Best Games for Laptops and Low-End PCs

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If you’re looking for games you can play on a low-end PC or laptop, you’ve come to the right place. This is ExtremeTech’s staff-nominated list of favorite games that will play well, even if your PC is old enough to run for president, with the computing power of a potato.

You shouldn’t have to give up on immersive gaming just because you’ve got an older or low-end rig. Even if your hardware can handle the games of today, don’t be afraid to explore the games of 10 or even 20 years ago. We’ve tried to round up a wide variety of types and genres here, including several that are mod-friendly. MacOS support is listed where available.

Some of the games listed here will even run fine with integrated graphics. UIs may be a bit clumsy—in some cases, layouts only make sense if you remember gamers in the era were often limited to resolutions of 640×480 or 800×600—but the quality tends to shine through regardless. So, even if your hardware is ancient or your skill level is low, come on in! The water’s fine.

(Key: ✔ No In-App Purchases ⚔ PVP 👋 Co-op 🎮 Controller Support 🛠 Moddable)

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1. Arkham City

Soar Through Gotham on: Any dual-core CPU at 2.4GHz or more, Nvidia 8800 GT or AMD Radeon 3850, 2GB of RAM. Supports Windows XP.

We’re sticking with Arkham City in this update, rather than moving on to one of the newer titles. Arkham Asylum is, to be sure, still an excellent game, and it runs on an even lower-spec system than Arkham City. But between the two of them, Arkham City is the better overall Batman game. Batman’s overall bag of tricks gets polished and AC offers you playing time as characters like Catwoman, with her own distinct moveset and animation style.

Arkham City feels as though it genuinely captures what it would be like to “be” Batman. The game also has a clever twist explaining why you face a never-ending army of thugs. If you want to find out if you’re going to like the Arkham game series, we’d say this is the best one to try. If you need something even gentler on system specs, try the original Arkham Asylum. To find out for sure, check out the demo, available on Steam. ✔ 🎮 🛠

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2. Balatro

Play Five Card Games At Once With: An i3 or later, plus a gigabyte of RAM and 150 MB storage. Integrated graphics OK.

Banned in the EU for allegedly encouraging gambling, the object of this rogue-lite is assembling the highest-scoring “hand” of cards to turn in out of the eight cards you’re dealt each round. Each level features its own gameplay challenge, such as “score more than 180,000 points,” called a “blind” for thematic reasons. Superficially, it looks like poker, but it’s not. You’re allowed to count cards, and you’re allowed—expected!—to stack your own deck. It’s like OpenGL Uno, but with the same cards and suits you remember from Solitaire—and some tarot cards and Pokemon cards, with a few baseball cards thrown in for good measure. Jokers apply buffs or debuffs that redefine ‘wildcard.’ Ooh, that one’s got the gold foil! ✔ 🎮 🛠

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3. Bejeweled 3

Give Smaug a Run For His Money Using: Any processor of 1.2GHz or greater, along with 128MB of video RAM and a single gigabyte of RAM. You’ll also need 320MB or so of storage. Steam Deck compatible. Runs on Windows XP+, and macOS X 10.5+.

Bejeweled is the chillest of the chill. It’s a great way to take a Pomodoro break or just wind down. Swap pairs of lustrous jewels to create a lineup of three, four, or more. Different game modes offer variations on that central theme. In the Endless mode, Bejeweled actually works with you like a wingman, to enable spectacular combos and cascades. If you like stress, there are also merciless timed and turn-based modes that demand strategy on the fly, like the “Butterflies” mode shown here. We’ve spent a truly disgraceful amount of time making just one more swap, hoping to hear “EXTRAORDINARY.” Free of in-app purchases and suitable for kids. ✔ 🎮

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4. Bloons TD 6

Destroy Your Balloon-Based Foes Powered By: At least a 64-bit 1.5GHz CPU, Windows 10 or macOS 10.13+, 4GB of RAM, and an OpenGL 2.0-capable graphics card.

Bloons TD 6 began life as a mobile game and those roots are easy to see. This monkey-themed tower defense game is absolutely ba—well, you know. Your task is to keep an endless stream of increasingly troublesome balloons (“bloons”) from getting through your defenses. (Are monkeys and balloons enemies in the wild?) Choose your Hero, assemble your Monkey towers, and pop, zap, scorch, and glue your way through dozens of different levels. Bloons is surprisingly complex underneath its bright, cartoonish facade. Difficulty ranges from nearly AFK to completely bonkers. ✔ 👋 ⚔ 🎮

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5. Braid

Weave Your Way Through Time Using Your Wits and: Any processor 1.4GHz or faster, alongside 200 MB of disk space and a gigabyte or so of memory. Requires DX9. Supports Windows XP, macOS 10.5+.

