Welcome to the third ever RPS 100: Readers Edition. This is the (nearly) annual tradition of you, RPS readers, telling us where we went wrong in *our *annual tradition of trying to fit all of our favourite games into a list of the 100 best PC games of all time.
The list below is your list, voted for by your fellow readers.
This year, so we don’t see four of your precious 100 slots filled up with different versions of Football Manager, I’ve combined the entries of games that are in the same series. It creates a few more slots in the list for other games, letting us see the full variety of your tastes. However, I’ve included the breakdown of the votes, so you can see which series entry was the most popular among your fell…
Welcome to the third ever RPS 100: Readers Edition. This is the (nearly) annual tradition of you, RPS readers, telling us where we went wrong in *our *annual tradition of trying to fit all of our favourite games into a list of the 100 best PC games of all time.
The list below is your list, voted for by your fellow readers.
This year, so we don’t see four of your precious 100 slots filled up with different versions of Football Manager, I’ve combined the entries of games that are in the same series. It creates a few more slots in the list for other games, letting us see the full variety of your tastes. However, I’ve included the breakdown of the votes, so you can see which series entry was the most popular among your fellow readers.
I want to say a huge thank you to everyone who voted and even huger thank you to everyone who took the time to share their thoughts on why they picked the games they did. It’s been a genuine pleasure to read through your words. There isn’t a single game in the top 100 that doesn’t have something written about it and it turns this list into a true celebration of your past time. There are many games in the list below that I’ll be returning to because of what you’ve written about them. So, again, thank you.
As with our top 100, I’ll be revealing 20 games a day until all 100 are revealed. So if you think a game is missing, make sure you check back, because it may be still to come.
Without further ado, let’s get onto the first games from your RPS 100: Readers Edition (2025).
100. X series
Image credit: Egosoft
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X3: Albion Prelude - 8 points
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X4: Foundations - 16 points
TheGreatOneSea – X4: Foundations Some games are carried more by being unique than being objectively amazing, and X4 is certainly one of them, but how many games let you be a Space Truckin’ Mercenary Captain Architect Pirate with their own Military Industrial Complex?
Jovian09 – X4: Foundations My favourite brand of space sim. The X series is peak eurojank, but it’s also a simulation of a fully living economy where every sector is worth visiting, you can fly everything from speedy fighters to lumbering freighters or colossal capital ships, build complex space factories and command fleets, and your every action impacts the universe around you. X4 executes its grand ambition by keeping the action in space-only sectors, which makes the scope expansive but much more sharply-focused than, say, Star Citizen or Elite Dangerous.
99. Hardspace: Shipbreaker
Image credit: Rock Paper Shotgun / Focus Home Interactive / Blackbird Interactive
Dglenny One of the only work sims that genuinely soothed and grabbed me. I don’t want to do power washing or lawn mowing – I do enough of that in my real life. But carefully deconstructing a spaceship – yes, please. See also: Crime Scene Cleaner, I suppose.
Bahumat The pure flow state you fall into, drifting in space, disassembling leviathans like the worms that feast on fallen whales.
NCD Banjos in space are cool. It’s also a masterpiece of game design where all the mechanics are integrated and justified in the narrative; from death to progression.
Phuzz This game seems to have bits taken from at least half the other games on my list, there’s wanton destruction, cleaning up, it’s set in space, there’s a story but mostly it’s a zen activity that tickles my brain *just right*. I’ve played hundreds of hours past the ‘end’ of the game. Just breaking down new hulks.
98. Horizon Zero Dawn
Image credit: Rock Paper Shotgun / Sony Interactive Entertainment / Guerrilla Games
Random squiggle Beautiful world, intriguing story, fighting giant robot dinosaurs!
Neminem88 I relate to the story, it has hope, and perfectly thought out gameplay.
97. Oxygen Not Included
Image credit: Klei Entertainment
Sockmoxy As I’ve said elsewhere on this site, this game has inspired actual real-world resilience and failure tolerance in me, as well as a useful recognition that small steps are needed to get somewhere big. Solving one problem always creates another problem to solve. Boredom is impossible. If you’re bored, something is wrong and you’re about to find out. Love the art, love that the devs are still supporting this regularly so many years later. Best game ever.
