These 20 deep, absorbing PC games will eat days of your life
Brad Chacos
Built to last
Far too many games these days are built to be played in
small bursts: brief encounters, designed for a world with too few hours
in the day and too many digital distractions. And that's fine! Blasting
through a few rounds of Call of Duty multiplayer, or playing a few run-throughs in Spelunky, is a wonderful way to spend a few minutes.
But sometimes, you want something more—something meatier.
Whether you're looking for an entertaining way to blow a long weekend
or simply want to wrap your head around a satisfyingly complex
experience, these 20 deep, intricate, and just plain great PC games will hold you for hours and hours and hours on end.
The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt
After years of teasing and trailers, The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt finally arrived
in May 2015, instantly becoming a must-play game for RPG fans. The
final chapter of witcher Geralt’s trilogy mixes the gritty, realistic
atmosphere the series is famed for with a wide-open world reminiscent of
Skyrim—but oh so different.
Grand Theft Auto V
It took years for Grand Theft Auto V to land on PCs, but the wait was worth it. The PC version of GTA V
is easily the definitive version of the game, bundled with a video
editor for custom clips and overflowing with all sorts of settings and
sliders to tweak to bend the look of Los Santos to your will.
And oh, what a glorious world Los Santos is. GTA V
features not only the massive city, but also the surrounding
countryside, along with numerous suburbs, towns, and wilderness areas,
all overflowing with stuff to do. This playground is utterly massive—and it’s fully open and ready to explore from the get-go, unlike previous GTA games. You could waste days simply people watching in first-person mode, and that's before dipping your toes into the addictive GTA Online.
Dark Souls II
YOU DIED. Get used to the words; you'll see them a lot. But as brutal as this dark fantasy is—and it is, have no doubt—each of those deaths serves a purpose. Every demise in Dark Souls II
provides a learning experience, a small glimpse into the tightly-timed
attack patterns and vulnerabilities of your tormentors. Over time—after
you die and die and die—understanding dawns. When you finally use that
knowledge to best the enemy, the frustration of all those deaths fades
away in the moment of glory.
Until his buddy runs along and kills you with a single blow. This is the Dark Souls way. Love it or loathe it, you have to respect it—and mastering this world will take you many hours and many, many deaths.
Elite: Dangerous
A sequel to the beloved Elite from the Amiga-era days, Elite: Dangerousis massive. This mammoth game drops you into the middle of a ginormous universe with more than 400 billion—yes, billion—individual
star systems, each with their own planets, spacestations, asteroids,
players, and more. And new things are being added all the time, aided by
the games connectivity requirement. Simply traveling from our reviewer’s starting point to Earth’s home system took roughly 30 hours.
Elite: Dangerous would be well-served by better
introductory tutorials, but for sheer size and scope, virtually no game
beats this living, breathing world.
Wasteland 2
And Wasteland 2 is long. Simply leaving
the first major area—a.k.a., the short one—takes roughly 30 hours. The
entire game can take you more than twice that to finish. And then it’s
all too easy to start another campaign, given how deeply you can
customize each member of your four-member party and the how branching
and responsive the wider Wasteland 2 world is to your decisions, both large and small.
Don’t miss this game, is basically what I’m saying.
LA Noire
LA Noire
is, at its core, an impeccably executed, hard-boiled police drama. As a
member of the 1940s LAPD, you spend your time combing scenes for clues,
interrogating suspects, following leads, et cetera.
Built around a large number of scripted cases with linear scenarios—though an optional free-roaming mode is available—LA Noire
leans heavily on deft writing and powerful performances, buoyed by the
use of MotionScan technology, which portrays actors' faces in startling
detail, from small wrinkles to nervous tics. (Expressions play a major
role during interrogation scenes.) Fistfights, shoot-outs, car chases,
and foiled bank robberies add delicious action to the drama.
LA Noire grabs you by the throat and doesn't let go for roughly the same amount of time as two TV series seasons—an apt description for such a narrative powerhouse.
Dying Light
Dying Light
drops you into the middle of Harran, a large city made even larger by
its immense verticality—and the hordes of shambling zombies. Dying Light’s wide open world is basically Dead Island meets Far Cry meets parkour, and striding and leaping through the cityscape while waving cobbled-together uber-weapons at the undead is a hoot.
