The best low-spec PC games

On the hunt for something new to play on your low end PC or laptop? You may be shocked just how great some of the lower spec games look. While gaming laptops power up every year, not everyone has a fresh laptop with a GTX 2080 in it. Some people need a notebook for travel, which often means not being able to play the most demanding PC games. Fortunately, in this golden age of gaming, we have countless great low-spec PC games to enjoy, whether it’s an indie or an old classic from Steam’s bottomless buffet.

This is our selection of the best games for laptops and low-spec rigs—games that will gas you up without burning down your system. We’ve rooted through and explored all sorts of genres, so you’ll find quick pick-up-and-play games alongside complex RPGs that you can lose days in. There are choices that can become your new main squeeze, and others that are great when you just have a few minutes to kill time between meetings.

These are mostly newer games with accessible system requirements, but of course there are tons of classic PC games, from Doom to Half-Life 2, that will run smooth as silk on any modern laptop. Check out GOG’s old games (opens in new tab) or the Internet Archive’s in-browser emulation library (opens in new tab).

Looking for a new laptop to game on the go? Here’s our guide to the best gaming laptops (opens in new tab). 

Best laptop games: Multiplayer

Among Us

(Image credit: Innersloth)

Release date: 2018 | Developer: InnerSloth | Link: Steam (opens in new tab)

If you’re up for a bit of subterfuge with friends, Among Us is one you can be sure they’ll be able to play almost no matter how old their machine is. It even has cross-play between PCs and phones if that’s all they have handy. Among Us is a familiar format to anyone who’s played Werewolf or other similar group tabletop games. A crew of brightly-colored space engineers are stuck trying to repair a ship while discovering who among them (get it?) is the imposter trying to murder the rest. The fun is in how well you and your friends can fool one another more than fancy lighting effects, so it’s an easy one to pick up and play on a low-spec machine. 

Old School Runescape

(Image credit: Jagex)

Release date: 2013 | Developer: Jagex| Link: Steam

This oldie hails from the era when today’s low end PCs were hot stuff. Runescape has been around for a long time and there’s definitely a reason why. This MMO hails from the days when online games didn’t always guide you down a paved path of quests and leveling opportunities. The Old School version of Runescape takes you back to those early days of its online world. You may struggle to get started in this one without the wiki handy, but at least it won’t put your PC to the test. 

Untitled Goose Game

(Image credit: House House)

Release date: 2019 | Developer: House House | Link: Official site (opens in new tab)

The not titled goose game is plenty short and so are its required system specs. If you somehow went dark on the internet in the weeks following the Goose Game’s launch, you may have missed how many goose memes it birthed into the unsuspecting mainstream social media sphere. The Goose Game is a charming little stealth puzzler about being a terribly foul goose on the loose in a quaint little British village. In our Untitled Goose Game review, Luke Kemp says “I can’t remember the last game that made me laugh so loudly and so often while I was playing it.”

Portal 2

(Image credit: Valve)

Release date: 2011 | Developer: Valve | Link: Steam page (opens in new tab)

We could have included pretty much any Source engine game here, such is the impressive way it scales to lower-spec hardware. (Admittedly, that might be because it’s getting on a bit.) While Half-Life 2 shines these days with visual mods and at higher resolutions, Portal 2 remains one of the funniest, smartest puzzle games around, even if you had cause to play it at 800×600 with all the settings turned to ‘Low’. You’re not playing this one to be wowed by fancy graphical effects—you’re playing for Stephen Merchant’s, J.K. Simmons’, and Ellen McLain’s terrific voice acting, and of course for that bit with the potato.

Minecraft

(Image credit: Mojang)

Release date: 2011 | Developer: Mojang | Link: Official site (opens in new tab)

One of the main questions you see asked online about laptops is “Will it run Minecraft?”, to which the answer, for future reference, is “Yeah probably”. Mojang’s infinite block-’em-up isn’t terribly demanding specs-wise, and it’s the perfect game to mess around with on a laptop when you’re supposed to be writing features for PC Gamer about low-spec games. While it’s often played on a tablet, phone or console these days, you’re getting the latest updates and mod support if you choose to build stuff with your PC. Here’s our frequently updated list of the best Minecraft mods.

