The Epic Store recently released a top 10 list of the best PC Games that are of the highest quality in their entire catalog. The list is produced in 2023 and includes some older games and some of the most recent releases.
The list comes out right after the holiday season when many players have received upgraded PCs or components. The games are not necessarily the latest games and some old stalwarts such as Sid Meier’s Civilization VI are rightfully on the list.
To be sure, there are some newer titles on the list including fan-favorite God of War Ragnarok. Interestingly, God of War Ragnarok won the category for Best Action/Adventure game during the recent Game Awards ceremony. So here are the 10 best PC games as chosen by the Epic Store:
10 Best PC Games from the Epic Store
Prey
Prey is an immersive sim set on Talos I, a space station that has been overrun by shape-shifting Mimics. Anything in the vast, open world can be an alien. Tables of mugs could harbor shadowy alien spiders, and “wet floor” signs skid off down the corridor, drawing you into the distressed station. Whether you survive Prey is a question of how resourceful you can be while dealing with increasing paranoia at everyday objects.
Prey doesn’t push back when a player tries to get creative. Exploration is encouraged, with abilities that allow you to possess items yourself (and wiggle through gaps as a mug) or to glide throughout the huge central hub to reach blocked-off areas. It even offers up the GLOO Cannon, a gun that lets you build your own routes up walls and over gaps. Or you can use it to freeze an alien.
It’s a vast puzzle of a game. A beautiful, bizarre mystery that expects more from the player than good aim and quick reflexes.
RimWorld
RimWorld is as much a collaborative story engine as it is a strategy game. You take charge of a small group of newly crashed colonists, trying to keep them housed, fed, and sane. While you’re doing this, the storyteller, a literal character with a background, will be preparing events that can raise morale or emotionally devastate your wards.
It’s a deep game. Your colonists have needs, desires, skills, inner thoughts, interpersonal conflicts, and more. Managing them is like raising a family. You give them goals, long strings of potential tasks they pick up as the need arises, but backstories and their mental condition will affect how they perform. Eventually, your colony will be a complex bunker, full of people just getting on with it, to those who are one insult away from a berserk rampage. Even without the storyteller waiting for a moment to strike, this would be challenging. But imagine starting the process of recovery from such an episode when a pirate raid is launched at you.
RimWorld is an almost voyeuristic game, but it’s one that will create lasting memories and even a few scars.
Hades
It takes a lot of confidence to release a game like Hades. You’re Prince Zagreus, the son of Hades, attempting to escape the cruel god’s underworld realm. Developers Supergiant Games have made a game where the character’s death is a requirement for growth, so every run will send you back to the start of the game, but better prepared for the next attempt.
You’ll keep coming back. The randomized challenges within the levels give the wonderfully designed worlds immense replayability. The resources you gathered in the previous runs can be used to purchase weapons and skills to make later runs more interesting. And with each death and rebirth, the panoply of gods and creatures of the underworld are drawn to talk to you, giving you deeper insight into the world you’re trying to flee from.
It’s the perfect game. Bite-sized runs of 30 mins can fit into a lunch break or longer spells of time if you decide to have one more go. And you probably will.
The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt – Game of the Year Edition
If there’s an RPG that defined the past few years, it’s The Witcher 3. The open-world adventure has no half-life, with players coming to Geralt of Rivia’s search for his adopted daughter in droves since its release in 2015.
Geralt is a monster hunter and slayer, a rare talent that causes deep suspicion among the people. But they need him to deal with the beasts that roam the land. He can use his senses to track monsters and battle them with weapons and magic. He wanders from hamlets to towns and cities, unraveling stories as he goes. The attention to detail in each moment is astonishing. Geralt can play a part in political intrigue, guiding the fates of rulers, or he can also fumigate a basement full of rats while chatting with a past lover.
The political situation is murkier than the swamps he fights in, but that’s what keeps the game so interesting and vital after all this time. Stories as compelling and reactive as The Witcher 3’s never age. To prove that point, the base game just had a next gen upgrade. Everything from graphics, sound, and controls have been brought up to modern standards, but they don’t need to touch the story. That’s timeless.
God of War
God of War’s a very human survival story that just happens to be about Gods. Having settled into family life in Midgard, Kratos and his young son embark on a trip to scatter his wife’s ashes at the highest peak of the nine realms. It’s a dangerous place, full of monsters and other gods, and Kratos must teach his son to navigate the world. Oh, and he has an awesome magic axe that defies the laws of physics.
It’s a lot of things. It’s, foremost, an absolutely classic and brutal action-adventure game and a great port of the original PlayStation 4 game. The axe is one of the best tools in all of gaming, and it’s at the heart of everything Kratos does. It can freeze creatures, home in on targets, and zip back to Kratos’s blood-slicked hands after being thrown. It’s the perfect weapon for a god.
