2025 is stacked with great games you probably missed
2025 has been a wild year for PC gaming. Big budget releases are everywhere, but what really stands out is how many smaller, stranger, and cheaper games have quietly dropped on Steam. While the big names eat up the headlines, a lot of the most interesting stuff is hiding in the lower price tiers with only a few hundred reviews.
This roundup focuses on those under the radar gems. Every game here released recently on Steam, most of them under twenty dollars, and all of them bring something distinct, weird, or just plain cool to the table. If you like horror experiments, crunchy retro shooters, claymation oddities, and throwback RPGs, this year is absolutely loaded.
Below is a tour of the standouts, grouped loosely by price and style so you can build a new backlog without breaking the bank.
Free and ultra cheap: instant download territory
If you just want to try something right now without thinking about it, these free and low cost games are a perfect starting point.
- The Children of Clay is a short horror point and click that lasts about fifteen minutes and still manages to be one of the most disturbing things on this list. It uses uncanny claymation and deeply unsettling audio to simulate being the doomed guy in a horror movie prologue. It costs nothing and hits hard.
- Lunacid: Tears of the Moon is a free prequel to 2023s Lunacid, a first person dungeon crawler built with FromSofts ancient Sword of Moonlight toolset. Expect eerie atmosphere, fragmented storytelling, and combat that feels a bit clunky but intentionally so. It is more about mood than mastery.
- Echo Point Nova: Under the Clouds is technically a free expansion to a paid game, but it is worth calling out anyway. Echo Point Nova is a hyper mobile co op FPS where you surf around on a hoverboard, grind rails at absurd speeds, and pop enemies in slow motion. Under the Clouds drops a second open world on top of the original one for zero extra cost, making the base game feel like a ridiculous deal.
- FlyKnight costs a few dollars and feels like someone mashed up Old School Runescape visuals with a moody, slow motion dungeon crawl. You play as an insect knight working down through a huge labyrinth. The swordplay is intentionally chunky, turning fights into careful little duels instead of twitchy brawls.
Indie horror, retro shooters, and strange RPGs under twenty
The sweet spot this year is in the ten to twenty dollar range. A lot of these games are short, but they are concentrated hits of good ideas and strong vibes.
- Cultic Chapter 2 finishes off one of the best retro FPS campaigns of the decade. The first chapter is already a banger, with crunchy visuals and nasty weapons. Chapter 2 more than doubles the length for another ten dollars, extending the bloody, autumn tinted rampage against cultists and grotesque monsters.
- Neverwinter Nights: The Doom of Icewind Dale is a new expansion for BioWares old school RPG from 2002. Built by a veteran modder turned author, it revives a corner of Forgotten Realms that only diehard fans remember, and does it with proper narrative chops and respect for the original systems.
- Butchers Creek is from the creator of Dusk and Iron Lung and feels like a playable video nasty. It leans into melee focused horror in the spirit of Condemned and Manhunt. You roam into a backwoods nightmare in search of snuff tapes and wind up in brutal first person brawls using axes, improvised weapons, and a disgustingly bare foot kick.
- Caput Mortum is a short horror game built around a unique control scheme. On a gamepad you move with one stick, control your hand with the other, and use the triggers and bumpers to nudge your view around. The delay between your panic and your characters clumsy motions is part of the horror, and the medieval alchemy aesthetic gives it a very particular identity.
- Eclipsium goes all in on lo fi, heavily dithered 90s dreamscapes. It mixes body horror with surreal puzzle solving in spaces that feel like cursed pre rendered tech demos. If you like weird horror more than straight jump scares, this one is worth watching.
- The Crazy Hyper Dungeon Chronicles is a turn based RPG with Paper Mario style timing mechanics. What sells it is the GBA era pixel art, playful humor, and a soundtrack that goes way harder than you would expect for a small dungeon crawler. It feels like a lost handheld cult classic.
- Beyond Citadel is a retro FPS that dives head first into cyberpunk body horror and explicit themes. It is uncomfortable on purpose, combining grimy shooting with the kind of provocative weirdness you would expect from a Yoko Taro project.