NCD I’ve never got anywhere in this game, but no other game in my library comes close to my total playtime on this game, so that has to count for something.
96. What Remains of Edith Finch
Image credit: Annapurna Interactive / Giant Sparrow
H3rz0g_zw31 A perfect game, which does everything it sets out to do.
I_have_no_nose_but_I_must_sneeze What could have been unbearably sad is infused with so much macabre exuberance. Death is a gateway to experiencing each person’s personal universe. An easy recommendation for any newcomers who want to see what all this gaming business is about.
95. Alan Wake 2
Image credit: Epic Games Publishing / Remedy Entertainment
RAC41 So much goddamn lore and the farther you go, the better it becomes. Sam Lake and Kyle Rowley did their best to create this masterfully crafted survival horror experience and it‘s extremely enjoyable.
Can‘t wait for Control 2.
OmegaJak Sublime meta fantasy horror madness. Resident Evil by way of Twin Peaks. Genius.
Garfieldsam Alan Wake 2 pushes games forward as an artform across multiple dimensions – writing, technical artistry, and art direction that’s genuinely stunning. If you’ve spent decades invested in Remedy’s connected universe, it delivers one of the best cross-IP stories ever told. It’s legitimately spooky as hell, not just atmospheric but genuinely frightening. The DLC even has legitimately useful and interesting things to say about generative AI.
B0dyp0litic Everything I could want from, David Lynch and the New Weird, having lived in both Oregon & NYC this is so accurate in its portrayals of each locale it was surreal.
94. Planescape: Torment
Image credit: Interplay Entertainment / Black Isle Studios
Plato_Karamazov Where I am going, time is not measured in years
Drygear I’m not sure if I’ll ever play this again, but the experiences I have had with it are some of the most memorable in gaming. For me, it’s all about unraveling (I wish the pun was intentional) the depths of your history with not only the world but with your companions. Trying to take the chance to repair the things I’ve broken and heal the people I’ve hurt, as much as possible. The way your actions can cause unexpected consequences, like the time I made it through a difficult conversation to persuade someone only for one of my party members to murder the person.
FreonTrotsky What can change the nature of a gamer? Torment’s winding philosophical story, told through dialogue choices and volumes of text, can feel a little overwhelming, especially when paired with pretty underwhelming combat and pathfinding. But it cuts deep, makes you think and feel things: troubling, mind-expanding, and mystifying things. And that’s just the text. The world of Planescape looks like spare engine parts crossbred with a bucket of viscera, and every NPC encounter feels like a stoned deconstruction of high fantasy tropes. Sound terrible? It’s fantastic, just completely bonkers.
93. Terraria
Image credit: 505 Games / Re-Logic
Caff I dig it. A massive game, given a huge number of free updates by the Re-Logic devs over the years.
Shay Linio Terraria is the indie of all indies. Still "in the making", it’s a game you could play with anyone. It is the game I bought ten times for ten different people ten years ago and feels like you could still play it in ten years.
92. Overwatch series
Image credit: Blizzard Entertainment
- Overwatch - 26 points
- Overwatch 2 - 2 points
Garfieldsam Overwatch hit the perfect middle ground between ultra-sweaty MOBAs and tactical shooters – accessible enough to be fun casually, deep enough to reward mastery. The characters were amazing, and for several years it fostered a remarkably positive, engaged, and inclusive community. It proved team-based shooters could be welcoming without sacrificing depth, at least until Blizzard squandered that goodwill.
Gaspacho Hero shooter with meaningful design choice for heroes capacity.
Chopoflamb I was hooked on Overwatch from the very first time I saw it, enjoy the competition and teamwork
91. Baba Is You
Image credit: Hempuli
Shay Linio One of the best puzzle games
Thrownfootfalls I have such a mixed experience with puzzle games. I’ve just discovered today that, at the moment, my top four games of all time are puzzle games, but if you’d asked me for my least favourite games instead, you’d find several well-respected games in there too. In many ways, the mechanics of Baba Is You are like the latter kind, but turned into something that feels crafted to delight, challenge, amuse, and thoroughly crumple my brain in the best possible way.
