Best PC games of all time

Elden Ring▲ Rising

FromSoftware handed its punishing formula an open world and the result was Torrent galloping across the Lands Between, letting players skip a wall they couldn't beat for a dragon they could. It solved Souls' biggest problem — linear brick-wall progression — without softening the difficulty, and became the studio's best-seller and Game of the Year sweep almost overnight. The argument for its spot here is simple: it made 'go anywhere, die anywhere' feel like freedom instead of chaos.

Year: 2022Critic score: 9.6/10

added by IJRin 13 rankings

Half-Life 2▲ Rising

The crowbar swings and the Gravity Gun turns every crate and sawblade into a weapon, but the real shock in 2004 was City 17 itself — a game that told its story entirely through scripted staging and Alyx Vance's face instead of cutscenes. It redefined physics-driven shooters and cinematic pacing in one stroke, and its influence is still visible in every game that lets an NPC silently sell an emotional beat. Two decades on, nobody's topped the barnacle, the airboat chase, or Ravenholm's dread.

Year: 2004Critic score: 9.6/10

added by IJRin 8 rankings

Baldur's Gate 3▲ Rising

Larian took the tabletop chaos of D&D and somehow shipped it — you can talk your way past a fight, seduce a bear-shaped druid, or just shove an inconvenient NPC off a cliff, and the game remembers. Act 1's tadpole-brain body horror alone contains more reactive writing than most RPGs manage in their entirety. It proved AAA-scale choice-and-consequence wasn't dead, just waiting for someone patient enough to actually build it.

Year: 2023Critic score: 9.6/10

added by IJRin 8 rankings

Portal 2▲ Rising

Wheatley's betrayal and GLaDOS's bitter one-liners turned a physics puzzle box into one of gaming's sharpest comedies, while co-op mode proved portal logic could scale into genuine two-player brain-melt. It expanded a cult short into a fully realized sci-fi satire without losing the elegant 'there's only one correct answer, find it' puzzle purity that made the original special. Few sequels so thoroughly out-scope their predecessor while staying just as tight.

Year: 2011Critic score: 9.5/10

added by IJRin 7 rankings

StarCraft II▲ Rising

Korea already worshipped the original as a national sport, and Blizzard's sequel refined the Protoss/Terran/Zerg triangle into esports' gold standard, with pro players executing build orders at superhuman APM while casters screamed over Marine drops. It kept RTS relevant in an era MOBAs were eating its lunch, proving there was still an audience for pure mechanical mastery over lane-pushing abstraction. The scene it anchored for a decade earns it a permanent seat at the table.

Year: 2010Critic score: 9.3/10

added by IJRin 5 rankings

Minecraft▲ Rising

A single Swedish programmer's blocky survival prototype became the best-selling video game ever, precisely because it never told you what to build — just handed you punchable trees and let civilizations, redstone computers, and a thousand YouTube empires grow from there. It taught a generation of kids to think in systems before they could spell 'systems,' and its influence runs through every sandbox and survival-crafting game since. There's no ceiling on this list higher than 'defined childhood for millions and is still doing it.'

Year: 2011Critic score: 9.3/10

added by IJRin 12 rankings

Half-Life: Alyx▲ Rising

Valve finally answered 'what's the killer VR game' by building Half-Life around it instead of bolting VR onto Half-Life, and the result was reaching out to physically grab a headcrab off your face in genuine panic. Combine soldiers become terrifying when you have to manually rack a slide under pressure, and City 17's alleys feel newly vast when you're standing in them. It's the strongest argument yet that VR isn't a gimmick platform but a genuinely different way to feel fear and awe.

Year: 2020Critic score: 9.3/10

added by IJRin 5 rankings

Age of Empires II

Somehow a 1999 castle-siege RTS never actually died — it got HD remasters, a Definitive Edition, and a still-thriving competitive scene decades later, with players micromanaging villagers and trebuchets like it's still LAN-party 1999. Its civilizations, tech trees, and Wololo monk chants became shorthand for an entire generation's understanding of real-time strategy. Longevity like this — genuinely still played, not just remembered — is its own kind of greatness.

Year: 1999Critic score: 9.2/10

added by IJRin 3 rankings

Portal▼ Falling

A short, cheap tech demo bundled into The Orange Box turned out to contain one of gaming's most quotable villains and the single most imitated mechanic of the decade — shoot two holes in reality, watch momentum do the rest. 'The cake is a lie' became internet folklore before most people had even finished the game, and its clean, minimalist puzzle design proved you didn't need forty hours to make something unforgettable. It's the rare experiment that immediately became a genre unto itself.

Year: 2007Critic score: 9/10

added by IJRin 6 rankings

DOOM (1993)▼ Falling

id Software's shareware disk turned into a cultural detonation — companies had to ban it from office networks because employees kept deathmatching instead of working. It codified the first-person shooter as a genre, popularized mod culture through its open WAD format, and made 'rip and tear' a permanent part of gaming's vocabulary three decades before the reboot cashed in on it. Everything from Quake to Call of Duty owes its skeleton to this game's speed and violence.

Year: 1993Critic score: 9.2/10

added by IJRin 2 rankings

Civilization VI▼ Falling

Sid Meier's 'one more turn' curse got a district-based makeover, spreading cities out across the map instead of stacking everything in one tile, which finally made city planning matter as much as the tech tree. It's the version that eats the most sleep schedules whole, as Gandhi's nukes and a surprise culture victory arrive at 3 AM for the hundredth time. Few strategy games have so successfully turned 'just one more turn' into a genuine meme about lost weekends.

Year: 2016Critic score: 8.8/10

added by IJRin 3 rankings

Disco Elysium▼ Falling

You wake up with amnesia, no idea what species of disaster you are, and your own internal skill checks start arguing with each other before you've even found your tie — Electrochemistry begging you to do a bump off the minibar, Volition trying to hold the wreckage together. It replaced combat entirely with a percentile-dice conversation engine and somehow wrote one of gaming's best noir mysteries and political character studies. No other RPG has made 'talking' feel this dangerous or this literary.

Year: 2019Critic score: 9.2/10

added by IJRin 5 rankings