The base game alone will take you around 20 to 25 hours to complete, but Dying Light is bursting with secrets stuffed into every nook and cranny, from Mario Bros. homages to hidden weapons modeled after legendary blades. Fully exploring Harran will take you days—and that doesn’t even count the times you’re sidetracked by an irresistible zombie massacre.
Fallout: New Vegas
Welcome to the Mojave Wasteland, the post-bomb remnants of the Nevada
desert—a land rife with super-mutants, robots, bandits, desolate
outposts, and irradiated water. As "The Courier," your decisions will
mold the future of the Mojave, and which of several warring factions win
control of Hoover Dam and New Vegas itself—a shining gem in the barren
hellhole of the desert. Fallout: New Vegas
is all about choice. How you build your character is up to you.
Stealthy lock-picker? Computer whiz? Run-and-gunner? It's all good.
What's more, the Mojave Wasteland is a vast, wide-open world to explore,
with hundreds of secrets hidden in the sand. Combined with the
branching storyline, New Vegas will take you dozens of hours to explore—or hundreds, if you decide to play again with new characters and factions.
The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim
The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim has a lot in common with Fallout: New Vegas,
which makes sense—Bethesda owns both. Massive, open world populated
with thousands of NPCs? Check. Deep character customization options?
Check. Dozens of side-quests to discover and conquer? Check. Inventory
items a-plenty? Yep, that's there too.
But Skyrim swaps out Fallout: New Vegas' retro-futuristic
desert and guns in favor of a frigid fantasy realm full of dragons,
magic, castles, and vampires. Join a guild, take sides in a rebellion,
or ignore everyone else and just go wandering through the snow-capped
mountains in search of lost crypts—Skyrim doesn't care. Either way, be ready to lose a big chunk of your life to Skyrim once you pick up your sword.
EVE Online
Ostensibly a massively multiplayer online RPG set in a space-tastic sci-fi setting, EVE Online's
often referred to as a "spreadsheet simulator" for its heavy reliance
on statistics and focus on long-term planning. Building advanced ships
takes insane amounts of in-game money and weeks of real-world time.
It's the players and universe that really make EVE Online shine, though: While day-to-day life in EVE
involves a fair share of trading, ship-building, or pirating, the
intrigue swirling around interstellar corporate politics gives EVE a feel unlike any other.
Sometimes, the tension explodes in massive space battles involving thousands of players and ships—like this one
that did more than 300,000 real-world dollars' worth of damage. And did
I mention the time one group tried to tank the entire game's economy by
burning the most populated system in the game—a supposed safe haven—to the ground?
XCOM: Enemy Unknown
XCOM: Enemy Unknown
tasks you with defending Earth against hordes of invading aliens,
commanding a force of soldiers putting their lives on the line to push
back the threat. That's no joke: If one of the commandos under your
watch dies, he stays dead, taking his hard-won experience with him. Too
many wrong moves could leave your squad stacked with rookies rather than
grizzled vets.
XCOM's tactical, turn-based combat is tough, but
the game gives you plenty of time to think through your moves. Between
missions, you deal with organizational tasks—managing finances,
expanding XCOM operations, researching newly uncovered alien tech, et cetera.
The single-player game is plenty long, but the enemy placement in
battle is randomized, so every play-through is a unique experience.
Divinity: Original Sin
Much like Wasteland 2, Divinity: Original Sin is part of the grand Kickstarter-funded wave of utterly superb old-school-esque CRPGs that took the world by storm in 2014.
Divinity: Original Sin sports some wickedly smart
dialogue—especially when you’re chatting with animals—and an awesome
level of interactivity in its environments, which adds a thrilling new
dimension to combat compared to most RPGs. The game features a
co-op-friendly pair of main characters, too, so you can play all of it
with a buddy at your side—or argue with yourself if you’re playing solo.
Pillars of Eternity
Oh wow. Yet another entry in this mini-gauntlet of
“Old-school RPGs that were funded on Kickstarter and wound up blowing us
away,” Pillars of Eternity is nothing short of an utterly masterful game—and the Baldur’s Gate spiritual successor you’ve been waiting for all these years. (It’s made by Obsidian, which also created Fallout: New Vegas.)
