Developers have rogueliked basically every genre at this point, but Void Bastards‘s combination of System Shock stealth-shooter and off-kilter British humor still won my heart. Playing as a prisoner in a corporate hell, you’re thawed from stasis and sent into the Sargasso Nebula, there to find important items like “A Laminator” and “Water Based Lube” and “That Ball That Used To Be In Computer Mice Before We Discovered Lasers And Stuff.”
These items are scattered across the nebula on various ships, all randomly generated and populated with fearsome foes. There’s a lot of sneaking, and a lot of shooting, and all of it complicated by the fact that your prisoner might randomly be eight feet tall or cough every 10 to 15 seconds and alert everyone on-board. I don’t often go for run-based games these days, but Void Bastards is hilarious and eminently fair, and I had a great time with it.
It does require a bit more firepower than most of the other games on this list, demanding a GeForce GTX 660 equivalent or better, so it might not run on a laptop with integrated graphics. It might just on newer laptops, though. Give it a whirl and take advantage of Steam’s return policy if you need to!
