Highest Rated Games on Steam | Updated 2023

Disco Elysium – The Final Cut

Disco Elysium is one of the most unique role-playing games ever released. After all, there’s very little combat here. Instead, the focus is on skills and dialogues, the latter expertly written at that.

Image credit: ZA/UM

The game puts you in the shoes of an amnesiac detective whose job is to solve a murder mystery, uncovering his past along the way and revealing a nefarious scheme in the background. Your choices are not without their meaning and impact; you can either become a glorious hero or a complete moral failure. The choice is up to you.

As we’ve mentioned above, there’s very little combat in this game – actually, there’s no such thing here, at least not in the traditional sense, since everything is handled through the aforementioned skill checks and dialogues. You can also internalize certain thoughts via the Thought Cabinet, which is a system that works a lot like the perk system from the Fallout series. Some give you bonuses, others might have some negative effects.

Disco Elysium is definitely an unorthodox role-playing game, so whether you’re going to enjoy it or not depends on the kind of titles you like playing. If you’re a fan of Planescape: Torment, you will very likely love it. If not, well, why not give it a shot, anyway?

Disco Elysium - The Final Cut

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Monster Hunter Rise

Fans of hunting gargantuan monsters have a reason to rejoice, as the latest addition to the Monster Hunter series, Rise, once again proved that this franchise is a really, really strong one.

Image credit: Capcom Development Division 2

The premise is simple: you’re the titular Hunter whose task is to either capture or kill huge monsters. To do this, you’ll need proper weapons and gear. Defeating beasts lets you forge new weapons and armor which then allow you to take on even more powerful enemies. It’s a very famous loop that fans of the series totally adore.

Still, there are various additions to the gameplay that make Monster Hunter Rise a bit different from its predecessors. As its title implies, the game encourages verticality thanks to a tool known as the Wirebug. It lets you swing across gaps, allowing for greater mobility. A new companion, Palamute, helps you traverse the area faster without losing any stamina and they can even help you defeat the monsters.

There are plenty of such improvements in the game. If you’re up for slaying some big beasts, grab Monster Hunter Rise. You shouldn’t be disappointed. In fact, you might be totally blown away by it!

Monster Hunter Rise

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Ori and the Will of the Wisps

Ori and the Blind Forest is one of the best platformers released in the last decade. Its direct sequel, Ori and the Will of the Wisps, is just as awesome, if not even better.

Image credit: Moon Studios

Once again you get to play as Ori, the titular white guardian spirit. The protagonist embarks on a new quest to a region called Niwen in order to help out a baby owl by the name of Ku. Expect a touching, emotional story which strikes all the right chords. Gameplay-wise, it’s a platformer/Metroidvania: over the course of the campaign Ori learns new abilities which let you revisit areas and explore previously unavailable locations.

Ori and the Will of the Wisps looks and sounds gorgeous and is an absolute blast to play, especially if you love artsy games with stories eliciting powerful emotions. If that’s the case, be sure to grab this title if you haven’t already.

Ori and the Will of the Wisps

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Vampire Survivors

Vampire Survivors is a great example of a game that charms with a simple presentation and clear premise, and then consumes your time like an angry vacuum.

Image credit: Poncle

Under the simple veneer of moving an auto-attacking character around a 2D map there is room for planning, discovery, and mastery, because the upgrade system and peculiarities of each map keep things interesting.

Any given run is unlikely to last longer than 30 minutes, but it’s filled with enemies swarming your position regardless of the increasing flurry of physical and magical defenses your chosen character throws around themselves. It’s a reverse bullet hell with Castlevania stylings, and it’s a perfect game to just launch and listen podcasts to, or otherwise unwind.

Vampire Survivors

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Persona 5 Royal

If you could steal the reason people turn evil, would you? It was a no-brainer for the Phantom Thieves of Hearts, a group of teens who got the ability to invade the psychic metaverse and steal the “Treasures” making certain adults wicked and prone to corruption.

Image credit: Atlus

Led by a transfer student Joker and wielding powerful psychic manifestations called personas, they are out to fix the world.