In this dreamy 2D puzzle platformer, the protagonist has come “unstuck” in time. The player must navigate a painterly world where just like their character, only some things move with time’s arrow. Rewinding time and manipulating the timeline are central gameplay mechanics. You can never die, and you never lose. Unlike rogue-type games and grind-heavy open-world RPG titles (cough, ARK, cough), Braid “treats your time and attention as precious.” The game doesn’t force you to solve puzzles by halting your progress until you get it right. If you can’t figure something out, you can simply play onward, and come back when you’re ready.

This game would run on a toaster. But just in case, there’s also a free demo on Steam, so you can try before you buy. ✔ 🎮

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6. Brutal Doom

Liquify Demons, Slaughter Hellspawn, and Reduce Your Enemies to Slurry With the Power Of: Any dual core CPU, 2GB of RAM, and a GPU with 256MB VRAM.

Brutal Doom is a bit different than any other game on this list. You’ll need to do a bit of legwork—and you need to own the original Doom / Doom 2, their various shareware versions, or have your own free WAD files you want to run. This list gives the instructions for installation and some links to free maps that are great to play with the mod, if you don’t have any of the official WADs.

As for what Brutal Doom is—it’s the version of Doom you’d want to play if it were made today, in a modern FPS engine. There are new, alternate weapons for your starting pistol. Guns now have load mechanics. There are alternate weapons for the Plasma Rifle and the BFG 9000, and you can find and use some enemy weapons that were not previously accessible in-game. Features like mouselook, aiming, and jumping are all implemented. There’s a fast rolling motion to dodge fire, a new fatality mode, and additional difficulty levels.

In short, it’s amazing. ✔ 🎮

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7. Creeper World 4

Fight the Endless Flood of Goo With: Any dual-core 2GHz CPU (64-bit preferred), 3GB of RAM, and 2GB of storage.

Take charge of an arsenal of weapons to do battle with a strange blue goo that is hellbent on taking over the world. Creeper World 4 is the first Creeper game to use 3D. The battles have a steady challenge level that remains engaging without crushing players via sudden difficulty spikes. Best of all, there’s a free demo on Steam you can experiment with before pulling the trigger. ✔ 👋 ⚔

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8. Cult of the Lamb

Explore the Depths of Adorable Darkness With At Least: A Core i3 or AMD FX-4300, a GeForce GTX 560 or Radeon HD 7750, and up to 4GB disk space. Requires Windows 7+ or macOS 10.9+.

Cult of the Lamb is a game about cults where you play as an adorable lamb—a lamb who is also a cult leader that ruthlessly exploits their “flock,” forcing them to toil, tithe, and participate in unholy Black Mass-style rituals of vaguely Lovecraftian darkness. It’s a 2D+ RPG that depends on NPC management in a way reminiscent of the Sims. (We’re looking at you, people who built a pool, let your Sims climb in, and then deleted the ladder.) Keep your cultists healthy and happy, and they’ll let you wring ever more labor and spiritual energy from them. But who’s really in control of a cult serving the forces of darkness? The game treads a fine line making gameplay that’s enjoyable and tongue-in-cheek funny, and deftly manages not to glorify either cults or the Antichrist by pointing out the banal horror of becoming a middle manager doing poop quests in a pyramid scheme literally from Hell. 🎮

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9. Cuphead

Visit the Era of Classic Animation (and Try Not to Die) If You’ve Got: An Intel Core 2 Duo E8400, AMD Athlon 64 X2 6000+, 2GB of RAM, Nvidia GeForce 9600 GT / AMD Radeon HD 3870, 20GB HDD space. Only needs DirectX 9.0c support, but still requires Windows 7.

Cuphead is a great game for someone looking for a game you might fairly call “Nintendo hard,” particularly if they enjoy its animation. Cuphead’s visual aesthetic is unique—it’s the only game we’ve ever seen that mimics the “rubber hose” animation style of the early 1930s. It also has bullet-hell aspects that measure up to legends of the genre. You’ll need sharp reflexes to beat this frenetic 2D platformer, but not much in the way of PC horsepower. Its physics are intuitive, and the core gameplay asks you to stretch your creativity and think on your feet to figure out what the bosses’ powers are, and what’s going on around you. Thoroughly enjoyable, and visually unforgettable. ✔ 👋 🎮

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10. Darkest Dungeon

Face the Unspeakable Horrors Your Ancestor Unleashed in the Stygian Depths: 2GB of RAM, a GPU capable of supporting OpenGL 3.2 (released in 2009), 2GB of storage. 1080p, 16:9 displays recommended. Supports Windows XP or later, macOS 10.9+, Linux (Ubunto 18.04), SteamOS and Steam Deck.

