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.
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.
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.
Man, for a console gamer coming over this thread has a bunch of pretty terrible recommendations. I can't imagine a better way to send somebody back to console gaming than immediately dumping a bunch of fiddly mods and janky old stuff on them so they can play their OS for a while before having any fun.
I mean, if they're into competitive, hardcore console stuff they probably will want to decide if they want to go down the rabbit hole of competitive PC gaming. Checking out a couple MOBAs or fast mouse and keyboard shooters is probably a good way to start (for Steam ease of use I suppose DOTA2 and CS2 are the obvious choices). That's the fighting game equivalent stuff they're unlikely to have played already. I'd say if they aren't feeling it, it's fine to step away, though.
Depending on how beefy their gaming PC is, it may be fun to go for crazy console-crushing visuals. Path traced games like Indiana Jones or Cyberpunk may be fun to check out even if they've played the console versions, if they have a current-gen expensive GPU in there.
There are a couple of genres that are also cross-over but play best on PC, like survival sims and the like. I'm a PC controller player, but I'll switch to mouse and keyboard for, say, Satisfactory, although that's less action-packed and timing-based.
And of course there's upcoming stuff. VF 5 REVO is coming out in January, and that seems like a good chance to jump into a new thing on a gaming PC instead.
I agree. People keep suggesting Factorio, which leads me to believe that they have not actually read the post since his friend is into souls-likes and heavy combat games. Factorio is the antithesis of that! I don’t personally play those games (Factorio is one of my most played games), so I can’t make suggestions aside from Monster Hunter.
Yeah, that's why Satisfactory is probably a better choice (I mean, it's mostly "what if Factorio didn't look like a 1999 Flash game").
Honestly in 2025 (hey, happy new year!) things are platform-agnostic enough that the biggest thing to do when you switch to PC gaming is go check how all the games you know play when you run them at 200 fps or whatever. But even if you're an action game guy I do think it's work taking a few minutes to decide if you're going to be a sweaty mouse and keyboard guy and it's time to start browsing online stores for mice with ten grams shaved off the mouse wheel or whatever.
DRG is a fantastic place to start with moving from a controller to mouse/keyboard.
I would personally T-up some classics like portal and Half-life 2 for solo “history lessons” after that. Only then would I make some harder recomendations like long RPGs, MOBAs, 4X, and would shy away from MMOs unless you have an organized group to introduce them to.
If your friend is new to PC gaming then they might not be aware of how much they can get for free. I just wrote a post (stickied in !freegames) summarising all the places you can regularly get freebies, could be a good way for them to try out a lot of different things.
Just in the past few years I got maybe 100-200 free games. I follow a few discord bots, and several free groups here on lemmy and Slickdeals website. Lots of resources. Amazon prime gives free games, epic free games, lots of free games on steam, itch.io, gog often has free games, other key websites often have free games too.
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