The 15 best PC games to play right now in 2023
Updated regularly
Did you get a blast of vouchers over the break, and aren't sure what games to get with them? Do you find yourself asking what are the best PC games to play right now? Fear not, because we have collected the cream of the crop of current gaming, and can present you with 15 different answers to that question. Whether you want to put a new PC through its paces, or just want to stay current so the cool kids don't laugh at you, we've got the best PC games to play right this second.
Now, this isn't a 'best games of all time' list. We have our RPS 100 for that, which is where you can find the big guns of PC gaming from across the ages. The list you're reading right now is designed to give you a handy one-stop shop of what the best games are over the last few months, with a sprinkling of genre bests that haven't been beaten since their release. So what are you waiting for? Read on for our low down on the best PC games you should be playing now.
The best PC games to play right now
- Cult Of The Lamb
- Vampire Survivors
- Weird West
- Neon White
- Strange Horticulture
- Warhammer 40k: Chaos Gate - Daemonhunters
- Apex Legends
- Elden Ring
- Hardspace: Shipbreaker
- Return To Monkey Island
- Saturnalia
- Betrayal At Club Low
- Slay The Spire
- Forza Horizon 5
- Norco
Cult Of The Lamb
Our review whapped a big Bestest Best sticker on this lamb's fuzzy butt, and for good reason. Part roguelike battler, part base-building colony sim, Cult Of The Lamb also mixes the cute with the frankly Satanic in an inimitably fun way. You play as a little lambkin who is sacrificed on a blood altar, but resurrected by a frankly very sus elder god chained in an underworld, and exhorted to start a cult in said god's name. This you do (what other choice do you have?), and it turns out to be a lot of admin.
On the one hand, yeah, you're out for revenge, aren't you? So you spend a bunch of your time running through different roguelite dungeons, killing enemy cultists with semi-randomised weapons and special curse abilities (like unleasing a blast of tentacles from the 'neath). These runs are where you fight bosses, yes, but they're also where you pick up your own neonate cultists and building materials.
Both of these are important for the other half of Cult Of The Lamb, where you build, maintain and expand your cult stronghold. Here you consolidate your believers', well, belief, which in turn makes you more powerful in battle. But if you don't take care of their needs - somewhere to sleep, and food to eat - then you're in trouble. Your compound has to have a church, little beds, farms, and you should hold regular sermons too. It's a busy old life, leading a cult.
Where can I buy it: Steam, GOG, Humble
Vampire Survivors
Vampire Survivors is our most recent Game Of The Year here at RPS, and with good reason. It's the most fun you can have for under a fiver outside of buying 499 off-brand cola bottle sweets. The goal is to survive 30 minutes in one of several haunted levels, starting with a mostly open field. This sounds easy, but I bet you all of your off-brand cola sweets that you won't make it past, oooh, 7m50s on your first run. You're constantly attacked by waves of enemies, of increasing toughness and size. Bats become zombies become skeletons with swords become giant praying mantises, and then ghosts and then swarms of ghosts, and then everything at once.
Your defence is walking about. In Vampire Survivors you auto-attack and potter around, avoiding enemies so they can't kill you before you kill them. And collecting the XP gems they drop allows you to upgrade your existing weapons and items - less cool down, DPS, AEO, and so on - or get new ones ('cos you can equip six items at once). And what items they are! There are throwing knives, whips and axes, sure, but you could also have an aura of garlic that constantly damages anything that walks into it, orbiting bibles, or holy water grenades. A lot of weapons will, if you max their level, combine with a passive buff item like armour to become a new, huge mega-weapon that deals continuous damage at a terrifying rate. This is what accounts for the screenshot up there. At 28 minutes it really starts to kick off. Vampire Survivors is easy to understand, easy to play, and ridiculous fun.
Where can I buy it: Steam
Weird West
If you're after a deep, complex and hard-as-nails cowboy RPG, but you're tired of everyone recommending Red Dead Redemption 2, then you should mosey on down to Weird West. It's an isometric RPG with tough gunslinging combat akin to a twinstick shooter, set in a growing, changing world. It's the kind of game where the more people you kill, the more plots the town's graveyard will have. Its look is instantly recognisable too, characterised by thick black lines and a judicious use of purple to contrast with the yellowy dust of cowboy-land. A very weird colour, is purple.
It won't do to get too attached to your character, though, as quite often you'll get dropped into the shoes (or spurred boots, as the case may be) of someone new. The star of the show is the Weird West itself, which takes clear inspiration from classic CRPGs, but with the persistent world and quality of life changes that come from modern game development. Towns grow and change in population; the sheriff might die and be replaced with someone new; dastardly outlaws that escape a gunfight with you might nurse a deadly grudge, and ambush you later down the line. What a stunner.
