unity of Command veterans and newcomers alike. It’s strategy is accessible enough for you to begin formulating plans, but complex enough that you’re always learning something new when those plans go wrong. It encourages you to think laterally, and taking the time to think through your next move — going out of your way to cut enemy supply lines, for example — yields satisfying rewards.
We wish it had more tooltips and tutorials, because it’s too easy to miss some key mechanics. But once you get to grips with the many tools on offer, you’ll be formulating multi-part strategies that take advantage of your enemies’ weaknesses. The central campaign stretches from 1943 North Africa to 1945 on the western front, and is consistently engaging, with urgent objectives that make it hard to stop playing. The complexity of each scenario means there’s hardly ever a route that’s obviously better than the rest, which adds a bit of chaos that the first game lacked.
Play it now:
Steam
30. Spelunky
Spelunky is a bottomless treasure chest: its simple mechanics are easy to learn – jump, whip, bomb – but the way they rub up against its procedurally-generated levels, enemies and items never stops surprising you. In one run you’ll find a freeze ray and a teleporter, and try to rob a shopkeeper, in the next you’ll find spring shoes and climbing gloves that let you bounce around, sticking to walls.
Completing the game, which means beating each of its five themed areas, is tough, and every level is full of traps and hazards. The controls are razor-sharp, so every time you die you know it was your fault, which only gives you more motivation to go again. Even when you defeat the final boss, you’ll want to replay to see what it throws at you next, and there are five hidden levels that are all worth finding.
If you’ve never played Spelunky, then it’s time to find out what all the fuss is about: if you’re a long-term player, consider this a reminder that it’s always worth revisiting, especially because a sequel will be out next year.
29. Resident Evil 2 (Remake)
When Capcom remade one of the best survival horror games of all time, they did more than just plaster it with HD textures. They kept the foundations of what made the 1996 original so tense but made tweaks all over the labyrinthine Raccoon City Police Department: the pulled-in camera makes you dread every corridor, zombies are now genuine, horrifying obstacles, and new locations offer extra head-scratching puzzles.ADVERTISINGinRead invented by Teads
But it’s the enemies that are the stars of Resident Evil 2. Everywhere you turn you find shambling towers of flesh inching towards you, mouths agape, skin peeling, bones shining through flesh. Some take several bullets to down for good, putting you in constant danger of an ammo shortage. And with every gunshot you risk attracting Tyrant, aka Mr. X, a giant of a mutant in a fancy hat who walks slowly towards you, expressionless, unbothered by your bullets. He’ll haunt your dreams. When you’ve finished it as Leon, play through as Claire for a completely different puzzle set.
Play it now:
Steam
Humble Store
Sam’s gaming PC is literally held together with masking tape, and he bought his PS4 from a friend of a friend of a (dodgy) friend for a tenner. He wishes that games still had paper manuals, mainly so he could get the satisfaction of ignoring them. He grew up in Essex, and now lives in London.
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