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 2021 games that are launching this year.
Earth Defense Force: World Brothers
Steam page
Release: May 27
Developer: Yuke's
Launch price: $48 | £43.19 | AU$72
If you've never played the Earth Defense Force games, they're a series of bonkers third-person action games about shooting the ever-loving crap out of aliens. That's kinda all you need to know. World Brothers mixes things up a tad (but not too much) with a voxel art style, which seems to have been adopted in order to up the ante where environmental destruction is concerned. The story barely tries to justify it: apparently World Brothers is set "in a parallel world where the Earth is made of digital blocks," because of course it is. All enemies are blocks, all playable characters are blocks—it's a very blocky game—and the game supports four-player online cooperative play. Honestly, switch your brain off and you'll have a blast.
The Longest Road on Earth
Steam page
Release: May 28
Developer: Brainwash Gang, TLR Games
Launch price: $9 | £7.19 | AU$13.05
Here's an intimate narrative game with an unusual focus on music, featuring four vignettes that aim to "capture the essence of everyday life." In each of these chapters you'll spend time with a particular character, though you won't interact with them per se: There's no dialogue and no text, so what you gain from The Longest Road on Earth will hinge on how willing you are to surrender to its quiet, meditative mood. You're not "winning" this game, or beating it, it's more like an interactive art work, I guess, or a videogame as a song.
The Company Man
Steam page
Release: May 28
Developer: Forust
Launch price: $16| £13 | AU$20
Here's a 2D platformer about surviving the gruelling 21st century office space. Protagonist Jim wears a suit, drinks coffee to survive, and wants to be a CEO for some reason. So he's not destroying the office because he hates it, he's destroying it because he wants to dominate it, which may evoke some moral discomfort as you help him smite farting co-workers with torrents of @s and emails. There are some amusing ideas here: the accounting level is the "ice level" (frosty air-conditioning) and human resource is the brown mountainous area (mountains of paperwork!). Looks like frivolous fun.
Fly Corp
Steam page
Release: May 29
Developer: KishMish Games
Launch price: $5 | £4 | AU$6
Here's another transport logistics simulator, this time entirely focused on planes. The Early Access title has you opening routes between key cities all over the world while you build your fleet of planes, maintain and upgrade them, and just generally make very sensible decisions with regard to moving passengers and freight. Each city has its real world population equivalent, and because your transport network doesn't have limitless funds, sorting out connecting flights and collaborating with other airlines seems to be a big focus here. The game is expected to launch into 1.0 in "less than half a year," with a new mode and a lot of balance fixes planned for that period.
Tender: Creature Comforts
Steam page
Release: May 29
Developer: Kenny Sun, Gideon Lazarus, Jie En Lee
$9 | £6.47 | AU$13.05
This game's title is a pun on Tinder, because it's basically that, except completely fictional and populated with love-seeking aliens. There are "hundreds" of alien profiles to swipe left or right on, and you can go on dates with them, too. If you love narrative-driven games this looks cool, especially if you're a fan of those that adopt a familiar computer user interface, like Emily is Away, for example.
These games were released between May 24 to 31 2021. Some online stores give us a small cut if you buy something through one of our links. Read our affiliate policy for more info.
