The best laptop games

The best "laptop games" these days are really just... great games. Once upon a time, high-end PC games were out of reach for our portable computers, but these days gaming laptops are powerful beasts, while thin-and-light laptops still pack powerful enough integrated graphics to play competitive games, deckbuilders, and endless hours of lightweight roguelikes and gripping strategy games.

You can play practically anything on a laptop, though that doesn't mean you should play everything on a laptop. Some games are just built for sitting at alert at a desk, or in front of a giant HDR screen that lets you appreciate the latest dazzling ray tracing. But that still leaves us with an absolutely dizzying number of PC games ideally suited to a laptop. So what should you play?

Our picks for the best laptop games prioritize lighter system requirements so you can make the most out of your battery life and keep those laptop fans from blasting hot air into your laptop. They typically play very well on a trackpad or with a USB travel mouse, so you can play them even without a perfect desk setup. There aren't many games ideally played with a gamepad on this list, but for recommendations in that vein check out the best Steam Deck games which likewise keep performance demands low.

The best laptop games don't rely on your PC blasting out 144 frames per second or having RTX on. A few are marked with a 🖱 to indicate you'll really want a mouse to get the best out of them, though.

Plenty of these games do scale up nicely to more powerful hardware. So if you have a Razer Blade or some other high-end laptop you'll still be able to put all that tech to work. But none of them require that level of oomph just to have fun.

Below you'll find our favorite just-one-more-turn games for laptops, plus a wealth of free-to-play picks, roguelikes, and absorbing adventures. And remember that just about anything from the early 2010s or prior will run on a new laptop with ease. Check out GOG's old games or the Internet Archive's in-browser emulation library for many, many more classic options.

And if reading about the best laptop games has you thinking it might be time for an upgrade, here's our guide to the best gaming laptops.

Free-to-play laptop games: What's hot right now

🖱 Marvel Rivals

Release: 2024 | Developer: NetEase | Link: Steam

Marvel Rivals is doing something pretty darn impressive in 2025: Show that hero shooters are still the bee's knees. The 6v6 third-person shooter owes a whole lot to Blizzard for its core hero designs (many Rivals heroes can be described as "this Overwatch character but faster"), but it's the striking ink-inspired art, expressive takes on familiar characters, and imaginative abilities winning over millions of players.

It's also reasonably low-spec for an Unreal Engine 5 game with semi-destructible maps, but NetEase has struggled with performance at launch. January's season one update added additional "performance" options for model and environment detail, which should help stabilize framerates.

🖱 Delta Force

Release: 2024 | Developer: Team Jade | Link: Steam

A bit Call of Duty, a bit Battlefield, this new military shooter doesn't necessarily carve out a wholly unique lane for itself. But it doesn't really have to: Being a large-scale multiplayer free-to-player shooter that comes within spitting distance of those two heavy hitters is enough of a feat to earn it a small army of active players. With a singleplayer campaign add-on dropping in the first half of 2025, it's likely to remain one of the most-played shooters of the year.

League of Legends

Release: 2024 | Developer: Riot Games | Link: Steam

Is it silly to call League of Legends hot in 2025? One of the defininitive free-to-play games has been going strong for ages and ages, but it nonetheless feels a bit buzzy at the moment, coming off the popular second season of Netflix series Arcane. Its first season of 2025, meanwhile, effectively serves as an Arcane epilogue, with a luxurious animated trailer showing off redesigns of several characters and promising that Riot's going to continue building out the fantasy setting of Runeterra even after Arcane's wrapped up.

Even if you're not a mega MOBA player, it's an ideal time to be excited about League.

Best laptop games: Strategy & card games

Tactical Breach Wizards

Release: 2024 | Developer: Suspicious Developments Inc | Link: Steam

PC Gamer's pick for the best strategy game of 2024 is a brilliant small-scale twist on XCOM, but with very funny wizards. As reviewer Harvey Randall wrote, it's "a prime example of a game that defines exactly what it's here to do, what vibe it's here to capture, and then proceeds to get full marks on every one of its own set goals."

