2023 games: Upcoming releases
Best PC games: All-time favorites
Free PC games: Freebie fest
Best FPSes: Finest gunplay
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 2023 games that are launching this year.
Starship Troopers: Extermination
Steam page
Release: May 18
Developer: Offworld Industries
Launch price: $25 | £21 | AU$36.50
A 16 player cooperative first-person shooter set in the Starship Troopers universe? Somehow I missed that this was coming, despite Andy writing it up last year, but it looks really good and the Steam reviews are "very positive" at the time of writing. There's a lot of alien murder, as you'd expect, but Extermination also involves taking and rebuilding bases, in a race to secure as much play space from the ruthless arachnid bastards as possible. There are three classes, an Apex Legends-style ping system, and make no mistake: countless horrible bugs on screen at once. Extermination is currently in Early Access, and will stay there for "approximately one year" while new maps, weapons, enemies, and much more are added, in addition to the usual polish.
Aetheris
Steam page
Release: May 18
Developer: Wild Wits
Launch price: $20.74 | £17.42 | AU$30.29
This tactical roguelike stands out for its utterly original art style, which defies description. It's colorful, collage-like, exquisitely elaborate, and looks even better in motion than it does in screenshots. What's the game like? Its centerpiece is turn-based tactical combat on a hex grid, while exploration is conducted from a sidelong perspective. You can expect the usual skill trees and ability management, though the nature of these is determined by the "personality" of your player character, which I'm guessing works a little like a class system. Aetheris is an Early Access affair: it's expected to release into 1.0 by September, with a cooperative multiplayer mode expected to roll out during that time.
Elypse
Steam page
Release: May 18
Developer: Hot Chili Games
Launch price: $13.49 | £13.49 | AU$19.75
Elypse is a gorgeous Metroidvania with some very obvious points of reference: it looks a heck of a lot like Hollow Knight and Ori and the Blind Forest. Like most exploration platformers, it lives and dies according to its, uh, vibe, and Elypse's art style has a lot going for it, especially if you find the two aforementioned games pretty. It definitely won't win any awards for originality, but it's surprisingly rare for precision platforming to factor into a modern Metroidvania, so you could probably throw a Celeste or Super Meat Boy reference into this blurb as well.
Hand of Doom
Steam page
Release: May 17
Developer: Torple Dook
Launch price: $10 | £8.50 | AU$14.50
Published by horror merchants DreadXP, Hand of Doom is a retro-styled dungeon crawler that looks the spitting image of something you'd have bought in a massive box back in 1993. It's actually a full-length version of a mini-game featured in the first Dread X collection, and follows the adventures of an apprentice wizard sent on a mission "across the planes of existence" to prevent some huge reality-destroying disaster. It looks like fantasy, but there's a strange surrealistic quality to Hand of Doom that can partially be attributed to its antiquated sound design and uncanny sprite-based 3D graphics. Also it has a doom metal soundtrack, so you can't go wrong.
Kargast
Steam page
Release: May 17
Developer: Frymore
Launch price: $9 | £6.29 | AU$13.05
Kargast is a narrative-driven retro RPG, and to be perfectly honest, the reason it's featured in this list is because it features a turn-based battle against an "80s car". That is funny to me. At least part of the aim of Kargast is to elicit a laugh, albeit a potentially uncomfortable laugh, because the setting is quite bleak: the protagonist is an "unwell child on the brink of death" who must navigate a surrealistic world, fighting weird enemies and uncovering an array of "strange truths". With its branching narrative and "semi-satirical view of narrative RPGs", this one looks cut from the same cloth as Undertale and Omori.
