Since 1873, the team at Rock Paper Shotgun have gathered once a year to select what they believe to be the best PC games of all time. Admittedly, they only started writing the list down in 2021, but try not to hold their spotty recordkeeping against them.
If you’ve been following along at home, you will have seen that what we consider to be the best PC games of all time changes substantially from year to year. We’re capricious souls and firm believers in Ralph Waldo Emerson’s maxim that a foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds. Just because we ranked a game one year doesn’t mean it will forever make the cut. This is a list that reflects the current team’s current tastes.
Creating lists is an exciting challenge. Even if there were a thousand places to fill, we would struggle to fit in every game we considered to be one of the best PC games of all time. As such, we have chosen our personal favourite games. We’ve not added games because they’re considered important or influential. And, as Katharine (RPS in peace) said back when the first of these lists was published, “Remember, if there’s a favourite game of yours we haven’t included, know that it’s at number 101”.
We’ll be revealing our picks all week. So, without further ado, here are the first games in the RPS 100: 2025 Edition.
100. Like A Dragon: Infinite Wealth
After bouncing off its predecessor, I was hesitant to review Like A Dragon: Infinite Wealth review. Despite blazing through all the games leading up to Yakuza: Like A Dragon, the series’ switch from real-time goon-smacking action to turn-based RPG battles with the not at all confusingly named Y:LAD left me cold. I missed the simple, cathartic fist swinging brawls of the earlier entries.
Infinite Wealth changed all that. Set across sun-drenched Hawaii and more familiar stomping grounds in Japan, Infinite Wealth gives Ichiban Kasuga – the face of the series’ new turn-based era – and classic protagonist Kazuma Kiryu – he of the beat-em-up fury – double-billing as dual leads. The Yakuza games have always had to balance serious Japanese gangster drama with surrealist laughs, and the two leads’ contrasting quests to find family and grapple with mortality aid the different settings in offering plenty of scope for meaningful smiles and sadness without risking tonal whiplash.
From a practical perspective, perhaps the better time I had with it was simply because I was more conscious of the need to seek out every battle, building my strength so the story never screeched to a halt when encountering a high-level boss, as it had in my Yakuza: Like A Dragon run. But more than that, I was able to appreciate that the fundamental switch to turn-based RPGdom hadn’t dulled the mainline series’ ability to offer the sort of straightforward romp which made me initially fall in love with Karaokegangstermanslappingoons Simulator. – Mark
99. Inscryption
Daniel Mullins’ Inscryption begins with you sitting in a log cabin facing a scraggly gremlin who gets a kick out of shoving his knobbly fingers in your face. But there’s no time to have a conversation about personal space because your new friend is jazzed to play his card game with you. A little like Slay The Spire, it sees you progress through a haunted forest, fighting woodland animals with the cards in your hand. The game is difficult, tipped against you. Animals rip and tear at you, ending your run short of the cabin at the end of the wood. So you play, over and over, beaten repeatedly because this crinkly ogre is straight-up cheating.
But there are ways you can cheat back…
To say much more would take away from the surprises up Inscryption’s sleeves. It is a horror game that transforms before your eyes time and time again, flipping systems it introduced hours ago, playing around with essential mechanics, and enticing you to break its rules and rig its systems in your favour. It is rare to find a game so inventive, so unexpected. – Callum
98. House Of The Dying Sun
Not one to let bygones be bygones, the final order of your murdered emperor in House Of The Dying Sun is a punchy one: hunt the traitor lords and bring ruin to their people. So starts your short rampage through the solar system, blasting away fighters, frigates, and capital ships with vengeful abandon.
House Of The Dying Sun is a space combat game built in the mold of Wing Commander, Descent, and Star Wars: X-Wing Vs Tie Fighter. Each battle in its short campaign sees you warp into a map littered with asteroids and other stellar clutter, and a target you must terminate before their backup arrives and outguns you.
Played on a gamepad, your little fighter feels both nippy and powerful, able to pull off maneuvers that would be impossible in gravity. By holding down the left shoulder button, you can shut off your rear thruster and spin round to fire on enemies chasing you, all while retaining your forward velocity. It’s the closest I’ve come to feeling like Starbuck in Battlestar Galactica outside of the demo for the (sadly cancelled) Beyond the Red Line Freespace mod.
