My first "desktop replacement" laptop circa 2006 weighed in around 10 pounds, and within a year or so I gave up on playing games on it and built a new desktop PC. In those days, a laptop couldn't really compete with the performance of a real graphics card, but a lot has changed in 20 years. Today the best laptop games are pretty much the same great PC games you can play sitting at a desk, and a lot of them will run well even on thin-and-light ultraportable computers.
There are decades of classic games that play well on even the lightest weight laptops. The same goes for some of our favorite PC games, like deckbuilders, strategy games, and esports-focused shooters and MOBAs. High-end gaming laptops can even keep up with ray tracing and high frame rates.
But if you can play basically anything on a laptop, what should you spend your time on?
2025 games: Upcoming releases
Best PC games: All-time favorites
Free PC games: Freebie fest
Best FPS games: Finest gunplay
Best RPGs: Grand adventures
Best co-op games: Better together
Our recommendations for the best laptop games prioritize lighter system requirements so you don't obliterate your battery life or overheat your system. Most of them are easy to play with a trackpad, so you can play them lying down in bed or on a train. Only a few are ideally played with a gamepad, but for more recommendations in that vein check out the best Steam Deck games which likewise keep performance demands low.
The best laptop games won't rely on your PC blasting out 144 frames per second (though if you have a high end Razer Blade or Asus Zephyrus, go nuts!). A few are marked with a 🖱 to indicate you'll really want a mouse to get the best out of them. The flashiest games are generally better suited to a desktop or TV setup, while the best laptop games instead tend to get us thinking or eat up the hours making strategic plays.
Below you'll find our favorite just-one-more-turn games for laptops, plus a wealth of free-to-play picks, roguelikes, and brain-teasing adventures. And remember that most AAA games from the early 2010s or prior will run on any new laptop with ease. Check out GOG's old games or the Internet Archive's in-browser emulation library for a bajillion more classic options.
And if reading about the best laptop games has you thinking it might be time for some new hardware, here's our guide to the best gaming laptops.
Free-to-play laptop games: What's hot right now
🖱 Marvel Rivals
Release: 2024 | Developer: NetEase | Link: Steam
Marvel Rivals is doing something pretty darn impressive in 2025: Show that hero shooters are still the bee's knees. The 6v6 third-person shooter owes a whole lot to Blizzard for its core hero designs (many Rivals heroes can be described as "this Overwatch character but faster"), but it's the striking ink-inspired art, expressive takes on familiar characters, and imaginative abilities winning over millions of players.
It's also reasonably low-spec for an Unreal Engine 5 game with semi-destructible maps, but NetEase has struggled with performance at launch. January's season one update added additional "performance" options for model and environment detail, which should help stabilize framerates.
Dark and Darker
Release: 2023 | Developer: IronMace | Link: Steam
This dark fantasy extraction game got a burst of activity in 2025 thanks to a new PvE mode, which means you can play the game without being brutally destroyed by other players! Instead, you can focus on being brutally destroyed by monsters while you try to survive your looting and pillaging journey through the dark.
Dark and Darker is still going through some early access growing pains, but it remains widely played and the inclusion of a co-op mode is definitely going to win over some players who otherwise didn't gel with the high stakes PvP. It's more graphically demanding than some other games on this list, but if your laptop has any kind of dedicated GPU from the last 4-5 years, you should be good to go.
League of Legends
Release: 2009 | Developer: Riot Games | Link: Official site
Is it silly to call League of Legends hot in 2025? One of the defininitive free-to-play games has been going strong for ages and ages, but it nonetheless feels a bit buzzier coming off the popular second season of Netflix series Arcane. Its first season of 2025, meanwhile, effectively served as an Arcane epilogue, with a luxurious animated trailer showing off redesigns of several characters and promising that Riot's going to continue building out the fantasy setting of Runeterra even after Arcane's wrapped up.
