Games
Is it worth it? How hard? How long? Live Steam data + comprehensive FAQs.
Amnesia: The Dark Descent
The 2010 game that created an entire genre: no weapons, a sanity meter that punishes you for looking at monsters, and a castle that's still the finest horror environment ever built.
Balatro
One developer, two and a half years, expected to sell ten copies. A poker-based roguelike that sold 5 million and won Game of the Year 2024.
Crimson Desert
Pearl Abyss's first single-player game -- a seamless, loading-screen-free open world with genuinely exceptional post-launch support that turned a mixed launch into a Game of the Year contender.
Cyberpunk 2077
An open-world action RPG in Night City that launched broken on base consoles and became genuinely excellent after three years of repair work.
Darkest Dungeon
A turn-based dungeon crawler where your heroes have a stress bar alongside their health bar -- push it too far and they don't just get weaker, they break into permanent, party-damaging afflictions.
Darkwood
A top-down survival horror game set in a corrupted Eastern European forest, built around a day/night cycle of scavenging by daylight and barricading yourself against unpredictable AI-driven threats after dark.
Dead Space
A full remake of the 2008 survival horror classic, rebuilt with the isolation, resource scarcity, and dismemberment combat that made the original work -- and that EA stripped out of Dead Space 3.
Destiny 2
A free-to-play looter shooter with some of the best gunplay in the medium, built on a monetisation architecture specifically engineered to erode your spending discipline.
Disco Elysium
An RPG with no combat where you play a washed-up detective with amnesia solving a murder. Your internal voices vote on your decisions.
ELDEN RING
FromSoftware's open-world Souls game, with no easy mode and 25 million copies sold -- proof the industry badly miscalibrated what audiences would engage with if given the chance.
Fear & Hunger
A one-developer dungeon crawler built in RPG Maker that goes to places no commercial horror game would be permitted to go. Genuinely disturbing, genuinely significant, absolutely not for everyone -- read the content warnings first.
Hades
A roguelike where failure advances the story. You play Zagreus, son of Hades, attempting to escape the underworld. Each death is a conversation.
Hi-Fi RUSH
A rhythm-action game where everything -- combat, movement, the entire world -- pulses to the beat of the soundtrack, from Tango Gameworks, the studio Microsoft closed less than a year after this shipped to genuine acclaim.
Hollow Knight
A vast underground kingdom, made by two developers on a AU$57,000 Kickstarter. One of the best Metroidvanias ever made.
KARMA: The Dark World
A first-person psychological horror game set in an alternate 1984 East Germany ruled by a surveillance corporation, where you dive into suspects' minds -- the most visually stunning horror game I've played, despite a middling 72 on Metacritic.
Mixtape
A narrative adventure built around 1990s American nostalgia and a licensed alt-rock soundtrack (The Smashing Pumpkins, Joy Division, The Cure), released to a genuinely unusual gap between glowing critic scores and a more divided player reception at launch.
Mouthwashing
A two-to-three hour PS1-aesthetic psychological horror game about a crew falling apart on a stranded freighter, told in deliberately disorienting non-linear order -- one of the most disturbing games of 2024.
Outlast
A first-person found-footage horror game with some of the best atmospheric design in the genre for its first two hours, undermined by an escalation into jump-scare spectacle in the second half.
PRAGMATA
Capcom's sci-fi action game where you control astronaut Hugh Williams and android companion Diana simultaneously -- his guns, her hacking -- across a moon base after an AI takeover.
SIGNALIS
A two-person survival horror game that references Resident Evil, Silent Hill, and Evangelion simultaneously, made over six years, and quietly better than what any major publisher shipped in the genre the same decade.
Skull and Bones
A naval combat live-service game that cost a reported $750 million and eleven years to make, and plays worse than the Black Flag naval combat Ubisoft built in 2013 for a fraction of the cost.
SOMA
A sci-fi horror game set in an underwater research station. The monsters are the least scary thing in it.
Stardew Valley
A farming and life-sim RPG built entirely by one person over four years -- one of the most beloved indie games ever made, and still one of the best value propositions on Steam a decade later.
Subnautica 2
The Early Access sequel to Subnautica, on a new alien ocean world with rebuilt base building, optional co-op, and a controversial no-weapons stance -- genuinely good already, with real, known gaps versus the finished original.
The Last of Us Part I
A full remake of the 2013 post-apocalyptic classic, following Joel escorting Ellie across a ravaged United States -- a genuinely excellent, morally uncomfortable story that Part II then had the courage to actually follow through on.
The Sinking City 2
A Lovecraftian survival horror sequel built by a Kyiv-based studio between 2023 and 2026, during Russia's invasion of Ukraine, that shifted the series from open-world investigation to focused Resident Evil-style survival horror.
The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt
An open-world RPG with genuinely exceptional writing and quest design buried under 100 hours of structurally identical filler and one of the more mediocre combat systems in a critically acclaimed RPG.
Vampire Survivors
The game that created the entire 'bullet heaven' genre -- automatic movement, automatic attacks, and the purest possible version of the roguelike progression loop, for the price of a coffee.
Windrose
A pirate survival-crafting game with soulslite combat and genuinely great naval battles -- peaked at 222,134 concurrent players in Early Access and earned it.