Darkest Dungeon is a 2D, side-scrolling dungeon crawler with a side helping of Lovecraftian horror (hold the racism) and a mental health management simulator. As your heroes wind their way through the stygian abyss, they’ll face the dripping claws and rasping moans of the eons-damned creatures that dwell beyond the stars. Safeguard them carefully, or you’ll find the abyss staring back at you when you least expect it. Darkest Dungeon can be legitimately annoying, but if you love mods like “Longest War” for XCOM, this series is a treasure. DD doesn’t pull punches, and if you think you’ve figured the game out, that probably means there’s a DLC or difficulty level waiting to kneecap you around the corner. ✔ 🎮

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11. Dave the Diver

Find Out Why the Caged Kaiju Sings With: A dual-core i3 or later with a GeForce GTS 450. Windows 7 or later, as long as it’s sporting DirectX 11 with 10GB available disk space. Asks for 8GB of RAM but doesn’t really use it.

This charming, pixelated game starts as Dave sets out to explore his local waters, to catch the freshest, tastiest fish for the restaurant he’s voluntold into fixing up with his friend, Bancho (AKA Swimuel L. Jackson). But like Subnautica, the game gets more interesting the deeper you dive. Dive and explore by day to uncover the secrets of the mysterious Blue Hole. Enemies include sharks, pirates, capitalism, and the suffocating consequences of your own hubris. At night, navigate friendships and outsmart competitors to build a thriving business and, eventually, open a new Bancho Sushi location. Technically moddable via BepinEx, but there are five whole mods available on Nexus. There are two free DLCs, Dredge and Godzilla. Don’t forget to feed the cat! ✔ 🎮

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12. Disco Elysium

Stagger Drunkenly at an Adequate Frame Rate Using: Intel Core 2 Duo, 2GB RAM, 20GB HDD space, 512MB graphics card. Windows 7+, or macOS 10.13+.

In Disco Elysium, you’re an alcohol-and-drug-abusing amnesiac detective who has been hired to solve a murder mystery. This sort of thing happens so often in games, you’d think there’d be some kind of agency in charge of ensuring would-be detectives still knew their own names.

As you work to solve a murder you’ll remember things about yourself. You’ll also have access to a system of traits with which to flesh out your character. There are 24 skills in the game, and they all have an impact on how the game evolves. Pick the wrong (or right) ones, and you may end up arguing with yourself over the correct course of action. Disco Elysium won Game of the Year from several publications, and it’ll run on 15-year-old hardware. 🎮 🛠

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13. Don’t Starve/Don’t Starve Together

Stave Off Certain Death As Long As Possible With: A 1.7GHz+ processor, a Radeon HD5450 or better, and 500 MB storage.

Players choose from an expanding stable of stock characters, all of whose names start with W, for…reasons. Each playthrough uses its own freshly generated 2.5D isometric map, whose parameters can be nudged for extremely customizable difficulty levels. The moment you spawn, the scramble for resources begins. Everything—everything—is out to get you, and the hounds always seem to show up sooner than you think. As with Hades, dying is part of the game, even though it ends a playthrough. The longer you live, the better your score. That score turns into XP that will unlock more characters, each with their own pros and cons. The dark is a living, active enemy and it just wants to give you a big hug. Forever.

Don’t Starve Together, the multiplayer version, is balanced for more than one person to a map. This makes it challenging as a single-player game. But you also get free in-game cosmetic items and clothing skins every day, just for logging in, which you can use to show friends your flair. 🎮 👋 🛠

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14. Faster Than Light

To Save the Galaxy, You’ll Need: a slide rule. No, seriously, this game’s requirements are the lightest of the lot. You’ll need a 2GHz processor, 1GB of RAM and 175MB drive space. But FTL only requires a graphics solution capable of 1280×720 and OGL 2.0, with 128MB of RAM. Available for Windows XP+, macOS 10.6+, Linux (Ubuntu 12.04 LTS), SteamOS and Steam Deck.

Do you enjoy spaceships, pixel art, and chiptunes? If so, FTL might be a great next binge game. Faster Than Light delivers a lot of replayability in a compact, low-overhead “spaceship simulation roguelike-like.” Take your chosen ship and crew on an adventure through a randomly generated galaxy filled with glory and bitter defeat. Permadeath means you have to start over if you die, but it’s worth it for the chance to try again. ✔ 🛠

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15. Hades

Wombo Combo the Lord of the Underworld With: Any dual core CPU of 2.4GHz+, and 4GB of RAM. However, Hades’ system requirements are the highest on this list, because of the disk space recommended—it’ll run on Windows 7 SP1 or later, but asks for 15GB of free space; for macOS, you’ll need 10.13.6+, and up to 20GB free.

Some games punish players for dying, docking them cash, items, and XP. But with Hades, there are no corpse runs: dying is the point. It feels entirely appropriate, for a button-mashing gonzo roguelike about the semi-immortal son of Hades, Greek god of the underworld. Every playthrough is different, and you can still have new interactions with NPCs after playing through to the final boss. Dark Souls players and early Super Mario World lovers will recognize the routine of counting i-frames while getting used to the game’s unforgiving timing.

