The 20 Best PlayStation 5 Games of the 2020s So Far

We’re almost at the halfway point of this decade, so obviously it’s time for us to do what websites and magazines love to do the most: rank some stuff. Two weeks ago we shared our list of the best games of the 2020s so far; earlier this week we looked at the best Nintendo games of the 2020s. Now it’s time to focus on the PlayStation 5, which has been the dominant high-end console this generation (the older, significantly less powerful Switch has greatly outsold it, but PlayStation’s leading in its one-on-one war with Xbox). As such, if a game gets a cross-platform release, it’ll almost always wind up on the PlayStation 5 sooner or later. That means its library is full of both top-of-the-line technical showcases from Sony and and the biggest corporations in the industry, and also some of the best games from small studios and independent publishers. If you’re interested in games as both a pastime and an artistic medium, you can’t really go wrong with a PlayStation 5—unless you want to play it on the go, in which case get a Steam Deck. Whether you own one already or are interested in picking one up, here are the best PlayStation 5 games of the decade so far.

20. Astro Bot

Astro Bot is proof that, when it comes to games, bigger doesn’t always mean better. Sure, this beefed up sequel to Astro’s Playroom is longer and far more popular than that game, but it comes at a cost; while Playroom was laser-focused on plumbing the capabilities of the brand new PlayStation 5, while paying a respectable amount of tribute to the platform’s history, Astro Bot is a little overstuffed with underexplored ideas and mechanics and weighed down by constant nostalgia and references. That’s not to say it’s a bad game; it wouldn’t be here if it was. Astro Bot is an ingenious and eminently playable romp whose restless creativity is admirable and infectious despite its lack of focus. If this was Astro’s non-VR debut instead of Playroom, it would have been a massive revelation. As it is, it’s a really good game that lacks the elegance of its predecessor. It’s still easily one of the best PlayStation 5 games of the decade, though, and a must-play for Sony heads or platformer fans.—Garrett Martin

19. Armored Core VI: Fires of Rubicon

Most of what happens in From’s mech game Armored Core VI happens because something needs to. This is not a complex story, the themes are direct and unadorned. There are bits and pieces, information is withheld, endings leave room for speculation. But this is not a game for deep epistemological work. Etymology is explanatory, but not revelatory here. Rubicon has meaning in that From Software has at least done cursory reading of Suetonius’ The Twelve Caesars. One of the first real challenges you’ll face is an unhinged, violent AC pilot named Sulla. Does this have any deep hidden meaning? No, not really. You can google it and learn all about Lucius Cornelius Sulla Felix if you want. But it won’t truly deepen your understanding of Armored Core VI like every other piece of media, there is no “unlocking” done by understanding the origins of every term. Mostly things are named what they are because it suits a general theme, things need names, and some names just sound more badass than others. Rubicon, for instance, has plenty of historical significance, but mostly people invoke the word “Rubicon” (a truly uneventful river named because of the iron saturation of the riverbed) when they want to either let you know they think they’re being hard as a motherfucker, or they want to call upon the YOLO or Live Más mentality. You know what also sounds pretty hard? “Let us go where the omens of the Gods and the iniquity of our enemies call us. The die is now cast.” That last sentence is actually the translation for the third ending achievement. There. Saved you a trip to Fextralife.—Dia Lacina

18. Ratchet & Clank: Rift Apart

The first real reason to own a PlayStation 5, Rift Apart is an embellishment on a formula that’s worked for 19 years. It’s splashy and charming. It doesn’t take itself too seriously, but it absolutely will dive into talking about trauma and disability, and tackle questions of belonging and imposter syndrome in ways that are simple enough to speak to children, but honest enough to resonate with adults. And at times, it manages to be surprisingly funny despite being entirely predictable, knitting trope to trope in a tapestry wrapped in more tropes. It’s a simple but surprisingly earnest and compassionate game. What carries this big flashy sci-fi romp along and helps elevate it from a simple farce is this charm and humanity. Rift Apart has the heart that Guardians of the Galaxy could never find.—Dia Lacina

