If you buy something from a Polygon link, Vox Media may earn a commission. See our ethics statement. Gaming PCs, especially powerful ones, may be more expensive than consoles, but PCs have flexibility, moddability, and power unavailable in the competition.
As a result, PC gaming is able to quickly pivot both toward and away from trends to give its players unique and amazing experiences. That includes some of our personal favorites, but also older games that cast a long shadow. Why 22 games, though? Any less makes it hard to narrow things down, and any more might be overwhelming. Twenty-two games is a solid number of titles, spread across multiple genres, with selections for just about every age group.
Also, this list is constantly evolving. For folks new to a platform, think of this as a starter kit. For long-term fans, consider it a list of what to play or watch next. To see a collection of other titles we recommend that might not have made the Essentials lists, check out Polygon Recommends.
Vox Media has affiliate partnerships. These do not influence editorial content, though Vox Media may earn commissions for products purchased via affiliate links. For more information, see our ethics policy. Here at Polygon, we called it both an artistic and a technical achievement. The gunplay is exceptional, matched by sound design and animation flourishes that earned six nominations and one trophy at The Game Awards in But what ties it all together is a wild sense of humor and a relentlessly unnerving story that rewards exploration and mastery in equal measure.
The game can be a bit intimidating, especially its skill trees and somewhat cumbersome map. Check out our detailed guides section to get started. After the success of Shadow Tactics in , the team took those same design tenets — small squads of specialized units tackling armies of soldiers with precision and quick-saving — to the Wild West with Desperados 3. Desperados 3 changes very little about what made Shadow Tactics great. The adventure is made up of stellar levels that look more like dioramas brought to life, each filled with charm and detail, from the rainy streets of New Orleans to the dusty byways of a sun-beaten desert town.
Fans of the classic Commandos series will feel right at home here. Old-school isometric role-playing games are having a bit of a renaissance of late, with winning franchises like Divinity , Pillars of Eternity , and Wasteland absolutely knocking it out of the park. The award-winning role-playing game puts you in the shoes of a middle-aged detective, but this is your nor regular gumshoe story. From our review :. Disco Elysium tells the story of a grizzled detective who got so drunk he forgot who he was, and now has to solve a murder.
And what makes Disco Elysium so unique mechanically is its ludicrously detailed character creation and leveling system, and the amount of control it gives you over how you play your character while leaving plenty of room for surprises coming from the game itself.
Get it here: Steam. From our review:. Doom Eternal stands apart from its contemporaries, the big, gaudy, self-serious first-person shooters like Call of Duty and Battlefield that demand instant, microscopic movements to perform headshots in order to survive against preternaturally gifted teens. Because you must restore health and armor with close-range attacks, moving in and out of scrimmages becomes the foundation of winning strategies.
A double jump, a double dash, and a hook that pulls you toward its living target all allow you to establish your distance, as do environments sprinkled with walls, hills, tunnels, platforms, and monkey bars — all meant to be used for cover and escape, but also your own amusement.
Regardless of whether you elect to play the game, simply creating a world in Dwarf Fortress is an experience not to be missed if you own a gaming PC. Dwarf Fortress is completely free.
Donations, naturally, are quite welcome. As a reward, you may be gifted with a handmade drawing. Get it here: Bay 12 Games Steam. One of the many benefits of PC gaming is the ability to get under the hood and tinker with the games that you already own. The Elder Scrolls 5: Skyrim serves as an excellent introduction to game modding, thanks to its integration with the Steam Workshop. For those who want to dig a little deeper, The Elder Scrolls 3: Morrowind provides a much more hands-on modding experience.
The sequel to the original Elite , a PC game that dates all the way back to , Elite: Dangerous and its Horizons expansion are a borderline spiritual spacefaring experience. At the core of this game is a realistic simulation of all billion star systems in the Milky Way galaxy. The secret is the so-called Stellar Forge, a procedural system that developer Frontier Developments used to realistically simulate the formation of our galaxy. Using the best available astronomical data, the studio sort of threw all of creation into a digital rock tumbler and then continued to polish what fell out as an MMO.
A recent effort to put new Fleet Carriers in every corner of the galaxy has contributed to a massive uptick in players, including all-time high player counts on Steam.
Get it here: Frontier Steam. It warrants new words. Imagine someone using tracing paper to re-create a favorite painting, adding their own flourishes and revisions. Once again, you begin in a cave full of spiders, skeletons, bats, and golden idols that egg you on to set to set off their lethal traps. Except now, things are ever so different. Yellow lizards roll across the room like that big ball chasing Indy, and agitated moles cut through the ground like the graboids in Tremors.
Your muscle memory is weaponized against you —Chris Plante. Share this: Twitter Facebook. Like this: Like Loading Leave a Reply Cancel reply Enter your comment here Fill in your details below or click an icon to log in:. Email required Address never made public. Name required. Search for:. Blog at WordPress. Follow Following. Arguably the definitive roguelike and perhaps even indie experience, Spelunky Classic paved the way for many of its peers to follow suit when it launched into cult status in A HD update came out in , but if you can deal with some more basic visuals and the less complete package, Spelunky Classic is yours for absolutely nothing.
Players are tasked with navigating underground taverns for treasure while fending off the beasties and ghoulies that lurk within. Sounds simple, but with an ever-changing layout and an oppressive difficulty that undoes all your hard work after a simple mistake, you have an addictive dungeon crawler with an iconic status that feels wholly earned.
A little bit of a cheat for our list of the best free PC games because the rest of the content past level 20 is gated off, but the Starter Edition for World of Warcraft is more than good enough if you simply want to socialise and take part in the best video game activity of them all: fishing.
The limitations with the free account are fairly numerous, though they may actually be a godsend to still allow you to see sunlight more than once every four months. Yes Download: Origin. But it truly deserves the limelight as Respawn, a studio who know how to craft an FPS with their eyes closed, delivered a game that charmed even the most jaded of battle royale veterans with innovations big and small.
The pinging is inspired and the respawning mechanic far deeper for match flow than you may first realise, making Apex a game with a lot of depth beneath its simple veneer. One quick Apex tip for new players: stick to your team, for the love of Christ. Pretty much everyone? Fair enough. From our Apex Legends review :. With a clear roadmap already laid out for the year ahead, surely Apex can only get even better from here. Developer: Bungie Publisher: Bungie Microtransactions?
Destiny 2 has walked quite the rocky path to get to where it is. Following a strong launch, the playerbase quickly turned on the game thanks to thin content, weak updates, and microtransactions where there were none in the previous game.
After splitting from previous publisher Activision, it looks like Bungie have done well to turn the space ship around. No Download: Direct. Released under a veil of secrecy, Deltarune: Chapter 1 was quintessential Toby Fox, almost a shadow drop with no need for marketing — the community itself took care of that.
The best thing about it? It was completely free. DLC packs Download: Steam. One of the densest, most patricidal strategy games ever made, Crusader Kings II is one of the best free PC games around, and also just generally one of the best you can play, period.
Its free version was released on Steam to coincide with the news of Crusader Kings III , which released in to wide acclaim. You are given a position of power in a country and then the rest is up to you — or your scheming underlings. You may need to hunt down a pretty chunky guide to ease you into the daunting experience, though. You can lose everything pretty quickly, I blame those vassals. No Download: Steam. A sequel is set for release sometime in the future and will even include the house from Night of the Living Dead as a map.
A lot of battle royale devs are trying desperately to make an impression on what is a saturated market with some pretty bad ideas.
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