But while the timing is demanding, Hades does a really good job of making you feel like a BAMF from the moment you pick up the controller. You don’t have to be “good at games” to land epic wombo combos and dance between the bullet-hell raindrops. Players battle their way across three planes of the Ancient Grecian underworld as Zagreus, son of Hades, collecting power-ups and leveling up abilities before facing the final boss. Weapons and items stay unlocked after Zagreus dies, which factors into the game’s highly customizable difficulty settings. Victory and defeat both end in death, beginning the cycle anew. Once you finish Hades, try out the demo for Hades II (which is still in early access). ✔ 🎮

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16. Half-Life 2

Visit Scenic City 17, Provided You’re Packing: A 1.7GHz+ processor, 512MB RAM, about 6GB storage, and a video solution that can support DirectX 8.1 SSE.

Half-Life 2 and its semi-sequels, Episode 1 and 2, are more than a little long in the tooth, but they remain a cornerstone of FPS gaming. More importantly, all three are titles we’d expect even the weakest of modern systems to be able to master. If you can set aside the fact that Valve never returned to finish the cliffhanger story, you’ll find a title that still shines, even after all these years. Half-Life is credited for revolutionizing the FPS genre and Half-Life 2 took things a step further with interactive environments, physics puzzles, and an administrative evil-doer that’ll have you looking up that long German word for “a face that cries out for a fist.” (It’s backpfeifengesicht. You’re welcome.) 🎮 🛠

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17. Hotline Miami 1 and 2

Slaughter the Russian Mob, So Long as You’re Packing: A 2.4GHz Core 2 Duo, 1GB of RAM, and a DX9 GPU. Available for Windows XP, macOS 10.6+, SteamOS, and Steam Deck.

The Hotline Miami games both received rave reviews for their unique settings, gameplay, and story. The first game casts you as a nameless character nicknamed “Jacket” by the community. The game takes place in a gritty, stylistically distinctive version of Miami in 1989. Your task? Kill off the local Russian mob. Hotline Miami 2 deals with the aftermath of your actions and the events that led to them, providing additional context around the story. It also skips ahead to 1991 to answer the question of what happened to Jacket after your rampage. ✔ 🎮

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18. Into the Breach

Calculate Strategic Micro-combat Using: Any 1.7GHz CPU, 1GB of RAM, 300MB storage, and an Intel HD 3000 IGP. Supports Windows Vista or later, macOS 10.7+.

Into the Breach is a turn-based strategy game that takes place on small maps of 8×8 grids. From the makers of FTL, Into the Breach challenges you to beat back waves of attackers in turn-based combat. There are no XCOM-style probability fields to deal with here—you get full transparency into what actions will be taken by both your own characters and the enemies you engage with. Into the Breach launched in 2018, but it’s still winning recognition for its unique approach to combat today. Definitely worth checking out. ✔ 🎮

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19. Minecraft

Learn to Stop Worrying and Love the Skeledoot With: A Core i3 3210 or A8-7600, Intel HD 4000 or AMD’s Radeon R5 family. You’ll also need 4GB of RAM, 180MB-1GB HDD space, and a 1024×768 display. High draw distances can be hard on performance.

Minecraft is an endearing, engaging open-world sandbox. People have used Minecraft’s redstone mechanic to create everything from 1:1 scale models of the Starship Enterprise to functional (if simple) CPUs. For us mere mortals, Minecraft is an easily accessible game with a rich crafting system, dangerous mobs, and huge worlds to explore. Rebel sympathizers may also be pleased to hear that the game has even become a bastion of journalistic freedom, thwarting disinformation and censorship on an international scale. The International Library of Alexandria exists within Minecraft, where Reporters Without Borders (RSF) uses it to bypass Internet censorship efforts like the Great Firewall of China Golden Shield.

This game has inspired millions of people to spend billions of hours stacking 8-bit voxels on top of each other. Its simple graphics belie incredible creative and expressive potential. Minecraft is a phenomenal crafting and building game, but its ending is enough to bring even jaded veteran gamers up short. It’s astonishingly evocative—if you know, you know. ✔ 👋 🎮 🛠

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20. Mutant Year Zero: Road to Eden

Search for Scrap in the Afterscape on: Core i5-760, Phenom II X4 965, GTX 580 / AMD Radeon 7870 HD, 6GB RAM, 8GB HDD.

This XCOM-meets-Fallout title is based on the tabletop Mutant Year Zero game. If you’ve played the modern XCOM games, you’ll be familiar with most of the gameplay mechanics. Mutant Year Zero gives you direct control of your squad outside of combat and fuses XCOM’s gameplay with some light RPG elements.

