Honestly, we all can’t be much more useful than any of the “Top 10 games of 2024” YouTube videos because we don’t really know your friend or his tastes.
A Steam gift card seems like a good idea? Let him pick his own games?
Might consider getting something that only plays well on keyboard/mouse. Factorio comes up off the top of my head. Shooters also generally translate poorly to controllers, so perhaps that?
It’s amazing with friends… especially when one of them decides to be the cook, and burns down the base because they forgot to turn off the stove while we’re all out scavenging for supplies…
Games with lots of mods for sure. It may be a generic recommendation but Minecraft with mod packs and gorgeous shaders is an amazing experience for someone who never got around to trying them.
Also if he’s a souls-like fan, I highly recommend Elden Ring’s convergence mod and Dark Souls 3’s convergence mod (they’re by the same team). It adds like a hundred new spells, new weapons and equipment, overhaul of some mechanics like having actual classes with game-changing effects, completely overhauls areas with new geometry, adds new enemies and bosses, etc. It’s a very fun time.
The souls games weren’t on sale, but I’ve passed the message along about the mods. I think he’s taking a break after pushing those games to the absolute limit but I’m glad something like that exists.
Avant-garde is my jam, it’s just hard to convince people who aren’t into that kind of game to play. I love the Cosmo D games, for example, but I know most of my friends wouldn’t enjoy them if I recommended them.
Limiting to PC only games makes things tricky. Most games on PC are available on console as well. Especially soulslike and fighting games.
But my recommendation is Ultrakill. It’s a fast paced FPS with a Devil May Cry style system. It really showcases the benefit of having a mouse and keyboard for shooters.
Outer Wilds is one of my favorite games. If he likes the explorey/other worldly feel of souls games, he might like it, but it certainly doesn’t have any combat.
As for fighting, I’ve recently started replaying Returnal, and I really enjoy that. It’s a well known console game, but I think it came out after 2020. It’s a roguelike format so slightly different from souls, but I love it.
Unfortunately he’s never been able to get into Outer Wilds despite it being one of my favorite games that I always shill. I’ll still push for him to play it.
Game bundles like from Fanatical are a good start. You can’t return them if you have issues, but they’re great if you haven’t played any of the offerings given.
A similar thing would be Xbox Game Pass, but that very much locks you into their ecosystem, and they’re clearly done investing into worthwhile games.
How powerful is the PC? Is the question more about games optimised for mouse+keyboard, or is it about demanding recent games that allows his new machine to flex its muscles?
Since you say he likes Souls-likes Black Myth Wukong probably checks both boxes - I never ended up playing it (my backlog is too long) but it looked great with stunning visuals and I heard good things about the gameplay.
Cyberpunk with full path tracing is still one of the prettiest games out there and a pretty damn good game too after the patches and expansions.
Finally, something like Fallout: London could be an interesting suggestion as mods of that nature are out of reach of the console crowd. Could give him a whiff of what he’s been missing out on.
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Aktywne