Best Games for Laptops and Low-End PCs in 2022

 If you’re looking for games you can play on a low-end PC or laptop, you’ve come to the right place. This is ExtremeTech’s staff-nominated list of favorite games that will play well, even if your PC is old enough to run for president, with the computing power of a potato.

You shouldn’t have to give up on immersive gaming just because you’ve got an older or low-end rig. If your hardware can’t handle the games of today, don’t be afraid to explore the games of 10 or even 20 years ago. We’ve tried to round up a wide variety of types and genres here, including several that are mod-friendly. Some of the titles listed here will even run fine with integrated graphics. UIs may be a bit clumsy — in some cases layouts only make sense if you remember gamers in the era were often limited to resolutions of 640×480 or 800×600 — but quality tends to shine through regardless.

RimWorld

Build a New Home on the Rim With: A Core 2 Duo, 4 GB of RAM, and 1 GB of available space.

RimWorld is an even mix of Dungeons&Dragons, an RTS, and an ant farm. Instead of assuming the role of a character, the player is a third-person DM who must keep a group of “pawns” thriving on a hostile planet. RimWorld is an open-ended, cooperative story-telling RPG where you set your own win conditions. The game was “inspired by Dwarf Fortress, Firefly and Dune,” if that helps give a sense of tone. Hazards include pirate raiders, marauding aliens, insectile horrors from the deep, and the ever-present specter of starvation or death by elemental extremes. When gameplay begins, your crew has crashlanded on an unknown, procedurally generated rimworld. Night is coming. Make some shelter!

For modding enthusiasts, RimWorld’s Steam Workshop hosts a huge variety of content, storyline, and QOL mods. Like Minecraft, load time is slower with a bunch of mods installed. But that’s not why I’ve got more than six hundred hours of playtime on record. This game is just as addictive as Civ.

Portal, Portal 2

Now We Can Continue Testing: Portal will run on a Pentium 4, while Portal 2 recommends a Core 2 Duo. Both games require 4 GB of RAM, and 1 GB of available space.

Pictured here: the Worst Potato. Or perhaps the Best?

What list of games that you can play on a potato would be complete without the inclusion of Portal? If you haven’t tried out the Portal games yet, you’re missing out. They’re a collection of maddening spatial puzzles that really do require you to start thinking with portals. Evade lasers, experience new depths of betrayal, and throw yourself headlong through holes in spacetime. Portal 2 also has co-op. For the fandom: the deadpan genius who voices Cave Johnson is also the voice of Tenzin and J. Jonah Jameson.

Faster Than Light

To Save the Galaxy, You’ll Need: a slide rule. No, seriously, this game’s requirements are the lightest of the lot. You’ll need a 2GHz processor, 1GB of RAM and 175MB drive space. But FTL only requires a graphics solution capable of 1280×720 and OGL 2.0, with 128MB of RAM.

Do you enjoy spaceships, pixel art, and chiptunes? If so, FTL might be a great next binge game. Faster Than Light delivers a lot of replayability in a compact, low-overhead “spaceship simulation roguelike-like.” Take your ship and crew on an adventure through a randomly generated galaxy filled with glory and bitter defeat. Permadeath means you have to start over if you die, but it’s worth it for the chance to try again.

Old School Runescape

Kick It Old School With: An i3 or thereabouts, capable of 2GHz. You’ll also need 4GB of RAM, 200 MB of disk space, and a broadband connection or compatible mobile device.

In this free-to-play MMORPG, build your character and step into a low-poly medieval wonderland without giving Blizzard a dime. Do you like PVP? Puzzles? Parkour? Runescape offers a dizzying variety of skills to improve. And there are also a lot of ways to play this game. It’s a little like SecondLife. You can hunt, fish, gather and cook. You can roam around as a murder hobo™ and reap XP for slayer quests. If you want to settle in, you can buy and furnish a house. There are no formal classes — you can level each stat to your own liking. Do you want to be a mage? An archer? A paladin? Shape your avatar’s powers in precisely the way you want.

Braid

Weave Your Way Through Time Using Your Wits and: Any processor 1.4GHz or faster, alongside 200 MB of disk space and a gigabyte or so of memory. Requires DX9. Supports Windows XP.

In this dreamy 2D puzzle platformer, the protagonist has come “unstuck” in time. The player must navigate a painterly world where just like their character, only some things move with time’s arrow. Rewinding time and manipulating the timeline are central gameplay mechanics. You can never die, and you never lose. Unlike rogue-type games and grind-heavy open-world RPG titles (cough, ARK, cough), Braid “treats your time and attention as precious.” The game doesn’t force you to solve puzzles by halting your progress until you get it right. If you can’t figure something out, you can simply play onward, and come back when you’re ready.

This game would run on a toaster. But just in case, there’s also a free demo on Steam, so you can try before you buy.

Super Meat Boy

Attain New and Exciting Dimensions of Rage If You Have: Any CPU of 1.4GHz or faster, a gigabyte of RAM, and 300 MB of storage space. Requires DX9; supports Windows XP.

Super Meat Boy is a 2D platformer, and it has a cult following for a reason. Yell in triumph as you finally nail that sweet wall jump and get through the impasse you’ve been swearing at for an hour. Keyboard and mouse controls are tight and responsive, and the title is also gamepad-friendly.