17. Street Fighter 6

All long-running games eventually have to figure out how to attract new players without disenchanting their fans. It’s even tougher with fighting games, and especially one as old, beloved, and rich in history as Street Fighter. Street Fighter 6 has figured out how to cater to its massive following while still welcoming new players, and then providing both with the innovation of a surprisingly deep RPG on top of the core fighting game. Whether you’ve been mixing it up in those streets for decades or never even reeled off a single hadouken before, Street Fighter 6 should be on your fight card. It’s the new standard in fighting game excellence, and one of the best games of 2023.—Garrett Martin

16. Umurangi Generation

Does this sound familiar? A city’s in lockdown after a crisis, its citizens wearing face masks for their own health. Heavily armed cops patrol streets rife with anti-cop graffiti. Institutions have violated their compact with the people, and those in power came down hard on those who rose up against them. It’s real life around the world right now, but it’s also the setting for Umurangi Generation, a beautiful photo game that contrasts the peacefulness of taking photos and making art with the fear and violence of a police state, and which came out a week before the protests inspired by George Floyd’s murder went global. The societal issues that people are protesting are timeless, sadly, and embedded at the very foundation of our culture, which means a game like Umurangi will always be timely—at least until society is transformed to the point of being unrecognizable. Playing Umurangi over the last few days can be taxing, especially if you turn to games simply to shut out the world around you and ignore what’s happening. The added context of the last week also makes it exhilarating, though, and in a way that leaves me feeling a bit guilty and shameful—like a tourist who, instead of documenting real life oppression, is living in a fictionalized version of it. The events that inspired Umurangi’s crisis are environmental—designer Naphtali Faulkner’s mother’s house was destroyed during the bush fires that raged through Australia last year, and the game’s dark red skies hint at a different kind of trauma than the one currently happening in America and elsewhere. It’s one that still looms above all of society, though; if we don’t tear our own cities down first, the worsening climate problem inevitably will. Despite the different disasters, and even with its futuristic, sci-fi trappings, Umurangi Generation is a vital, current, powerful game that uncannily captures the mood of its time.—Garrett Martin

15. Thirsty Suitors

Thirsty Suitors is a rich narrative that carefully and truthfully deals with culture, family, LGBTQIA+ issues, relationships, and self-expression. You meet and interact with a diverse range of characters in terms of race, personality, and gender and sexual identity, and each are developed and dealt with in their own unique ways. The plot introduces a number of different stories for Jala Jayaratne to unearth and resolve. When you’re trying to repair familial relationships, save Timber Hills’s skateboarding scene, and reconcile with exes, it’s hard for each of those stories to develop in complex and evenly-paced ways, but Thirsty Suitors does its best by giving every story its own focused element that defines it and supports the other stories.—Maddie Agne

Jala is the cool and alternative skater girl I dreamt up when I was younger and wondering what my type was. She’s a vision. She also eschews many of the tropes of romantic characters in games, who are sometimes flattened by the need to be appealing to players by being the multi-faceted protagonist of the story. Sometimes Jala is even unlikeable, lending her dimensions that make her feel like a real person. Rather than turn me away from her, it only solidifies the crush I’ve developed on this character who skirts the line between reality and fantasy wonderfully.—Moises Taveras

14. Baldur’s Gate 3

Much has been made of how the Dungeons & Dragons-based videogame Baldur’s Gate 3 adapts its tabletop origins, but what’s most interesting about it comes from its videogameness. One of the things that is so thrilling and strange about tabletop to me is that it is negotiable. We can discuss everything, the course is far from set. A videogame, by nature, is bound to its code. There’s unpredictability, sure. But even in a game as big as Baldur’s Gate, there is a single course that all players must chart. There may be hidden secrets, oft-discarded paths, but the general arc of the game is recognizable and familiar to every player. It’s unwise to characterize Baldur’s Gate 3 as a tabletop sim for exactly that reason. It has limits that friends around the table do not have, but that also means it cannot be negotiated with.—Grace Benfell