90. Chrono Trigger
Image credit: Rock Paper Shotgun / Square
Soberbandana An unparalleled mixture of top notch music, storytelling and gameplay that stands the test of time.
Elazul It’s the best RPG game from the golden age of SNES RPG games. Fantastic gameplay from creators Yuji Horii, Hironobu Sakaguchi and Kazuhiko Torishima. Also, amazing music done by Yasunori Mitsuda, and art done by Akira Toriyama. It also helps that it has aged like fine wine. It’s even spawned its own 16 bit copy cat genre as well with such games as Sea of Stars.
89. Heaven’s Vault
Image credit: Inkle
Cpt_freakout A profound reflection about history and memory, in which all that is air comes to solidify into relations of imperial domain, resistance, and the uses and abuses of the past. Language is power: to translate is to recover lost meanings, to redraw the boundaries of myth and storytelling already found, and to propose words for the future, an affirmative remix of the past and present.
Rincechicken A genius idea with the language to decipher, and a surprisingly deep and rich story text as you uncover the remains of the civilisations. I can see why RPS staff have always kept it in the top 100. Well deserved.
Random squiggle The sense of discovery, the language puzzles. Relaxing and engaging.
Kniggit Such an ambitious and fascinating game. Great believable story. Beautiful music.
88. Jagged Alliance 2
Image credit: TopWare Interactive / Sir-Tech Canada
Rince Wind It is the mercs that make this game. They have so many lines for a game of the time, and there are so many of them. And not just to react to stuff happening on the battlefield, but their interactions with friends and rivals and the messages on their answering machines and when you actually reach them by phone.
I really need to play the 1.13 patch/mod again.
HyperTextHero (#8466) I received my boxed copy of Jagged Alliance 2 in Italy during the spring of 1999 after playing its Demoville level the year prior, installed from some PC gaming magazine CD, for longer than I play most full games.
Keeping track of everything, from missions and side quests, team dynamics with incompatible personalities, cashflow from captured mines, and a toybox full of items from sunglasses and camouflage makeup to gun trinkets and different types of ammo for the tactical battles is challenging, and shapes the game into a peculiar strategic and tactical problem solving exercise that few games can muster.
87. Star Control II: The Ur-Quan Masters
Image credit: Accolade, Inc / Toys For Bob
Pauleyc The ideal space adventure: brilliant dialogue, excellent music and engaging arcade combat.
86. Team Fortress 2
Image credit: Rock Paper Shotgun / Valve
Marglark I don’t like COD or Battlefield, but before griefers were commonplace I loved this game. It has a sense of humor in its bones, and cares more about people having fun cooperating than anything else.
Joel B The Free to Play era of Team Fortress 2 has soured my memories of it a bit. But in honesty I’d say that 1) TF2 as a F2P game has been a huge mover and shaker in the fortunes of Valve and PC gaming, and 2) pre-F2P, I put crazy amounts of time into TF2. I loved Team Fortress, I loved Team Fortress Classic, and I loved TF2. The art direction was tasty, those short films were hilarious, but most importantly it was a game where occasionally some actual teamplay would appear out of nowhere among random pubbies. That’s the best.
Bahumat *inarticulate Pyro-main noises*
RPS said it best: The most culturally important game I’ve ever played, short of like, what? Mario? What else do you even put on that plinth? Pac-man?
Team Fortress 2 *was* the Mario for the generation it hit for.
85. The Long Dark
Image credit: Hinterland Studio
P53 Countless times since its release more than a decade ago, it has provided me with tons of emergent experiences and feelings. I come back to this game like a good, old friend, who is always there for me. Also – simply the best survival sim out there. And I know them all.
84. The Stanley Parable
Image credit: Rock Paper Shotgun / Galactic Cafe
Caff Silly and mind-bending in all the right ways.