There’s a sequel, Super Meat Boy Forever, but it’s an auto-runner with mixed reviews. Crowd consensus is that in both mechanics and plot, SMBF is more like an expansion pack than a new game.

Bejeweled 3

Give Smaug A Run For His Money Using: Any processor of 1.2GHz or greater, along with 128MB of video RAM and a single gigabyte of RAM. You’ll also need 320MB or so of storage.

Bejeweled is the chillest of the chill. It’s a great way to take a pomodoro break or just wind down. Swap pairs of lustrous jewels to create a lineup of 3, 4 or more. Different game modes offer variations on that central theme. In the Endless mode, Bejeweled actually works with you like a wingman, to enable spectacular combos and cascades. If you like stress, there are also merciless timed and turn-based modes that demand strategy on the fly, like the “Butterflies” mode shown here. I have spent a truly disgraceful amount of time making just one more swap, hoping to hear “EXTRAORDINARY.” Free of in-app purchases, this game is also suitable for kids.

Creeper World 4

Fight the Endless Flood of Goo With: Any dual-core 2GHz CPU (64-bit preferred), 3GB of RAM, and 2GB of storage.

Take charge of an arsenal of weapons to do battle with a strange blue goo that is hellbent on taking over the world. Creeper World 4 is the first Creeper game to use 3D. The battles have a steady challenge level that remains engaging without crushing players via sudden difficulty spikes. Best of all, there’s a free demo on Steam you can experiment with before pulling the trigger.

Bloons TD 6

Dart, Bomb, and Nuke Balloon-Based Foes Powered By: At least a 64-bit 1.5GHz CPU, Windows 10, 4GB of RAM, and an OpenGL 2.0-capable graphics card.

Bloons TD 6 began life as a mobile game and those roots are easy to see. This monkey-themed tower defense game is absolutely ba — well, you know. Your task is to keep an endless stream of increasingly troublesome balloons (“bloons”) from getting through your defenses. (Are monkeys and balloons enemies in the wild?) Choose your Hero, assemble your team of Monkey towers, and pop, zap, scorch and glue your way through dozens of different levels. Bloons is surprisingly complex underneath its bright, cartoonish facade. Difficulty ranges from nearly AFK to completely bonkers.

Hotline Miami 1 and 2

Slaughter the Russian Mob, So Long as You’re Packing: A 2.4GHz Core 2 Duo, 1GB of RAM, and a DX9 GPU.

The Hotline Miami games both received rave reviews for their unique settings, gameplay, and story. The first game casts you as a nameless character nicknamed “Jacket” by the community. The game takes place in a gritty, stylistically distinctive version of Miami in 1989. Your task? Kill off the local Russian mob. Hotline Miami 2 deals with the aftermath of your actions and the events that led to them, providing additional context around the story. It also skips ahead to 1991 to answer the question of what happened to Jacket after your rampage.

Brutal Doom

Liquify Demons, Slaughter Hellspawn, and Reduce Your Enemies to Slurry With the Power Of: Any dual core CPU, 2GB of RAM, and a GPU with 256MB VRAM.

Brutal Doom is a bit different than any other game on this list. You’ll need to do a bit of legwork — and you need to own the original Doom / Doom 2, their various shareware versions, or have your own free WAD files you want to run. This list gives the instructions for installation and some links to free maps that are great to play with the mod, if you don’t have any of the official WADs.

As for what Brutal Doom is — it’s the version of Doom you’d want to play if it were made today, in a modern FPS engine. There are new, alternate weapons for your starting pistol. Guns now have load mechanics. There are alternate weapons for the Plasma Rifle and the BFG 9000, and you can find and use some enemy weapons that were not previously accessible in-game. Features like mouselook, aiming, and jumping are all implemented. There’s a fast rolling motion to dodge fire, a new fatality mode, and additional difficulty levels.

In short, it’s amazing.

Among Us

Learn to Distrust Friends and Family Using: Intel P4 2GHz, Nvidia GeForce 510, 250MB HDD space.

Among Us pits a group of 4-10 players against each other. 1-3 players are Imposters, while the remainder are Crewmates. Crewmates must complete a defined list of tasks and discover who the Imposters are. Meanwhile, the Imposters pretend to be Crewmates so they can sabotage the ship by stealth. If your family manages to remain zen through four-hour Monopoly games, try challenging them with this.

Poly Bridge

Your Inner Civil Engineer Requires: Pentium 4 2GHz, 2GB of RAM, GeForce 7200 GS, 150MB of storage.

Poly Bridge is a great puzzle game, somewhat in the tradition of now-ancient titles like The Incredible Machine. In this case, you must design bridges that can carry a certain number of vehicles while also coming in under budget. These two simple goals can be difficult to achieve in later levels (there are more than 60), since the game adds various hazards and the need to deploy construction techniques I’m fairly certain the Army Corps of Engineers does not approve of.

The game recently got a sequel (which I haven’t played yet). Reviews of it seem a bit less enthused than for Poly Bridge, with one noting it felt more like an expansion pack to the original. It is, however, excellently rated on Steam.