Stardew Valley

(Image credit: Eric Barone)

Release date: 2016 | Developer: ConcernedApe | Link: Humble Store (opens in new tab)

An indie sensation that brought the idyllic farm life of Harvest Moon to PC. Build your farm into a vegetable empire, go exploring, learn about the lives of your neighbors, fall in love and settle down. Simple graphics ensure this one will run like a dream on your laptop, and it’ll make long flights pass by in a snap. Stardew Valley has officially supported co-op farming for a couple years now, which is undoubtedly a great way to go back to Pelican Town.

Best laptop games: Strategy

Loop Hero

(Image credit: Devolver)

Release: 2021 | Developer: Four Quarters | Link: Steam

This tiny strategy game was one of our early favorites in 2021. “From the moment the 16-color title screen fades in alongside dramatic chiptunes, you feel like you’re playing some forgotten, VGA-era fantasy RPG, a game that still contains some of the mystery and difficulty of 1991, but gently modernized to 2021,” Evan says in our Loop Hero review. Most importantly, all that classically-inspired goodness comes in a tiny installation that shouldn’t challenge your PC nearly as much as your strategy skills.

Slay the Spire

(Image credit: Mega Crit Games)

Release date: 2019 | Developer: Mega Crit Games | Link: Steam (opens in new tab)

An instantly addictive card combat roguelike, which takes the strategic fun of deckbuilding board games and marries it with the sensibilities of games like The Binding of Isaac and Risk of Rain, where finding random “relics” can change how you play. Or, if you get a lucky combination, turn you into a murderous card god. Like the best roguelikes and deckbuilders, Slay the Spire feeds you that immense satisfaction when you find a combo that absolutely wrecks. Enemies that were once intimidating fall before you like flies. It’s a fun one to replay again and again, thanks to unlockables like more powerful cards for each deck type, and protagonists that play wholly differently from one another.

Into The Breach

(Image credit: Subset Games)

Release date: 2018 | Developer: Subset Games | Link: Humble Store (opens in new tab)

A phenomenal, bite-sized turn-based strategy game from the makers of FTL, and easily one of PC Gamer’s favorite games of 2018. It’s incredibly replayable, with different mech squads and tactics to master. As we said in our Into The Breach review: “Exacting, agonising, challenging, and intensely rewarding, Into the Breach delivers in the tiniest package the most perfectly formed tactics around.”

Civilization 5

(Image credit: Firaxis)

Release date: 2010 | Developer: Firaxis Games | Link: Humble Store (opens in new tab)

Civ is usually a safe bet when it comes to low-end machines, and you won’t need too beefy a PC in order to play the second newest entry in the series. Just don’t go blaming us when you forget to sleep, so embroiled are you in your quest to wipe the warmongering Gandhi from the face of the Earth. 4Xs in general tend to be quite kind to laptops, so if you meet the (slightly less modest) requirements, it’s worth casting your eye over Amplitude Studios’ fantasy-themed Endless Legend, and Triumph’s Age of Wonders III as well.

Magic: The Gathering Arena

(Image credit: Wizards of the Coast)

Release date: 2018 | Developer: Wizards of the Coast | Link: Official site (opens in new tab)

Finally, the digital adaptation Magic deserves. The eternal collectible card game has gotten plenty of bite-size videogames over the years, and limped along with the bigger, messier Magic: The Gathering Online, but this one is finally the real Magic experience, and it’s still a lot of fun. And its recommended system specs belong to 2011 hardware—any modern laptop will handle it no problem.

“It’s free-to-play and generous,” we wrote in our Magic: The Gathering Arena review. “When you buy a booster pack, whether with cash or gold earned in-game, you earn wildcards which can be traded for any card of an equivalent rarity (replacing the typical dusting and crafting systems of other digital CCGs). It is much more generous than tabletop Magic. You’ll still need to drop money for whatever perfect deck’s dominating the meta, or if you can’t be bothered grinding daily quests for gold. But if you climbed out of the money hole of collecting Magic cards in a book full of plastic sleeves back in the day, this is a safe way of re-experiencing that without going broke.”

