Lots of CRPG and TRPG. A few experimental indie RTS. And a few indie auto-battlers. Plus a few casual co-op shooters. Oh, and some indie horror as well.
I’m surprised no one has mentioned Caves of Qud or Path of Achra (I got them both). Aren’t we hipster enough?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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