2025 games: Upcoming releases
Best PC games: All-time favorites
Free PC games: Freebie fest
Best FPS games: Finest gunplay
Best MMOs: Massive worlds
Best RPGs: Grand adventures
On an average day about a dozen new games are released on Steam. And while we think that's a good thing, it can be understandably hard to keep up with. Potentially exciting gems are sure to be lost in the deluge of new things to play unless you sort through every single game that is released on Steam. So that’s exactly what we’ve done. If nothing catches your fancy this week, we've gathered the best PC games you can play right now and a running list of the 2025 games that are launching this year.
Hail to the Rainbow
Steam page
Release: November 28
Developer: Hосков Сергей
Hail to the Rainbow is a moody first-person narrative game set in an Eastern European post-apocalypse. Despite the setting, the atmosphere and overall art style is quite different to Stalker or Chernobylite, leaning in a subtle cyberpunk direction. Protagonist Ignat has been living a relatively stable albeit joyless existence in this post-apocalypse, but this equilibrium is shattered when he receives an "unexpected message" prompting him to go out into the icy brutalist fray. Expect a lot of looking around, leavened with combat (both melee and ranged) and puzzle-solving.
Captain Wayne - Vacation Desperation
Steam page
Release: November 16
Developer: Ciaran Games LLC
This is a deliberately ugly boomer shooter that seems to pose the question: What would happen if a 12-year-old boy made a Build engine game? You play as Captain Wayne, who is on a permanent quest to rob and murder "every rich asshole around the globe" (now we're talking). He achieves this via the usual means—guns—but there's the usual retro boomer absurdism applied here, so expect the ballistics to get bonkers. Also expect a lot of ridiculous animated cutscenes.
The Use of Life
Steam page
Release: November 26
Developers: Daraneko Games
After a three year stint in early access, this "multi-ending adventure book style JRPG" has now hit 1.0. While most retro-style JRPGs tend to stick very close to the template forged in the 1980s, the creators of The Use of Life have taken an unorthodox approach to both combat and story presentation. The former mixes a turn-based approach with QTEs and is designedly tough, while the story unfolds like a story book, or visual novel. It's probably not for everyone, and even the developer admits as much. That's why there's a free demo.
Abandoned Archive
Steam page
Release: November 25
Developer: Vedal
I'd normally pass over another action roguelike with an art style like this, but Abandoned Archive has over 600 "overwhelmingly positive" reviews so it must be doing something right. Combat is all about spellcasting and synergizing different elemental magic, while exploration takes a pretty straightforward dungeon crawling approach, as the player descends a dangerous archive to encounter "some kind of synthetic horror" at its base.
Randomice
Steam page
Release: November 26
Developer: Videoludid
Here's a charming metroidvania roguelite about being a mouse. It's set in a big suburban house, which our vermin hero must navigate using an assortment of upgrades whose locations are randomized with every run. In other words, while the house's layout doesn't change, the way it must be navigated does—quite dramatically —depending on the layout of items. These include a rocket and a magnetic grappling hook, of course, these being things mice are known to use.
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