13. Vampire Survivors

I blame it on the garlic, which obliterated enemies that dared step to me, and made me feel invincible. Of course I wasn’t, and fell mere minutes later, but that taste of what it might mean to utterly dominate the indomitable was more than enough to hook me on Vampire Survivors. Even as I write this blurb, my eyes are darting over to the game’s icon on my desktop, and I can almost hear it calling me. Vampire Survivors is a game that pretty explicitly digs its claws into everyone who plays it, but you have to be willing to embrace the cacophony that follows to be really happy with it. Inside that madness is a wonderful roguelike—an alchemical wonder, if you will—that obscures its depth and secrets with simple graphics and overwhelming odds. It is the easiest game to pick up and the hardest to let go of and, whoops, I’ve begun another run.—Moises Taveras

12. Signalis

While Signalis fits into a larger trend of games that emulate PSX-era survival horror, its bold aesthetic choices and spellbinding storytelling help push it past its influences to create something singular. Its gameplay successfully channels some of the usual suspects like Resident Evil(2002) and Silent Hill 2 as your forage for keys, avoid Crimson Head-esque reviving zombies, and repeatedly backtrack to solve puzzles. However, its greatest selling point is that it has one of the most compelling videogame narratives of the year, its ruminations on death, identity, and accepting loss conveyed through cryptic symbolism and recurring cycles of pain. By constantly switching settings, artistic styles, and perspectives, it creates a disorienting headspace that emphasizes the confusion of its protagonist, slowly revealing the meaning of its recurring images until the horrible weight of it all comes crashing down. It’s a brainworm of a love story that I can’t get off my mind.—Elijah Gonzalez

11. Pentiment

On every level, Pentiment’s illustrations, storytelling choices, and most clearly people are a mirror for the manuscripts that shape its characters’ lives. Whether they read or not, everyone is a repository of history, with their own verbal handwriting, quirks, and opinions on what the town of Tassing’s legacy should be. These human texts open up genuinely insightful questions about authenticity in art and what it will come to mean centuries later, as well as what to do when your history has been lost to you. It is a beautiful portrait of history that doesn’t limit itself from commenting on labor inequity, parental loss, or artistic hopelessness, all things the medieval and early modern art it draws from portrays so vividly. In bringing some of those stories to us today, Pentiment accomplishes the remarkable goal of being both clear-eyed about the medieval period’s faults, and sincere about its masterpieces.—Emily Price

10. Thank Goodness You’re Here

Thank Goodness You’re Here, a surreal puzzle-platformer where comedy takes precedence over everything else, is a game like none other. Imagine if peak Monty Python somehow made an Adult Swim show in the 2000s, except it was a game and not a show, and featured Matt Berry giving another impeccable Matt Berry performance. The “puzzles” are less about challenging you and more just a framework for bizarre little comedy sketches, pretty much all of which are absolutely hilarious. And it smartly ends well before it starts to wear out its welcome, after only two or three hours. It’s basically a perfect game if you share its sense of humor, and if you don’t share its sense of humor, you’re probably a bit of a bore. (Sorry.) It’s one of the most purely enjoyable games I’ve ever played, and I’m thinking it will be as fun to revisit again and again as the great comedies it echoes.—Garrett Martin

9. Live a Live

Live A Live still has it. Takashi Tokita led a young team of fans at Historia, Inc. to create a version of a classic as vibrant and exciting and crucially unique in Square’s catalog today as it was in 1994. Released between Final Fantasy VI and Chrono Trigger and passed over for translation due to its technically less impressive sprite work compared to its flagship siblings, it shines today as the celebration of a cult classic, with a worldwide legacy and influence as an important milestone in an entire alternate history of RPGs. Live A Live is the exact opposite of the unique masterpiece that’s so good it ruins other games: it is a heartfelt tribute to everything there is to love about the RPG format, and will leave you invigorated and excited not just to play more RPGs, but to watch more Kung Fu movies, more Westerns, more classic Sci-Fi. If you’ve even a passing interest in the genre, it is simply a must play.—Jackson Tyler

