We found this list in the ladies restroom
Image credit: Rock Paper Shotgun / Bethesda / Eidos
The immersive sim has seen a revival in recent years. Not only from larger studios like Arkane, keeping the faith alive with their time loops and space stations, but also from a bunch of smaller developers bravely exploring a typically ambitious genre. RPS has always had an affinity for these systemically luxuriant simulations, historically lauding the likes of the original Deus Ex as the best game ever made. But given everything that has come since, is that still the case? Only one way to find out: make a big list.
The “immersive sim” is also hard to define. I’m tempted to call it “any game with flushable toilets” and leave it at that. But that’s not quite right. Mark Brown did a good video on the subject once upon a time in which he suggested that a true immy-simmy had to emphasise the following traits: agency, systems, emergence, consistency, and reactivity. It’s a pretty decent rundown of the principles that underpin the design philosophy of many games on our list. Buuuuuut these are also somewhat woolly terms. It opens up the genre to things that might not otherwise feel like a classic immersive sim (Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain ticks all those boxes, right? What about the Hitman games? Hmmm. I’d actually be fine with that…) Whatever. Sometimes it’s best not to overthink these things. For a lot of the list, I’ve just gone with my gut.
Remember: if you love a particular immersive sim, and find it absent below, please recommend it in the comments. You’re also welcome to lambast me for not including BioShock. All right, simmer down. Here we go.
The best immersive sims on PC
Here’s the list in short. The links here are in alphabetical order, but the list itself is ranked because everyone loves scrolling to see what’s number 1. If your scrolling finger isn’t functional, no worries. Just click a title below to head straight to that game.
Cruelty Squad
Deathloop
Deus Ex
Deus Ex: Mankind Divided
Dishonored 2
Gloomwood
Prey
Shadows Of Doubt
System Shock (2023)
Vampire The Masquerade: Bloodlines
10. Cruelty Squad
Image credit: Consumer Softproducts
Cruelty Squad is like playing a migraine. In our review Nic called it “a maximum effort shitpost wearing a puke stained Rainbow Six t-shirt.” So much of this game is made contrary to both the commonplace standards of attractiveness and conventional wisdom of game design. Your view is surrounded by a clammy frame at all times. The mismatching textures assault your eyes. The default controls are a grab bag of awkwardness (“R” to interact, “X” to crouch!?) and the soundtrack is like listening to something a sentient cheese grater would come up with in a DAW and label “music.wav”. But for the right kind of reprobate, all of this will only add to the punishing door-kicking charm of this gig economy hell. You can, at any time, buy and sell human organs on the stock market. You can invest in an “ammunition gland” that generates bullets continuously. Or a pair of “nightmare vision goggles” that give off a putrid stench and have “seemingly no effect on anything.” One of the most expensive items in the game’s menu is a house in the countryside. I do not necessarily recommend that you play Cruelty Squad. But, before we move on to more conventional imm-sims, I do demand that you acknowledge it. Done? Okay. Done.
9. Shadows Of Doubt
Procedural detective ’em up Shadows Of Doubt really runs with the “sim” part of immersive sim. An entire noir city and its residents is in full swing, with ordinary folk going about their lives on preset routines. The catch? Some of these people are murderers. That means your average NPC citizen might be randomly selected for death, and find themselves the victim of a fatal drubbing. This is where you come in. As the investigator, you have to figure out each killer’s identity based on various clues they’ll leave lying around. Financial transactions, broken windows, telling emails, secret notes. You can tell this is an ambitious game not solely by the premise, but also thanks to the funny bugs the developer has had to endure thanks to the depth of the simulation. At on epoint, some assassins who choose to kill using a sniper rifle kept missing their shots again and again, and players would find mounds of spent bullet casings in some apartment buildings. If an immersive sim is partly defined by the emergent nonsense of its systems, then this surely qualifies.
8. Vampire The Masquerade: Bloodlines
Image credit: Activision
A very 90s role-playing game that arguably fits the immersive sim mould. Right? Right, that’s what I thought. You’ve got a hub world with a lot of freedom to explore, a stats-pumped character that can range from ugly sewer monster to sultry neck biter, and a bunch of characters hanging out in predetermined spots waiting for you to come along and mess everything up. Many an admirer of Vampire The Masquerade: Bloodlines has stalked the halls of RPS, muttering to themselves and turning into smoke when perceived. The sequel, Bloodlines 2, has been in something of a development hell since its announcement in 2019, swapping from one developer to another in 2021. It’ll doubtless be hard for the follow-up to charisma-bomb its way into as many hearts as the original, which was as much about sex and sadism as it was about sneaking into a blood donor clinic for snacks. But we can hope.
7. Deus Ex
Image credit: Eidos Interactive
If you play Ion Storm’s conspiratorial sneaking sim today you’ll see the bones and sinew of a genre that, by rights, should have been granted layer upon layer of musculature with a vast number of imitators. Alas, PC gaming of the early 2000s still trembled in the shadow of Half-Life, which set other significant precedents for the first-person shooter. The influence of Deus Ex rippled through time in a slightly quieter way than that of Gordon Freeman’s loud machine-gunning. But it did ripple. The genre-bending ability to pump skill points into your leather-coated gunman wasn’t so common in first-person shooters back then, for example, but today those systems of progression are in nearly every blockbuster game. And the ambition of a plot that deviates in micro-detailed ways was deeply impressive at the time (everyone remembers being told off for visiting the ladies toilets in your office building). By now, of course, we have the vents and vaults of nu-Deus Ex, the shapeshifting of Prey, and the choices-mattersness of the Mass Effect series. The shooter-focused RPG is not so strange a beast now, and we have Deus Ex to thank for that.
