20. Into The Breach
Into the Breach simply is a great turn-based strategy game for those who like to make difficult calls, you know from the beginning that you won’t be able to make it out of a battle completely unscathed.
The aliens that oppose you are too many, too ruthless, to allow for you to win without making sacrifices, and there are simultaneously so many options for what to do next that you just end up staring at your mechs and oddly cute aliens for minutes at a time. The endless nature of the game, made possible through time travel, makes you wonder whether you can ever truly win, but once you’ve funnelled hundreds of hours into sessions, you’ve probably long given up on the notion.
Available on PC, Switch
19. Tacoma
Sci-fi games often assume that the practices in place now will be in places many many years from now, their effects exacerbated. That’s true for the depiction of the gig economy in Fullbright’s walking simulator Tacoma. As someone hired by an intergalactic insurance company, you find yourself on the spaceship Tacoma, puzzling together what has happened to its crew via the ship computer’s last recordings.
Fullbright games shine thanks to consistently great dialogue. It’s a feat that even in a game with fairly short runtime, you will come to care so much for characters you can’t even see, learn about their pasts and their dreams and thus start to root for them. For how it efficiently does a lot with seemingly little, Tacoma is one of the best narrative games out there, and definitely some of the absolute best the walking sim genre has to offer.
Available on PC, PS4
18. Detroit: Become Human
Developer Quantic Dream uses its patented lightly interactive gameplay in a story about the rebellion of household androids in the near future. Detroit: Become Human impresses with its immense number of possible outcomes, both to the ending of the game and the relationships of characters among each other, but also to hundreds of seemingly small decisions. It’s a gorgeous game with a cast that’s sure to give you the feeling of playing an interactive movie that the studio was going for.
Available on PC, PS4
17. No Man’s Sky
The pull of No Man’s Sky is pretty easily explained – sheer freedom. With its procedurally generated planet there’s always something new to explore, and a plethora of crafting options will have you boldly go where no man has gone before in order to collect and refine ores and flesh-eating plants.
If you haven’t played the game, now is the best time to do so, as the recent big updates have made No Man’s Sky into something much more intriguing than it was at launch, and now accommodates both the need to just relax and take a few nice screenshots and to get into wild battles with the local fauna.
Available on PC, PS4, Xbox One
16. Stellaris
To play Stellaris is to make a pretty large commitment – you haven’t played a 4x grand strategy game before, there’s a steep learning curve to deal with, and once you’re comfortable, there are just heaps and heaps of DLC to keep you playing. But the beauty of this game lies just in that love for detail. Once you’ve painstakingly built a colony on a planet and watched your civilisation grow, you don’t want it to perish at the hands of invaders, and you do want to ensure their success across the galaxy.
Stellaris shines especially because it puts a lot of stock into your species and their individual behaviour, and because it uses Total War-esque crisis events for the endgame to keep things balanced.
Available on PC, PS4, Xbox One
15. EVE Online
Much like Minecraft, EVE Online is one of those games that show how massively creative a gaming community can become. It’s almost a possible version of our future, as players are dropped somewhere in space and need to engage with the virtual society and economy to keep the game running. The most well-known part of EVE Online however, are likely the large-scale intergalactic wars in massive spaceships. Its completely communal nature has garnered EVE a lot of attention outside of traditional gaming spaces – it’s been discussed as an experiment of human self-organisation and exhibited at the MoMa in New York and the V&A in London, citing player’s social achievements.
Available on PC
14. Nier: Automata
It doesn’t get more sci-fi than robots fighting a proxy war for the glory of mankind, but Nier: Automata goes deeper than that. If you’re looking for a game that discusses similar topics as Detroit: Become Human with a little more depth (but similar amounts of drama) and you enjoy challenging action and bullet hell combat, Nier: Automata is unmissable. Don’t let the anime look fool you – the subjects of morality and autonomy are handled with great care, all within the package of a great action title.
Available on PC, PS4, Xbox One
13. Destiny 2
Bungie’s next big foray into space after Halo never got its story off the ground in the way many of us hoped, but it’s still one of the most engrossing looter shooters out there, chiefly because there’s always something to do. By now Destiny 2 is free to play, and you don’t even have to have played the first Destiny to find your way around.
As is often the way with games as service, over the years Destiny 2 just grew, and by now, especially if you’re committed to playing the full package with DLC, you get not only a good-looking game with fun raids, but also a campaign experience that does the story justice.
Available on PC, PS4, Xbox One
12. Star Wars Jedi: Fallen Order
A list of sci-fi games is nothing without one of the absolute evergreen franchises of the genre. While there are a lot of Star Wars games, and many of them have something going for them (Knights of the Old Republic!), they do look their age. Star Wars Jedi: Fallen Order is just incredibly modern with its lush looks and Dark Souls-style combat. Being a Jedi has simply never felt as fluid or satisfying, and the story works even if you haven’t studied Star Wars lore for decades.
Available on PC, PS4, Xbox One
11. Outer Wilds
Games are about exploration, about traversal, and about uncovering secrets. Seldom has a game captured the feeling of giddy discovery as well as Outer Wilds. You go out to uncover the history of a prior civilisation in your little solar system, because solving the mysteries they themselves were working on it the only way to save everything you’ve come to know from certain doom. That may sound very stressful, but a weird tranquillity sets in wherever you’re creeping through a cave on the hunt for left-behind messages or meet a previous explorer on his lonesome near a campfire.
Ironically, sometimes you need exactly what Outer Wilds doesn’t endorse – patience. Some pathways can only be found if you’re willing to let the planets and their carefully thought-out physics do their thing, and sometimes the journey can get lonely. Stunningly, that makes the payoff even bigger when you find a hint and the hunt for your ancestors suddenly looks promising again.
Available on PC, PS4, Xbox One
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