Where can I buy it: Steam, GOG, Humble, Epic Games Store
Strange Horticulture
Plants and weird magic stuff are both big trends in games at the moment, so a game where they converge has gotta be one worth looking at. Strange Horticulture is both a gentle game and a spooky game, where you run a local weird plant store and listen to rain on the roof - but also help, indirectly, to avert the apocalypse. So you got that going for you.
Your job in the main is to serve customers by supplying whatever, ahem, strange horticulture they need - something to help them sleep, perhaps, or to stop an itch (although if you don't like them you can always make the itch worse). When you start, however, you have no idea which plant left on the shelves of your new shop is or does what, and must identify them by means of consulting a massive, lovingly illustrated tome. You can collect more samples by following often-obscure directions, plotting the location out on your big foldable map of the area.
Once you've got your plants you can, as any respectable shop owner would, go about labelling and storing them, via your own personal Dewey Decimal System. Perhaps you want to shelve your plants by colour? Or by medicinal property? Alphabetically? Separating out the flowering, non-flowering, and the fungi? It's up to you. You can arrange and rearrange to your heart's content, as the leaves gently sway in an unseen breeze, and the rain thrums on the roof. Also, you have a cat.
Where can I buy it: Steam, GOG, Humble, Epic Games Store
Neon White
Neon White is an etremely - nay, terrifyingly - fast speedrunning FPS, where you catapult yourself through weird castles in the sky using superhuman parkour abilities. Superhuman is right, too, because you play one of a group of heavenly assassins sent to dispatch demons, and who look like what I would describe as "what if the opening of Reservoir Dogs was very anime?". These assassins are known as Neons, and you're Neon White. Makes sense? Sure it does!
Your basic weapon is a sword, but you can get exciting guns by collecting Soul Cards as you self-yeet around the arenas. These, very pleasingly, have names like Elevate, Godspeed and Dominion, but each one of them can be sacrificed to give you a cool parkour ability. Your pistol could be a pistol, or you could shred the card and get a double jump. Sacrificing your shotgun basically turns you into a sentient fireball. It's a great balance of the economy of need vs. speed, learning heavily towards the speed end of the scale.
It's a game built for speedrunning, in other words, and while you don't have to get caught in that loop of honing your skills to get faster and faster, there's every chance you'll succumb to the charms of killing demons extremely quickly like Alice0 did.
Where can I buy it: Steam, Humble
Warhammer 40k: Chaos Gate - Daemonhunters
Do you like aggressive turn-based strategy? Do you also like big stompin' power armour and guns? Do you also really not like dastardly chaos God Nurgle? Then Warhammer 40k: Chaos Gate - Daemonhunters might be literally the only game for you. You control a beefy squad of Space Marines (specifically Grey Knights, a Chapter whose job is hunting daemons). Nurgle has unleashed a deadly plague, known as the Bloom, so off you go to stamp it out - XCOM style!
The isometric battles here can get more up close and personal than the grande dame of alien shootin' strategy games, though. Daemonhunters puts almost as much focus on slapping your enemies around in melee as it does taking pot shots from afar. And no bad thing! It adds an extra thrill. At the same time as your boots-on-the-ground battles, though, you have to choose where and when to deploy your limited resources. A map of the galaxy shows planets succumbing to the Bloom, and letting it fester for too long on a planet will make inevitably the fight when you do get there a lot harder. It makes for a rich, complex and (above all) really bloody fun strategy RPG.
Where can I buy it: Steam, Humble, Epic Games Store
Apex Legends
The initial pitch didn't sound particularly enticing: a first-person shooter set in the Titanfall universe, but minus that series' defining mechs and in their place a free-to-play game chasing the battle royale bandwagon. To our surprise and delight, it used grappling hooks to board that bandwagon and wrest control of it. Years on from release, Apex Legends is still the best battle royale game in town.
It's the last game standing for us for the smart ways in polishes up the genre's core tenets. You can designate a leader to control the descent of everyone in your party during the initial drop, ensuring you stick together. The ping system is a masterclass in easy contextual communication with teammates. Survivors can bring their fallen teammates back to life if they're bold or sneaky enough. Also, yes, there's a robot with a grappling hook that's more fun to play than almost any other character in any other character-based online shooter.
Matt wrote in his review that Apelegs was "the best battle royale game we're going to see for a long, long time," and after years of new characters, maps and modes, that's still true.