Pillars of Eternity , like Divinity and Wasteland 2,
features outstanding writing and world-building that reveals just how
deep lore can go when freed from the shackles of voice acting and facial
animations. The game’s 11 well-balanced character classes go far beyond
the usual “fighter-mage-thief” trio. In a nutshell, Pillars of Eternity screams “Infinity Engine,” but with all the rough edges polished off.
Deus Ex: Human Revolution
The cyberpunk world of Deus Ex: Human Revolution
doesn't shy away from asking heavy questions. Playing as a private
security agent whose body is augmented with biotechnology after a
terrorist attack leaves you broken, Human Revolution's deep and
dark storyline ponders the ethics of transhumanism, globalization,
poverty, and the role of increasingly powerful corporations in human
society.
Whew! Fortunately, all those heavy themes are backed up by some
stellar first-person gameplay. The augmentations you choose help you
tailor the gameplay to your chosen style: It's possible to be a weapons
expert, a hacker, a stealthy sneak, a smooth talker, or some combination
of your choosing. Heck, you can even play as a pacifist, never killing a
single enemy, with numerous endings available depending on your
actions. Don't miss this.
Sid Meier's Civilization V
No talk about intricate, meaty games guaranteed to suck away your free time would be complete without Sid Meier's Civilization V. The fifth installment in Meier's universally acclaimed series, Civ V is a 4X strategy
extravaganza, tasking you with growing an empire from its first
primitive settlement all the way through a bustling multi-city empire in
the atomic era—perhaps even to the stars, if that's how your game
shakes out.
There's a wide world to be discovered: cities to be built;
land to clear for resources; technology to research; nation-altering
social policies to implement; and, oh yes, plenty of wars to be fought.
What's more, each of the dozens of available countries plays
differently. It's all so well-balanced, so finely tuned, that you'll be playing "just one more turn" long into the night.
Europa Universalis IV
Europa Universalis IV—one of PCWorld's favorite games of 2013 —is an empire-building 4X strategy game like Civ V, but the resemblances end there. Whereas Civ has a very defined (if widely varied) set of end goals, EUIV delivers a more sandbox-like experience.
Once you pick a country to play as and a year to start, you're basically left to your own devices. Europa Universalis IV
is a game about colonization, enlightenment, overthrowing tyranny,
religious upheaval, nation-building, mercantilism, piracy, feuding
monarchies, and political intrigue—or none of that, if you feel like
ignoring it. War is discouraged; patience and planning is required.
Endless Legend breathes new life into the somewhat
stale genre by imbuing each faction with distinctive attributes. The
differences are more than mere unique units, too: Certain factions can’t
declare peace after being provoked, while others are able to relocate
their city at will, and so forth. Getting a handle on each of the stock
factions in this wondrous game takes days and days, and once you do, you
can even create custom factions of your own. Whew!
State of Decay
I know, I know—zombie games are a dime a dozen these days. But State of Decay
stands out by being more of a zombie-apocalypse simulator than anything
else. Sure, there's a story to follow if you feel so inclined, but it's
more of an excuse to drop you in a zombie-filled survival sandbox.
Limited weaponry and a harsh stamina meter means you'll spend more time
running from zombies than mowing them down. You'll need to slink around
town to find survivors, scavenge for supplies, and scrounge up
reinforcements for your safehouses.
State of Decay's world continues even if you're not
playing. Sign off for too long, and your supplies will be low when you
return, while members of your group may trust you less. Some may even
commit suicide in despair. Character death is permanent, and any
accumulated skills also perish.
Inquisition —one of our favorite games of 2014—features
several large, wide-open areas to explore, all teeming with baddies to
kill, quests to solve, and treasures to sniff out. The storyline and
characterization is second-to-none, and it’s all sporting BioWare’s
customarily insane level of polish. If the game winds up grabbing you by
the throat, BioWare says there’s more than 120 hours of content in
total. But there’s still a heck of a lot of superb gaming to be found in
Dragon Age: Inquisition even if you skip out on some of the fetch quests and optional resource gathering.
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