(Image credit: Larian Studios)
2024 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 2024 games that are launching this year.
KinnikuNeko: Super Muscle Cat
Steam page
Release: March 19
Developer: Kamotachi
As the simplest person on the PC Gamer team, I am easily sold on a game if it stars a cat, but I did not see a bodybuilding cat in my tea leaves this morning. Is it cute or a horrible abomination? That’s the tension at the heart of KinnikuNeko, which is a pretty straightforward 2D platformer and beat ’em up about being a weird muscle cat. It comes wrapped—perhaps inevitably—in bright and cheerful anime stylings, and also inevitably, our ripped feline friend must defeat an alien scourge in the company of two pretty normal looking kids. Looks like dumb, low-stress fun.
Thunder Helix
Steam page
Release: March 22
Developer: David Walters
The ’90s was a golden age for complex flight simulators with austere un-textured polygonal graphics. I myself was not smart enough to play most of them, aside from the more arcade-centric Chuck Yaeger’s Air Combat, but there was a big market for the deep and serious flight affairs, and Thunder Helix is the first game (that I’ve seen!) to capitalise on a presumed nostalgia for that tradition. This helicopter gunship sim definitely looks the part, albeit with a frame rate maybe quadruple what my 386 could handle. The format seems similar to games of yore: missions carry out across a handful of objectives, but Thunder Helix also has evening and dawn missions, and uh, explosive camels for some reason. It’s in Early Access, with full release expected in about a year.
4D Golf
Steam page
Release: March 23
Developers: CodeParade
As the name implies, this is golf, but the mini-golf inspired courses enjoy a mind bending fourth dimension. If you’ve ever stared at a tesseract for hours wondering what the heck it’s meant to represent or evoke, a couple of hours playing 4D Golf will force you to figure it out. There are 120 levels, a level editor, “tons of visualization options to master 4D space” and probably a headache or two as you navigate the surreally shapeshifting spaces. Looks brilliant.
Parry Nightmare
Steam page
Release: March 22
Developer: Kakukaku Games
This is a bizarre action RPG where you don’t attack your enemies: you parry them. So parry-haters look away, I suppose. It kinda looks like a Vampire Survivors clone, for the fact that the topdown view is absolutely crawling with enemies, but as you can probably imagine, the action is a little more precision oriented. Health is obtained with every successful parry, and if you end up with an excess of “souls” you can use them to emit a screen-wiping special attack.
Bears In Space
Steam page
Release: March 23
Developer: Broadside Games
Bears in Space is a whimsical first-person shooter with intense bullet hell projectile dodging. There’s a big focus on precision and ceaseless movement, and—for some reason I’m not going to research—if you consume enough of the honey pots that are illogically strewn throughout the maps, you can transform into a bear. Better still, all this stupidity doesn’t come in the form of a roguelite: it’s a linear, single-player first-person shooter with varied environments and even mini-games. Also: bears.
