That there are more than 100 entire PC games is a revelation as shocking as it is disturbing, but despite recently spending days translating Horace’s sonorous yawps into the list that eventually became our RPS 100, a chill silence recently befell the treehouse when we realised that some of our personal favourites had somehow been excluded. Determined to right this most heinous of wrongs, and armed with the conviction that no subjectivity be allowed to exist on the internet without at least one supplementary article of caveats, we’ve all put forth a single game that absolutely should have made the list. Consider the matter closed, then, at least until we all realise we’d actually like to do a 102nd pick each.
]]>Update:
The full list is now live as promised.The RPS 100 is our list of the best games to play on PC. It encompasses the full breadth and width of PC gaming stretching back to 1873, but focuses solely on those games that remain great to play today. It's updated yearly by our crack team of writers, and the first half of the 2024 edition is live now.
]]>Welcome to the second ever RPS 100: Reader's Edition. Over the last week, you'll have seen our own RPS 100 list counting down our favourite games of all time (and if you haven't, do go and have a look at Part One and Part Two when you've got a spare moment), as well as some additional features about the games that made it into our collective top ten. But now it's time for your list, as voted for by you, the RPS readership. There have been some interesting movers and shakers this year, and some rather intriguing new entries, so read on below to find out what your 100 favourite PC games of all time are for 2023.
]]>How does one make a sequel to a basically perfect game? 2007's physics-platformer-in-a-weird-science-facility Portal is a lodestar piece of game design from top to bottom. It's one of my favourite games, and I went into 2011's Portal 2 with many a reservation. But it's very good! And there are so many things I love about Portal 2 that it's quite hard to pick just one thing to write about.
I could do "the joy of Portal 2's retro science", where you fall through the floor into the old school Aperture Science labs and see the 60s-ish version of all the big buttons and testing chambers you were put through in the first Portal. I could do "the joy of the corrupted personality cores in Portal 2", a group of corrupted AI spheres including Rick The Adventure Sphere, which is largely just Nolan North making up his own action theme song. I could even do "the joy of potatoes in Portal 2". And then I realised that most of the things I like about Portal 2 also intersect with Stephen Merchant's character Wheatley, a weird little guy (in the most pejorative sense).
]]>Portal 2 is obviously brilliant, in part because each of its chapters possesses a distinct charm. GLaDOS’ return, for instance, is a stretch of pure puzzling with just a dash of dread, while your first steps into the abandoned 1960s Aperture facility interrupt a fairly hopeless tone with an upbeat sense of discovery. For me, though, Portal 2 peaks late. So late that by the time it begins, your journey through the 'true' puzzle chambers are essentially over, leaving you as little more than a loose end in the big glowing eye of a former buddy. It’s Chapter 9: The Part Where He Kills You! Mmm, love that part.
]]>I’ve lost track of how many times I’ve recommended people play Return Of The Obra Dinn. It's the one game I'm confident recommending to anyone to folks who play games frequently, but also to those who don't. My biggest triumph was recommending it to my dad, a 62-year-old retired manufacturing manager from Wales, who loved it so much he not only recommended it to a friend (who also loved it) but also said my mum should try it too - and I agree! It’s all subjective of course, but for me, its banger of a story, accessible it is, and how you can practically run it on a potato make it a wonderful gateway into gaming in general.
]]>Return Of The Obra Dinn is, quite rightly, one of the greatest video games of all time. It's certainly one of my personal favourites, and as this year's RPS 100 has proven, it's also greatly beloved by the rest of the RPS Treehouse. A brilliantly conceived murder mystery puzzle box (boat?) that not only has you working out whodunnit, but howdunnit, Obra Dinn is one of those detective games that really thrusts you into the thick of its deduction process. As you set about working out the identities and causes of death for each of the 60 souls onboard, it places you firmly in front of the ship's wheel before giving you free rein to steer its hull of supernatural horrors into whatever port of judgment you deem fit.
There are no truly wrong answers in Obra Dinn, but due to the nature of how you go about solving it, it's also one of those games I can't play too often without feeling like I know all the answers already. It's only now, five years later, that I feel like I could probably go back to Lucas Pope's nautical masterpiece and marvel at it afresh on a second playthrough, but there's one particular set of crew unmaskings that even its time-travelling stopwatch can't erase from my memory banks. Spoilers to follow obviously, but if you know, you know. I'm talking about the shoe and hammock revelation.