The worst thing we can say about Mutant Year Zero is that you’ll have to do some Googling to figure out which buttons are tied to which keyboard functions. The game’s plot and post-apocalyptic setting recall the best parts of Fallout. Although the game isn’t as deep as one of those sprawling titles, it still feels like a spiritual sequel. Mutant Year Zero: Road to Eden feels a bit like a “AA” game, for lack of a better phrase. Reasonably well-polished with solid aspirations, but you won’t mistake it for a 400-hour dungeon crawler. ✔ 🎮

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21. Old School Runescape

Go Back to Your Roots and Kick It Old School With: An i3 or thereabouts, capable of 2GHz. You’ll also need 4GB of RAM, 200 MB of disk space, and a broadband connection or compatible mobile device. Supports Windows XP and macOS 11+.

In this free-to-play MMORPG, build your character and step into a low-poly medieval wonderland without giving Blizzard a dime. Do you like PVP? Puzzles? Parkour? Runescape offers a dizzying variety of skills to improve. While the game hails from 2013, publisher Jagex is still actively adding and updating quests. And there are also a lot of ways to play this game. It’s a little like SecondLife. You can hunt, fish, gather, and cook. You can roam around as a murder hobo™ and reap XP for slayer quests. If you want to settle in, you can buy and furnish a house. There are no formal classes—you can level each stat to your own liking. Do you want to be a mage? An archer? A paladin? Shape your avatar’s powers in precisely the way you want.

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22. Orcs Must Die, Orcs Must Die 2

The Plot Chickens. Defend the Order Rift Using: Any dual-core CPU at 2GHz or above, a GeForce 6800 or ATI Radeon x1950 with 256GB of RAM, 2GB of RAM, and at least 256MB of VRAM. Supports Windows XP.

Orcs Must Die and Orcs Must Die 2 are some of our favorite titles for mindless slaughtery goodness. There’s an army of marauding orcs coming—and, you see, they must die. This hybrid tower-defense/action game tasks you with burning, blasting, freezing, smashing, dissolving, shooting, and generally wreaking mayhem against wave after wave of orcs, trolls, ogres, and other various bad guys. It’s easy to learn and sometimes surprisingly difficult to master.

OMD excels at offering a variety of fun ways to end monsters in style. Spring-loaded traps that hurl creatures through the air? Check. Acid sprayers and arrow traps? Check. Trinkets to transform you into a massive ogre, hurl fireballs, or turn orcs into chickens? Check. ✔ 👋 🎮

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23. Oxygen Not Included

Build the Space Ant Farm of Your Dreams If You Have: Any 64-bit CPU of 2GHz or greater, 4GB RAM, and 2GB space on disk.

Did you like Dwarf Fortress? Do you yell at the TV when space explorers take off their helmets on strange planets? If so, this game is made for you. Nurture a growing colony of semi-NPC “duplicants” (their word for tiny, adorable doots literally too stupid to live) and build a system of resource management to help them keep the air breathable, find water, farm, ranch, research new technologies, take up interior decorating, and generally eke out a more pleasant existence on the asteroid they now call home. Oxygen, water, carbon dioxide, heat—it’s all in the simulation, and it all has to be accounted for, down to the last milligram and Dalton. The game’s latest expansion, the Frosty Planet Pack, adds an asteroid fragment so cold liquid CO₂ makes puddles on the floor—and on that asteroid, an adorable new wild creature called a flox whose antlers are made of shearable Wood. Customizable difficulty with a fully featured sandbox mode. ✔ 🛠

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24. Peglin

Make Your Enemies Crit Their Pants With: Any 64-bit CPU. This game literally does not list a minimum CPU beyond “64-bit.” Unless your 64-bit chip can drink legally, it can play this game. (Sorry, Alpha owners.) 2GB of RAM and an iGPU are all that’s required. Runs on Windows 7 or later, Steam Deck, and macOS X 10.13+.

If you’ve played and enjoyed Peggle, you might enjoy Peglin, a deck-building Pachinko roguelike. You play a tiny, adorable green goblin (peg + goblin = peglin), who must navigate through a map created anew for each playthrough. The game takes place across three acts, each with its own boss. It’s also one great big fandom crossover. The whole game is a long series of hat tips and orb puns. There’s the Svoltorb—a portmanteau of “swole” and “Voltorb,” the Pokemon. Then there’s the Bob-orb, named for the Bob-omb of Mario fame. Let’s not forget the Orbelisk, and the Daggorb. And what game would be complete without some Wall Chicken? Adversaries include floor tiles, trash mobs, mini-bosses, new bosses, a gigantic tree, a wall, a worse wall, and the four worst Rubik’s cubes ever.