The writing adds a personal and silly flair you don't see in more military-minded strategy games, but the strategy itself also crackles with creativity: "Instead of long-term battles, it zeroes in on the 'breach, clear, repeat' loop of bite-sized combat puzzles, and gives you more tactical tools than you could fit inside a bag of holding."

🖱 Factorio: Space Age

Release: 2024 | Developer: Wube Software LTD. | Link: Steam

Factorio is a modern PC classic in the base-building / automation space, but this new 2024 expansion, Space Age, is practically a sequel. Heck, it's bigger than the original game, and is destined to be the kind of game PC players keep coming back to for the next decade. As we wrote in our review of Factorio in 2020: "Let's skip the preamble, shall we? Factorio is brilliant. If you're remotely interested in games about management, construction, and above all production chains, then hop aboard the nearest conveyor belt and grab yourself a copy of Factorio this instant. Then pick up another copy for the most important person in your life, because they won't be seeing you for a while, and at least this way they'll understand why."

Balatro

Release: 2024 | Developer: LocalThunk | Link: Steam

The indie card game sensation of 2024, deckbuilder Balatro uses the theming of poker to create a game that is very much not poker. Get ready to put together some wild "illegal poker hands" with jokers galore and blinds and point totals that ascend into the multimillions. "It’s like watching a Poker game on a cursed TV accidentally tuned to 1972, filmed by a crew gradually coming down from hallucinogens," as we wrote in our 91% review. "A roguelike deckbuilder debut already worthy of joining Slay the Spire and Monster Train at the King’s table. Essential."

Ballionaire

Release: 2024 | Developer: newobject | Link: Steam

One of our final reviews of 2024 turned out to be a breezy surprise hit: Ballionaire, a cross between pachinko and a deckbuilding roguelike. Reviewer Abbie Stone describes Ballionaire's compulsive loop like so: "Essentially Peggle has gone to college, smartened up, and gotten itself a masters degree in compelling strategy gameplay. Oh no. Oh God no."

The regular dopamine hits will likely have you saying oh god, yes, though, as she laid out later in her 80% review: "A game that at first feels as random as flipping a coin can be manipulated into one that actually rewards strategy... It’s a marvelous bookend to a year that opened with the almighty Balatro, and with a few updates, Ballionaire could easily become my new podcast game of choice."

Cobalt Core

Release: 2023 | Developer: Rocket Rat Games | Link: Steam

A blend of FTL's space journey with Slay the Spire's deckbuilding, Cobalt Core manages to not feel too derivative of either. You'll use cards to do more than attack: positioning your ship and dodging attacks are key to battles, and the meta progression will see you recruit new crew members and unlock new ships that change how you play. It may sound like standard roguelike stuff, but the way all the pieces come together makes Cobalt Core quite possibly the best one of 2023.

🖱 Age of Wonders 4

Release: 2023 | Developer: Triumph Studios | Link: Steam

A new 4X favorite in 2023. Age of Wonders 4 resembles big strategy games like Civ, but with its own magical flavor. As Fraser wrote in our 87% review: "By selecting the physical form, traits, cultural leanings and societal quirks of your people, you're able to create all sorts of unusual empires, from sinister mole-people with a penchant for cannibalism to industrious goblins who just want to build epic cities and make new friends. Through these choices you'll determine your empire's starting bonuses, alignment and magical affinities, establishing how you'll influence the world ... every time, I return from my fantasy foray with a sack full of anecdotes, like when I resurrected a rival ruler who had been plaguing me all game as an undead minion, forced to serve me for eternity. Magic just makes everything more fun."

Slay the Spire

Release date: 2019 | Developer: Mega Crit Games | Link: Steam

An instantly addictive card combat roguelike, which takes the strategic fun of deckbuilding board games and marries it with the sensibilities of games like The Binding of Isaac and Risk of Rain, where finding random "relics" can change how you play. Or, if you get a lucky combination, turn you into a murderous card god. Like the best roguelikes and deckbuilders, Slay the Spire feeds you that immense satisfaction when you find a combo that absolutely wrecks. Enemies that were once intimidating fall before you like flies. It's a fun one to replay again and again, thanks to unlockables like more powerful cards for each deck type, and protagonists that play wholly differently from one another.

