The loveliest sound in Hollow Knight might be a man humming at work. It means Cornifer is nearby, and after twenty minutes of taking wrong turns beneath Hallownest, you’ll gladly pay him for a map. Team Cherry builds an entire sense of place out of details like that. Even on a modest screen, you can recognize a neighborhood with your eyes closed. | © Team Cherry
Before raiding an outpost in Far Cry 3, check the cages. One well-placed shot can release a tiger, at which point the pirates have a more pressing personnel issue and you still have all your grenades. That freedom to improvise is the best reason to revisit the Rook Islands. On a PC with newer integrated graphics, 720p and low settings are a sensible starting point. | © Ubisoft Entertainment
A motel corridor barely wide enough for two people becomes an excellent test of friendship when somebody startles a Witch. Valve’s four-player zombie shooter gets extraordinary mileage out of familiar spaces because its AI Director varies the pressure on each trip through them. Yesterday’s safe corner can be the exact spot where your group discovers who took the last first-aid kit. | © Valve Corporation
Aim is optional in Team Fortress 2, depending on which union you join. An Engineer who puts a teleporter near the front can do more for the team than a Sniper who spends the whole round admiring the scenery through his scope. Nine sharply defined classes give Valve’s free shooter that flexibility, right down to the Spy who makes everyone briefly suspicious of their own Medic. | © Valve Corporation
An archer has you lined up. The swordsman behind you is about to swing. Take one step and, with a little foresight, one of them can settle your problem with the other. Shogun Showdown squeezes that much strategy onto a single row of tiles, gives you time to think between moves, and lists Intel HD Graphics 3000 as its minimum. | © Roboatino
Someone should really have gathered more grass. It’s an unglamorous thought to have as night falls in Don’t Starve Together, particularly if everyone spent the afternoon collecting interesting mushrooms and nobody can make a torch. Klei’s co-op survival game makes division of labor feel natural. Give it a couple of evenings and your friend group will have a cook, a hunter, and a mushroom guy on probation. | © Klei Entertainment
Fight, flirt, or tell a depressed ghost a joke. Toby Fox gives monsters enough personality that opening the Act menu in Undertale feels a little like figuring out what to say at a party. Then it’s their turn, and you’re steering a tiny heart between projectiles. A handful of pixels can tell you an awful lot about the person trying to kill you. | © Toby Fox
Keep the old wooden platforms. In Terraria, they’re handy for climbing out of a mine, but a few long rows suspended above your house also make an excellent arena for fighting a giant flying eyeball. The pleasure is discovering how often construction and combat overlap. A boss that flattened you yesterday might be perfectly manageable tonight because you did a little carpentry. | © Re-Logic
“Skip” may be the smartest button in Slay the Spire. Every tempting card you add after a fight makes it a little less likely you’ll draw the one you desperately need next turn. That small bit of arithmetic gives this deck-building roguelike its teeth. Sooner or later, you’ll start paying a merchant to take cards off your hands and consider it money well spent. | © Mega Crit
The traffic cone tells you almost everything you need to know. Here comes the same shuffling idiot as before, only this one has discovered protective headgear, so your single peashooter could use some help. PopCap teaches most of Plants vs. Zombies through sight gags like that. The original PC game still plays beautifully with one mouse and a deeply unreasonable attachment to a wall-nut. | © PopCap Games
Dragging a sheep spell onto an enormous dragon is a fine argument for keeping a basic mouse around. Hearthstone gives its Warcraft card battles a wonderfully physical feel, from the thump of a hefty minion hitting the board to the little distractions tucked around its edges. If building a deck sounds too much like homework, Battlegrounds lets you recruit a warband as you go. | © Blizzard Entertainment
For all the spectacular castles people build in Minecraft, a dirt hut with a door remains a genuine architectural achievement when the sun is going down and you can already hear a skeleton. On an office PC, keep the render distance modest and leave the fancy shaders off. You can spend a remarkably satisfying evening turning that emergency shelter into somewhere you’d actually like to live. | © Mojang Studios
Grandpa was thoughtful enough to leave you a farm. He might also have mentioned that most crops die when the season changes, a fact many a Stardew Valley farmer has learned over a field of dead cauliflower. Planning next spring’s harvest becomes half the fun. The other half is abandoning that plan entirely because it’s raining and you’d quite like to go fishing. | © ConcernedApe
A pair of twos is a lousy poker hand until you’ve spent half a run arranging for precisely that pair of twos to make you rich. Balatro lets Jokers bend the scoring rules so thoroughly that the best hand to play can look downright embarrassing. Watching the multiplier climb is especially satisfying when the whole ridiculous scheme began with whatever the shop had on clearance. | © LocalThunk
Drop through a hole in the floor, shoot out of a wall, sail across the room. It takes about two seconds to execute a solution in Portal 2 and considerably longer to explain to a co-op partner why you need them to stand right there. Valve even lists Intel HD Graphics 2000 among its minimum options. Aperture’s test chambers have aged remarkably well on that budget. | © Valve Corporation
Nobody buys an office PC for its graphics card, assuming it even has one. But the same desktop that spends Monday morning running Excel can handle a surprisingly good dungeon crawl after hours. We’ve picked 15 games with modest system requirements for anyone who’d like to spend the evening playing something good without first spending it shopping for an upgrade.