8. Astro’s Playroom

Is this a perfect game? I can’t find anything to criticize in Astro’s Playroom, the short but endlessly enjoyable platformer that comes installed on every PlayStation 5. Judged on both style and substance, Astro’s Playroom is an ideal pack-in game. It’s fun, beautiful, deeply entertaining, and also elegantly introduces the major new features of the PlayStation 5’s controller. And with its meta concept of playing entirely within the new system, while also tracking down art and items from the 26 year history of the PlayStation, it pays tribute to the company’s past and present without getting too schmaltzy or nostalgic. If you’re getting a PlayStation 5, this should be the first game you play.—Garrett Martin

7. Balatro

As someone who would rather play virtually any board game than a hand of poker, I was pleasantly surprised by Balatro, a roguelike deckbuilder that transforms this card game into something else entirely. Some elements are what you’d expect; you begin with a standard 52-card deck and score by putting together traditional poker hands like pairs, flushes, and straights. However, where things get interesting is that over the course of a run, you can augment your deck by replacing certain cards with others, upgrading them, collecting passive upgrades that amplify your score, and more. Instead of playing against opponents like in Texas Hold ‘Em, your goal is to build hands that score enough chips to get you through an increasingly expensive series of antes. Like any successful deckbuilding game, decision-making matters in both assembling your deck and playing it. Instead of just going by traditional poker hand strength, points are calculated by multiplying the base amount of chips your hand is worth (chip count corresponds to the card rank, i.e., 9, 10, J, Q, etc.), with the particular multiplier associated with that hand (for instance, a two pair has a x2 multiplier while a three of a kind has a x3 multiplier). Where things get busted is that you can upgrade the multipliers associated with specific hands or cards, and passive abilities add to your multiplier, which can eventually dramatically boost the number of chips you earn. You can gear your deck around certain hands, suits, or passive abilities to increase the odds of hitting big. Outside of the deckbuilding, you’re given a wide array of options and information that makes it feel tactically deep. The game counts cards to let you know the odds, has the option to discard and redraw, allows you to change the order that passive abilities activate, and has consumable items. Good deckbuilders feel fair and like they offer meaningful decisions while constructing and playing your deck. Balatro does all that while also letting you blast apart the rules of poker.—Elijah Gonzalez

6. Kentucky Route Zero Act V

Kentucky Route Zero’s final act finally came out early this year, and capped this brilliant game off perfectly, with the same combination of mystery and mundanity that has always been its hallmark. Kentucky Route Zero is one of the slipperiest, most subtle games ever when it wants to be, and thuddingly, powerfully upfront when it needed to be, turning the classic point-and-click adventure framework into an existential Southern Gothic allegory about work, art, life, and everything else. Despite the seven years between Acts I and V, Cardboard Computer somehow never lost the thread along the way, with all its digressions and discursive plot points contributing to its magical realist explorations of life. If you haven’t played it before, it’s the perfect time to jump in, now that it’s finally finished.—Garrett Martin

5. Citizen Sleeper

You can think of Citizen Sleeper as a sort of digital board game set in a sci-fi dystopia beset by end-stage capitalism and all the rampant dehumanization that entails. It’s a game about work and death where the only levity comes from the relationships we make with others—yes, the friends we made along the way, but not nearly as banal or obvious as that sounds. It questions what it means to be a person in a system that inherently subjugates personhood to corporations and wealth, and it probably won’t surprise you that the answers it lands on aren’t always the most optimistic or uplifting. Here at Paste Cameron Kunzelman described its “melancholy realism” as part of a trend alongside other story-driven games that are largely hostile to the dominance of capitalism, and it echoes the impossibility of thinking seriously about this medium, this industry, and, well, every aspect of society today without discussing the impersonal economic system that drives it all. It’s a heady RPG that respects your time and intelligence, and one of the best games of the 2020s.—Garrett Martin

