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.
Kingdom of Night
Steam page
Release: December 3
Developer: Friends of Safety
Kingdom of Knight is a pixel art action RPG set in 1980s Miami, but not that Miami. I'm talking a tiny Arizona town with the same name which, after a brief sojourn on Google Maps, looks like the perfect setting for a horror game (with apologies to Miami residents!). While Kingdom of Knight undeniably looks like more post-Stranger Things nostalgia bait, it's also an engaging RPG with five distinct classes, oodles of skills to deliberate over, and an abundance of graded loot to sift through. So while its influences are pretty obvious, it combines two things—1980s horror and a loot-oriented action RPG—that aren't often matched. Best of all, it has split screen co-op.
Nine-Ball Roulette
Steam page
Release: December 5
Developer: WaveBox Labs
Nine-Ball Roulette is an online twist on pool for up to four players, but as the name implies, everyone's armed with a pistol. Each player is tasked with taking on a random pool-oriented challenge, and if you mess it up you'll need to pull the trigger at your skull and hope for the best. After a stint in early access, Nine-Ball Roulette launched into 1.0 last week with a bunch of new modes and the ability to throw crap onto the table to distract your opponents. It looks like a lot of fun, and its recent "overwhelmingly positive" status is promising for a $3 game.
Effulgence RPG
Steam page
Release: December 3
Developers: Andrei Fomin
Your mileage may vary depending on your age, but I'm immediately drawn to Effulgence RPG for its glorious dayglo ASCII art style. It's an early access sci-fi RPG, and what you can buy on Steam today is basically a short 1.5 hour demo. In other words, at this point it's only worthwhile for people who want to help shape the game, but if that's you this thing looks sumptuous. The turn-based party-oriented combat is all about smashing enemies into ASCII fragments, which you can then use to make gear. Joshua Wolens played a demo back in October and liked it a lot.
Scrabdackle
Steam page
Release: December 3
Developer: jakefriend
Scrabdackle is another early access project taking the form of an open world Zeldalike. It's set to release in three episodes, with this first comprising a decent 15 hour chunk. It follows the travails of Blue, a budding wizard who has been forcibly ejected from their besieged wizard academy. Blue needs to make their way home through the dangerous world of Scrabdackle, and in the spirit the older Zelda games there's several ways to tackle this task, though some avenues will be gated based on the skills you've acquired. The art is charmingly askew, both hand-drawn and hand-animated, with thick readable lines and amusingly cute baddies.
Old School Rally
Steam page
Release: December 4
Developer: Frozen Lake Games
If you think rally games went down hill after 1998's Colin McRae Rally, this is the game for you. Old School Rally looks like a quintessential fifth generation racer, with box-like cars, flat roadside forests, and charmingly awkward tree sprites. It takes an arcade approach to the sport, but there's still a good amount of precision involved, and while it's single player only, there are leaderboards to compete on.
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