While there are larger and more complex space fighter games, they overstay their welcome and run out of ideas. House Of The Dying Sun is an adrenal shot of moody cool space shootery. And, if you’ve a VR headset, it’s one of the best games to play with a screen strapped to your head. – Julian
97. Dragon’s Dogma II
To the folk who insist Dragon’s Dogma II is merely a remake of the first game, I hear you. But it still sticks with me as a singular case of Capcom using their fancy RE Engine to create the equivalent of a D&D campaign run by an improvising Dungeon Master. Case in point: as you walk from town to town or ride a caravan (there’s no fast travel here), you’ll bump into a big ogre, say, and chaos will ensue. You’ll scramble up its back to whack its noggin. As you do so, there’s a chance the ogre will bump into a griffin, and suddenly a whole bloody kaiju battle has commenced in the forest.
While the first Dragon’s Dogma had these moments of barely-controlled chaos, it didn’t have an item called the Unmaking Arrow. An item that kills whatever it touches in one shot. Dragon’s Dogma II makes this list, then, for the chutzpah it possesses to forego modern gaming habits and tropes, similar to a Dungeon Master throwing their hands up and exclaiming, “Okay, you want to use the Unmaking Arrow on the final boss? The one I spent all week preparing? Fine. But you have to live with the consequences.” – Jeremy
96. Devotion
Devotion is remembered for being hounded off the internet by Chinese bigwigs over an in-game reference to a meme about Xi Jinping resembling Winnie the Pooh. Said Chinese bigwigs might have been less narked if developers Red Candle weren’t Taiwanese.
In any case, Devotion deserves to be remembered for more than denting Winnie Jinping’s ego. It’s one of the best horror games ever made, a tale of despair, kooky cults and crushing familial expectations that charts several periods in one majestically creepy apartment building. It makes exquisite use of a tiny layout, expanding the setting into delusion where necessary, and mixing in Edith Finch-esque dalliances with other genres and aesthetics. Its manipulations are dreadful: you’ll see a Thing, make a slow deduction and turn to find that, yes, there is another Thing behind you. In terms of ambience, it’s not worlds away from P.T. and Silent Hill 4, but it’s far too crafty a game to be called a homage. Fortunately, you can now buy it direct from the developers. – Edwin
95. DayZ
Well before anyone fought through trembling hands in the final ring of a battle royale, or stole the spoils from a murdered stranger in an extraction shooter, there was DayZ: a zombie-flavoured ArmA II survival mod whose unbearably tense PvP shootouts led the world in shaky hands and stranger murder alike.
This, the standalone version, is still defined by the danger of being cruelly shot by a man dressed as a shrub from 400 yards away. And while years of early access refinements and post-1.0 launches have fleshed out sandbox elements like base building and disease management, both these and, indeed, the zombies remain secondary concerns to the risk of player-induced death.
Accept this risk, however, and DayZ can still deliver the thrills that the mod did in 2012. Exchanges of gunfire remain heart-punchingly intense, and looting what appears to be a completely abandoned hut still carries the tension of knowing that a Czech psychopath could stick a Mosin through the window at any moment. This uneasiness continues to flavour encounters with friendlier players too – even telling someone you’re only passing through, and them believing you, is like narrowly surviving another close call. Death is everywhere in DayZ, and yet few games make me feel so alive. – James
94. Wreckfest
Bang. Bash. Bonk. Wreckfest is a driving game that wants you to do all of these plosives. It encourages you to pick any track, be it a dirt circuit, stunt run, or figure eight and smash shit up. It has a nice roster of customisable scrapyard-dwellers for you to do that smashing with. They thunk and bump to bits in immensely satisfying fashion, especially if you’re hit or hit someone from the side or head-on.
Wheels, bodywork, detritus, the entire boxy skin of a motorhome, or the twisted form of a school bus that’s been buckled nearly in half, it all goes flying or drags along in your wake. Like wrapping paper on Christmas morning. If you’re lucky, your ride might still run at the end. Even if it doesn’t, you’ll have had a blast. – Mark
93. Dyson Sphere Program
Dyson Sphere Program was such an ambitious idea for a game, I immediately scoffed upon hearing it. A factory building game like Factorio, set on an actual spherical planet? Oh excuse me – not just one planet, but dozens of planets across multiple star systems, all entirely traversable? And the aim is to create a Dyson Sphere out of hundreds or thousands of parts, capable of harnessing the power of a star to run an entire civilization living inside a virtual reality simulation? Bah! Preposterous! Turns out, they completely and utterly nailed it.
From the first moments trundling about the surface of a planet mining ores with your fuel-powered mech, I was sold. The game ran smoothly, the scope and soundtrack were inspiring, and the lure of steadily automating mega-factories spanning whole solar systems, and creating massive interplanetary transport and logistics networks, was utterly captivating. It’s a truly special game. – Ollie
92. BattleTech
What sets BattleTech apart from the other turn-based tactical games on this list is a healthy infusion of callous capitalism. As you fly from planet to planet in the Inner Sphere, commanding your lance of mechpilots on competing jobs for feuding warlords, you’re never far from the mercenary company’s P&L sheet.