]]>"We don't go to Ravenholm…" Half-Life 2's sixth chapter heading warns, and when you arrive at the outskirts of this abandoned mining town, you immediately see why. This headcrab and zombie-infested cess pit is an absolute horror show right from the off. Moans and screeches assault your ears from every nook and cranny of this dark murder hole, and if the hoarse crow calls and suspiciously high number of propane barrels weren't enough to put you off, the bloodied torsos lodged against its log cabin walls by deep set saw blades certainly will. Every fibre of your being is telling you to get the hell out of this place, and that surely, the Combine forces chasing you down here can't be worse than what's in front of you.
But I'd also add an addendum to that heading that goes something like this: "We don't go to Ravenholm, and definitely not with just a gravity gun." This is a place that demands you to have as much firepower as you can possibly muster, such are the monstrosities that lie in wait here. But what did baby Katharine decide to do when she was playing it alone on her terrible university laptop in the dead of night back in 2010? She decided to have a go at that old Zombie Chopper achievement for no good reason whatsoever. And what followed was even more horrifying than Ravenholm had any right to be.
]]>Civil Protection officers are shorter than I thought they’d be. Don’t get me wrong, I'm very much a Short King myself, but I assumed the gas mask-wearing enforcers of City 17 would be more vertically intimidating. As I defiantly refuse to pick up litter in Half-Life 2’s opening sequence, I find the approaching officer and his raised electric baton to be weirdly adorable. Until he hits me, of course. The resulting crack gives me such a fright that I fling my arms out and smack my hand against the corner of a bookcase.
This has been my experience of playing the first few hours of Half-Life 2’s excellent fan-made VR mod, a completely free add-on that transforms Valve’s 2004 masterpiece into a full virtual reality experience. Under my direct control, Gordon Freeman is less a time-displaced MIT graduate with a penchant for murder and instead a gawking tourist who’s more interested in staring at canal architecture than liberating humanity. I spend the majority of my time leaning in really close to walls and muttering, “That’s interesting,” before a leaping headcrab shocks me so severely that I damage some more furniture and scare the cat.
]]>If you own Half-Life 2 but never bothered with its freebie tech demo, Half-Life 2: Lost Coast, do give it a whirl. Its showcase of HDR lighting might have lost the "Huh, nice" factor it had in 2005, but it’s still a satisfying slice of punchy HL2 combat, with a nod to the original Half-Life that Valve regretted not making in the main game. I know this because Valve told me, via Lost Coast's other innovation: its developer commentary.
I love these things, these spinning speech bubbles inflated with knowledge straight from the FPS coalface. So do Valve, judging by how dev commentary has appeared (in identical, node-activatable form) in most of their games since. They’re interesting and illuminating, don’t interfere with the game unless the player wants them to, and help build design literacy. Why, then, don’t more games offer commentary as well?
]]>Citizen Sleeper is a game with lots of brilliant individual stories in it, even the ones that end so catastrophically badly that redemption seems nigh on impossible. But when I look back on this tabletop-infused RPG and think of my favourites, there is one that stands head and shoulders above the rest. It isn't one of Citizen Sleeper's more emotional story beats (I miss ya, Lem and Mina), nor is it its most thrilling (big love to my man Feng). Rather, it's one of the game's quietest and arguably least significant plot points, but the fact it's there at all is probably what cemented Citizen Sleeper as one of my favourite games of last year. It is, of course, befriending The Stray who takes up residence in your Lowend apartment.
]]>I can almost remember the moment in the original Dishonored when I realised, "Crap. Chaos is coming, and there's nothing I can do to stop it." It was around the halfway point of the game that the world of Dunwall was visibly starting to sour before me, and it was all because I hadn't quite taken the time to truly understand how its chaos system worked. I'd let too many of my mistakes get away from me, killed one too many people in the process, and now its Low Chaos ending seemed permanently out of reach. I thought in vain that if I behaved really nicely for the rest of the game, it might balance out my former transgressions. But alas, it was not to be. I ended the game in High Chaos, and I was furious. For whatever reason, getting a game's 'good' ending really mattered to me back then.
It was this personal failing that drove me to some extreme lengths when Dishonored 2 came out a couple of years later. Not only did I resolve to do a Clean Hands run this time, guaranteeing a Low Chaos ending by refusing to kill anyone, but as I cast my eye down its list of Steam achievements, I also got it into my head that, 'You know what? If we're going no-kill, let's Shadow run it as well and do it completely unseen at the same time.' A great idea at the time, I thought, if a little unusual for me. Cut to my fifth hour trying to clean out Kirin Jindosh's Clockwork Mansion on a review deadline, however, and you might think that decision would have worn a little thin. But you'd also be totally and utterly wrong.
]]>Dishonored 2 is an immersive sim stealth 'em up by Arkane and it's been in my brain a lot more than usual. Partly due to this year's RPS 100, but also because of the mess that was Redfall. Arkane swung at the live service hero shooter and missed, with some comments writing off my sadness in the review as an inevitability. Sure, there's definitely truth to Arkane having changed over the years, of course it has. But I don't think there's anything wrong with being hopeful.