There's also a physical card game on the way and a fighting game spin-off due this year. Even if you're not a mega MOBA player, it's an ideal time to be excited about League.
Best laptop games: Strategy & card games
Promise Mascot Agency
Release: 2025 | Developer: Kaizen Game Works | Link: Steam
An incredibly difficult game to place on this list by genre, but an incredibly easy one to recommend, Promise Mascot Agency is part sim, part adventure, part visual novel, which sees you trying to pay off a massive debt by managing a talent agency of living mascots. Reviewer Maddi Chilton praised how all of its ideas tie together in her 94% review:
"What's tremendous about Promise Mascot Agency is that the excessiveness of its concept only serves to anchor it deeper in our own material reality. Everyone Michi meets is real, even the people who aren't. A noble-minded bureaucrat stifled by his idiot boss is found down the street from a dissected eel whose sole purpose in life is to stop people from eating unagi; a foreign teacher who's trapped in town for visa reasons is right next door to a sentient grave marker giving unprofitable tours out of historically minded selflessness... Kaso-Machi is both a total freakshow bizarro sideways world and a patient and thoughtful representation of a dying town somewhere in rural Japan."
Whether you play it for the management sim aspects or the funny, at times insightful dialogue, this is just as unique an outing as the developer's first game, detective mystery Paradise Killer.
Tactical Breach Wizards
Release: 2024 | Developer: Suspicious Developments Inc | Link: Steam
PC Gamer's pick for the best strategy game of 2024 is a brilliant small-scale twist on XCOM, but with very funny wizards. As reviewer Harvey Randall wrote, it's "a prime example of a game that defines exactly what it's here to do, what vibe it's here to capture, and then proceeds to get full marks on every one of its own set goals."
The writing adds a personal and silly flair you don't see in more military-minded strategy games, but the strategy itself also crackles with creativity: "Instead of long-term battles, it zeroes in on the 'breach, clear, repeat' loop of bite-sized combat puzzles, and gives you more tactical tools than you could fit inside a bag of holding."
Balatro
Release: 2024 | Developer: LocalThunk | Link: Steam
The indie card game sensation of 2024, deckbuilder Balatro uses the theming of poker to create a game that is very much not poker. Get ready to put together some wild "illegal poker hands" with jokers galore and blinds and point totals that ascend into the multimillions. "It’s like watching a Poker game on a cursed TV accidentally tuned to 1972, filmed by a crew gradually coming down from hallucinogens," as we wrote in our 91% review. "A roguelike deckbuilder debut already worthy of joining Slay the Spire and Monster Train at the King’s table. Essential."
Ballionaire
Release: 2024 | Developer: newobject | Link: Steam
One of our final reviews of 2024 turned out to be a breezy surprise hit: Ballionaire, a cross between pachinko and a deckbuilding roguelike. Reviewer Abbie Stone describes Ballionaire's compulsive loop like so: "Essentially Peggle has gone to college, smartened up, and gotten itself a masters degree in compelling strategy gameplay. Oh no. Oh God no."
The regular dopamine hits will likely have you saying oh god, yes, though, as she laid out later in her 80% review: "A game that at first feels as random as flipping a coin can be manipulated into one that actually rewards strategy... It’s a marvelous bookend to a year that opened with the almighty Balatro, and with a few updates, Ballionaire could easily become my new podcast game of choice."
🖱 Factorio: Space Age
Release: 2024 | Developer: Wube Software LTD. | Link: Steam
Factorio is a modern PC classic in the base-building / automation space, but this new 2024 expansion, Space Age, is practically a sequel. Heck, it's bigger than the original game, and is destined to be the kind of game PC players keep coming back to for the next decade. As we wrote in our review of Factorio in 2020: "Let's skip the preamble, shall we? Factorio is brilliant. If you're remotely interested in games about management, construction, and above all production chains, then hop aboard the nearest conveyor belt and grab yourself a copy of Factorio this instant. Then pick up another copy for the most important person in your life, because they won't be seeing you for a while, and at least this way they'll understand why."
