Celeste
A precision platformer about climbing a mountain while depressed, built on one of the genre's most respected Assist Mode implementations — and still, honestly, brutally hard for a meaningful slice of the players who bounce off it.
9 / 10
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Games released in 2018
136 games released in 2018 and reviewed here, best first.
Browse the reviews
136 reviews
Return of the Obra Dinn
A deduction game that hands you a magic pocket watch, sixty deaths, and no other tools — and asks you to work out exactly who died how, in what order, and at whose hand, using nothing but observation and logic.
9 / 10
RimWorld
A colony sim that treats the AI storyteller, not the tech tree, as the main system — every skill point your colonists earn is really just raising the stakes for the disaster it's about to send you. Seven years and five expansions after 1.0, the total price of owning everything has become one of the review's own subjects.
9 / 10
Subnautica
An open-world survival game that strips out weapons almost entirely and replaces them with an oxygen gauge, a sound cue you can't place, and a lot of very dark water. Eight years after full release, it's still the best argument that dread works better than a sword.
9 / 10
Bloons TD 6
One of the best-reviewed games on Steam, and the one whose critics have played it for a median of 254 hours — because the people angriest about where it's heading are the ones who never put it down.
8.5 / 10
CrossCode
An action RPG about playing an MMO, built around one verb — throwing an energy ball that ricochets off walls — that does double duty as the combat system and the language every dungeon puzzle is written in.
8.5 / 10
Dead Cells
Motion Twin's roguelite metroidvania turned a simple pitch — permadeath runs through a procedurally reassembled castle — into one of the best-supported action games on Steam, and it mostly still holds up now that the studio behind its five years of updates has closed the book.
8.5 / 10
Frostpunk
The 2018 society-survival strategy game that made keeping a city's generator running feel like a moral crisis. Eight years and 136,000-plus Steam reviews later, Frostpunk still holds a Very Positive rating — earned by a first playthrough nothing else quite replicates, and complicated by a second and third playthrough that keep finding the same optimal path.
8.5 / 10
Into the Breach
FTL's creators followed up randomness with certainty — a tiny, perfect-information tactics puzzle where every enemy move is telegraphed in advance. Most players call the trade a triumph; a consistent minority of FTL fans still feel the resentment the top positive review admits to feeling at first.
8.5 / 10
Monster Hunter: World
Capcom's breakout entry turned a niche Japanese series into a global phenomenon by making its hardest lesson — learn the monster, not the menu — finally worth teaching. Eight years on, the hunt loop still holds up better than almost anything that copied it, even if the gear ladder's endgame RNG and a genuinely obtuse multiplayer system haven't gone anywhere.
8.5 / 10
Epic Battle Fantasy 5
A solo-developed turn-based RPG with 133 achievements, a monster-catching system and genuinely deep combat — 98.9% positive, and its handful of critics almost all say the same thing: it's the fourth game again.
8 / 10
Rust
Eight years after release and still getting a major update every month, Rust remains the most uncompromising survival game ever made — and the one whose own veterans write the funniest negative reviews about how much of their lives it took.
8 / 10
Two Point Hospital
The spiritual successor to Theme Hospital that launched rough — pathing bugs, a missing copy-paste room button, repetitive late-game hospitals — and, unusually for this library, has visibly improved rather than declined as measured by its own negative-review volume over time.
8 / 10
Yoku's Island Express
Villa Gorilla's pinball-metroidvania hybrid won a BAFTA for Best Debut and sits at Overwhelmingly Positive on Steam eight years on -- a genuinely inventive idea that a small but consistent minority of players say the traversal design never quite lives up to, in a game its one-off studio never got the chance, or perhaps never wanted, to follow up.
8 / 10
Space Huggers
A tight, procedurally-generated run-and-gun platformer packed into a JS13K-competition-sized file - confirmed working correctly with real WASD movement and mouse-aim on desktop, and correctly shipped as a desktop-only title since its LittleJS build predates the engine's touch virtual gamepad.
7.6 / 10
Assassin's Creed Odyssey
The most beautiful open world Ubisoft has built, and the clearest case study in gaming of a cash shop reaching backwards into a game's design. Eight years on it costs NZ$19.99 and holds 89% — but the level gates it built around its XP boosters are still exactly where they were.
7.5 / 10
DARK SOULS: REMASTERED
One of the most genre-defining action RPGs ever made, sold through a remaster its own launch-week reviewers called a $25 patch for known bugs that are, in several cases, still in the game — with the cheaper original delisted from Steam entirely.
7.5 / 10
Evolve
A free, open-source browser incremental that takes a species from primordial ooze to interstellar empire across thirteen distinct reset layers — one of the deepest idle games ever built, and one of the least interested in explaining any of it to you.
7.5 / 10
EXAPUNKS
A 1997 hacker fantasy where you write assembly to keep a disease at bay — and where the puzzle is usually working around what the language deliberately can't do.
7.5 / 10
Heroes of Hammerwatch
Heroes of Hammerwatch turns the original Hammerwatch's four-player arcade dungeon crawl into a roguelite with a persistent town to rebuild between runs. Seven years and two paid expansions later, the question isn't whether there's enough content — there plainly is — it's whether the grind holding all of it together is a deliberate long game or the thing that wears players out first.
7.5 / 10
Idle Loops
A free browser incremental where every attempt is a program — a fixed mana budget, an action queue you write in advance, and a loop that runs it out to the letter. Skills carry over between attempts, the interface never stops being a spreadsheet with buttons, and the game has outlived three different maintainers without ever quite finishing.
7.5 / 10
Kenshi
A squad-based open-world RPG with no main quest, no level cap on how far you can fall, and an engine that has been fighting its own interface since a Steam Early Access launch in March 2013 — five and a half years before the "release date" most storefronts show. Its systemic freedom is genuinely unmatched; its performance and UI never caught up to the ambition.
7.5 / 10
Kingdom Come Deliverance
An ambitious, unusually grounded medieval RPG whose historical immersion and storytelling are still praised even by its harshest critics — undercut by a combat system reviewers say only really works one-on-one, persistent bugs eight years on, and two fresh 2026 controversies: a retroactive EULA change requiring a third-party account, and an allegation that Warhorse replaced a human translator with AI.
7.5 / 10
Kingdom Two Crowns
The third and most complete entry in the minimalist Kingdom series — a side-scrolling micro-strategy game about riding a horse, throwing coins and watching a kingdom grow — is Very Positive across 10,000-plus reviews, and genuinely loved, but shares a specific, long-documented builder-AI bug with its predecessors that several reviewers say has survived multiple sequels unfixed.
7.5 / 10