There are two layers to Persona gameplay. The first takes place in the mundane world and involves Joker’s day-to-day life: building relationships with other characters, working part-time jobs, and doing all the other stuff against a rather restrictive schedule. The other side is the heists, which involve dungeon exploration and stylish-as-heck turn-based battles. It’s pretty awesome.

Persona 5 Royal

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Placid Plastic Duck Simulator

This is a game that’s somehow barely a game, and yet… it is strangely compelling. The idea is simple: there is a pool located in one of two fancy locations, and every now and then a new plastic duck appears.

That’s basically it. Each duck is different, with various patterns, materials, and even weirder traits, like a tesla orb or a hat with a tiny propeller which sometimes makes it fly.

At its most basic, the game is effectively an interactive, dynamic screensaver, but some ducks have unique interactions or trigger unique events to keep things interesting. There’s also a secret involving a certain keypad, with a pretty elaborate solution. All of this comes with chill music and pretty graphics, so it’s really nice to look at. And there are SO MANY odd ducks to collect!

Neon White

Neon White is a very stylish game about Heaven-hired assassins, named Neons, competing to be the best demon-killer in the afterlife. As Neon White you’ll have several missions to clear, and a few NPCs to talk to in the meantime, gradually discovering your prior connection to them.

Image credit: Ben Esposito

What’s important is that this game has a very high mastery ceiling, and it wants you to reach it.

Each mission takes place on a fairly complex map, and your objective is to kill all the demons and get to a specific location. Aiding you in this job are Soul Cards — serving double duty as weapons, and special maneuvers — which aid your mobility or help with disposing of larger groups of enemies. Good usage of these cards will make or break your run, so you’ll quickly start forming plans.

Neon White

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Metal Hellsinger

What if Doom was a rhythm game? It would probably be similar to Metal: Hellsinger, a game which wants you to murder demons to the beat of a ton of excellent heavy metal tracks.

Image credit: The Outsiders

The better your attacks, dashes, reloads etc. match the rhythm, the more damage you deal. It’s a simple idea, but it works extremely well, and the soundtrack is one of the best in the genre.

There’s even some story involved, putting you in the role of a soul called The Unknown who goes on an infernal rampage to recover her voice. It’s a good thing she can express herself through her lethal arsenal. Metal: Hellsinger is intense, spectacular, epic, and sounds great. What else would you need from a heavy metal-themed game?

Metal Hellsinger

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Stray

The success of Stray shouldn’t be a surprise to anybody, after all: this game has a cat as the playable character. Not only does it have a cat: it’s a realistic-looking, realistically behaving cat. With a robot buddy!

Image credit: BlueTwelve Studio

With such a combo, the game was bound for great ratings. And that’s before we even factor in the cool cyberpunk city you get to explore, populated only by robots, for some reason.

The plot is a mix of cyberpunk themes, including transhumanism and evolving AI, and provides an interesting thread…but it’s hardly the star of the show, is it? Much of the game revolves around using the cat’s agility to solve environmental obstacles, but no cat is so objective driven. As a result, you can also do cat things, like nuzzling to robots, or knocking things off tables for no reason at all.

Stray

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God of War

The Ragnarok is coming, don’t allow yourself to be surprised by it. God of War proved, that it is possible to create a dramatically different sequel/soft reboot and still make long-time fans happy. And also draw many new fans.

Image credit: SIE Santa Monica Studio

2018’s God of War was the first game in the series to visit PC, and it quickly gained the same adoration it did a few years earlier on PlayStation.

This game takes Kratos out of Greece way up north, to the land where Norse gods and monster dwell, and the iconic fiery blades are replaced by a frosty axe. The game also shifted into a TPP camera, which brings you closer to the crunchy, satisfying action and allows for immersive, stunning shots of the gorgeous world you get to explore…and slaughter, to some extent.

God of War

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Dorfromantik

There is something about pleasant, peaceful games that helps them rise through the ranks. Take Dorfromantik, for example, a simple strategy game about building a world out of tiles.

Image credit: Toukana Interactive

Some tiles add water, other have trees, sometimes you might even get a special assignment…also completed by clever placement of tiles. It’s like a prettier, non-competitive game of Carcassone.

In the default mode, the stack of tiles is procedurally generated, to make things more exciting. If you’d rather have something completely free-from, there’s also a free mode, allowing you to just build without having to worry about objectives or unfavorable order in the pile of tiles. In a way it feels as if you’re building a map for a 4X game…without having to worry about any of the 4 Xs.