Best laptop games: RPGs

Path of Exile 2

Release: 2024 | Developer: Grinding Gear Games | Link: Steam

Path of Exile's successor has been a long, long time coming, but the years of work have seemingly paid off. Even in a paid early access launch preceding its eventual free-to-play release later in 2025, it smashed Grinding Gear's expected player numbers and has pulled legions of action RPG fanatics away from Diablo 4. It's a slightly slower and weightier game, but there's still bajillions of monsters to kill and scads of loot to accrue as you spec your character out with its incredibly deep skill trees. This one's going to be around for years to come.

Metaphor: ReFantazio

Release: 2024 | Developer: Atlus | Link: Steam

One of the best games of 2024 is quite possibly Atlus's most accomplished RPG ever, and that's saying something given its string of hits with Persona and Shin Megami Tensei. We scored this fantasy RPG a rare 95%, praising its story, combat, and changes to returning Atlus ideas like social relationships with your party members and a daily calendar of activities to manage. It's a must-play, and best of all, has very modest CPU and GPU requirements that any gaming laptop should be able to chew up and spit out.

Dread Delusion

Release: 2024 | Developer: Lovely Hellplace | Link: Steam

Dread Delusion is like a bite-sized Elder Scrolls, a snackable Morrowind, an amuse-bouche of Shivering Isles. You're chasing down an outlaw on the Asteroid frontier of a magical society that's killed its gods and enforces atheism at the point of a sword. The combat is meh but that's not why we're here⁠—Dread Delusion's got all the juicy exploration and atmosphere of an Elder Scrolls but with all the fat trimmed off, and the cosmic horror sci-fi writing on display is killer. PC Gamer writer Ted Litchfield ranks one of its quests among his RPG all-timers: It involves reckoning with the ethics of a human meat substitute relied on by a society of vegetarian zombies. If you loved Morrowind's weird, it's only amplified here.

Disco Elysium - The Final Cut

Release: 2019 | Developer: ZA/UM | Link: Steam

This is one of our favorite RPGs of all time, and our Game Of The Year in 2019. Disco Elysium is gorgeous in a sad, gritty way, but its painterly 2D environments won't push your system. It's a detective RPG that feels quite a lot like playing a classic adventure game or a visual novel. Expect to slow things down here to discover clues and secrets in its detailed environments and read a lot of fantastic writing. It's sly, clever, and full of surprises, meaning you can get some of the best new RPG action without needing a GPU that handles ray-tracing.

Thanks to the Final Cut version of the game that now comes standard, Disco Elysium's installation size is a bit beefier than it used to be. If you've got the space to spare though, it should still run swell.

Best laptop games: Puzzle & Adventure

Riven

Release: 2024 | Developer: Cyan Worlds | Link: Steam

"This is how you remake a classic," we said in our 90% review of Riven, the 2024 update to the sequel to Myst. We reviewed this game on an aging laptop with an Nvidia GTX 1070 and found it played fabulously with the graphics dialed right up, while the experience of exploring Riven's world absolutely holds up thanks to some smart changes from the original. "The Riven remake preserves that unique sense of estrangement even though I've been to this world before," we wrote, pointing to how some puzzles have been changed. But "what hasn't changed in 27 years is that this is less a game to be solved and more a place to be experienced."

A new in-game notetaking system proves to be a smart addition, though, if you do want to fully unravel Riven's big mystery.

Lorelei and the Laser Eyes

Release: 2024 | Developer: Simogo | Link: Steam

This puzzle mystery is quite a departure from developer Simogo's last game, the music- and rhythm-focused Sayonara Wild Hearts. But we boldly called it as an early contender for Game of the Year in our 89% review, praising how the pacing is built "around your own wit." Expect to think your way through "a whole haunted manor filled with puzzle boxes, safes, locked doors, mazes, and other puzzles that aren't immediately evident."