Once you’ve beaten the game, you can play it through in Cruciball mode. The player must cope with increasingly steep debuffs and penalties for each escalating level of Cruciball difficulty. Its 8-bit graphics and MIDI-style chiptune soundtrack mean this game will play perfectly on an old or slow machine, and there’s a free demo so you can check it out ahead of time. ✔ 🎮

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25. Poly Bridge

Your Inner Civil Engineer Requires: Pentium 4 2GHz, 2GB of RAM, GeForce 7200 GS, 150MB of storage.

Poly Bridge is a great puzzle game, somewhat in the tradition of now-ancient titles like The Incredible Machine. In this case, you must design bridges that can carry a certain number of vehicles while also coming in under budget. These two simple goals can be difficult to achieve in later levels (there are more than 60), since the game adds various hazards and the need to deploy construction techniques we’re fairly certain the Army Corps of Engineers does not approve of.

The game recently got a sequel (which we haven’t played yet). Reviews of it seem a bit less enthused than for Poly Bridge, with one noting it felt more like an expansion pack to the original. It is, however, excellently rated on Steam. ✔

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26. Portal, Portal 2

Now We Can Continue Testing: Portal will run on a Pentium 4, while Portal 2 recommends a Core 2 Duo. Both games require 4GB of RAM, and 1GB of disk space. Available for Windows 7, macOS 10.5+, and Steam Deck.

What list of games that you can play on a potato would be complete without the inclusion of Portal? If you haven’t tried out the Portal games yet, you’re missing out. They’re a collection of maddening spatial puzzles that really do require you to start thinking with portals. Great if you’re hunting for a game whose core gameplay requires you to do things more interesting than kill a billion wolves. Evade lasers, experience new depths of betrayal, and throw yourself headlong through holes in spacetime. Portal 2 also has co-op. For the fandom: the deadpan genius who voices Cave Johnson is also the voice of Tenzin and J. Jonah Jameson. ✔ 👋 🎮

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27. Resident Evil 4 (2005)

Rescue the President’s Daughter if You’ve Got At Least: Any CPU of 1.4GHz or faster, 512MB of RAM, and an operating system that supports at least DirectX 9.0c (Windows XP or later).

Where Cult of the Lamb puts the player in control of a cult, in Resident Evil 4 you’re fighting a cult. To be clear, this is not the new, remade Resident Evil 4, but the original version from way back in 2005. As much fun as the remake is, the 2005 game still punches way above its weight class. RE4 ditches the isometric, over-shoulder perspective of the original games and aims more for action and horror as opposed to the slower-paced gameplay featured on the PS1.

Those of you who are comfortable with modding might want to look into the Resident Evil HD Project. While it won’t make the 2005 version look like it was made in 2024, there are a number of real graphical improvements here. ✔ 🎮

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28. RimWorld

Build a New Home on the Rim With: A Core 2 Duo, 4GB of RAM, and 1GB of available space. Available for Windows 7+, macOS 10.12+, SteamOS, and Steam Deck.

RimWorld is an even mix of Dungeons & Dragons and an RTS. Instead of assuming the role of a character, the player is a third-person DM who must keep a group of “pawns” thriving on a hostile planet. RimWorld is an open-ended, cooperative story-telling RPG where you set your own win conditions. The game was “inspired by Dwarf Fortress, Firefly, and Dune,” if that helps give a sense of tone. Hazards include pirate raiders, marauding aliens, insectile horrors from the deep, and the ever-present specter of starvation or death by elemental extremes. When gameplay begins, your crew has crashlanded on an unknown, procedurally generated rimworld. Night is coming. Make some shelter!

For modding enthusiasts, RimWorld’s Steam Workshop hosts a huge variety of content, storyline, and QOL mods. Like Minecraft, load time is slower with a bunch of mods installed. But that’s not why we’ve got more than 600 hours of playtime on record. This game is just as addictive as Civ. ✔ 🎮 🛠

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29. Slay the Spire

Swash and/or Buckle Your Way Through the Forces of Darkness With: Any 2GHz processor, 2GB of RAM, and 1GB of storage.

Gameplay in this simple, low-overhead rogue-lite is a little like Hearthstone or Magic: the Gathering, with shades of Final Fantasy, but draped across a framework and map like Peglin. Unlock and upgrade cards to build your deck, which you then use to battle monsters across a map toward bosses of escalating difficulty. Lends itself well to bite-size play sessions of just a few minutes. ✔ 🎮 🛠

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30. Stardew Valley

Want to Farm Crops and Help People? Bring Your Pickaxe and: Any CPU at 2GHz or more, any GPU with at least 256MB of RAM and SM 3.0 support, 2GB of RAM, and 500MB of storage.

Inspired by the Harvest Moon series of video games, Stardew Valley adds its own spin on the concept. Explore Pelican Town, make friends, fall in love, and restore your grandfather’s farm to health in a gentle, open-ended title that will tease your curiosity as opposed to yanking you hither and yon with formulaic quest demands.