Cobalt Core
Release: 2023 | Developer: Rocket Rat Games | Link: Steam
A blend of FTL's space journey with Slay the Spire's deckbuilding, Cobalt Core manages to not feel too derivative of either. You'll use cards to do more than attack: positioning your ship and dodging attacks are key to battles, and the meta progression will see you recruit new crew members and unlock new ships that change how you play. It may sound like standard roguelike stuff, but the way all the pieces come together makes Cobalt Core quite possibly the best one of 2023.
Slay the Spire
Release date: 2019 | Developer: Mega Crit Games | Link: Steam
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.
Best laptop games: RPGs
Keep Driving
Release date: 2025 | Developer: YCJY Games | Link: Steam
This turn-based "management" RPG "perfectly captures the feel of a long and memorable road trip," writes PC Gamer's Chris Livingston in his 90% review. A distant descendant of The Oregon Trail, you'll experience a range of events as you make a cross-country road trip that effectively serve as turn-based combat. Hitchhikers add utility to your journey, but as you spend more time withj them you'll learn more about them, too. "Developer YCJY Games does an impressive job of developing characters who are, technically, just pixelated square portraits you lock into inventory slots," writes Chris. "With minimal text, their stories and personalities come through, and by the end of the trip it's clear that we're all crammed into this car for the same reason: because we're all a little damaged, a little aimless, a little adrift."
With multiple endings to discover this is a simple-looking game that can keep you busy for quite awhile. It's a little cramped on the Steam Deck's screen, which makes it perfect for a laptop.
Metaphor: ReFantazio
Release: 2024 | Developer: Atlus | Link: Steam
One of the best games of 2024 is quite possibly Atlus's most accomplished RPG ever, and that's saying something given its string of hits with Persona and Shin Megami Tensei. We scored this fantasy RPG a rare 95%, praising its story, combat, and changes to returning Atlus ideas like social relationships with your party members and a daily calendar of activities to manage. It's a must-play, and best of all, has very modest CPU and GPU requirements that any gaming laptop should be able to chew up and spit out.
Dread Delusion
Release: 2024 | Developer: Lovely Hellplace | Link: Steam
Dread Delusion is like a bite-sized Elder Scrolls, a snackable Morrowind, an amuse-bouche of Shivering Isles. You're chasing down an outlaw on the Asteroid frontier of a magical society that's killed its gods and enforces atheism at the point of a sword. The combat is meh but that's not why we're here—Dread Delusion's got all the juicy exploration and atmosphere of an Elder Scrolls but with all the fat trimmed off, and the cosmic horror sci-fi writing on display is killer. PC Gamer writer Ted Litchfield ranks one of its quests among his RPG all-timers: It involves reckoning with the ethics of a human meat substitute relied on by a society of vegetarian zombies. If you loved Morrowind's weird, it's only amplified here.
Disco Elysium - The Final Cut
Release: 2019 | Developer: ZA/UM | Link: Steam
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.
Best laptop games: Puzzle & Adventure
Blue Prince
Release: 2025 | Developer: Dogubomb | Link: Steam
"One of the best puzzle games in years," PC Gamer's Chris Livingston declared in his 92% review. If that's not all you need to hear to load Blue Prince up on your laptop, here's a bit more: you're exploring a mansion by puzzling your way through it, but how you build the mansion, by placing rooms you randomly draw as cards, is itself a part of the puzzle.
"A few puzzles are contained to certain rooms and you'll encounter them repeatedly, like a math-based dartboard puzzle in the billiards room and a logic puzzle in the parlor, but most of Blue Prince's best puzzles, the real puzzles, the ones you'll keep thinking about when you're not even playing the game, are spread throughout the mansion," Chris writes. "I've had so many great 'Eureka!' moments (though mine are usually expressed as 'Holy shit!') where I spotted something for the first time and then flipped frantically through my notes because I'd seen something related to it in a different room on an earlier run, maybe even days earlier."