Each month you need enough money in the bank to pay your pilots and the maintenance cost of their mechs. Fail and you’ll have a mechanised mutiny on your hands. This doesn’t just mean you’ll take almost any job just to keep the engine running, but in battle it impacts all of your decisions. Repairs are costly, so quick kills will keep your overheads low. However, if you want valuable loot, you need to disable enemy mechs without destroying them outright – bringing them low by sniping at their legs instead of the higher hit-chance torso shots.
This vein of sci-fi accountancy brings surprising dramatic weight to the battlefield, which is impressive in a game already dotted with 100-tonne war machines. – Julian
91. Full Throttle
There are many arguments over which Tim Schafer adventure game is best, and while Grim Fandango is certainly worthy of praise, my favourite has always been Full Throttle. Maybe it’s my inner dieselhead speaking, or perhaps it’s the high production values of this LucasArts masterwork, which kicked my ass with its opening rock song “Legacy,” courtesy of The Gone Jackals.
Focusing on a biker named Ben who’s stuck in the middle of a motorcycle company takeover orchestrated by the corrupt businessman Adrian Ripburger (voiced with sinister glee by Mark Hamill), Full Throttle oozes style as it prods you to solve puzzles and punch thugs in the face while driving at 90 miles per hour. It’s a very short affair – only requiring about two hours of your time if you know what you’re doing – but this is the worst thing about it. Channeling Mad Max with a dash of that standard LucasArts humour, Full Throttle was one of Tim Schafer’s finest works, and it’s a damn shame that the sequel never came about. – Jeremy
90. Deep Rock Galactic
Built by a small studio in Copenhagen, Deep Rock Galactic is a fine example of doing more with less. Its alien mines are proc-genned instead of handcrafted, but the system produces such visual striking and spatially engaging cave networks that it’s hard to complain. The four classes of playable space dwarf all use pitch-shifted variants of the same lines recorded by a single voice actor, but this simple editing bodge produces so much distinction between their granted bantz that it’s hard to notice.
More importantly, Deep Rock Galactic is just simply a very, very good co-op shooter. Bouts of chunky insect-blasting mix satisfyingly with teamplay-heavy spelunking, aided by a set of traversal tools that are flexible enough to allow for more expressive and creative deployments in combat – a favoured point defence tactic among my usual crew is to have a Driller dig out a makeshift bunker in the nearest wall while an Engineer blocks off the ceiling with deployable platforms, funnelling bugs into a tidy frontal killbox.
This easy synergizing is just one of several qualities that contributes to Deep Rock Galactic’s friendly, laid-back vibe, which in turn keeps it as a welcoming retreat for anyone burnt out on the competitiveness and/or daily login grind of contemporary live service FPSes. Others include the mission control base having a functioning pub, the inherent comic value of accidentally downing half the team with wayward explosives, and the dedicated keybind for shouting out “Rock and Stone”. Rock and Stone. – James
89. Stray
Stray remains my favourite of the early 2020s cat games, which were oddly numerous, now that I think about it. And despite the sci-fi elements of this third-person (for want of a better phrase) adventure across the streets and roofs of a Kowloon-styled walled city, part of its appeal does lie in how authentically cat-like your ginger tabby feels through the thumbsticks. The light trotting! The little wind-up before a jump! The knocking over of objects that would preferably not have been knocked over! I’ve never had “be a domestic shorthair” on my most-wanted list of video game fantasies but hey, turns out they can make quite the charming protagonists.
Even better than the feline kinetics, mind, is the city itself. It’s a brilliantly realised space, all but a few areas being chokingly dense, hyper-detailed urban canyons where manky walls and rain-soaked pavements bathe in the light of neon signs and the optical sensors of friendly robot inhabitants. It’s gross and gorgeous and steeped in an atmosphere that manages to find the warmth among the gloom. Not the worst conditions for a cat, there. – James
88. Return Of The Obra Dinn
As the offspring of two parents who consume a concerning amount of detective shows, it was inevitable I’d inherit a genetic disposition towards solving whodunits. Though I don’t spend my Sunday afternoons bingeing the Alibi channel, I moonlight as a digital gumshoe, chowing through every detective game I can find. However, after playing Return of the Obra Dinn, none of them scratch that itch quite the same.