4. Elden Ring

You’d be forgiven for thinking Elden Ring was the only game that came out this year. For a solid three months it seemed to be the only thing anybody talked about, wrote about, or even played. From Software blew its signature RPG formula up into one of the largest open world games in memory, which makes it more accessible than their earlier Souls games, but also even more mysterious and unsettling. Its massive, secret-filled world is clearly influenced by The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild, but with the brutality and subtle approach to storytelling you expect from a Souls game. It might be a little too big, and devolves into a bit of a slog in the late game, but Elden Ring remains an almost unthinkable achievement. I’m dumped over 170 hours into it and still occasionally pop in again to look for any caves or ashes I might’ve overlooked. Elden Ring has a way of setting up camp inside your head and refusing to leave that few games can match.—Garrett Martin

3. Hades

What makes Hades so great—and what elevates it above other roguelikes—is how it creates a consistent sense of progress even as you keep dying and restarting. Part of that is mechanical—although you lose all the boons bestowed upon you by the Greek gods after a run ends, along with other power-ups acquired during your journeys through the underworld, there are a few things you do hang on to when you return to the game’s hub world. More important than that, though, is how the game’s narrative unfolds between runs, driving you to keep playing through whatever frustration you might feel in hopes of learning more about the game’s story and characters.

Between every run in Hades your character, Zagreus, returns to his home—the palace of his father, Hades, the God of the Dead. Yep, he’s another rich kid who feels his first bit of angst and immediately starts slumming it. Here you can interact with various characters, upgrade the decor, unlock new permanent perks, and practice with the game’s small arsenal of weapons. Every time you return the characters who live here have new things to say, slowly unraveling their own storylines and deepening their relationships with Zagreus. And given that the writing in Hades is as consistently sharp and human as it’s been in all of Supergiant’s games, getting to talk to these characters alone is a reason to actually look forward to dying in this game.—Garrett Martin

2. Norco

As a Southerner I don’t really trust anybody to write about the South unless they, too, are from here—or at least have lived here long enough to truly understand what makes it great and awful in equal measure, and how the ways in which the South is actually fucked up often diverge from the ways in which outsiders think it’s fucked up. Norco, a smart narrative-driven game about the unique ways in which institutions like religion and big business have exploited the South, its people and its land throughout history, is clearly the work of people who understand this region and its fundamental defects. It’s an unflinching, occasionally surreal glimpse into an only slightly exaggerated version of Louisiana, with its mythical and allegorical flourishes only highlighting the aimless mundanity and real-life degradations of the modern South. If you only play one game from this list, make it Norco.—Garrett Martin

1. Alan Wake II

Sam Lake reaches the apotheosis of his postmodern kick with this sequel to one of 2010’s most interesting videogames. The Remedy Entertainment head has long tried to break down the barriers between games, film, and literature in a knottier, more avant-garde fashion than the many major studios making “cinematic” games, influenced as much by Pynchon and Twin Peaks as noir or horror movies, and with Alan Wake II he’s crafted another impressive combo of commercial blockbuster and trippy experimentalism. A survival horror game that explores notions of free will, destiny, authorship, and ownership, Alan Wake II doesn’t come close to answering all of the questions it asks, but it raises them with such style, confidence, and confusion that you’ll realize the answers don’t matter. It’s far from a perfect game —the investigation mechanics are inelegant, and Lake’s big narrative swings don’t always connect—but  Alan Wake II does more than any other game to undermine the bullshit dichotomy between “AAA” and “indie” games. Just because a game has a budget and a large team doesn’t mean it has to be a safe, hackneyed, overly familiar genre workout.— Garrett Martin