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At a Glance: The Best PC Games
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Although video games are more popular than ever with the emergence of home consoles — like Sony PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X/S, and Nintendo Switch — PC gaming is starting to make a really good impression with all sorts of gamers. This is thanks to the rise of off-the-shelf gaming desktops and laptops from manufactures, including Alienware, Razer, MSI, Asus’ Republic of Gamers, Lenovo, and much more.
Meanwhile, the amount of high quality gaming platforms — Steam, Xbox Game Pass Ultimate, and others — is making it really easy to just play games on a PC, which is largely cross platform across consoles. For example: The game Hi-Fi Rush was an Xbox original, but it’s also available to play on PC and now PS5. Additionally, graphics and audio cards are much more advanced than those found in home consoles, while you can simply upgrade cards when the next generation of gaming hits store shelves.
We’ve rounded up some of our favorite PC games, including picks we’ve played ourselves, along with games that received higher than a four-star rating from gamers using GOG.com and Humble Bundle digital distribution platforms. Here are our top choices.
In This Article
What Are the Best PC Games?
Below are some of the best PC games to consider playing in 2024. All picks are sold at reputable online retailers, have high critical scores and reviews, and feature at least a 4/5-star rating from gamers.
1. ‘Baldur’s Gate 3‘
$53.99 $59.99 10% off
Winner of the Game of the Year Award and the Golden JoyStick in 2023, Baldur’s Gate 3 is a role-playing fantasy game with single-player and online multi-player cooperative mechanics with open-world design. It has gained critical acclaim for its high-quality writing, storylines, production quality, and voice acting that have effectively combine tabletop gameplay with PC gaming.
The game builds on a number of quests and side adventures where you go solo or gather your own party to embark on a journey throughout the Forgotten Realms in the world of Dungeons & Dragons. You awaken with a mind-controlling parasite in your brain. You. can either fight off the evil thoughts and resist darkness, or give into corruption in a quest for absolute power and destruction.
2. ‘Street Fighter 6‘
$39.59 $59.99 34% off
The seventh main entry in the Street Fighter franchise (with more than 80 releases overall), Street Fighter 6 is a fighting game that combines classic mechanics from the past with new techniques, like its “drive” meter, never before seen in previous entires in the nearly 40-year-old series. This go around, there are 18 fights in the main roster — including Chun-Li, Ken, Ryu, Guile, Manon, Marisa, Kimberly, and more — with four characters added in each season of its expansion DLC (downloadable content) pack.
Although the game features the same classic mode that gamers are used with the franchise, Street Fighter 6 also has a “World Tour” single-player mode that’s a mix between a fighting game and RPG (role-playing game). It includes a customizable character that you create, while you navigate through the world of Street Fighter, as you learn to become a championship yourself.
In our testing, Street Fighter 6 plays like a classic fighting game with a few new tricks up its sleeve that makes gameplay feel powerful, fluid, and overall fun. While the single-player mode was nice addition in theory, it feels slow and dull at times in practice. However, “World Tour” is optional. We’re here for the fights!
3. ‘Against The Storm‘
$19.49 $29.99 35% off
Against the Storm is a city-builder game where you play The Viceroy, a leader tasked to reclaim the wilderness and lost riches of Smoldering City. By orders of The Scorched Queen, you must re-build, re-populate, manage, and expand the city to withstand “The Blightstorm,” the destroyer of the old world, to take back the realm in a new journey. Think of Against the Storm, like The Sims, but set in a fantasy world.
The game was nominated for the 27th Annual D.I.C.E. Awards (Design Innovate Communicate Entertain) for strategy/simulation game of the year earlier in 2024.
4. ‘Slay The Princess‘
$14.39 $17.99 20% off
A fun twist on the “damsel in distress” trope, Slay The Princess — from Canadian indie studio Black Tabby Games — is an adventure game where you either save the princess, or kill the princess. The game is told as a visual novel with hand-drawn illustrations, as you have to choose to save or slay the princess, after the narrate instructs you to kill her — otherwise the world will end. All of the decisions in the game leads to her death or yours.
Slay The Princess received nearly universal praise among game critics with a 90% on Metacritic for its simplicity and “no choice is bad” mechanics. It even won the OTK Video Game Award for best indie RPG in 2023.
