THE PC GAMER TOP 100 PC GAMES 2019

Every year, the global PC Gamer team gets together to craft the PC Gamer Top 100. The result is this: a rundown of what we think are the best PC games you can play today. Every entry is something we recommend that PC gamers play in 2019. To celebrate the variety of the platform, we (mostly) only allow one entry per series. Enjoy the list!

100 GRIM FANDANGO REMASTERED

RELEASED 1998 | LAST POSITION 78

Tom: It’s vague to suggest an adventure game has ‘heart’, but it evokes the warmth and humanity of Grim Fandango’s cast, who in story terms actually happen to be cold and dead. It’s a story of love, friendship, and death-after-death in an afterlife inspired by the Day of the Dead. The puzzles are often nonsense, but it’s bursting with jokes, and even features a few touching moments. Glottis the big orange demon is the friend we all deserve, and Hector LeMans is a terrifying villain.

99 BATTLE BROTHERS

RELEASED 2017 | LAST POSITION New

Evan: Mount & Blade sandboxiness plus XCOMbat. Your mercs take the form of cute, legless pawn pieces, but it’s the brutality of Battle Brothers that stands out. Your guys can suffer stat-altering injuries, like brain damage, or a missing nose. It’s refreshing to play a campaign where your trajectory isn’t just steady accumulation of power and loot. The difficulty is all-you-can-eat, and getting on the wrong side of a barbarian or acid-blooded giant worm produces setbacks that you feel for days.

98 MAX PAYNE 2: THE FALL OF MAX PAYNE

RELEASED 2003 | LAST POSITION New

Samuel: Remedy’s slow-motion shooter is more challenging and interesting than pretty much every cover shooter I’ve played, turning each room into a puzzle that has to be solved (by diving through the air and firing guns wildly). Bullet time became passé a bit too quickly, as slow-mo crept into more and more games to no real benefit, but Remedy’s Max Payne games always did it incredibly well.

Tom: I wish Max Payne was a genre. I would spend hours in beautiful sequels wearing increasingly detailed leather jackets and shooting goons in slow motion. I’ll never forgive Max Payne 2 for making Max’s face normal, but improved level design and more physics-driven destruction make it the better shooter.

Tyler: I don’t have any proof of this, but I swear I was the first person to post a mod for this game on the official forums. I mean, “mod” might be generous, as I just messed with certain numbers to make bullet time last longer, if I recall, but it speaks to the game’s spirit that it was so easy to mess around with—a better time, if I’m letting nostalgia take over. Cheesy. Silly. Weird. Modable. Max Payne 2 encapsulates what made me fall in love with PC gaming.

97 PSYCHONAUTS

RELEASED 2005 | LAST POSITION New

James: Double Fine’s bizarre platformer is still a gleefully grim adventure. Thanks to the fusion of the formerly massive genres of 3D character-based platformers and adventure games, Psychonauts’ nostalgic qualities take on more power. Deal with the tricky camera and pointless combat for a playful, funny, and earnest coming-of-age story.

96 OXENFREE

RELEASED 2016 | LAST POSITION 76

Jody: This horror game about teenagers on a spooky island does have eerie moments—if you’ve ever read about numbers stations, you’ll understand the kind of creepiness it’s evoking. It’s hard to talk about Oxenfree’s horror side without spoiling it, but its conversational side—well-written and funny—makes it worthwhile on its own.

95 RISING STORM 2: VIETNAM

RELEASED 2017 | LAST POSITION New

Evan: An asymmetrical, 64-player historical FPS. It might cost 200 US Marines to claw your way up Hill 937, where the North Vietnamese have vision, bunkers, RPGs, traps, and can dig their own spawn points. Fighting through ‘unfair’ circumstances like this provides a small insight into the brutality of the Vietnam War.

94 STAR WARS: KNIGHTS OF THE OLD REPUBLIC II

RELEASED 2005 | LAST POSITION New

Fraser: Star Wars at its boldest. It takes a bit of effort getting it working well, but the reward is one of the best Star Wars stories ever written. Word of warning: if you decide to go down the Dark Side and take all of your crew with you, be prepared for some guilt pangs. It’s brutal.

Jody: HK-47 is in it. That’s a recommendation.

93 MORDHAU

RELEASED 2019 | LAST POSITION New

Evan: Messy, unfair, and brutal, just as medieval warfare was meant to be. It’s the heroic fantasy of winning outnumbered fights, of dancing around four dudes who are poking at you with spears and still being the last one standing. It’s a shame it’s being undermined by a toxic community and the absence of a modern player reporting system.

92 THUMPER

RELEASED 2016 | LAST POSITION 83

Tom: You play a silver pill hurtling into the mouth of a god, bouncing through turns to nightmarish rhythms in an ethereal landscape. It’s beautiful and uncomfortable at the same time.

James: Talking about Thumper requires describing it as an abstract sensory experience. But it’s also one of the most intense games ever made.

91 HEARTHSTONE

RELEASED 2014 | LAST POSITION 39

Tim: It’s easy to see Hearthstone as embattled on multiple fronts these days, what with the current fad for Auto Chess draining the game of streamers and the rise (at last) of a serious competitor now that Magic: The Gathering has a digital version that doesn’t look like Excel. But for all those travails, it’s also easy to forget how much Blizzard’s colorful card battler gets right. And recently, with more active card balancing and the first range of buffs we’ve seen since the beta, the game has felt more vibrant than it has for a long time.

This year’s Rise of Shadows expansion was followed by the best single-player mode Team 5 has created yet in The Dalaran Heist, which provided a welcome outlet for those of us who like to build meme decks without having our heads brutally kicked in on ladder. Next up is Saviors of Uldum, which sees the return of the League of Explorers—the most iconic heroes Blizzard has designed without drawing on existing World of Warcraft lore.

Still, the game is in danger of slipping out of the top 100 for the first time. In order to retain its place, Blizzard surely needs to implement a bigger feature shake-up, including revisiting the tournament mode that it mothballed last year. Oh, and nerf Dr Boom Mad Genius. I definitely did not order all these bombs.

90 THE NORWOOD SUITE

RELEASED 2017 | LAST POSITION 72

A first-person exploration adventure about falling down the rabbit hole