The Best Early Access Games Worth Buying Right Now, Even Though They Aren't Finished
Most Early Access games are a promise. These are the ones that are already a great time, with the roadmap as a bonus on top.
Aymen Sakouhi//5 min read
© Scarecrow Arts. Official media via Steam.
Early Access is a genuine gamble. For every survival hit that grows into a phenomenon, there is a promising build that stalls out and never gets its missing half. The trick is to buy the games that are already fun today, where the roadmap is about adding more of a good thing rather than fixing something broken, and to treat everything still to come as a bonus rather than the reason you paid. These are the unfinished games in our review catalog that clear that bar right now, ranked by our scores.
Valheim (8.5): the one that set the standard
Iron Gate's viking survival game is the model every other entry here is measured against. Even years into Early Access it is a huge, atmospheric, brutally moreish co-op adventure, with building, sailing, and boss fights that already feel complete enough to swallow a hundred hours. It keeps expanding in large free biome updates, so buying in now gets you a game that is both enormous today and quietly getting bigger. If you want proof that Early Access can be worth it, start here.
The co-op crowd: Far Far West, Lethal Company, ODDCORE
If you play with friends, three of our picks are built for exactly that. Far Far West (8.5) is an online co-op FPS made by a tiny team that already plays like a much bigger game, and its Overwhelmingly Positive reception in Early Access speaks for itself. Lethal Company (8.5) turned scavenging for scrap with terrified friends into one of the defining co-op horror experiences of its moment, and it did it as a mostly solo-developed Early Access release. ODDCORE (8.0) is the newest of the three, a fast, weird roguelite shooter set in a corrupted PlayStation 1 theme park, built around brilliant five-minute runs, and its only real weakness, thin variety, is precisely what its six-to-twelve-month roadmap exists to fix. All three are cheap, and all three are already a blast.
For the solo tinkerers: Sandustry, Slay the Spire 2, Dead as Disco
Three more picks reward playing alone. Sandustry (8.5) is a falling-sand factory sim that turns a screen of simulated particles into a deep, absorbing automation puzzle, the kind of game you look up from at 2 a.m. Slay the Spire 2 (8.0) is the sequel to one of the most important deckbuilders ever made, and even early it delivers exactly the compulsive one-more-run loop that made the original a genre-definer. Dead as Disco (8.3) is a stylish rhythm-action brawler where you fight in time with the music, an idea sharp enough to carry it through its Early Access rough edges. None of them is finished, and all of them are already worth the entry price.
How to buy Early Access without regret
The rule that runs through every game here is simple: buy the loop, not the promise. Judge an Early Access game only on what it does today, assume the roadmap might slip or change, and pay only if the current build would already be worth the money as-is. Every pick above passes that test, which is why our scores treat them as real games rather than IOUs. If the extra content lands, wonderful. If it does not, you still bought something good. That is the only safe way to play the Early Access game, and these are the safest bets on the board.
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