5. ‘Videoverse‘
Videoverse is a narrative adventure game that serves as a fun dose of nostalgia. Set in 2003, you play as a teenaged gamer named Emmett, who plays his favorite fictional game Feudal Fantasy, while navigating internet relationships and build online communities on a his favorite fictional social network and message board called “Videoverse.” However, after announcing that you’re leaving the social media site, you have to deal with the backlash and fallout of your decision.
The game is an accurate portrayal of what digital life was like back in the early 2000s when dial-up home internet was king! In addition, Videoverse won the Digital Festival of Independent Games’ critics’ choice award during the Indie Cup UK in 2023.
6. ‘Hi-Fi Rush‘
Developed by Tango Gameworks and Published by Bethesda Softworks, Hi-Fi Rush is a super fun action game that combines elements of platforming with rhythm-based mechanics. The game follows Chai, a wannabe rockstar who gets a music player implanted into his chest during an experimental cybernetic operation. The result is that everything around him moves to the beat of his favorite music, including songs by The Black Keys, Nine Inch Nail, The Flaming Lips, Fiona Apple, The Joy Formidable, Zwan, and others.
The object of the game is to escape and eventually defeat the evil Vandelay Technologies, who is responsible for the botched surgery with the help of your cybernetic friends, Peppermint, Macaron, Korsica, CNMN, and the adorable cat 808. Action is rhythm-based, so the better you attack villains and jump platforms with the beat, the better chance your have making it out in one piece.
In our gameplay, we found that Hi-Fi Rush is fluid with a slight learning curve for those aren’t familiar with rhythm-based mechanics. However, because the character is learning his new abilities, players are also learning how to play the game as it progresses. With that in mind, it doesn’t feel intimidating to pick up, but after about 20 or so, you can easily master timing and attacking on the beat. It’s also just so much fun to play!
7. ‘Alan Wake 2‘
Alan Wake II is a survival horror and mystery game that follows, you guessed it, Alan Wake, a horror novelist who gets trapped in an alternate dimension. Over the past 13 years, Alan Wake tries to escape his nightmares by writing a story about Saga Anderson, an FBI agent trying to solve the case of a string of murders in a small fictional Pacific Northwest called Bright Falls. Fun fact: Alan Wake II was actually released 13 years after the original game in 2010.
You play as Wake and Anderson to get a better perspective on the stories and to better solve the mysteries locked within the game
It won three Game Awards in 2023, including best game direction, best narrative, and best art direction. Although Alan Wake II didn’t win, it was also nominated for Game of the Year.
8. ‘Cyberpunk 2077: Ultimate Edition‘
$53.59 $79.99 33% off
Set in the fictional Night City, California, Cyberpunk 2077: Ultimate Edition is an award-winning science fiction action role-playing game. You play as V, a mercenary with a cybernetic “bio-chip” implant with the biometrics of Johnny Silverhand, who is voiced by and modeled after Keanu Reeves, a rockstar and former terrorist. Silverhand’s consciousness starts to overtake V’s, so you must separate the two.
Although the game a number of technical difficulties upon release in 2018, developers have gone to update those bugs with online patches to make Cyberpunk 2077 play smoother with virtually zero issues. In fact, the game went on to win the Gamescom Award for best PC game in 2020.
Buying Guide; How to Pick the Best PC Game
There are many factors to think about when choosing the best PC games for yourself. Ahead, you’ll find a few important factors that we considered when putting this list together.
Storage Space: Gone are the days of swapping floppy disks into a PC to play a video game. Nowadays, games are downloaded over the internet in massive files. It’s important to consider how much available storage space you have inside of your PC before you pick a game to play. Modern games can range from smaller titles, like Against the Storm with a tiny 5GB file size, to sprawling and in-depth games, like Balder’s Gate 3 with a whopping 150GB file size. If you plan on downloading multiple games to your PC, then storage space could run out very quickly. You may also have to consider additional storage options, if that’s the case.
Price: While physical copies for PC games are available, it’s increasingly rare with the popularity of instant gratification of just downloading games. Luckily, since it’s a download, PC games can be cheaper than console games. In fact, the games on this list range from just $13 with Videoverse to $80 with Cyberpunk 2077: Ultimate Edition.
Fun Factor: The most important thing about selecting a PC game is if it’s fun to play. If you’re going to spend a few minutes or a few hours playing a game on your PC, it has to look like a fun and immersive experience.
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