You’re investigating an insurance claim on the Obra Dinn, a ship owned by the East India Company., working out who, if anyone, is owed a payout. The vessel arrived in port with no surviving crew or passengers. It’s your job to determine what happened to all sixty of them. Though, the smattering of corpses on board, suggest something unsavoury occurred.
Thanks to your pocket watch, the Memento Mortem, you investigate a body to see the last seconds before its death. From these frozen snippets, you must figure out who you’re watching, their job, their relationships, and their secrets. Your notes and timelines quickly turn into a conspiracy board. It’s a mystery and story you can only unravel by attending to every tiny detail. – Callum
87. Plants Vs Zombies
I replay the original Plants vs. Zombies nearly every year, and each year it reminds me without fail why no other tower defence game comes close. It feels like a game from an alternate universe where everyone knows all you need is a single static screen, some colourful sprites, and an unbelievable amount of charm and charisma to make a masterpiece.
In Plants vs. Zombies, you must protect your house by placing plants in the lanes of your garden, so you can defend against the waves of zombies looking to feast on your brains. With almost every one of its levels, you get a new type of plant to play with, and a new type of zombie will appear, gently forcing you to rethink your tactics and try new things. The rhythm is further broken up by minigames every five levels or so, where instead of placing down plants you’re playing Whack-A-Zombie, or going Wall-Nut bowling. And every ten levels, the setting changes. Suddenly you’re in the back garden, where the middle two lanes are a pool of water that only allows certain plants. Or perhaps it’s nighttime, and graves appear towards the end of the lanes which spawn additional zombies during the final waves.
If you’ve never played a game in your life, let Plants vs. Zombies be your first. Everything is understandable at a glance, and – perhaps more importantly – endearing at a glance too. The plants are all stupidly adorable, and somehow so are the zombies. The bobbing Sunflowers, the little smile of the Wall-Nut which turns sad as more and more of it gets eaten… And all the while, the timeless soundtrack by Laura Shigihara plays in the background, making it genuinely impossible for you not to play with a big dumb smile on your face. – Ollie
86. Pentiment
If you’ve ever wondered what 16th century monks had for lunch, Obsidian and Josh Sawyer have got the game for you. Pentiment’s about loving history in all of its most pedantic detail, putting you in the shoes of artist turned impromptu detective Andreas Maler. There’s a murder mystery to solve and in classic RPG fashion, the lives of everyone in the village of Tassing and Kiersau Abbey will be affected by the choices you make as you search for the culprit.
The art style, inspired by illuminated manuscripts and early printed works, is gorgeous and gives the whole thing an enchanting storybook feel. That said, it’s not afraid to tackle the cold realities of a strictly stratified medieval society and the deep effects life’s ugly twists can have on people. That’s when it fancies rolling away from the sort of pleasant charm that comes from chatting to someone about the various aspects of Andreas’ life and skillset. You can pick different options for these traits for each playthrough, opening up different bits of dialogue and pathways for some nice replayability.
As one of the few games I know for sure I can run on my regular old laptop, it’s inevitably gotten whipped out during summer holiday evenings for the last couple of years, and will be for years to come. – Mark
85. Gorogoa
The best thing about writing up Gorogoa for this list is that I have sort of forgotten about Gorogoa, and can go discover it again. Here’s what I remember: you are trying to assemble mundane things and places into an image of the divine. The game takes place in hand-drawn worlds of castles and staircases, orchards and towers. These scenes occupy four panels, and can be dragged about, combined and transformed to allow a wanderer to move between them. The art is 2D and depthless in both senses: each image hosts others, secreted in the texture or revealed by means of your growing understanding of unspoken cosmic principles. Between the folds of the palimpsest, you see the peacock’s eye and endless rolling scales of something like a god. I do wonder in hindsight if Gorogoa is too cleanly-made and gratifying, almost soporific in its gracefulness, but still, I’m not sure I’ve ever played anything quite this enchanted. – Edwin
84. Conquests of the Longbow
Robin Hood has starred in his fair share of electronic amusements (Defender of the Crown, anyone?) but there’s only one game that lovingly encapsulates the heart of Nottingham’s favourite forest fella. Conquests of the Longbow explores Robin’s drive to unite his merry men against the foul Sheriff in a tale that we’ve heard before. But what makes it stand out beyond typical fare of the era is an earnest dollop of historical authenticity thanks to director and writer Christy Marx (of Jem, Elfquest, and Red Sonja fame). This is a game that inhabits the Robin Hood myth. It brings to live 1190s England, filling it with puzzles, staff fighting on Watling Street, archery contents, and even a game of Nine Men’s Morris – a form of copy protection, no doubt, but at least a fun one.
