10 Best Free-To-Play Games With Overwhelmingly Positive Reviews on Steam

If you’ve spent enough time browsing Steam, you’ve probably noticed that the Overwhelmingly Positive badge isn’t handed out lightly. Plenty of games launch to strong reviews, but only a small number manage to maintain that level of praise across thousands of players, let alone for multiple years after release.

The best part is that some of those games won’t cost you a thing. Whether you’re looking for a weekend distraction, a memorable story, or something you’ll keep returning to for months, there is a surprising amount of quality hiding behind a free download button. Here are ten of the community’s favorites:

Fighting for main character status. | Image Credit: the Rejects TRY AGAIN follows Benny, a temporary test character stuck inside an unfinished game world on what is effectively his last day of existence. The developer (The Designer) is under pressure from her publisher, the game is nowhere near ready, and Benny would quite like to avoid being deleted before everything is over.

The idea alone would have carried a lesser game, but TRY AGAIN backs it up with excellent platforming and a surprising amount of creativity. Levels constantly shift around Benny, reacting to the developer’s increasingly frantic attempts to finish the project. The most common complaint you’ll find in Steam reviews is that it ends too soon.

Puzzles and ego trips. | Image Credit: Galaxy Shark Studios If you’ve ever found yourself lost in Portal 2, you’ll feel right at home here. Gravitas takes place inside the Gallery of Refined Gravity, a bizarre museum filled with increasingly dangerous exhibits and an equally bizarre Curator who insists on reminding you that everything was his idea.

The puzzles are clever, but the Curator is what most people remember. He’s constantly talking, and the game is smart enough to react when you solve a puzzle before he’s finished explaining it. Not bad for a project that began as a student development effort.

Darkness cuts both ways here. | Image Credit: Cold Brew Entertainment The easiest way to describe Disfigure is as a survival roguelike in which darkness is just as dangerous as the monsters hiding within it. Every run forces you to balance awareness and firepower while the screen fills with increasingly unpleasant things trying to kill you.

The “vision system” adds an extra layer of tension to every run. Seeing farther means narrowing your field of view, while seeing more around you comes at the cost of distance. Add in the huge pool of upgrades and weapon modifiers, and no two runs tend to play out quite the same way.

Blink and it’s over. | Image Credit: Lemaitre Bros STRAFTAT’s main hook is that every match is strictly either a 1v1 duel or a 2v2 showdown. It is, quite literally, a “1v1 me/2v2 us bro” simulator, with rounds ending so quickly that rematches become inevitable.

Its movement is a huge part of why those matches work so well. Sprinting, corner peeking, sliding, wall-running, and bouncing through maps become second nature surprisingly quickly, turning every fight into a frantic test of aim and mobility. With more than seventy maps available in the free version, repetition rarely becomes an issue either.

Silence tells the story. | Image Credit: Nikita Igorevich Studio/Smysl Media 93, Kuindzhi is a short first-person narrative experience (in the vein of “walking simulators” like What Remains of Edith Finch) that follows Artyom, an 18-year-old volunteer helping civilians in Mariupol after his father is drafted. He refuses to carry a weapon, and the game never tries to turn him into a hero.

Much of its impact comes from the atmosphere. Creaking buildings, distant artillery, and long stretches of silence do a lot of the storytelling. It’s a difficult game in terms of subject matter, but one that approaches it with a great deal of restraint.

Old-school carnage returns. | Image Credit: Dobrx/Split Signal Harbinger feels like it was made by people who spent far too many hours playing shooters from the 1990s and decided that was a perfectly reasonable foundation for a modern game.

The result is a fast, bloody shooter that rewards movement just as much as accuracy. You’ll spend most of your time blasting through monsters before retreating to the Tavern between runs to unlock new tools and prepare for the next trip back into the chaos.

Cute, until the combat commences. | Image Credit: Pun Intended The premise of Bloody Hell is simple enough: an angel goes to Hell to kill Satan. What follows is a surprisingly substantial metroidvania packed with secrets, upgrades, boss fights, and a lot more blood than the not-so-subtle title itself might suggest.

The fact that it was built by a team of just three students makes it even easier to appreciate. Years after release, Steam reviews are still full of people wondering why a game of this quality was released for free in the first place.

Four “bros,” endless chaos. | Image Credit: Free Lives/Devolver Digital Promotional tie-in games don’t usually stick around in gaming conversations for very long. The Expendabros is one of the rare exceptions.

Originally released alongside The Expendables 3, it drops up to four players into destructible levels filled with explosions, bullets, and enough action movie references to keep the joke going from start to finish. It helps that the game itself is genuinely fun, even if you’ve never seen the films.

The hospital awaits. | Image Credit: We Create Stuff Before survival horror leaned heavily on stealth and helplessness, Nightmare House took a different approach by giving players the means to defend themselves while still maintaining a constant sense of dread.

This F2P standalone Steam release preserves one of the most memorable Source engine horror mods of its time. Its unsettling atmosphere and effective scares have all aged quite well, but its real strength is in the overall pacing. Every time the game starts to feel predictable, it introduces a new twist that keeps the tension high and players on edge.

Teamwork not sold separately. | Image Credit: ISART DIGITAL Wires And Whiskers is a co-op puzzle game about a cybernetic gerbil and the oversized exosuit built to keep it alive. As premises go, it’s certainly one of the stranger ones on this list.

One player controls the agile gerbil while the other operates the exosuit’s weapons and puzzle-solving tools. The whole thing can be finished in well under an hour, but it’s packed with enough clever ideas to leave a much bigger impression than its runtime suggests.

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Here are all the 10 Overwhelmingly Positive-rated free-to-play games we’ve discussed above, at a glance:

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Have you played any of these already, and which free game do you think is a true hidden gem on Steam? Let us know in the comments below!