Dave the Diver

Release: 2023 | Developer: Mintrocket | Link: Steam

An "adventure RPG" that sort of defies genre; Dave the Diver has you managing a sushi restaurant and diving in the sea as an explorer, with many more activities layered on top. Like, many more, as described in our 91% review: "Nearly every time I sat down to play Dave the Diver it threw a new feature or activity at me. Night fishing opens up the pursuit of new species and turns the once comforting ocean spooky, and new gear like tranquilizers and submersibles give you new ways to catch fish. A staff management system for the restaurant lets you hire and train workers to help out... There's a farm to breed fish so you don't have to rely entirely on daily dives, and a farm to grow rice and vegetables for new recipes, and eventually even an underwater farm to grow different types of seaweed. As soon as you've gotten comfortable with one system, the game throws a new one on top."

The Case of the Golden Idol

Release: 2022 | Developer: Color Gray Games | Link: Steam

Investigate a dozen baffling and gruesome murders, all involving the same mysterious artifact, in one of the most inventive and satisfying detective games in years. In The Case of The Golden Idol you're shown the moment someone has been killed, a grisly tableau frozen in time. Investigate by clicking on anything that seems suspicious or interesting—you can go through the pockets of the victim and bystanders, learn the names of everyone involved, and slowly collect clues, in the form of words, needed to solve the crime. Place the words into blanks on incomplete scroll to solve the murders and the motives behind them, each more puzzling than the last.

Alongside the individual mysteries there's a sprawling story spanning decades centered around the powerful and bizarre idol itself and the horrifying things people will do to possess it. The murders are fun to solve, and the story behind them is fascinating. I don't say this often (or ever) but this is one videogame that would make an outstanding mystery novel.

The 2024 sequel Rise of the Golden Idol is also fantastic. Play it next!

Best laptop games: Action & Platformers

Animal Well

Release: 2024 | Developer: Billy Basso | Link: Steam

This metroidvania-styled adventure may have actually fit in better with the puzzle games above. It plays like a platformer but diverges from other games in this style like Hollow Knight to focus far more on unraveling the world through clever puzzles, like modern classic Fez. There's no combat, and the more we played it the more inventive it revealed itself to be. In our 90% review we praised how puzzles are sometimes single-screen affairs, while other times they "spawn whole regions."

"The credits rolling in Animal Well just marks the end of one game and the beginning of another," wrote reviewer Shaun Prescott. "Animal Well morphed from a fun-verging-brilliant indie metroidvania into something that now keeps me awake at night. I'm not ready to move on, and I won't, but I'm going to need a hivemind's help to unpick its deepest secrets."

Hades 2

Release: 2024 (early access) | Developer: Supergiant | Link: Steam

If you're still playing the first Hades, we wouldn't blame you. But this follow-up is already the bigger game, even in early access, and makes enough fundamental changes to combat and boons that it's less a replacement for the original than it is a fantastic complement to it. We think it's absolutely worth playing right now, and we think you'll come to love some of the changes from the first action roguelike, even if they take awhile to settle in.

Terraria

Release: 2011 | Developer: Re-Logic | Link: Steam

Terraria is a huge game in a very tiny package. Even if you originally wrote it off as a 2D Minecraft clone, it's grown far beyond that label in the years since. Terraria is a crafting adventure with heaps of updates to its name with new bosses, biomes, fishing, and too many other things to name, and it's still seeing updates as of 2023. It's also wild how little this huge game demands from your computer with its tiny install size and modest system requirements.

Best laptop games: First-person shooters

🖱 Cultic

Release: 2022 | Developer: Jasozz Games | Link: Steam

One of the standouts of the boomer shooter renaissance (and less twitchy than some others), Cultic is comic booky with a gnarly horror shimmer, nasty in just the right ways. The first episode released in 2022 is a meaty 6-8 hours of shooting, but it also got a whole new level in 2023 and has another big chapter on the way.

"What Cultic impressed me with most was its ability to shift tonal gears," writer Dominic Tarason said in 2022. "Within a single level it’s not unusual to traverse long trails full of small encampments before assaulting a cult stronghold in a frantic cover-to-cover battle accompanied by some very John Carpenter synth jams. Moments later, I’m in a dark corpse-lined tunnel, tension building and the music completely absent until a horror set piece introduces a new supernatural threat. All that in the space of 10 minutes."

