Stardew Valley
2016Stardew Valley
Inherit a farm, meet the neighbours, lose four hundred hours. One developer made all of it.
SimulationRPG
The best Nintendo Switch games
46 hand-picked games
Games available on Nintendo hardware. Nintendo rarely discounts its own titles, so the first-party games on this list are usually cheapest as physical copies.
Minecraft
2011Minecraft
The default answer to "what should we play together" for an entire generation.
SandboxSurvival
The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt
2015The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt
The side quests are better written than most games' main stories. Budget accordingly.
RPG
Hades
2020Hollow Knight
2017Hollow Knight
A vast, quiet, hand-drawn ruin that trusts you to find your own way through it.
MetroidvaniaPlatformer
Terraria
2011Terraria
Looks like a side-scrolling Minecraft, plays like a boss-rush RPG with a construction habit.
SandboxAdventure
The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild
2017The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild
Climb anything, cook nonsense, ignore the plot for thirty hours. All of that is intended.
AdventureOpen World
Rocket League
2015Rocket League
Car football. Explains itself in ten seconds and takes a decade to get good at.
SportsRacing
Apex Legends
2019Apex Legends
The battle royale with the best movement, and a ping system every other game copied.
ShooterBattle Royale
The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom
2023The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom
Hands you a physics sandbox and a glue gun, then refuses to say what the solution is.
AdventureOpen World
Sid Meier's Civilization VI
2016Sid Meier's Civilization VI
The one-more-turn game. Start after dinner and watch the sun come up.
Strategy
Hollow Knight: Silksong
2025Hollow Knight: Silksong
Faster and more aggressive than Hollow Knight. Worth the wait, which is not a low bar.
MetroidvaniaPlatformer
Mario Kart World
2025Mario Kart World
Mario Kart with the tracks joined into one open world you can just drive around.
RacingParty
Super Smash Bros. Ultimate
2018Super Smash Bros. Ultimate
Every fighter from every game. The definitive four-people-on-a-couch machine.
FightingParty
Mario Kart 8 Deluxe
2017Mario Kart 8 Deluxe
The one game in this list your entire family will agree to play without negotiation.
RacingParty
Animal Crossing: New Horizons
2020Animal Crossing: New Horizons
Runs on a real-world clock and asks for twenty minutes a day, indefinitely.
Simulation
DOOM Eternal
2020No Man's Sky
2016No Man's Sky
The redemption arc is real — years of free updates turned it into what it claimed to be.
SurvivalExploration
Hades II
2025Hades II
Bigger and denser than Hades, with a protagonist who is much less interested in your approval.
RoguelikeAction
Persona 5 Royal
2020Persona 5 Royal
Part turn-based RPG, part calendar management, entirely the best-dressed game ever made.
RPG
Subnautica
2018Subnautica
Underwater survival that understands the scariest thing in the ocean is not being able to see.
SurvivalAdventure
Disco Elysium
2019Disco Elysium
No combat. You argue with the parts of your own mind and lose most of those arguments.
RPG
Dead Cells
2018Dead Cells
Fast enough that a failed run costs you nothing but the urge to start another one.
RoguelikeMetroidvania
Slay the Spire
2019Slay the Spire
The game that made deckbuilding a genre. Still the cleanest version of the idea.
RoguelikeCard Game
Balatro
2024It Takes Two
2021It Takes Two
Two-player only, start to finish, and it invents a new mechanic roughly every ten minutes.
PlatformerCo-op
Cities: Skylines
2015Cities: Skylines
You will spend four hours on a roundabout and consider it time well spent.
SimulationStrategy
Factorio
2020Factorio
The factory must grow. People say that as a joke until about hour thirty.
SimulationStrategy
Outer Wilds
2019Outer Wilds
Knowledge is the only upgrade. Go in knowing nothing else and do not read about it.
AdventurePuzzle
NieR: Automata
2017NieR: Automata
Finishing it once is not finishing it. The credits are a checkpoint, not an ending.
Action RPG
Celeste
2018Celeste
Brutally precise, and gentle about it. The assist options are part of the design, not an apology.
Platformer
Ori and the Will of the Wisps
2020Ori and the Will of the Wisps
The prettiest thing on this list, and the movement is as good as it looks.
PlatformerMetroidvania
Vampire Survivors
2022Vampire Survivors
You barely press anything and it is still one of the most compulsive things ever made.
RoguelikeAction
Don't Starve Together
2016Don't Starve Together
Harsh, funny, and much easier to stomach with friends dying alongside you.
Survival
Cult of the Lamb
2022Cult of the Lamb
Half village-management cosy game, half dungeon crawl, entirely about starting a cult.
RoguelikeSimulation
Tunic
2022Two Point Hospital
2018Two Point Hospital
A management sim with jokes, which sounds like faint praise until you play a humourless one.
Simulation
Overcooked! 2
2018Into the Breach
2018Into the Breach
Perfect information tactics in eight-by-eight squares. A full run fits in a lunch break.
StrategyRoguelike
Return of the Obra Dinn
2018Return of the Obra Dinn
Identify sixty corpses from frozen moments in time. Deduction, with no hand-holding whatsoever.
PuzzleMystery
Super Mario Odyssey
2017Super Mario Odyssey
Endlessly generous. Every corner of every level has something hidden behind it.
Platformer
Metroid Dread
2021Metroid Dread
Tight, tense, and confident enough to be short. Nothing here is padding.
MetroidvaniaAction
Firewatch
2016Firewatch
A summer in a fire lookout tower and a voice on the radio. One evening, well spent.
AdventureMystery
What Remains of Edith Finch
2017What Remains of Edith Finch
Short stories about a family, each told with a completely different set of rules.
Adventure
Untitled Goose Game
2019Untitled Goose Game
You are a horrible goose. That is the entire pitch and it is entirely sufficient.
PuzzleSandbox
A Short Hike
2019A Short Hike
Walk up a hill, talk to some animals, feel better afterwards. That is all it wants.
Adventure
How this list is put together
Every game here was added to the PlayNext catalog by hand and tagged individually. The order is editorial — a popularity weight set by a person, not an aggregate review score — so the games most people are actually looking for come first rather than whichever obscure title happens to have a 9.4 average from forty ratings.
Length estimates are how long the game takes to finish, or to feel done with if it doesn't end. Use the game finder to narrow any of these lists further by time and budget.