Dorfromantik

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PowerWash Simulator

Sometimes all you need to be a hit is a simple idea well executed. PowerWash Simulator is a game with an extremely simple idea encapsulated fully in its title.

Image credit: FuturLab

You have a power washer, and a large object, building, area to clean. It’s like these oddly satisfying videos you see on the internet, but in a video game form.

It has a career mode if you want extra structure, it has co-op if you want to play with friends, and it has many maps with their own opportunities and challenges. There are many ways to play, and most of them won’t judge your speed, or efficiency… unless you want to hop into a challenge mode! PowerWash Simulator is truly a wonder: a simple idea expressed through many playstyles.

PowerWash Simulator

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Marvel’s Spider-Man Remastered

Insomniac Games managed to do something many have failed at before: they made an unequivocally good Spider-Man game which doesn’t require any caveats.

Image credit: Insomniac Games

Marvel’s Spider-Man does a great job balancing both sides of Peter Parker’s life, with excellent open-world gameplay and great, well-acted story to motivate you from scripted mission to scripted mission.

Originally a PlayStation exclusive, Marvel’s Spider-Man came to PC with the Remastered version, delivering excellent combat and traversal to everyone, and extra flashy visual upgrades for owners of mighty PC machines. Of course, PC-bound comic book fans should also rejoice, since they’ll not only meet many familiar characters, but also discover many Spidey costumes with unique traits.

Marvel’s Spider-Man Remastered

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People Playground

If you’ve frequented Youtube circa the early 2010s, you’re probably aware of the popular browser game called Happy Wheels, in which the goal was to move the character through the obstacle course of lethal weapons.

Image credit: mestiez

The game was mostly interested in shock value, presenting gore-y executions of the player character. People Playground, is very similar to that title.

The key gameplay feature of PP is massacring ragdoll characters using various lethal tools. The game allows the player to shoot, stab, burn, drown, vaporize, and otherwise mutilate the motionless character. The game doesn’t aspire to be anything more than what you can see in the short trailer presenting various ways of killing the subject of your torture, but a 96,80% rating on Steam means people must dig that kind of stuff.

People Playground

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Portal

Portal is a puzzle-platforming title in which the player controls a young woman named Chell, a subject in the lab run by Aperture Science.

Her task is to escape captivity using the portal gun – a device capable of opening passages on any flat surface. Using the portal gun Chell will have to pass all the nefarious traps set for her by GLaDOS, Aperture’s A.I. gone rogue.

Set in the same universe as the classic Half-Life series, Portal was a highly popular title in its day. The portal gun gameplay was nothing short of revolutionary. How it was used to solve various spatial puzzles brought to mind the classic physics-based puzzles of Valve’s opus magnum. Seeing how so many years after release the game is still popular is a testament to how much fun it provides.

Portal

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Half-Life: Alyx

While it isn’t a numbered sequel featuring the fan-favorite protagonist, dr. Gordon Freeman, the adventures of Alyx on the alien-infested Earth will definitely satisfy the fans of the series in particular and FPS enthusiasts in general. Oh, and did we mention that the game is fully VR?

Image credit: Valve

Yes, Valve experimented once again, this time investing in the virtual reality-based title. Half-Life: Alyx is a competent first-person shooter with great graphics, elevated by the application of VR goggles. The player is transported to the conquered earth and gets the first-hand experience of fighting against the invading aliens. The game also features elements of survival-horror, giving the player little ammo and putting them against the overwhelming alien forces.

Half-Life: Alyx

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Rimworld

RimWorld allows the player to feel the weight of running a space colony. The game is set in a distant corner of the universe – the titular RimWorld. As the outpost leader, your job will be to manage its operation, gather resources necessary to expand it, and make sure that the settlers are well taken care of.

Image credit: Ludeon Studios

RimWorld is a representative of a popular genre of games focusing on construction and management. Players who like titles like SimCity or Cities: Skylines, and especially Dwarf Fortress will definitely enjoy the intricacies of running the space colony. The game features elements of combat, offering various scenarios in which the colony falls under attack, and the player must respond by building defenses or drafting the colonists to fight.