🖱 Wild Bastards

Release: 2024 | Developer: Blue Manchu | Link: Steam

"The roguelike and FPS genres haven't been spliced so successfully since Deathloop—and Wild Bastards deserves just as much acclaim," we wrote in our 91% review. High praise for a shooter that, for this list's purposes, doesn't have a high barrier to entry; its recommended system specs call for only a quad-core Intel processor. The cool structure here sees Wild Bastards playing out like a strategy roguelike, except each expedition you set out on puts you inside a fast-paced arena FPS shootout. Enjoy how each Bastard plays differently (stealth is also a viable option) and you'll be able to play it for many a trip away from your desktop.

🖱 Counter-Strike 2

Release: 2023 | Developer: Valve | Link: Steam

After years of Counter-Strike: Global Offensive being the biggest FPS in the world, Valve has transformed it into Counter-Strike 2, a free shooter that is largely similar to its predecessor. Then again, in the grand scheme of things Counter-Strike hasn't changed that much since its very first iteration in the '90s. As a result the small details matter a lot, and CS2 does make some meaningful changes that will keep the competitive scene on its toes for the next year or so. Whether you've never played CS or haven't played in years, now is an ideal time to jump in: the game hasn't been this shiny and new for a decade.

Best laptop games: Multiplayer

Abiotic Factor

Release: 2024 (early access) | Developer: Deep Field | Link: Steam

This fantastically inventive co-op survival game feels a bit like an off-key version of Half-Life. You're stuck in an underground science lab when an alien disaster strikes, and you've got to use whatever's at hand to survive—the more comical the resource, the better. Expect to make chest plates out of couch cushions, survive on vending machine rations, and have your character defined by positive and negative traits. "I chose to have a weak bladder (I have to relieve myself 20% more often) so I could afford the Decathlon Competitor trait (sprint a lot longer)," writes Morgan Park. "I'm realizing that it's not survival-crafting that I was tired of all along, it's the homogeneity of trees, cabins, furnaces, and caves that wore me down."

Lethal Company

Release: 2023 (early access) | Developer: Zeekerss | Link: Steam

A viral smash hit from 2023, this dirt cheap survival game features the rarest of all multiplayer coups: making voice chat essential. Also hilarious, as described by editor Jacob Ridley in our GOTY 2023 entry:

"What makes this game so absurdly entertaining is 1) the proximity-based chat and 2) the lack of polish and 3) the social mechanics. The game is scary, and it's going to make you jump at times, but it's fun for the massively overblown reactions it generates and way it always keeps you either talking to one another or talking about one another (when you're dead).

"You'll find yourself giggling as your pal creeps deeper into a dark room. Then laughing as a far-off scream turns to a sudden silence. Then as quickening footsteps approach the room you felt oh so safe inside, the laughing quickly subsides and you're the one screaming as you sprint towards the door."

Stardew Valley

Release date: 2016 | Developer: ConcernedApe | Link: Humble

An indie sensation that brought the idyllic farm life of Harvest Moon to PC. Build your farm into a vegetable empire, go exploring, learn about the lives of your neighbors, fall in love and settle down. Simple graphics ensure this one will run like a dream on your laptop, and it'll make long flights pass by in a snap. Stardew Valley has officially supported co-op farming for a couple years now, which is undoubtedly a great way to go back to Pelican Town.

🖱 Minecraft

Release: 2011 | Developer: Mojang | Link: Official site

One of the main questions you see asked online about laptops is “Will it run Minecraft?”, to which the answer, for future reference, is “Yeah probably”. Mojang's infinite block-'em-up isn't terribly demanding specs-wise, and it's the perfect game to mess around with on a laptop when you're supposed to be writing features for PC Gamer about low-spec games. While it's often played on a tablet, phone or console these days, you're getting the latest updates and mod support if you choose to build stuff with your PC. Here's our frequently updated list of the best Minecraft mods.