As always, it’s hard to believe we’re already halfway through 2018. Seems like just yesterday we were crowning 2017’s best PC games, and now there’s six more months of titles swelling the backlog.

This year’s been a bit odd though, with many of the biggest and most anticipated games (Sea of Thieves) floundering, and others ending up on this list that I hadn’t even heard of until they popped up on Steam (Yoku’s Island Express). We’ll see how many of them survive for our final Game of the Year list in December, but for now? Read on for our 10 favorite PC games of 2018...so far.
Subnautica

I’m not much of  a fan of survival games normally, but Subnautica ($25 on Humble) had me hooked for weeks. The mysteries of its alien oceans held so much promise, and I fell right into the familiar loop—crafting gear to go deeper to find new loot to craft even better gear, and so on, sinking ever further into the depths and encountering weirder and weirder creatures.
[ Further reading: These 20 absorbing PC games will eat days of your life ]

It’s a marvelous example of world-building, blended with a story that casually guides you to interesting hand-crafted moments without undercutting the strengths of its sandbox. Just enough direction to keep you moving forward. Or downward, as the case may be.
A Case of Distrust

I’m a sucker for a good detective game, and A Case of Distrust ($15 on Steam) is a great one. Set in San Francisco in the 1920s, you play as Phyllis Cadence Malone, a private investigator on the trail of a murder. The game is almost entirely based around conversations, as you interrogate various members of the community and try to catch them in lies.

But it’s the art that really earns A Case of Distrust a spot on this list. Every frame is this eye-catching monochromatic minimalism, more suggestions of scenes than anything else. It’s absolutely stunning, and an excellent pair to the writing itself.
Kingdom Come: Deliverance

When I first saw Kingdom Come: Deliverance ($60 on Humble), I thought it might be a disaster. It was just so damn ambitious, an Elder Scrolls-style RPG set in medieval Bohemia with semi-realistic melee combat, potion brewing, horseback riding, and about a dozen other systems on top. Oh, and it was being made in CryEngine, which is hardly what I’d picture for an Elder Scrolls-style RPG.

And yet somehow it works. Kingdom Come: Deliverance is janky as all hell, bug-ridden, clumsy, and often poorly voice-acted. Despite all that, it’s also one of the most—and I don’t use this word often—immersive RPGs I’ve played in a long, long while. By the end, I felt surprisingly invested in my character Henry, the blacksmith’s-kid-turned-knight who helped save a realm. Proof history can be just as compelling as fantasy, given the developers put enough love and care into the details.