Where can I buy it: Steam, Origin
Elden Ring
Elden Ring is arguably the RPG to end all RPGs at the moment (and will possibly stay that way for a long time in the future). While there's a lot to be said for your Witcher 3s and your Red Dead Redemption 2s and even your absolute classic Mass Effects, right now the immeasurably epic dark fantasy RPG to get into is Elden Ring.
This time the world, and its strange lore, has been written by Game Of Thrones flatcapman George R.R. Martin. And strange it is: a land of wolf men in hidden caves, surprise dragons, weird little guys who've been turned into a bush... and that's just the starting area. Each time you come to a new part of Elden Ring's Lands Between it's almost like an entire game unto itself. And don't worry, 'cos there are loads of strange bosses with too many limbs or a tree where their face should be - or, yeah, that dragon - to fight in vicious battles that require precise timing.
Because you know the Soulslike deal by now, yeah? You live, you die, you live again, dashing yourself against the rocks until you're strong and/or smart enough to crash through them. Except Elden Ring's size and design gives you the ability to walk away and find new, smaller rocks to have a go at. It's both the most grand and the most forgiving FromSoftware game to date, and it's a bloody good time.
Where can I buy it: Steam, Humble
Hardspace: Shipbreaker
Hardspace: Shipbreaker scratches the same itch as first-person manual labour sims like PowerWash Sim, or all those different kinds of mechanic simulator, except you are in space breaking down huge junk spacecraft with advanced tools. Also, if you do things in the wrong order you could make everything explode. It's kind of a reverse jigsaw, as you laser the most valuable parts off the corpse of the ship and drop them into your space-hopper for collection. As you go, you learn to recognise different types of ship, so you can strip them more efficiently with an eye to making more money.
This is important because, as well as a sim about being a skilled labourer, Hardspace: Shipbreaker is also a critique of ultra-capitalist, anti-union mega-corps. You rent your tools, jetpack fuel, and even your oxygen from the Lynx corporation for huge sums of money - and they're not even that good. You also have to pay for repairs, and upgrades for tools that allow you to actually do your job without being in mortal peril. There's a story to uncover that shows how Lynx overthrew governments on Earth. But also, you can just peel open ships like big metal oranges.
Where can I buy it: Steam, Humble, Epic Games Store
Return To Monkey Island
Point and click adventure games have tended to be a devisive genre. Either you like their kind of idiosyncratic puzzles and sense of humour, or you don't. But it would take a hard heart indeed to not be softened by Return To Monkey Island, a new entry in the legendary piratical series of adventure games made by some of the original creators. Join Guybrush Threepwood for a race against dread zombie pirate LeChuck to go back and, er, actually find the treasure of Monkey Island, since they both got derailed the first time they tried.
Return To Monkey Island treads the line between nostalgia for die-hard fans, and welcoming in new players. The fresh new art style is expressive and suggets a kids' story book, and the controls are streamlined and easy to get the hang of. Combined with a robust hint system and a couple of difficulty levels, it's the perfect game to dip your toe in the genre. But if you're a card-carrying Monkey Island fanatic, Return has references to the old games that'll make you laugh, cry, and feel all warm and fuzzy - without overwhelming everything. And the story is pitched perfectly between longing for the old days, and not being able to go back. It's an all-around lovely game.
Where can I buy it: Steam, Humble
Saturnalia
Horror is an often-overlooked genre, but if you're missing out on horror games then you're genuinely missing out on some of the best games around. Case in point: Saturnalia is a geniune work of art, at the sime time as being very scary. It takes place in 1989, in a fictional Sardinian mining town full of screts and ancient traditions. You play a group of four outsiders trying to escape Gravoi, but the catch is that this involves surviving the night of a festival where a masked monster stalks the streets, snatching up the unwary. The catch is that you have no map screen, and have to make your way around town using maps boards and clues in the world itself. The catch is that you have no weapons, only tools and methods of distraction, and places to hide until the creature is gone. The catch is that if all four characters get caught by the creature, the layout of the town changes. Okay, so there are a lot of catches.
Alternately creeping and sprinting in panic through the streets of Gravoi, chased by the weird shivery rattling noise the creature makes, is a scary experience. But you do start to learn you way around - to recognise the particular windows and posters that function as your landmarks. And it's not just about escaping; Saturnalia is about secrets and lies and tradition, and you can uncover many sad little stories of the towns history, if you're brave enough to explore. It's worth it! And it helps that Saturnalia is an notably beautiful game, with bright blooms of neon colour applied to the black and white base of the game, in a style inspired by giallo movies. It's exceptional to look at, and to play.