This one's going straight onto our list of all-timer puzzle games, and its light hardware demands make it perfect for a laptop.
Riven
Release: 2024 | Developer: Cyan Worlds | Link: Steam
"This is how you remake a classic," we said in our 90% review of Riven, the 2024 update to the sequel to Myst. We reviewed this game on an aging laptop with an Nvidia GTX 1070 and found it played fabulously with the graphics dialed right up, while the experience of exploring Riven's world absolutely holds up thanks to some smart changes from the original. "The Riven remake preserves that unique sense of estrangement even though I've been to this world before," we wrote, pointing to how some puzzles have been changed. But "what hasn't changed in 27 years is that this is less a game to be solved and more a place to be experienced."
A new in-game notetaking system proves to be a smart addition, though, if you do want to fully unravel Riven's big mystery.
Dave the Diver
Release: 2023 | Developer: Mintrocket | Link: Steam
An "adventure RPG" that sort of defies genre; Dave the Diver has you managing a sushi restaurant and diving in the sea as an explorer, with many more activities layered on top. Like, many more, as described in our 91% review: "Nearly every time I sat down to play Dave the Diver it threw a new feature or activity at me. Night fishing opens up the pursuit of new species and turns the once comforting ocean spooky, and new gear like tranquilizers and submersibles give you new ways to catch fish. A staff management system for the restaurant lets you hire and train workers to help out... There's a farm to breed fish so you don't have to rely entirely on daily dives, and a farm to grow rice and vegetables for new recipes, and eventually even an underwater farm to grow different types of seaweed. As soon as you've gotten comfortable with one system, the game throws a new one on top."
The Rise of the Golden Idol
Release: 2024 | Developer: Color Gray Games | Link: Steam
The sequel to 2022's killer Case of the Golden Idol, we loved this follow-up puzzler nearly as much as the original, and some folks out there consider it the stronger of the two. You can't go wrong playing either, and the sleuthing in this one is much the same.
"it's your job at grisly crime scenes to sort out not just what happened, but how it happened, and especially why it happened," PC Gamer's Chris Livingston wrote in his 87% review. "Just as in its prequel, The Case of the Golden Idol, the answers only come after exhaustively examining the scene, identifying the participants, and building a narrative of the events. Once again the cases are incredibly clever and solving them is almost always deeply satisfying, and each brings you a step closer to unraveling a central mystery that sprawls through the entire game."
Incredibly modest system requirements mean this will run on even an old laptop with integrated graphics.
Best laptop games: Action & Platformers
Animal Well
Release: 2024 | Developer: Billy Basso | Link: Steam
This metroidvania-styled adventure may have actually fit in better with the puzzle games above. It plays like a platformer but diverges from other games in this style like Hollow Knight to focus far more on unraveling the world through clever puzzles, like modern classic Fez. There's no combat, and the more we played it the more inventive it revealed itself to be. In our 90% review we praised how puzzles are sometimes single-screen affairs, while other times they "spawn whole regions."
"The credits rolling in Animal Well just marks the end of one game and the beginning of another," wrote reviewer Shaun Prescott. "Animal Well morphed from a fun-verging-brilliant indie metroidvania into something that now keeps me awake at night. I'm not ready to move on, and I won't, but I'm going to need a hivemind's help to unpick its deepest secrets."
Hades 2
Release: 2024 (early access) | Developer: Supergiant | Link: Steam
If you're still playing the first Hades, we wouldn't blame you. But this follow-up is already the bigger game, even in early access, and makes enough fundamental changes to combat and boons that it's less a replacement for the original than it is a fantastic complement to it. We think it's absolutely worth playing right now, and we think you'll come to love some of the changes from the first action roguelike, even if they take awhile to settle in.
Terraria
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, and it's still seeing updates as of 2023. It's also wild how little this huge game demands from your computer with its tiny install size and modest system requirements.
