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126 games released in 2017 and reviewed here, best first.
126 reviews
A busier, more mechanically ambitious sibling to Holyday City Reloaded, wrapped around a King Midas fantasy — but its optional events lean harder into gambling than its stablemate ever did, and its last patch predates that game's too.
5.8 / 10
">observer_ sends a neural detective into the minds of suspects and corpses alike to solve a murder in a decaying cyberpunk Kraków, anchored by Rutger Hauer's final screen performance. Its atmosphere and story earn genuine praise, while a large, specific, and unresolved cluster of launch-crash reports has left a meaningful share of buyers unable to play the game at all."
5.5 / 10
Deep Sky Derelicts sends a three-person mercenary crew scavenging through derelict alien ships using a card-driven turn-based combat system, wrapped in a distinctive retro-comic art style reviewers repeatedly single out. Its opening hours land well for a real share of players, before an unusually consistent complaint about brute-force enemy stat inflation as the game's only real difficulty lever takes over the conversation.
5.5 / 10
Released weeks after EA's infamous "sense of pride and accomplishment" defense of Star Wars Battlefront II's loot boxes, this satire skips straight to the unboxing and dares you to chase its own joke achievement to the end. Years later, that achievement is still broken for a meaningful share of the people trying to earn it — a bug the developer's own launch-week notes admit to and years of otherwise active support never fully fixed.
5.5 / 10
Lazy Galaxy mixes an idle/clicker core with light RTS fleet-building, wrapped in a sci-fi comedy about a race of lazy alien octopi conquering the universe out of pure boredom. It is a real, complete, cheap idle experience for some players and a thin one that runs out of things to say for others, and the review sample splits almost exactly down that line.
5.5 / 10
Low Magic Age recreates 3.5-edition Dungeons & Dragons rules with startling mechanical fidelity inside a procedurally generated sandbox world, and its most devoted fans call it one of the best tabletop-rules emulators ever made on PC. Nearly a decade after entering Early Access, it is still there, and a large, detailed body of reviews argues its content and story have never caught up to its rules engine.
5.5 / 10
A decade-old mobile mining clicker arrives on Steam mostly unchanged — a genuinely sticky biome-hopping loop wrapped in a shop that never stops interrupting it.
5.5 / 10
A voxel-based co-op action RPG that promises to let you "craft your adventure, forge your hero" across floating fantasy islands, Very Positive across nearly 17,000 reviews for its charm and accessibility — while a consistent complaint since launch argues the content underneath doesn't expand fast enough to match its ambition.
5.5 / 10
Shovel Knight - Specter of Torment is a standalone prequel campaign starring the scythe-wielding Specter Knight, sold separately on Steam even though it comes bundled free with Shovel Knight: Treasure Trove. That purchasing trap is the single most-flagged issue in its review sample, ahead of real, specific complaints about automated, imprecise platforming controls.
5.5 / 10
An isometric Norse action RPG that split its own audience almost exactly down the middle at launch, and nine years later carries a second, separate complaint that has nothing to do with balance -- the developer stopped supporting it within months, and online co-op has been reported broken for years.
5.5 / 10
A well-regarded VR escape room with genuinely clever puzzles, let down by real, specific motion-sickness reports from experienced VR players, a short three-room runtime, and a promised fourth room this review confirmed via the developer's own 2017 news post was never delivered.
5.4 / 10
A beloved, nostalgic third entry in a genuinely well-regarded hidden-object adventure series, undercut by a severe, independently corroborated bug that makes the mouse cursor disappear for a meaningful share of players — described by more than one reviewer as making the game nearly unplayable.
5.3 / 10
Read review of Awakening: The Goblin Kingdom Collector's Edition
An old Viking's only goal is to find a death glorious enough to earn Valhalla, and the tall-tale premise is genuinely funny when the pop-culture gags land. What undercuts it is how much of its 2017 Steam port still behaves like the touchscreen game it started life as, down to the mid-playthrough prompt to rate it five stars on an app marketplace.
5.3 / 10
A NZ$7.45 wave shooter spun off from Nightbinder's budget Masked Forces series, swapping the franchise's PvP arenas for zombie hordes. The core shooting loop still works nine years on, but Steam's own player-count API returns zero, so the PvP and co-op the store page advertises exist mostly on paper.
5.2 / 10
Beans is the scrappy, Kickstarter-backed apartment project that became the founding game of Whitethorn Games, a publisher that's since built a real catalogue and reputation. The satirical hipster-coffee-shop writing still lands for most reviewers years later; the game itself has been persistently, specifically, and honestly acknowledged by its own developers as buggy for its entire life, running on a discontinued 2015 engine nobody ever replaced.
5 / 10
ClickRaid took the Clicker Heroes formula and made it genuinely multiplayer — classes, parties, and shared raid bosses that need real coordination rather than solitary number-watching. That's a rare and interesting idea for the incremental genre, one buried under one of the most consistently criticized interfaces in this review's sample and a periodic CAPTCHA mechanic that a paid add-on exists specifically to make less frequent.
5 / 10
Constructor remakes the 1997 cult-classic satirical property-tycoon sim, letting players sabotage rival landlords on the way to building a crime-laced real-estate empire. It launched in a genuinely broken state that the developer spent over a year patching, and has since been superseded by a separate, more complete sequel that a large share of reviewers now recommend buying instead.
5 / 10
Golem Gates blends real-time strategy with a customizable card deck, sending a lone commander and their nanite army against ancient golem machines without any base-building to slow the action down. Its central hybrid concept earns real, specific praise from RTS fans who miss Battleforge, while a large, convergent share of reviewers describe the execution — pathfinding, AI balance, and stability — as falling well short of that promise.
5 / 10
We Were Here is a free two-player co-op puzzle adventure that splits partners between two halves of a frozen castle, communicating only by walkie-talkie. Its central concept still earns genuine praise as the origin of a beloved franchise, but a specific, heavily-corroborated bug in its chess puzzle sequence has reportedly blocked players from finishing the game for years.
5 / 10
A solo developer's debut point-and-click, built in open homage to the LucasArts era — charming in its music and its sincerity, undone by a flat voice cast, a clumsy inventory and a runtime some players clock at well under an hour.
4.5 / 10
Cart Racer's pitch is a genuinely funny image — hurl a shopping cart through cities, castles, and snowy mountains — and its own review sample treats the concept with real affection. What that same sample describes with striking, cross-language consistency is a broken, punishing execution that spends most of a player's time fighting bugs and RNG rather than the actual racing.
4.5 / 10
Realpolitiks lets players lead any contemporary nation through diplomacy, war, and economic maneuvering on a real-world map. Its ambition earns credit for scope, but an unusually large, specific, and detailed body of reviewer criticism argues nearly every one of its systems — war, diplomacy, economy, difficulty balance — is broken or badly oversimplified.
4.5 / 10
A free city-building clicker whose own achievement list requires replaying the entire game roughly 60 times for full completion, sitting on top of a Mixed 65% built from two very different arguments — reviewers who call the active, worker-assignment gameplay "not real idle" and reviewers who report resources vanishing every time they close and reopen it.
4 / 10
An idle guild-manager that has sat labelled "Early Access" on Steam since January 2017 with no update since that September — still installable, still free, and still collecting reviews from players logging hundreds of hours in a game its own developer stopped touching almost nine years ago.
4 / 10