Stardew Valley received a third major content update in 2024 with Patch 1.6, featuring new villagers and NPCs along with new items, quests, flora, and fauna. The update includes various bug fixes and quality-of-life improvements, and rolls in features from some of the most popular mods. ConcernedApe has also announced official cooperation with the creator of SMAPI, to add mod support to the game’s vanilla source code. ✔ 👋 🎮 🛠

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31. Subnautica

Meet the Sea Dragon and Unlock a New Phobia or Two With: Haswell 2 or later, 4GB RAM, and Intel HD 4600 graphics or later. Needs 20GB of drive space, which is one of the larger downloads on this list.

Tired of running around shooting things on procedurally generated 2D planes? Looking for a healthy dose of existential terror? Subnautica pairs an astonishingly beautiful undersea world with a sleek soundtrack, surround-sound audio that loves headphones, and a tight gameplay loop, salted just right with heart-stopping scares. (How much oxygen is in this tank, again?) Sure, you can speed-run the game, but it’s enough fun to just swim around that I tend to make my own side quests. Friendly, bioluminescent creatures flit through flourishing sun-dappled coral reefs, belying the danger of leviathan-class predators lurking in the deep. There’s nothing quite like the literally hair-raising experience of hearing a Reaper scream, out of the silence. Customizable difficulty includes sandbox mode. ✔ 🎮 🛠

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33. Subspace Continuum: Trench Wars

Brush Up On Your Micro and Shoot the Enemy With: A TI-84? No, seriously, a Core 2 Duo and 64 MB of RAM will do you. 100MB of disk space required.

This fast-paced space shooter MMO features simple, responsive controls, a diverse array of ships and weapons, a half-dozen different game modes, and a great community. Uses about 128 pixels, so the framerates are lightning fast. Even with a steep difficulty curve, it’s been a space nerd standby since the nineties. Draws you in quick and keeps you coming back when other games turn stale. Like Stardew Valley, you’ll want the wiki on speed dial. From my favorite review: “10/10 would be polite again.” ✔ 👋 ⚔ 🎮

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34. Super Meat Boy

Attain New and Exciting Dimensions of Rage If You Have: Any CPU of 1.4GHz or faster, 1GB of RAM, and 300MB of storage space. Available for Windows XP, macOS 10.7+, SteamOS, and Steam Deck.

Super Meat Boy is an ultra-lightweight 2D platformer, and it has a loyal following for a reason. Yell in triumph as you finally nail that sweet wall jump and get through the impasse you’ve been swearing at for an hour.

There’s a sequel, Super Meat Boy Forever, but it’s an auto-runner with mixed reviews. The crowd consensus is that in both mechanics and plot, SMBF is more like an expansion pack than a new game. ✔ 🎮

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35. Terraria

Forge the Mighty Zenith Blade (And Maybe Play Some Golf) With: Any 2.0GHz+ processor, 200MB disk space, and a video card that supports DX9 or OpenGL 2.1+. Available for Windows XP, macOS 10.9+, Linux (Ubuntu 14.04 LTS), SteamOS, and Steam Deck.

What do you get when you combine Mario, Minecraft, and an ant farm? You guessed it: Terraria. It’s a 2D side-scrolling platformer, but Terraria also leans heavily on base-building and crafting. Players forge enchanted armor and weapons with crazy powers, in order to defeat a huge roster of bosses ranging from trivial to challenging to deeply annoying. Meanwhile, each map has a creeping awfulness called the Crimson or the Corruption, that players must cleanse before it takes over the world. Readers recommended Terraria, and we heartily agree.

Like Minecraft, much of the game takes place underground, and you can greatly enrich your experience (and your character) by building little towns and inviting NPCs to live in them. Also like Minecraft, Terraria has a vibrant modding community; not only are there a ton of Steam Workshop mods, there’s an officially integrated mod manager, tModLoader, with an overlapping set of mods and its own save file directory. Special ‘secret’ world seeds like fortheworthy and not the bees! give players access to new, tougher worlds with outrageous rules. ✔ 👋 🎮

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36. They Are Billions

Defy The Endless Hordes With Several Dozen Veteran Snipers And: A dual-core 2GHz CPU, 4GB of VRAM, Intel HD3000 graphics. Runs on DX9.

This zombie-themed tower defense RTS takes place a few hundred years after a mysterious plague tore through society. What happened? Find newspapers and learn the story through gameplay. The game includes a survival mode, a campaign mode, and various weekly and user-created challenge maps. Campaign mode, in turn, has its own RTS, survival, and horde-defense minigames. Maps unlocked in survival mode remain unlocked thereafter.

