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.
Forewarned
Steam page
Release: April 26
Developer: Dreambyte Games
In Early Access since 2021, this first-person co-op horror spelunker is now in 1.0. Up to four players team up to explore ancient Egyptian ruins where there is, of course, more than just treasure to be found. Egyptian tombs generally have their fair share of mummies, but the preserved bodies you'll find in Forewarned are anything but conventional (to put it bluntly: they're hideous) and once reanimated they all want to kill you. To navigate these death zones you'll have a bunch of cool tools at your disposal, and while the whole point of co-op is to strategize with your friends, Forewarned can also be played alone, both in VR and on screen. Think Indiana Jones crossed with Amnesia Rebirth crossed with Phasmophobia.
Pools
Steam page
Release: April 26
Developer: Tensori
Pools is a game about walking around uncanny interiors. Most, if not all of these interiors, have pools in them. It's very Backrooms-adjacent, with its focus on quietly unsettling human-made environments that seem to unfurl endlessly in a world devoid of exteriors and other rational living phenomenon. Still, this isn't one of the dozen-or-so Backrooms games that release every month: it's definitely more of an ambient experiment, akin to listening to the entirety of The Caretaker's Theoretically Pure Antereograde Amnesia on a long haul flight. Tyler spoke to its creator a little while ago.
Assault Suit Leynos 2: Saturn Tribute
Steam page
Release: April 25
Developers: City Connection
Originally released for Sega Saturn in 1997 and never released in the west, this is the first time Assault Suit Leynos 2 has been playable with English localisation. It's the sequel to the Sega Genesis / Mega Drive shooter Target Earth, which did release in North America, so anyone fond of that game or Sega Saturn obscurities in general will definitely get mileage out of this. For everyone else? Well, it's a notoriously hard sidescrolling mech action game that feels a little like an antecedent to the Armored Core series. I'm not going to play it! But it's brilliant to see this niche finally catered for.
Oddsparks
Steam page
Release: April 24
Developer: Massive Miniteam
Launched into Early Access last week, Oddsparks is an automation game with a pinch of real time combat and an even smaller pinch of town building. In addition to managing the production lines of "Sparks"—the inhabitants of the fantasy world Oddsparks is set in—you'll also task them with adventuring through the world on resource extraction hunts, which inevitably results in skirmishes with the wildlife. It's a nice blend, and with online co-op support you can share the mental load of automating fantasy serfs with up to three friends. The Early Access period is expected to last for a year or so, with new biomes, resources and more expected to be added.
Jawbreaker
Steam page
Release: April 23
Developer: Vincent Lade
Set in the distant dystopian hellscape of 2028, where economic collapse has transformed America into a free-for-all war for survival, Jawbreaker is about the gangs that riddle this brave new world. You play as a member of one such gang, whose inventory is fast depleting. The best corrective for this is, of course, to rob other gangs of their means of living, so you're sent to infiltrate the base of the Faceless Gang. What follows is a first-person stealth survival horror (don't worry: there's guns) set in a genuinely perturbing near-future.