6. Gloomwood
Image credit: New Blood Interactive
When Gloomwood first released into early access it offered only a short and tantalising taste of a low-poly immersive sim inspired by the likes of the Thief games. Alice B (RPS in peace) enjoyed her time throwing severed arms as distractions and was frustrated only because most of the game’s creepy city remained off-limits. “I get you!” she yelled at the locked gates of the town. “I want to throw more decapitated heads as lures!” So good news: the game has since seen a bunch of updates, including new areas like a market district complete with a dodgy merchant, a power station full of bad dudes, a wrecked tavern with something freaky lurking inside, and a mirror realm that allows for ad hoc fast travel. It’s still not finished, but if you’re the type to buy in early, perhaps now is a good time to drop from the rafters.
5. System Shock (2023)
Image credit: Rock Paper Shotgun/Nightdive Studios/Prime Matter
The slew of remakes in recent years has given developers the chance to adapt old favourites in surprising ways. Final Fantasy VII Remake extends Midgar in unrecognisable ways, and Black Mesa redesigns Half-Life’s alien dimension. But the System Shock remake is a different kind of modernised memorial. Instead of rethinking the layout of Citadel station, developers Nightdive doubled down on the original blueprints, content to beautify the surroundings and spruce up everything else. It is an act of faith that rewards those with an ingrained sense of place for the space station gone bad. For our review, Jeremy called it “a maze of uncomfortably cramped corridors, cubbyholes and crawlspaces – a Japanese capsule hotel made massive”. It’s within these confines you can sweat through the ideals of one of the earliest immersive sims, without squinting at ye olde pixels.
4. Prey
Image credit: Bethesda Softworks
You can turn yourself into a coffee mug in Prey. You can roll under the little gap in the perspex window of a security booth as a piece of idiot ceramics, and re-balloon to human form feeling both smart and slightly stupid at the same time. But the enemies in this sprawling space station have the same powers of mimicry and may be hiding anywhere. Which turns the huge, explorable space into a sci-fi jumpscare factory. What’s more, your various powers and weapons unlock routes that would feel plain broken in any other game. A glue gun makes virtually any wall climbable with enough patience, for instance. There’s an escape pod that becomes reachable surprisingly early, and provided you’ve nabbed the key from another room, the game simply lets you abandon ship, ending the story as abruptly as you like. It’s not a satisfying ending, of course, but the very fact that the designers allow for it is a testament to how much freedom you have on board Talos I.
3. Dishonored 2
Image credit: Bethesda Softworks
If you ask fans of Dishonored 2 what their favourite level of the game is, they will instantly disintegrate into a pile of verbs and nouns and be unable to assist you. The fantasy stab ’em up is downright greedy when it comes to great level design. The Clockwork Mansion puts the player into a space that is constantly shifting and changing. While A Crack In The Slab gives you the power to hop back and forth through time, between a decayed manor and its glorious past (for a single level! Only Titanfall 2 has had the same confidence when it comes to chewing up gimmicks in one level that could entirely power whole other games). Me? I’m weirdly fond of the opening level, with its sunny docks and narrow streets. You can practically smell the place. But whatever the environment, you commonly explore it from an almost animal-like perspective. Looking down like a crow, squeezing through gaps like a mosquito, crawling through the gutters like a rodent. Karnaca is a city built to creep within.
2. Deus Ex: Mankind Divided
Image credit: Eidos Interactive
There’s a bank in downtown Prague that is begging to be infiltrated in Deus Ex: Mankind Divided. From the moment you set eyes on this rich, opulent building – its shining lobby, its grandiose architecture – your fingertips are burning to send Jensen deep into its vents and backrooms. With enough time (and gathering of various hacking and wall-bashing skills) your wish will be granted. The great thing about Palisade Bank is that, while it features in a story mission, a huge amount of it is entirely optional, filled with subterranean vaults stacked with special weapons, nanoblade blueprints, Praxis kits, and more. And this is not even counting the executive safes up top. This leaky financial institution of the future is just one of the vulnerable edifices of Mankind Divided’s densely packed city, with all its rooftops, balconies, sewer manholes and back doors. A sublimely designed town ripe for cyberpunk subterfuge.
1. Deathloop
There is a certain player behaviour that all good immersive sims unwittingly encourage: the act of save scumming. Who can resist sniping a critical character from across the map to see what might happen, knowing that you can easily quickload and undo all the chaotic ramifications. On top of that, the immersive sim’s traditional dedication to allowing non-lethal runs only adds to the perfectionist quicksaving compulsion. Agency and consequence are the salt and pepper of this genre, and nobody knows this better than Arkane, whose Dishonored games basically require the player to constantly quicksave every few minutes. With Deathloop, they said: “nah, fuck that.” Here you will finally manage to shake off that bad habit. No save scumming here, friend. The game will reset things for you. It makes things so much better.
As beefy security man Colt, you’re trapped in a time loop on a messed-up island with no idea how to break free. Eventually, you learn that a perfect run of assassinations (targeting the elites of the island) will get you out of the bind. What follows is a clever back and forth across the same few towns and laboratories, slowly accruing the knowledge you need to perform your perfect string of hits. Like the Prague of Deus Ex Mankind Divided, so much is done with relatively little sapce. Instead of making whole new levels, the designers simply change what’s happening in each area according to the time of day. The result is a refined clockwork kingdom of people waiting to eat dirt in some excellent ways, and a take on the immersive sim so refreshing that I live in perpetual fear nothing will surpass it.
Well, that’s it. We’ve crawled through all the vents. There are no more immersive sims out there. I guess we can move on and– what? You found a secret room? And your favourite game from this genre was hidden inside? Well, do share this forbidden knowledge in the comments. You can offer any game you like! As long as it’s not BioShock. BioShock is an ordinary shooter. Get real.
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