The sequel to Conquests of Camelot, a 1990 effort that shone a similar light on Arthurian legend, Conquests of the Longbow remains a worthy yet overlooked gem. Where else can you relax with a pixelated Friar Tuck while musing over the vagaries of Sherwood Forest and listening to lute tunes as translated via the smooth sounds of an AdLib soundcard? Ready your arrows and give this one a go if you’re tired of pirate wannabes in your adventure games – the original outlaw can give ’em a run for their money. – Jeremy
83. Into The Breach
Earth is lost, the supersized alien bugs have won. Across the globe, cities burn as mandibles click-clack in celebration. Humanity’s only hope is to send a team of mechpilots back in time to stamp out the insect invaders before they can overwhelm the planet’s defenders.
In Into The Breach you command those time-travelling, mech-piloting, bug-stomping soldiers in a turn-based tactical offering in a tiny package. Each procedurally-generated map is only an 8×8 grid, made up of civilian-filled city blocks, forests, rivers, and mountains. Yet, despite their size, these diorama-like levels are stuffed with life. When your mechs beam into action, speech bubbles relaying messages of relief appear above the homes that dot the map.
You and the aliens take turns trying to destroy each other, but clever tweaks to the genre’s tried-and-tested formula transform Into The Breach into something unique. For a start, your health isn’t tied to your mech pilots’ survival, but the civilians’. If too many die then it’s game over. Second, the aliens telegraph their intended moves, giving you total knowledge (and responsibility) for what the enemy achieves in its turn. Third, while your cannons and artillery do damage, they also shove their targets away from the explosions. Each turn becomes an intricate puzzle of how to use your limited actions to derail the bugs’ plans. Using your weapons to shove and pull foes into a new pattern that sees their attacks hit allies instead of your mechs.
But it’s offloading your health bar to the civilian structures that makes the most impact. It’s a twist that points at your role as humanity’s defender. Over a campaign, you will choose to make heroic sacrifices, moving your mechs into enemy fire to block shots that would otherwise level a city block. You become the valorous commander from a kaiju movie, protecting innocent life above all else. – Julian
82. The Stanley Parable
I’ll level with you, reader, I hate describing why The Stanley Parable is good. It’s exactly the kind of game where, ideally, the only thing you’d know about it going in is whether or not you meet the system requirements.
Then again, it’s also surprising, funny, and inventive enough that it can probably endure a spot of gushing. I’ve adored The Stanley Parable’s walking simulation, in which you wander an office in accordance with or in defiance of a caramel-voiced narrator, since its original Half-Life 2 mod; its standalone remake in 2013 greatly expanded the scope of your potential disobedience and honed the sharpness of the jokes, before the Ultra Deluxe edition (which is probably the one you should buy today) did both yet again.
The resulting complexity might tempt you towards performance-enhancing guides, mapping out the game’s many secrets and myriad endings. Please try to resist. The Stanley Parable’s offbeat charm is truly singular, and thus, best appreciated with as little knowledge and as few expectations as possible. – James
81. Peggle
I have played more than 200 hours of Peggle, so I have to believe there is something more to it than bouncing marbles between pegs in a desperate need to hear Ode To Joy.
Maybe it’s about the randomness of the universe. A parable of how we are but marbles flinging through life, pinging between encounters with family, friends, and strangers. Often those meetings go nowhere, we bounce away earning only an awkward memory – like that time you said “And you too!” to the person in the trainstation ticket booth who wished you a pleasant trip.
But sometimes… sometimes, one connection pings you into another. You strike up a chat with a stranger on the train and realise they went to your school. You’ve friends in common. You like the same band. It’s a moment of joyous synchronicity. You realise this is what people call kismet; it’s as though the universe is aligning around you. Every beat in the conversation feels like a link in a preordained chain of events that flies in the face of the idea that the universe is a simplye sea of chaos. You step off the train together, ready to explore this fledgling friendship, and step right into the 100,000 point bonus bucket, Ode To Joy starts playing and your sick score earns you the admiration of a unicorn called Bjorn.
Look, I don’t know. It’s Peggle. I’ve played 200 hours of it and it’s great. – Julian
Come back tomorrow to see what we consider to be the 80th – 61st best PC games of all time.
Or, if you’ve an insatiable taste for game ranking. Read through what we chose as the best PC games of all time in 2024, 2023 (part 1, part 2), 2022 (part 1, part 2), and 2021 (part 1, part 2).
You still hunger for lists? Well, see what our readers said were the best PC games of all time in 2023 and 2022.