At low difficulty, it can be like shooting fish in a barrel. At the highest difficulty levels, it turns into a roflstomping so one-sided all you can do is laugh while you lose. You will emerge with a new understanding of how to completely wall off your base. One stray zombie stumbling vaguely toward the light and noise of your colony can ruin everything. But they approach, unrelenting, from every side… and they are billions. (Pro tip: middle-click to see beneath the foliage and terrain. You’re welcome.) ✔ 🎮

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37. Untitled Goose Game

Chase People Like an A****** With: Core 2 Duo 8500, Nvidia GeForce 510, 4GB of RAM, 830MB storage. The 510 is a bottom-end card from 2011, which means this will run smoothly on midrange or high-end cards from 2011. As long as your GPU can handle DX11, you’re fine. Windows 7+, macOS 10.12 or later.

Untitled Goose Game challenges you to find the Canadian goose inside yourself. Yup. Don’t let the cute fool you. This is a game about being an adorable, unrepentant asshole. Since the joys of honking and flapping don’t require a high-end PC, Untitled Goose Game is another game that’ll run on just about any toaster you can drag out of storage.

Honk. Flap. Troll people. Get into places you shouldn’t. Steal stuff, trick humans, annoy pets, wash, rinse, and repeat with great relish. It’s a brilliant game for people turned off by “typical” titles looking for a silly, funny, low-key experience. ✔ 🎮

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38. West of Loathing

Spittoon-and Snake-Themed Exploration Needs: An Nvidia GeForce 7200 GS, Core 2 Duo 7400, 2GB of RAM, and 4GB of storage. Runs on Windows XP SP2+, macOS 10.9+, SteamOS, and Steam Deck.

West of Loathing is a “graphical” adventure game that could run on a Lite-Brite. But don’t let the black-and-white stick-based graphics fool you: Under the hood is a classic adventure game with RPG elements, killer clowns, demon cows, snake oil salesmen, and a heap of spittoons to dig through in search of loot. The dialog is laugh-out-loud funny and the game’s irreverent humor recalls the best adventure game writing of earlier eras.

West of Loathing came out at the end of 2017, but it’s still a top pick if you need a game that runs on anything and offers some genuine laugh-out-loud moments. ✔ 🎮

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39. World of Warcraft Classic: Cataclysm

The Hour of Twilight Approaches. Join the Resistance With: Is your PC literally old enough to run for office? No? You’re fine. Officially, Core 2 Duo E6600 or AMD Phenom X3 8750, 8800 GT or Radeon HD 4850, or Intel HD Graphics 4000. Unofficially, you can probably run Classic on less. I’ve tested it on a 2015 Razer Blade Stealth with Intel 520 HD graphics and the frame rate was high enough to make me think there’s some headroom in those already-low-end graphics options. Interestingly, WoW Classic isn’t listed as requiring a DX11 GPU.

Stand in fire, DPS higher. We added WoW Classic to this list when it launched back in 2019. Now, having defeated the murderous Lich King in the 2024 Wrath of the Lich King expansion, players must face off against the Cataclysm: a great corruptor known as Deathwing, bent on ruling a world that cowers in his shadow. Where he goes, all is fire and ruin. (Seriously, he flies through overworld zones from time to time and sets the very air afire.) Meanwhile, the nations of Azeroth, both Alliance and Horde, are invaded by a doomsday cult that calls itself the Twilight’s Hammer.

There’s a lot to love in the original version of Blizzard’s MMO classic, especially if you like games of this era in the first place. Wrath-era refinements to gameplay and endgame scaling make Classic far more approachable than Vanilla was, while new group-finder tools make it easier than ever to get access to endgame content. Players looking for greater difficulty will find it in Cataclysm raids, which are among the most demanding Blizzard has ever fielded. Cata Classic uses the modern WoW engine (including the water engine), but Blizzard re-used the original WoW’s textures and assets. The result is a game that runs just fine on a low-end PC, including Carrizo-powered AMD ultrabooks and Intel integrated graphics. Free to play, although paid subscriptions and cosmetics do exist. ⚔ 👋 🎮 🛠

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40. Among Us

Learn to Distrust Friends and Family Using: Intel P4 2GHz, Nvidia GeForce 510, 250MB HDD space.

Oh, Among Us. We saved the best—or worst—for last. Among Us pits a group of 4-10 players against each other. 1-3 players are Imposters, while the remainder are Crewmates. Crewmates must complete a defined list of tasks and discover who the Imposters are. Meanwhile, the Imposters pretend to be Crewmates so they can sabotage the ship by stealth. If your family manages to remain zen through four-hour Monopoly games, try challenging them with this.

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So there you have it: our list of favorite games for low-end PCs. And readers, thank you for your votes and suggestions! Feel free to chime in with your own. What older games or titles still have a cherished spot on your hard drive, and what games do you find yourself returning to, long after they’ve supposedly been surpassed by more recent releases?