Best laptop games: First-person shooters
🖱 Cultic
Release: 2022 | Developer: Jasozz Games | Link: Steam
One of the standouts of the boomer shooter renaissance (and less twitchy than some others), Cultic is comic booky with a gnarly horror shimmer, nasty in just the right ways. The first episode released in 2022 is a meaty 6-8 hours of shooting, but it also got a whole new level in 2023 and has another big chapter on the way.
"What Cultic impressed me with most was its ability to shift tonal gears," writer Dominic Tarason said in 2022. "Within a single level it’s not unusual to traverse long trails full of small encampments before assaulting a cult stronghold in a frantic cover-to-cover battle accompanied by some very John Carpenter synth jams. Moments later, I’m in a dark corpse-lined tunnel, tension building and the music completely absent until a horror set piece introduces a new supernatural threat. All that in the space of 10 minutes."
🖱 Wild Bastards
Release: 2024 | Developer: Blue Manchu | Link: Steam
"The roguelike and FPS genres haven't been spliced so successfully since Deathloop—and Wild Bastards deserves just as much acclaim," we wrote in our 91% review. High praise for a shooter that, for this list's purposes, doesn't have a high barrier to entry; its recommended system specs call for only a quad-core Intel processor. The cool structure here sees Wild Bastards playing out like a strategy roguelike, except each expedition you set out on puts you inside a fast-paced arena FPS shootout. Enjoy how each Bastard plays differently (stealth is also a viable option) and you'll be able to play it for many a trip away from your desktop.
🖱 Counter-Strike 2
Release: 2023 | Developer: Valve | Link: Steam
After years of Counter-Strike: Global Offensive being the biggest FPS in the world, Valve has transformed it into Counter-Strike 2, a free shooter that is largely similar to its predecessor. Then again, in the grand scheme of things Counter-Strike hasn't changed that much since its very first iteration in the '90s. As a result the small details matter a lot, and CS2 does make some meaningful changes that will keep the competitive scene on its toes for the next year or so. Whether you've never played CS or haven't played in years, now is an ideal time to jump in: the game hasn't been this shiny and new for a decade.
Best laptop games: Multiplayer
Abiotic Factor
Release: 2024 (early access) | Developer: Deep Field | Link: Steam
This fantastically inventive co-op survival game feels a bit like an off-key version of Half-Life. You're stuck in an underground science lab when an alien disaster strikes, and you've got to use whatever's at hand to survive—the more comical the resource, the better. Expect to make chest plates out of couch cushions, survive on vending machine rations, and have your character defined by positive and negative traits. "I chose to have a weak bladder (I have to relieve myself 20% more often) so I could afford the Decathlon Competitor trait (sprint a lot longer)," writes Morgan Park. "I'm realizing that it's not survival-crafting that I was tired of all along, it's the homogeneity of trees, cabins, furnaces, and caves that wore me down."
Lethal Company
Release: 2023 (early access) | Developer: Zeekerss | Link: Steam
A viral smash hit from 2023, this dirt cheap survival game features the rarest of all multiplayer coups: making voice chat essential. Also hilarious, as described by editor Jacob Ridley in our GOTY 2023 entry:
"What makes this game so absurdly entertaining is 1) the proximity-based chat and 2) the lack of polish and 3) the social mechanics. The game is scary, and it's going to make you jump at times, but it's fun for the massively overblown reactions it generates and way it always keeps you either talking to one another or talking about one another (when you're dead).
"You'll find yourself giggling as your pal creeps deeper into a dark room. Then laughing as a far-off scream turns to a sudden silence. Then as quickening footsteps approach the room you felt oh so safe inside, the laughing quickly subsides and you're the one screaming as you sprint towards the door."
Stardew Valley
Release date: 2016 | Developer: ConcernedApe | Link: Humble
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.
🖱 Minecraft
Release: 2011 | Developer: Mojang | Link: Official site
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.