Where can I buy it: Epic Games Store
Betrayal At Club Low
If you're looking for surreal experiences, you might as well stop your search with Cosmo D's games. The most recent, Betrayal At Club Low, is a tale of espionage and pizza (pizza is a recurring motif in Cosmo D games). Your job is to infiltrate the titular club, a cave full of weird music and weirder patrons, to extract an old colleague who's there on an intelligence gathering mission, and is in danger of having his cover blown. To get him out you'll need to use all the skills at your disposal: dancing, wits, and, yeah, pizza again.
Though it has the scrappy can-do attitude of a punk zine made of collages of other stapled-together magazines (pizza magazines, probably), Betrayal At Club Low is a surprisingly complex third-person RPG with eleven different endings, depending on how you go about things. Your decisions are tested with skill checks using a clutch of dice, which you can upgrade as customiseable pizza dice, baking toppings onto different faces to incur buffs when you roll them. As you explore the club to make allies and plot your getaway, you might merge your consciousness with the security system, drop some hot moves on the dance floor, drink from a puddle - you know, regular RPG stuff! It's a short but savory experience that's as weird and interesting as it is fun and satisfying. And, short and stacked as it is, it encourages repeat plays to find all there is to be found.
Where can I buy it: Steam, Itch
Slay The Spire
Pick a class, and take on the spire: a tower filled with progressively tougher enemies as you ascend its many floors. Your tools in the fight are your cards, with which you can concoct a fabulous damage-dealing machine. Every choice matters because every card can have value if used in the right way - and because death sends you right back to the start.
While the roguelike element might sound frustrating, it's what saves Slay The Spire from the progression systems and marketplace (real money or not) of other CCGs. Here, you build your deck through play, but all the cards from a class are available to find on any life, and dying throws them all away again anyway.
The other thing being roguelike affords the game is ridiculously powerful cards. Cards which do damage to every enemy on screen, cards which do damage umpteen times, cards which stack into fabulous maths explosions. These sorts of cards would imbalance another game; here, it makes the run on which you find it an exciting delight, and then it's gone. The silver lining? You'll find a different and equally powerful and exciting set of cards during every life.
Also there's a mod that adds googly eyes to everything.
Where can I buy it: Steam, GOG, Humble
Forza Horizon 5
We couldn't escape from this list without leaving a racing game in our tracks, now could we? And if you're looking for the best racing game out there right now, well that honour definitely goes to Forza Horizon 5. A spin-off series that has now arguably outstripped its maker, the latest Forza Horizon is an open-world carstravaganza on a humongous scale. The racing festival framing might be getting a little tired now, but Forza Horizon 5 dishes up some show-stopping setpieces in Mexico (an active volcano! Huge dust storms! Actual changing seasons!) all set to a soundtrack of licensed tracks that you can really bop to.
The difficulty is pretty flexible, encouraging you to relax and explore the ludicrous, polished world in all its realistic mud-splattered glory, clearing many a map marker as you go. But there are also deep customisation options for cars - including all the marquee brands like Porsche and Ferarri - and drivatars, and community challenges and player-made events to keep you coming back for new hashtag car content.
Where can I buy it: Steam
Norco
Norco is a Southern Gothic, near-future dystopian point and click adventure, taking you to the decaying suburbs of industrialised South Louisiana. You play Kay, whose mother has recently died, and it's why Kay has come home - but on arrival it seems Kay's brother has gone missing. Thus Kay and Million, the galaxy-faced fugitive security droid who has been with the family for years, go on a mission to find him.
This is a fairly straightforward task to get your head around, but it soon takes a multi-layered turn for the odd. You don't just play through the search for your brother, but also the last few days before your mother's death, as she began working for a weird gig-economy app that... well... leads to something pretty, uh, unexpected. There's a pseudo religious group, a conspiracy involving memory and big tech, and at one point you can pet a cat so much it vibrates off into space.
Norco is great at the convergence of the small, weird and local, and the large - the forces moving against us that are great than it feels we can deal with. And how the two smash together. And, not for nothing, but Norco is incredibly beautiful to look at. Every fram is, honestly, a painting.
Where can I buy it: Steam, GOG, Humble, Epic Games Store, Itch
That's our list of the best PC games to play as of... right now. But remember that this is a living list, and we're going to be updating it again. Maybe you think we've missed an obvious one, but check back regularly to find out what new games have been added - and what we've removed - so you can be surprised and delighted all over again.