The Norse setting (Kratos spent the previous games in Greece) brings new friends and foes to Kratos and gives each character in this vast tragedy the chance to express themselves. It’s not an open world, but it’s big and has room for some god-sized personalities.
But, at its heart, it’s about a dad passing his knowledge onto his son and hoping he turns out alright.
Related: Dying Light Enhanced Edition is Available for FREE on Epic Games Store!
Outer Wilds
Every 22 minutes, the star at the center of your solar system explodes and sends you back to the start of the game. You need to uncover secrets in every loop, piecing the solution to the disaster together across multiple lives and deaths.
Outer Wilds a game about exploration. About the joy of finding secrets that unlock more secrets. Clues that send you off on a journey about language and forgotten places. The design is remarkable, with planets built from clumps of twisted vines or twin bodies orbiting each other as a thin stream of ash pours from one to the other. Amidst the ruins and NPCs is a tale that slowly comes together, beautifully paced and guided by the previous solutions. It all adds up.
Despite the countdown, there’s a lovely, languid pace about life in the system. Even though it’s on the edge of exploding, it’s so perfectly realized that you’ll want to spend as long as you can there.
Disco Elysium – The Final Cut
No one has the same experience in Disco Elysium. The RPG is a dense tome, where fully-fleshed-out characters inhabit almost every area of the game. Your ability to deal with your own vices and manipulate others is at the heart of the game.
It goes deep. Your own stats have opinions on how they’ll be used, what you’re doing, who you are. You don’t have one inner voice but a family of them, and each one will give you strength or undermine your psyche. Your armor and weaponry and mostly mental.
And that’s just inside your head. In the real world, there’s a murder to solve, but you have woken on a bed without any memory of who you are and what you do. Even the decision of what to wear at this point will impact your strengths and weaknesses, sending you off on a personal journey through the pox-ridden city, one that you might not even survive.
Sid Meier’s Civilization VI
There’s no more enduring series on the PC than Sid Meier’s Civilization. The turn-based strategy series has a grasp on its fans like nothing else. It asks players to guide their civilization across millennia, expanding their tribe across an increasingly busy world.
The 4X game (“eXplore, eXpand, eXploit, and eXterminate”) is an alternate history lesson. Real-world leaders and countries settle onto the map and start to take over the map’s hexes. Your growth takes strategic knowledge, diplomatic insight, and some luck. You’ll be researching technology and aiming to power up from pottery to space flight while the map is slowly swallowed up by competing countries.
It’s a lot, but that’s the point. You don’t start a Civilization VI session without fully committing to the cause. You do it because the rewards are an endlessly fascinating game of global politics, one where a pacifist leader can develop nuclear capabilities under the right circumstances.
Even the AI program ChatGPT Loves Civilization!
Red Dead Redemption 2
As Arthur Morgan, you’ll experience the final throes of freedom of the Van der Linde gang as they move from camp to camp, paradoxically committing crimes in the hope of earning the right to settle down.
You won’t find a more lived-in open world on the PC than Red Dead Redemption 2. The elegant western game can lay claim to having one of the most detailed and beautifully designed game worlds ever. From drunken nights in the mud-packed towns of the frontier to quiet prairie nights under star-filled skies, there’s a real sense of place. Anything seems possible here. Head out on your horse, and you’re guaranteed to find someone interesting to talk to or rescue, a creature to hunt and skin, or a poor sap with a purse of gold for the taking.
Red Dead Redemption 2 might be knee-deep in cow splat, but there’s something compelling about the freedom it encourages. Giddy-up!
XCOM 2
If you’re seeking tactics, there’s no more compelling game than XCOM 2. The series is a PC gaming mainstay, and the modern reboot has built on the themes and gameplay of the older classics.
This time around, the Aliens are already occupying Earth, and you’re now the resistance. The titles were always about struggle, and now it’s felt more keenly than ever as you fight a guerilla war. It’s a game of two parts. The meta layer involves base building, which allows you to research technology, build weapons, recruit troops, and plan your missions. Then there are the battles, turn-based skirmishes where all that good world can come undone thanks to a poor choice of cover.
It’s the troops that really matter in XCOM 2. You get to know each squad member, and they grow in stature and skills with every victory. They’re a person, and you’ll feel their loss when they’re killed in action.
Conclusion 10 Best PC Games Chosen in 2023
In closing, these are the 10 best PC Games so far in 2023 that have been curated specifically from the Epic Store. Some of the games are older and some of them are brand-new updates. Enjoy them with your new PC equipment from the holiday season!