Thrownfootfalls One of my family members will occasionally try a game, and no matter the genre or style or difficulty, they will entirely refuse to engage with it on its own terms, and then later say how bad it was. I think this game is the only one that might just meet them where they are.
Saliken – Ultimate Deluxe Edition I specify the Ultra Deluxe Edition here but to me both the original and sequel feel like one enmeshed experience. Where the first humorously contemplates narration and player agency, the sequel goes off the walls challenging you to think about what you’re doing and why. God I don’t know why but I love that bucket.
83. Like A Dragon series
Image credit: Rock Paper Shotgun / Sega / Ryu Ga Gotoku Studio
- Yakuza 5 - 6 points
- Yakuza 0 - 12 points
- Like a Dragon: Infinite Wealth - 9 points
- Like a Dragon: Pirate Yakuza in Hawaii - 1 points
Wall Jump Games – Infinite Wealth It’s always a toss up for me between 7 and 8 for my favourite game in the Yakuza series, but at the end of day, Yakuza/Like A Dragon is my favourite series, and Infinite Wealth is, on top of being a stellar RPG in both story and mechanics, a brilliant celebration of the whole series before it. Kiryu’s part of this story is one of the emotionally strongest elements of the entire series whilst still being resplendent with fan service, hitting every part of my Yakuza fan brain with equal intensity.
Justin – Yakuza 0 The Yakuza series is a revelation. Punch your way through your problems on the backstreets of Kamurocho. Ludonarrative dissonance is a phrase that thankfully doesn’t get bandied about as much as it used to, but whatever the opposite of ludonarrative dissonance is is what I feel when I play a Yakuza game. Of course, Kiryu (and by extension, I) should beat that guy up. He’ll probably be my best friend after and thank me for the whalloping he so richly deserves. Please let’s all be sure to rip our shirts off first though, so we can admire each other.
Tattoos!h3rz0g_zw31 – Yakuza 5 Since I can’t stuff the list with just Yakuza, I’ll pick the biggest, dumbest one. It just feels like a game where every idea got in. Whole campaign as a teen idol? Sure! Whole plot weirdly centered around baseball? Alright! Taxi driving and racing minigame with a separate storyline? Why not! I love it so much.
82. Football Manager series
Image credit: Sega / Sports Interactive
- Football Manager - 15 points
- Football Manager 2012 - 2 points
- Football Manager 2017 - 9 points
- Football Manager 2020 - 1 points
- Football Manager 2024 - 1 points
Mackemforever – Football Manager 2017 For me, Football Manager can be summed up with two words. Rafael Asprilla. Mr Asprilla doesn’t exist, and yet as I write this I am wearing a shirt with his name on it. It was 2037, I was managing Alianza Petrolera F.C. in Colombia when a young Rafael Asprilla joined our ranks. For a few years he did nothing, but eventually got a chance and never looked back, going on to be a club legend. So I bought an Alianza Petrolera F.C. kit with his name on. And that is why Football Manager is great.
81. Call of Duty series
Image credit: Activision / Infinity Ward
- Call of Duty - 5 points
- Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare - 14 points
- Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 - 9 points
Hiddencamel – Call of Duty (2003) The original Call of Duty was just so freakin epic in single player – no other shooter before had really gone all out on being cinematic like CoD did, and man it was awesome. The multiplayer was also amazing fun. The asymmetric and limited weapon choices between teams and the generally amazing map designs made for a super tense, super compelling online shooter with none of the progression based bloat of its descendents.
Nathan A – Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare People forget how innovative and genuine cod used to be. This game revolutionized online multi-player and solidified the fps genre.
Come back tomorrow to see the the next 20 picks.
What do you think of the picks so far? Anything you’re glad is included that you think was missing from our 100 best PC games of all time list?
If you’re hungry for more lists, then have a look and what we said were the PC games of all time in 2024, 2023 (part 1, part 2), 2022 (part 1, part 2), and 2021 (part 1, part 2). Or go back to the previous RPS 100 Reader Editions to compare how your choices have shifted over the years. We’ve polled you ofr picks twice before, in 2023 and 2022.