Decided to work through some old games while I’m furloughed. I’ve been playing through Spec Ops: the Line. I’ve owned it for forever and never played it. I’m going to finish it then move on to Sniper Elite: Resistance.
I recently bought Oddsparks: an Automation Adventure on the PS5, as I was desperate for a factory game. It replaces conveyor belts with paths, along which cutesy little golem creatures carry resources. It seems nice enough so far, though it remains to be seen how necessary the logic gates and so on are. All I know is that there was a charming wooden railway system in the trailer, so that should give me my moneys’ worth.
Recently played through Cabernet on Steam and really enjoyed it. Shorter, but worth the $20. Think Harvest Moon relationships combined with a casual vampire life simulator. Morality system & wide variety of gameplay in which you can choose to only drink blood from animals and other ‘ethical sources,’ or you can choose to drink from and kill humans at your leisure. Or do something in-between. Most of the characters in the story can be killed (or helped) by you. Multiple endings as well.
On a whim, that I couldn’t really afford, but what the hell it’s only sixteen bucks, I just picked up Shapez 2 . I’ve only played about an hour of it and I have to admit I was a little overwhelmed with the options - I guess just from the unfamiliarity of the interface and all that. As I fiddled with it I started to see what was what and I think I’ll be able to pick up the gist of it pretty well. Now, I know as soon as I get somewhat proficient at the controls of it I’m going to get completely stymied by all the option and I’ll end up in vapor lock but I can’t help it. I love factory games even though I suck at them (story of my video game life, to tell the truth).
What I like the most is that there are no costs to anything. It’s true sandbox. I’m horrible with money in the first place (I bought this game, didn’t I?) I hate that extra level of stress when I’m trying to relax with a video game.
Oh, it’s, so, so good! Stick with it for a few hours and it’ll really start to come into its own. It’s the fine whiskey of factory games, stripped of adulterants and refined to its purest form. It has all the intricacies of the greats like Factorio, Dyson Sphere Program, Satisfactory, etc., but without the drudgery. No resources, no grinding, just the most efficient designs you can make. And then it becomes designs within designs, scaled up more and more and more. Really amazing expression of the genre.
PC Gamer recently published their Top 100 PC Games. Actually a pretty decent list, people I know didn’t see a lot on there to object to. More just “I thought that would be higher/lower” than “wtf is that doing here?”
It’s sort of a Top 100 PC games you can play now rather than Top 100 of All Time Most Important Games or anything. It’s also PC games versus video games. So, for both these reasons, while Half Life 2 is on the list, Pong or Donkey Kong or Super Mario isn’t.
I noticed I own a number of these that I’ve never played. Off the top ten (spoilers?) I own RDR2 and Disco Elysium. Am thinking I might try to play through the ones I own, starting from the top. Not necessarily complete each game but give them a spin at least.
I looked through it and the thought that kept recurring was “Will that pretty good game from 2024/2025 still be in the top 100 in 5 years? Probably not.”
I played RDR 2 for maybe 15 hours before putting it aside; maybe I’ll try it again. (I think I liked RDR 1 better.)
Possible but that’s why they refresh the list annually. But there’s a number of titles that have withstood the test of time so no reason why none of the 24/25 games could as well.
I was the same way with Disco Elysium. It’s one of those games that I should love and really get into, but I kind of hate it. Idunno, I didn’t realize the general grind of the game would be so boring. But I played the hell out of Red Dead.
I played a ton of Red Dead Online but never RDR2. I suspect the biggest barrier would be thinking “Man, what do you mean I have to do all this plot stuff? I wanna ride my horse to Armadillo and shoot vultures!” while it’s trying to meaningfully tell me its story.
Still easily in the top three prettiest game worlds I’ve ever experienced though. Don’t ask me for the other two, I’m just leaving allowance in case I forgot something.
Checking another thread, I put it aside in December 2020. Time flies…
I have like four of them. And I’ve never even heard of about half of them. I am really out of touch these days, even with things I used to be quite into.
It’s not just you. There are way more games released now than ever before:
https://steamdb.info/stats/releases/
20 years ago, we were lucky to have a few dozen releases a year. Now, there’s nearly 2000 games released per month. Nobody can keep up.
Edit: That said… (this is embarrassing…) I’ve heard of 94% of those games (all but 6 titles, all #50 or below), considered maybe half of them, and own about a third. Of that third, only 2-3 earned more than a couple hours of play. None of the games I’ve spent hundreds or thousands of hours on even make the list.
That doesn’t mean I disagree with the list; I do agree that BG3 is probably the best PC game of all time, even though I only played it briefly. It is, in every meaningful creative and artistic way, a much better game than something like Call of Duty 27 or whatever number they’re up to.
Remind me to get Clair Obscura the next time it’s on sale…
I suspect most new titles released via Steam are taking advantage of the relaxed “adult” rules, trivially easy puzzle games, trivially easy puzzle games taking advantage of the relaxed rules, or DLC.
I was surprised Caves of Qud was in the #7 place, I’d have expected its simple graphics to knock it down some (given how graphics-obsessed the game industry often is).
It’s really good, though.
Maybe, but even if you applied saner filters (let’s say at least 500 reviews, 80% positive — e.g., “Very Positive” — only games and not DLC, not adult only), like this: https://steamdb.info/stats/gameratings/2025/?category=-888&displayOnly=Game&min_rating=85&min_reviews=500
You’d still get 346 games in 2025 alone:
I was curious and charted this back to 1994:
(Steam was released in 2004, Half-Life 1 in 1998).
So even with those filters, there are still hundreds of excellent PC games worth checking out every year! It’s both a blessing and curse…
(EDIT: Ah, sorry, I made a mistake! I accidentally applied a 85% review filter instead of 80%. The threshold for “Very Positive” is 80%, so in reality there would actually be quite a few more games that qualify.)
Maybe. I also see a bunch of quickie knock-off versions of whatever the indie game flavor of the month is (e.g. Vampire Survivors, Balatro, etc.).
Some of those knock-offs can be really good, though. The best games end up creating their own genre, but sometimes the copycats and sequels can be even better “expressions” of that genre than the original.
Purely IMHO:
e.g. Rock Band was arguably better than Guitar Hero despite being a copy.
Among Vampire-likes, Deep Rock Survivor, Soulstone Survivor, and Jotunnslayer are all as good if not better than Vampire.
Balatro is still amazing, but it itself is arguably a spin-off of earlier roguelike deck builders like Slay the Spire, Monster Train, etc.
Among factory games, Factorio was one of the earlier successes, but then Dyson Sphere Program is much more user-friendly, Satisfactory took it first-person and removed the grid, Shapez distilled it down to the essence, etc.
Don’t even get me started on Diablolikes…
If imitation is the most sincere form of flattery, well, we PC gamers are lucky to have so many flatterers in our midst 
Luck Be A Landlord is probably a better example of a precursor for Balatro.
Which was itself inspired by Slay the Spire:
Inspired by the popular deckbuilding roguelike Slay the Spire and ancient Windows 98 freeware games, [Luck Be A Landlord] developer DiIorio wanted to make a slot machine game not explicitly tied to “insidious mechanics that try to get the maximum amount of real-world money out of the player.” It was about the fun of watching the lots whiz by and watching numbers wildly swing up and down.
And now we’re back to slot machines again with the grimdark gambler CloverPit.