Best of the best
(Image credit: Xbox Game Studios)
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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 2025 games that are launching this year.
Carimara: Beneath The Forlorn Limbs
Steam page Release: October 6Developer: Bastinus Rex
Carimara is a mysterious lil’ narrative game that lasts for around the length of a feature film. As the “small, mute sorcerous” Carimara, it’s your task to roam a bizarre, greyscale house and its surrounds, conjuring questions for its inhabitants via cards. These cards are obtained from objects—like an old grave in the yard, for example—and once found, can be presented to the inhabitants. Be careful though, because the responses vary, and sometimes these people will not appreciate some topics being broached. This is a subtle horror-inflected experience which leaves a lingering melancholy in its wake.
Dying Breed
Steam pageRelease: October 7Developer: Sarnayer
When I first stumbled on the Steam page for Dying Breed I thought it was a newly exhumed '90s RTS deep cut, but it’s actually new, and studio Sarnayer has nailed the retro presentation. From its Command & Conquer style FMV cutscenes, through to the chunky top-down pixel art, Dying Breed has 1994 written all over it, except for one big difference: it has a horror post-apocalypse theme, which is unusual for this genre. Yep, there are zombies. This Microprose-published affair is in Early Access: it currently has two playable factions, 22 missions and over 50 unit and building types, but it’ll grow much bigger over the next 12 months.
Bye Sweet Carole
Steam pageRelease: October 10Developers: Little Sewing MachineHere’s a fascinating horror game with an art style reminiscent of early '90s Disney animation. It’s a sidescrolling cinematic platformer, roughly in the same mould as Another World, Unravel and Little Nightmares, though the moments you play and the moments you watch feel very much of a piece, giving it the air of a long lost feature film. Expect a mix of puzzle solving and tense stealth as you help protagonist Lana Benton seek out her missing friend in a gorgeously rendered early 20th century England.
The Lacerator
Steam pageRelease: October 10Developer: Games From The Abyss
If the vibes above are too subtle, here’s The Lacerator to the rescue. It’s a '90s style fixed-camera third-person horror with a ruthlessly grim set up: you’re a porn star trapped in the trap-infested lair of a snuff filmmaker. That means trying to get out, of course, via the solving of problems and the elimination of grim adversaries, but there’s also an unkillable Nemesis-style stalker—in the form of the dungeon-owner themself—to contend with the whole time. As you can probably imagine, it looks like absolute shit in the most terrifying, evocative way possible.
The Farmer Was Replaced
Steam page Release: October 11Developer: Timon Herzog
The Farmer Was Replaced is a fascinating game about programming a drone to automate various farming tasks. And yes, that means doing some actual Python-style programming. In other words, it’s ticking two niche sim boxes at one: automation and programming. As the Steam page points out, most programming games are a series of discrete puzzles, but in The Farmer Was Replaced you’ll continue to tend to these same, increasingly large garden, solving increasingly byzantine problems.
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