Darkest Dungeon

(Image credit: Red Hook Studios)

Release date: 2016 | Developer: Red Hook Studios | Link: Humble Store (opens in new tab)

A brilliant, stressful strategy dungeon explorer that channels Lovecraft with brilliant narration and truly terrifying quests. As your party encounters horrors in the dark, the stress piles on, and too much stress causes them to take on new personality quirks that snowball into yet more stress and loss of sanity. This creates a constant tension. What if your plague doctor is the most reliable member of your party, but insults his comrades every few minutes, raising their stress levels? Permadeath is brutal in Darkest Dungeon, but you’ll find it hard to quit even when an entire party of heroes gets wiped out.

Best laptop games: RPGs

Disco Elysium – The Final Cut

(Image credit: ZA/UM)

Release: 2019 | Developer: ZA/UM | Link: Steam (opens in new tab)

This is one of our favorite RPGs of all time, and our Game Of The Year in 2019. Disco Elysium is gorgeous in a sad, gritty way, but its painterly 2D environments won’t push your system. It’s a detective RPG that feels quite a lot like playing a classic adventure game or a visual novel. Expect to slow things down here to discover clues and secrets in its detailed environments and read a lot of fantastic writing. It’s sly, clever, and full of surprises, meaning you can get some of the best new RPG action without needing a GPU that handles ray-tracing. 

Thanks to the Final Cut version of the game that now comes standard, Disco Elysium’s installation size is a bit beefier than it used to be. If you’ve got the space to spare though, it should still run swell.

Sunless Skies

(Image credit: Failbetter Games)

Release date: 2019 | Developer: Failbetter Games | Link: Steam (opens in new tab)

Like Sunless Seas before it, Sunless Skies is part roguelike adventure, part interactive fiction. But it does both better than ever. It earned a 90 in our review, “because of how brilliantly its disparate elements combine to produce exciting stories, from scrapes you survive by the skin of your teeth, to moments where your own hubris gets you killed. It helps that death means something, because that elevates the stakes when you’re one direct hit from a yawning hole opening up in your hull and some hideous monstrosity is circling around for another attack… Beyond the changes you make, the sheer range of scenarios and potential outcomes means you’ll discover something new on every run.”

For more wonderful writing in a game that leans more heavily towards interactive fiction with fewer survival mechanics, check out the sublime 80 Days, too. A game about traveling the world is perfect when you’re traveling the world with a laptop.

West of Loathing

(Image credit: Asymmetric)

Release date: 2017 | Developer: Asymmetric | Link: Steam (opens in new tab)

The funniest game of 2017, and maybe the funniest RPG we’ve ever played. This is a game you explore for jokes, not loot. They’re in every corner of the world, and even in the options menu, and it’s a joy to discover them. West of Loathing is also a genuinely fun and clever RPG, with classes like the Beanslinger and Cowpuncher instead of genre standards.

As we wrote in our West of Loathing review: “Flush a toilet for an XP gain, search a haystack for a needle or dig through a mine cart for a hunk of meat ore (West of Loathing has a meat-based economy), and insult yourself in a mirror to gain a combat buff because you angered yourself so much. Most importantly, sticking your nose in every corner of West of Loathing isn’t just beneficial for improving your character’s stats and filling your bottomless inventory with weapons, garments, food, hooch, and hats (there are over 50 of them!). This is a funny game, and you’ll want to root out every last shred of humor before you’re done with it.”

Undertale

(Image credit: tobyfox)

Release date: 2015 | Developer: tobyfox | Link: Humble Store (opens in new tab)

2015’s breakout RPG inversion might owe a bit of its widespread success to the fact that a toaster could run it. This isn’t to say it’s not a looker or fun. For those versed in RPG and popular video game tropes, Undertale is a colorful, charming, upsetting swan ride through your habits and behaviors. Date a skeleton, pet (or kill) some dogs, think way too hard about mice and cheese. As we explain in our Undertale review, it will make you second guess every key press except the ‘Buy’ button.

