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126 games released in 2017 and reviewed here, best first.
126 reviews
A hand-drawn, 1930s-cartoon-style boss-rush platformer that's as punishingly hard as it is beautiful — and whose second most-upvoted negative review points at a real, still-unaddressed colourblind accessibility gap that echoes a pattern this library keeps finding.
9 / 10
The 2017 original that the whole modern metroidvania wave points back to. Nine years on it still sells on reputation alone — and the reputation holds up, with one honest asterisk.
9 / 10
Nine years on, the game that taught Larian how to build Baldur's Gate 3 is still the sharper tactical puzzle of the two — a combat system built from fire, water and armour that rewards a party that thinks in physics, and a brutal opening act that punishes one that doesn't.
8.5 / 10
A genuine landmark action RPG whose Steam version spent four years as a warning label of its own — a beloved, philosophically ambitious game shipped in a technically broken PC port that Square Enix quietly fixed on a different storefront first.
8.5 / 10
Build a machine that makes gold, then spend three hours making it smaller — 97.1% positive, nine years old, and still receiving patches a fortnight ago.
8.5 / 10
A free browser incremental that spends its first ten minutes as a joke and its last hour as a genuinely tense endgame, built around a premise everyone already half-knows and a structure that keeps rewriting the rules underneath it.
8.5 / 10
You hire desperate men, name them, watch them die, and hire more. Nine years on it's still the best mercenary-company RPG ever made — and still arguing with its own players about whether a 75% hit chance that misses four times running is good design.
8 / 10
Detention sets a ghost story inside a real, specific historical horror — Taiwan's White Terror era of martial law and political persecution — and lets that history do most of the emotional work. Its reception is close to unanimous that the atmosphere and story succeed at something rare; a smaller, more specific critical thread argues the puzzle-adventure mechanics underneath never quite earn their place alongside it.
8 / 10
One of the most acclaimed RPGs ever written, still holding a 94.4% lifetime score nine years into its Beamdog remaster — and its own recent reviewers are refreshingly honest that the combat everyone warns you about really is the weak point, not a myth built by contrarians.
8 / 10
Arkane Austin's 2017 immersive sim remains Very Positive across more than 54,000 Steam reviews, widely regarded as one of the genre's finest achievements — a reputation this review can confirm survived the closure of the very studio that made it, when Arkane Austin was shut down entirely by Microsoft in 2024, and a real controversy over the game's own title, which this review can confirm Bethesda forced onto an unrelated story over the objections of Arkane's own founder.
8 / 10
One of the most-loved games on Steam at 98% across 155,976 reviews — and the two loudest criticisms on its store page are complaints about an Early Access build it left behind nine years ago.
8 / 10
A potato-powered clicker that spends its idle timers on story instead of retention, and then does the one thing almost nothing in the genre does — it actually finishes.
8 / 10
A widely loved grand-strategy classic whose negative sample documents a real 2018 spyware scandal, persistent Denuvo/always-online friction, and a heavily criticised DLC structure requiring ownership of a separate game to access its best campaign mode — a complaint Creative Assembly substantially resolved in December 2025 by giving Warhammer III free to owners.
8 / 10
A classless sandbox MMORPG where every sword, ship and set of plate armour is player-made — and where losing a fight in the wrong zone means losing all of it. Nine years in, and now on Xbox, the question is whether that risk still teaches or just filters.
7.5 / 10
A party of the world's most useless heroes carries a fairly ordinary idle RPG through sheer force of writing, while its rewarded-video-ad economy is honest enough about what it's selling that the comparison to gacha idlers actually favours it.
7.5 / 10
Clone Drone in the Danger Zone sends a robot gladiator through a satirical game show arena, hacking off enemy limbs with genuinely satisfying voxel-based melee combat. Nearly a decade of continuous developer support has kept the game evolving well past its Early Access roots, though a persistent multiplayer population shortfall and a few specific unfairness complaints keep it from a clean sweep.
7.5 / 10
Doki Doki Literature Club! spends its opening hours doing everything a cute high-school dating sim is supposed to do, then spends the rest of it doing almost nothing a dating sim is supposed to do. Nearly a decade after it became one of the most talked-about indie releases of its era, its own small Steam review sample is still arguing about whether the subversion is a genuine achievement or a mean-spirited trick played on an unsuspecting audience.
7.5 / 10
DUSK helped kickstart the retro "boomer shooter" revival, channeling Quake and Blood through three fast, blood-soaked campaign episodes. Its atmosphere and gunplay earn overwhelming praise, while a specific, recurring set of complaints targets particular enemies, a difficulty spike late in its second episode, and a save system some reviewers call genuinely frustrating.
7.5 / 10
A NZ$49.95 psychological action-adventure from Ninja Theory that holds Very Positive across roughly 34,000 Steam reviews since August 2017 -- a genuinely landmark portrayal of psychosis built on binaural audio and researched with clinicians and people with lived experience, wrapped around combat and rune-hunting puzzles a large share of its own reviewers, including many who still recommend it, describe as the weakest part of the game.
7.5 / 10
Kindergarten traps players in a single, endlessly repeating Monday at a violent, absurdist elementary school, where every character's storyline must be pieced together through trial, error, and death. Reviewers overwhelmingly praise its dark humor and dense writing, but a real minority push back hard on the tedium of repeating the same dialogue to fix a single mistake.
7.5 / 10
Kingdoms and Castles asks a simple question — grow a hamlet into a walled kingdom while vikings, dragons, and rival AI kingdoms try to burn it down — and has spent nearly nine consecutive years answering it with free major updates, from Steam Workshop support to VR to a 2025 dragon-taming system. It has also, in that same nine years, never shipped a tutorial, and its own reviewers are still arguing about whether the core loop underneath all that content was ever as deep as the update list makes it look.
7.5 / 10
A snowball rolls down a mountain, day turns to night and back again, and a single tap drops a trampoline to bounce it over kids, bears, foxes and rocks. A js13k 2017 entry that placed 15th of 100 on craft and art alone, with a touch scheme confirmed here to be as simple as the premise promises.
7.5 / 10
Home to one of the most inventive systems in action RPGs — a system its publisher then patented, blocking every other studio from building anything like it, a decision reviewers are still angry about years after the studio that made it, Monolith Productions, was shut down.
7.5 / 10
Team Ninja's samurai-era Souls-like pairs one of the deepest stance-based combat systems in the genre with a Diablo-style loot flood that a large, vocal share of its own fans say fights against everything the combat is trying to do -- a disagreement that hasn't moved in nine years of reviews.
7.5 / 10