I think of Dishonored 2's A Crack In The Slab mission as both a beacon of Arkane's past pedigree and a symbol of their situation in the present. While I can't look into the future, I still think there's worth in turning to an all-time classic of a stealth level.
]]>Like everyone with a shred of taste and a pair of mostly functional eyes, I can look at Minecraft and appreciate the outrageously ambitious and detailed builds that get shared around every few weeks. Putting form to my own megastructures, though? Can’t, sorry – I already have plans to wander around and gawp at nature.
]]>What lies beyond Limgrave? I honestly don’t know. I’ve muddled my way through Elden Ring’s starting peninsula three times now, but have yet to step foot beyond the crumbling gatehouse of Stormveil Castle. The second Godrick The Grafted is reduced to a sickly pile of wobbly limbs, I turn the game off and walk away.
It’s not that I don’t like Elden Ring. I’m not struggling to connect with its open world take on the Souls genre. I’m not put off by the difficult encounters that await me, or the obtuse challenges I’ll be forced to overcome. The answer is weirdly simple. Limgrave provides me with everything I could ever want from a Souls game to the point that when Godrick croaks his final rancid breath and his (presumably) four tongues comically lop out of his stupid mouth, I’m left with the deep satisfaction that comes with the end of a journey, rather than the beginning of one.
]]>Welcome to Part Two of The RPS 100 for 2023, our annual countdown of our favourite PC games from across the ages. Earlier this week, we ranked our favourite games from 100-51, which can be found over in Part One of this year's list. But now it's time for the big 50, going all the way to our collective number one. And I'll tell you now, it's not the same as last year.
]]>Welcome to the 2023 edition of The RPS 100, our annual celebration of our favourite PC games of all time. Like previous years, this isn't a list of the definitive best PC games of all time, nor is it about what's considered the most important or influential. Rather, this is a ranking that reflects who we are as a team - our own personal Bestest Bests, so to speak, and the games that are nearest and dearest to our collective hivemind hearts. Once again, we're splitting the list in two articles this year, so come on in and find out what's made the cut in Part One below.
]]>The RPS 100 is our annual countdown of our favourite PC games of all time, and this year, we're finally doing it at a sensible time - in that semi-quiet lull between notE3 and Gamescom, and definitely not during October when it's actual silly season for end of year releases. And like last year, we're bringing back our Readers Edition so you can join in with the endless debate about what's the correct number one PC game of all time as well. So vote now for your favourite PC games of all time, to be published as a separate list that will be yours and yours alone. Here's how to get involved.
]]>Welcome to the very first RPS 100: Reader Edition. You've already read our RPS 100 list of our favourite PC games of all time (and if you haven't, do go and read Part One and Part Two when you've got a mo), but now it's your turn. You've cast your votes, I've counted them all up, and here we are. These are your top 100 favourite video games of all time.
]]>Welcome to Part Two of The RPS 100, our annual countdown of our favourite PC games from across the ages. Earlier in the week, we ranked our favourite games from 100-51, which you can find over in Part One of this year's list. But now we're here for the main event, counting down our top 50 games all the way to number one. Come and join us for the final stretch.
]]>Welcome to the 2022 edition of The RPS 100, our annual countdown of our favourite PC games of all time. This is the second time the RPS Treehouse has gathered together to hash out our collective Bestest Bests from across the ages, and lemme tell you, this year's list has seen tons of movement compared to last year's ranking. Not only are there buckets of new entries, but there's been plenty of upward and downward shuffling of old favourites, too. So come on in and find out what's made the cut.
]]>The RPS 100, our annual countdown of our favourite PC games of all time, is coming back for its second edition later this month - and let me tell you, with practically an all-new team in place since we last cast our votes, this year's RPS 100 is looking to be quite the shake-up compared to last year's list. This time, though, we wanted get you, our fair readers, involved as well. To that end, we're introducing The RPS 100: Reader's Edition, where you can vote for your favourite PC games of all time, to be published as a separate list that will be yours and yours alone forevermore. Want to get involved? Here's how:
]]>Welcome to Part Two of The RPS 100, our brand-new annual countdown of our favourite PC games of all time. Hopefully, you've just read Part 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.
]]>Welcome to The RPS 100, our brand-new annual countdown of our favourite PC games of all time. We've wanted to do a big top 100 list like this for some time now. In fact, we first started compiling this list about a year ago, although for reasons that will forever remain a mystery, it's taken us until now to actually wrangle it into shape. At long last, here we are.
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