Browse by year
126 games released in 2017 and reviewed here, best first.
126 reviews
A slow-paced, atmospheric survival simulation set in the frozen Canadian wilderness after a geomagnetic disaster, Very Positive across nearly 41,000 reviews for its enduring, celebrated sandbox survival mode — clouded by a decade-long wait for its narrative campaign's final chapter, which launched in March 2026 to a wave of disappointed reviews, and by reported community moderation of critical players.
6.5 / 10
Deck13's sci-fi Souls-like introduced limb-targeting combat and an exosuit-crafting loop genuinely novel for the genre, and spent nine years being described in almost identical terms by its own fans -- a great first few hours undone by clunky combat and a back half that runs out of ideas.
6.5 / 10
East Side Games' 2017 licensed idle tycoon turns Sunnyvale Trailer Park into a business-management loop, wraps its prestige reset in the show's own running joke about jail, and is still getting seasonal updates on mobile nine years later — even after its Steam PC version was quietly abandoned and delisted.
6.5 / 10
A steampunk grid-based dungeon crawler built squarely in Legend of Grimrock's shadow, with atmosphere and a Bioshock-flavoured setting that reviewers consistently praise -- and one specific, repeatedly-named design decision, enemy level-scaling, that a large share of its own fans say ruins the back half.
6.5 / 10
An award-winning narrative anthology exploring the mysterious deaths of a cursed family through a series of inventively told vignettes, Very Positive across more than 18,400 reviews for its genre-defining use of gameplay as storytelling — undercut by a specific, extensively documented field-of-view problem causing real motion sickness for a meaningful share of players, alongside consistent length-for-price and shallow-storytelling complaints.
6.5 / 10
MachineGames' sequel brings B.J. Blazkowicz's fight against a Nazi-occupied America to Steam with genuinely praised gunplay and presentation, sitting Very Positive across nearly 50,000 reviews — undercut by a real, remarkably consistent "step down from The New Order" complaint about cutscene-heavy pacing and underdeveloped new characters, and by a specific, dateable technical incident this review can confirm: an August 2018 patch that broke previously-working video memory handling, which the developer then hotfixed within roughly five days.
6.5 / 10
A twin-stick shooter welded to an idle tycoon, told through a space-capitalism gag that outlasts most of the systems built to support it.
6.3 / 10
A NZ$43.59 online martial-arts RPG whose deck-built, learn-by-fighting combat system drew sustained praise across roughly 11,500 Steam reviews since August 2017 — the same review page that, especially from 2021 onward, keeps repeating one specific complaint: the developer moved on to make Sifu and left Absolver's short story and PvP-dependent structure to run on a population that's mostly gone.
6 / 10
Bendy and the Ink Machine sends Henry back into the abandoned 1930s animation studio where he once worked, chased by a corrupted cartoon mascot risen from the ink itself. Its distinctive art style and atmosphere earn genuine, sustained praise, while an unusually large and specific body of reviewer criticism targets slow, repetitive gameplay and persistent, progress-breaking bugs.
6 / 10
Bridge Constructor Portal merges the engineering-puzzle series with the Portal license, guided by Ellen McLain's GLaDOS through 60 test chambers of portals, propulsion gel, and wobbly bridge physics. The crossover concept and voice work earn genuine praise, while a specific, repeated complaint about jittery bridge physics and a near-absent tutorial runs through a large share of the review sample.
6 / 10
Dream Daddy sends a single dad into the seaside town of Maple Bay to date seven other dads, mixing genuinely funny writing and charming character art with a specific, heavily discussed narrative choice that a large share of reviewers argue undercuts the game's own themes of self-acceptance.
6 / 10
Idle Evolution rebuilds a 2015 Kongregate browser game into a paid Steam release that teaches real periodic-table chemistry through an idle/time-management hybrid, honestly advertising itself as "transformed to make it fully active" rather than a passive clicker. Eight years on, the developer quietly returned in late 2025 to patch it further, an unusual show of long-tail commitment most budget educational games never get.
6 / 10
Let Them Come sets you in one spot with a gun and an endless wave of aliens, betting everything on the loadout-building loop underneath that simple pitch. Reviewers largely say the bet paid off for a cheap, short, retro-styled shooter — right up until a specific, unresolved freezing bug or an unpredictable softlock ends the run for good.
6 / 10
Loot Box Quest is a solo developer's one-week clicker experiment built entirely around a joke — what if a loot-box-fueled idle game had a story about the person playing it slowly becoming the industry he claims to hate? It's a clever premise for a review's first ten minutes and a much more divisive one by the time the single, unrepeatable playthrough ends.
6 / 10
Infamous for one of gaming's most viral bad launches — the animation bugs — Andromeda's own reviewers agree the real, lasting problem was never the glitches but a story they call the weakest in the series, now sold for NZ$9.99.
6 / 10
A NZ$24.79 co-op wizard-apprentice action-RPG from Trine developer Frozenbyte that holds Mostly Positive across roughly 4,100 Steam reviews since December 2017 — beautiful and genuinely fun with a friend, but sitting under a "confirmed no longer supported" developer statement and a specific, years-spanning bug where private co-op sessions randomly turn public and let strangers into your game.
6 / 10
Snake Pass built an entire game around one genuinely novel idea — you are a snake, with no legs and no jump button, and every puzzle has to be solved by thinking like one. Its own reviewers agree almost unanimously that the idea is brilliant; a similarly large share also agree the physics meant to realize it never quite became precise enough to fully deliver on it.
6 / 10
A deeply systemic space-station engineering simulation covering atmospherics, electrical grids and manufacturing, Very Positive across nearly 6,000 reviews for genuine simulation depth — held back by an extraordinarily consistent complaint that its interface is deliberately, unapologetically obtuse, and by nearly nine years in Early Access without several originally promised systems.
6 / 10
The Sexy Brutale traps a masquerade mansion's guests in a repeating 12-hour loop of murder, tasking the player with learning each death down to the second and rerouting fate to save them. Its atmosphere, music, and worldbuilding earn genuine, specific praise, while an unusually large share of reviewers describe the puzzles underneath that atmosphere as too simple, too linear, and undercut by a widely disliked ending twist.
6 / 10
The Vagrant wears its inspiration on its sleeve — hand-painted, Vanillaware-style fantasy combat clearly modeled on Odin Sphere and Dragon's Crown, sold for a fraction of the price. Its own reviewers are unusually candid that the homage doesn't reach the games it's imitating, while still agreeing the art and the asking price make it worth a look regardless.
6 / 10
A Kickstarter-backed spiritual successor to Planescape Torment that inherited its predecessor's greatest weakness (combat) more than its strength — checked directly against Planescape's own current numbers, the gap between "spiritual successor" and "successor" is stark.
6 / 10
A year before Moonlighter made "run a shop by day, loot a dungeon by night" a genre unto itself, Weapon Shop Fantasy tried the same dual-loop pitch from the other direction — stay behind the counter, send your staff out adventuring, and craft what they bring back into gear to sell. The idea holds up better than its rough edges do.
6 / 10
Wunderdoktor dresses a click-heavy dexterity game in gorgeous gothic paper-cutout art and a premise straight out of a dark fairy tale — a traveling quack curing arachnocough and ghostly maladies. The presentation earns near-universal praise; whether the clicking underneath it holds up depends heavily on what genre you expected walking in.
6 / 10
A deliberately combat-free, chore-and-exploration adventure that sold itself as a Zelda meets Stardew Valley hybrid -- reviewers who took that pitch literally have spent nine years saying the same thing, that the surface is genuinely lovely and almost every system underneath it is thinner than the comparison implies.
6 / 10