Rimworld

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Stardew Valley

After spending some time in space, fighting alien invaders, or sneaking through mad science labs, it’s good to heal your soul by unwinding with one of the most calming games in history.

Image credit: ConcernedApe

Stardew Valley offers the player a chance to try their hand at farming, and nothing cleanses the palate after a high-octane action better than tending to a plot of land and seeing it flourish.

Stardew Valley’s gameplay draws a lot of inspiration from Harvest Moon (also known as the Story of Seasons), another game focusing on farming. In the beginning, the player of SV receives a plot of land which they must tend to. The produce of the land can be sold in the market, bonds with the neighbors can turn into marital propositions, and nearby caves are filled with creatures to slay and ore to mine. Each activity in Stardew Valley, be it farming, cooking, fishing, etc., aims at putting the player at ease – something that we sorely need these days.

Stardew Valley

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The Witcher III: Wild Hunt

CD Projekt RED’s so-far-final installment of the Witcher franchise is a culmination of the studio’s ambitions.

Image credit: CD PROJEKT RED

The story of Geralt of Rivia wraps up with an epic flair, and the players are there to see it. The game introduces a variety of new mechanics, including a semi-open world environment and expanded combat gameplay, making The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt not only the best game from the Polish studio but one of the best action-RPGs, period.

Wild Hunt follows the usual rule of sequels: make everything bigger. The world is larger and full of content to enjoy. The combat is more fluid, with a bunch of new moves and skills Geralt has in his Witcher arsenal. And the story, drawing inspiration from various plot points of Andrzej Sapkowski’s novels, grabs the player and keeps them glued to the screen for long hours. If you’re a fan of fantasy action RPGs, then The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt is a game just for you.

Terraria

No list of the best Steam games is complete without at least one roguelike or roguelite title. It so happens that one of the most beloved games on Steam is Terraria.

Image credit: Re-Logic

This action-adventure game takes the player to a procedurally generated environment, where they can explore and fight against random enemies. The game emphasizes chance encounters, with different types of opponents appearing depending on specific circumstances.

Defeating enemies and collecting items unlocks the areas of the game to be inhabited by NPCs. These characters provide the player with various services, like selling items, healing, etc. The game utilizes a 16-bit graphics design, similar to that of the classic Metroidvania games, making it an excellent game for fans of retro titles.

Terraria

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Hades

Hades has become a true phenomenon among gamers and proved that indie studios are capable of creating experience easily on-par with AAA-level games.

Image credit: Supergiant Games

The story of Zagreus, the son of Hades, and his quest through various regions of the Underworld captured the imaginations of players around the globe. But it wasn’t the only reason Hades was met with such a warm welcome.

Supergiant Games’ roguelike is one of the best titles of its genre currently available on the market. It features all the mechanics of a good roguelike and cranks them up to eleven. Throughout each run, the player will face increasingly harder enemies, including powerful bosses waiting at the end of each region. The game highly emphasizes story and lore, which the player can discover by conversations with NPCs – hand-drawn sprites of various Greek deities aiding Zagreus on his quest.

Hades

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Factorio

Similar to RimWorld, which tests the player’s skills in managing a space colony, Factorio tests the player in running a successful factory.

Image credit: Wube Software

The game includes the elements of survival – the player has to start their industry from scratch, building the factory from materials they can find in the area and upgrading their skills to create better equipment.

The gameplay mechanics focus on managing the factory by researching systems to make production more efficient. Other features include combat, in which the player must build defenses against the monsters. Factorio can be played solo or in multiplayer, cooperating in running the factory or fighting against each other.

Factorio

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Portal 2

It’s rare that a series is so good that several instalments would warrant presence on this list. And yet! Portal 2 features similar mechanics as the first installment of the series.

Image credit: Valve

However, there are some significant differences. The biggest one is that Portal 2 adds a separate multiplayer mode which emphasizes cooperation between two players.

Whether you’re controlling Chell in the singleplayer mode, or two bumbling robots in co-op, you’re in for some of the fienst physics-based puzzle-platforming you could hope for. In some ways, Portal 2 truly is more interesting and better than its predecessor, and the SP story has a few cool twist to witness.

Portal 2

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