Torment: Tides of Numenera

(Image credit: inXile Entertainment)

Release date: 2017 | Developer: inXile Entertainment | Link: Humble Store (opens in new tab)

A successor to Planescape: Torment? It seemed too good to be true, and yet inXile took the engine Obsidian made for Pillars of Eternity and managed to return to the world of Torment in an RPG that recaptures much of what made the original so special. Lucky for laptop gamers, it can also run on low-end hardware, which is fitting for a throwback RPG. In our Torment: Tides of Numenera review, we wrote that “a slow start gives way to a thought-provoking adventure in a remarkable setting. A fitting follow-up to a beloved RPG.”

Best laptop games: Puzzle & Adventure

Opus Magnum

(Image credit: Zachtronics)

Release date: 2017 | Developer: Zachtronics | Link: Steam (opens in new tab)

We have only good things to say about Opus Magnum, but this endorsement could really be swapped out for any of Zachtronics’ insidiously deep and clever puzzle games. If cyberpunk’s your jam, try out Exapunks instead. But why Opus Magnum? The joy of expression that comes from building simple (or ridiculously complex) machines to solve a particular problem, then sitting back and watching it all work. 

We scored it a 91 in our Opus Magnum review, writing “the magic to Opus Magnum is that while there are theoretical perfect machines, the space in which you construct your solution is so wide open that you feel like you’re piecing it all together entirely yourself, and the restrictions are entirely common sense, so frustrations are usually down to your own inability rather than arbitrary rules…  You’ll see how your Steam friends rated and a histogram showing where your ratings lie across all players; I challenge you not to feel tempted to go right back again to make your machine better, and to wonder, how on Earth was it possible to make it *that* quick?”

Baba Is You

(Image credit: Hempuli Oy)

Release date: 2019 | Developer: Hempuli Oy | Link: Steam (opens in new tab)

The best puzzle game of 2019? Certainly the one with the catchiest name. It’s about pushing blocks, but also pushing words, which then become commands. And from those simple combinations, wild varieties of puzzles unfold. It’s hard to describe but easy to understand once you play it, and in our Baba Is You review we dig into why it’s so fun to play: 

“[One] solution is to make use of the blocks which determine your avatar—they read ‘Baba is you’ in a vertical line. Don’t disconnect them, otherwise ‘you’ no longer exist in the level and cannot interact with it. But you can use ‘Baba’ as the start of a horizontal command, a bit like a programming crossword puzzle. Write ‘Baba is win’ and it makes you (Baba) the win condition of the level. There’s so much potential and it’s so satisfying!”

Unavowed

(Image credit: Wadjet Eye)

Release date: 2018 | Developer: Wadjet Eye | Link: Steam (opens in new tab)

The latest adventure game from Blackwell creators Wadjet Eye is one of its best, bringing in demons, exorcisms, and some light roleplaying elements that affect how the story plays out. Take it from our Unavowed review (opens in new tab): “Unavowed is another fantastic adventure from Wadjet Eye, and it’s great to see studio founder Dave Gilbert back in the saddle. The humour didn’t always land for me and some of the voice acting is a little iffy, but otherwise this is a fine example of a modern point-and-click adventure. The addition of character customisation and companions doesn’t sound like much, but it massively changes the feel of the game, even if other aspects, such as the puzzles, are still steeped in the past.”

Gorogoa

(Image credit: Buried Signal)

Release date: 2017 | Developer: Buried Signal | Link: Steam (opens in new tab)

An ingenious puzzle game years in the making, hand-drawn by creator Jason Roberts. Gorogoa tells a story with its puzzles, rather than simply placing puzzles in a thematic wrapping. This is part of what makes it something special, and particularly engrossing, as we wrote in our Gorogoa review: “The story itself is an interesting, ambiguous framework through which to explore the idea of repeating patterns. You aren’t quite seeing the underpinnings of the game’s universe so much as you’re tuning into refrains that recur across time and scale—coherence rather than transparency… A fantastic feat of interlocking storytelling and design.”

Best laptop games: Action & Platformers

Terraria

(Image credit: Re-Logic)

Release: 2011 | Developer: Re-Logic | Link: Steam

Terraria is a huge game in a very tiny package. Even if you originally wrote it off as a 2D Minecraft clone, it’s grown far beyond that label in the years since. Terraria is a crafting adventure with heaps of updates to its name with new bosses, biomes, fishing, and too many other things to name. It was still getting updates in 2020. Frankly, Wes thinks it’s ludicrous that it still costs just $10. It’s also wild how little this huge game demands from your computer with its tiny install size and modest system requirements.