- Platypus Reclayed revives a claymation shoot em up from 2002 and gives it the remaster it should have had years ago. Every ship and bullet is sculpted clay, and in the current wave of claymation indies it finally feels like it has hit the right moment.
- Keep Driving is a turn based road trip RPG about being young with a junker car, a little cash, and no real plan. You cruise, buy snacks, blast tunes, pick up questionable hitchhikers, and deal with breakdowns and weird encounters along the way. It captures the dreamy side of road trips and then slowly reveals the dangers creeping in.
- Mashina is a stop motion adventure about a cheerful robot digging through a ruined, garbage choked world. It is a spiritual sibling to the developers earlier game Judero but with a more WALL E style tone, focusing on exploring and rebuilding a robotic settlement rather than fighting.
- Labyrinth of the Demon King blends Kings Field style slow horror with Silent Hill atmosphere and the brutality of Condemned. It also weaves in Japanese historical elements and a soundtrack built from temple bells and house creaks, making everything feel like a playable nightmare folklore.
- Mohrta is a wild one. It runs on the Doom engine but borrows the hub and spokes structure of Demons Souls, pairing deliberate level and boss design with a look that splits the difference between anime alchemy and Fifth Element style sci fi. It is a surreal FPS with real weight to its levels.
- Bloodthief plays like a fantasy flavored Ghostrunner with retro visuals. First person parkour, fast kills, and secrets hidden in ways that feel like you are breaking the game on purpose. Level exploration can send you way off the beaten path if you are curious enough.
- Éalú is another stop motion standout, but this time the whole game is built from wood and shot frame by frame in a garden shed. The result is a cozy yet mysterious point and click adventure that feels like a cross between Myst and a handmade Aardman short.
- Wizordum finally left early access and basically becomes a modern love letter to Heretic and Hexen. It has bright fantasy visuals, chunky spell slinging, and that slightly confusing old school level design where you sometimes get lost but the payoffs are worth it.
Bigger budgets, stranger visions
At the higher end of the price range you get some heavier hitters and more polished experiences that still stay off most peoples radars.
- Absolum is a side scrolling beat em up that actually feels fresh. Strong voice acting, music from Doom composer Mick Gordon, and a structure that borrows ideas from Hades make it far deeper than the average arcade brawler.
- The Knightling is a full 3D collectathon that hits the nostalgia of Mario and Spyro era platformers. The gimmick is a huge shield that doubles as skateboard, sail, platforming tool, and weapon, turning basic movement into a toy box of tricks.
- System Shock 2: 25th Anniversary Remaster rebuilds a stone cold classic immersive sim with modern controls, especially on gamepad and Steam Deck, and updated graphics that still feel like the game you remember. If you have never played it, this is the version to grab.
- Keeper is a new Double Fine adventure that somehow launched to surprisingly little noise. It is compact and focused, built around a small scale vision that still manages to dazzle without leaning on live service fluff or roguelike gimmicks. Think heartfelt storytelling and oddball charm.
- Sword of the Sea comes from the studio behind Journey like experiences and mixes serene exploration with hoverboard style surfing through ancient ruins. It is gorgeous, short, and a bit pricey for its four hour runtime, but that visual spectacle is something you do not see often.
- Psycho Patrol R tops the list as the priciest pick but also one of the most ambitious. Imagine an immersive sim in the vein of Deus Ex or S.T.A.L.K.E.R. fused with first person mech combat. You pilot a customizable V Stalker, hop in and out of it at will, and exploit a ridiculously deep web of systems to break missions in creative ways. It is abrasive, surreal, and already worth the ticket in early access if you like games that let you bend the rules.
All together, these twenty five games show how strong 2025 has been outside of the usual mainstream releases. Whether you are into horror experiments, oddball RPGs, retro throwbacks, or handcrafted animation, there is probably at least one new favorite waiting on this list that you have never heard of.
Original article and image: https://www.pcgamer.com/games/25-great-steam-games-you-probably-missed-in-2025-from-freebies-to-usd40/