Amid Evil

(Image credit: New Blood)

Release: 2019 | Developer: Indefatigable | Link: Steam (opens in new tab)

In the wake of 2016’s Doom, we’ve seen a resurgence of new-but-old shooters that fully embrace the graphical styles and level design of 90s hallmarks like Quake and Hexen. Amid Evil may be the best of them: it’s the heavy metal album cover version of a 90s FPS, full of epic axes, swords that shoot green energy beams, and grenade launcher wands that fire miniaturized planets as weapons. Every area in the game has a unique aesthetic and set of enemies, so it never overstays its welcome. And because the design is faithful to its 90s inspirations, it’ll run on a toaster (a suitably hardcore toaster, anyway).

If Amid Evil isn’t quite your aesthetic, check out the also fantastic Dusk or Ion Fury.

Celeste

(Image credit: Matt Makes Games)

Release date: 2018 | Developer: Matt Makes Games | Link: Steam (opens in new tab)

The indie platformer darling of the past few years, and with good reason: Celeste combines tight, instantly satisfying controls with wonderful music and a story that may speak to you, if you’ve ever battled your way through depression. If you’re more into the jumping than the self-reflection, that’s okay too—Celeste has the snappiness of Super Meat Boy, where trying a challenge over and over again takes only seconds, and nailing it at the end leaves you pumping your fists. That air-dash. *Chef’s kiss*

Like many PC platformers, Celeste is perfectly playable with mouse and keyboard, but you might want to throw a controller with a good D-pad in your bag if you’re traveling.

Cuphead

(Image credit: StudioMDHR)

Release date: 2017 | Developer: StudioMDHR | Link: Humble Store (opens in new tab)

Quite possibly the prettiest game you can play on a laptop or low-end system thanks to its hand-drawn, classically animated 2D graphics. Cuphead channels Gunstar Heroes and other 90s platformers with tough as nails multi-stage bosses, but learnable tells and patterns make it conquerable if you keep a cool head and stick with it. It’s worth playing for the phenomenal soundtrack and art alone, but why not team up with Mugman and take down a few bosses while you’re admiring the craft?

Heat Signature

(Image credit: Suspicious Developments)

Release date: 2017 | Developer: Suspicious Developments | Link: Humble Store (opens in new tab)

Made by former PC Gamer editor Tom Francis, creator of the also-excellent (and low-spec-friendly) Gunpoint (opens in new tab), Heat Signature is a game about sneaking onto spaceships, braining guards with a wrench or using all kinds of gadgets to carry out a mission, and dealing with the chaos that ensues. In our review, we wrote: “Heat Signature inspires creativity through emergent complexity like any great immersive sim. I can’t stop regaling friends with my stories of heists gone bad or boasting about my flashes of brilliance in the heat of the moment. Heat Signature is brilliant at teasing these anecdotal threads out of a procedural universe.”

Best laptop games: Story games

Emily Is Away <3

(Image credit: Kyle Seeley)

Release date: 2021 | Developer: Kyle Seeley | Link: Steam

The entire Emily Is Away series looks like it’s running on a 15 year old machine, and it probably could. These fake social media games are interactive stories about a group of high schoolers navigating all their interpersonal relationships. Emily Is Away and Emily Is Away Too are made to look like AOL Instant Messenger while the third has moved along to the Facebook era. They’re all excellent stories that will take you back to the old internet days and they’ve got system requirements to match.

Her Story

(Image credit: Sam Barlow)

Release date: 2015 | Developer: Sam Barlow | Link: Steam

Her story is an FMV game about watching video tapes from interviews with a woman concerning a murder from 1994. Hunting through a database using keywords to find clips and solve the mystery has all sorts of twists and turns that make it an excellent story. “Her Story has all the drama and intrigue of the best TV crime shows, but plays to the interactive strengths of the medium in a daring, imaginative way, trusting you to make sense of the scattered jigsaw pieces at your own pace,” says our Her Story review.