What are some of the best games for low-spec PC?

If you happen to like rpgs, Baldur's Gate 1 and 2, and Knights of the Old Republic 1 and 2 are fantastic choices. They're on the older side, too, so your computer can definitely handle them.

You might like Heat Signature, its a top down space rouge-like! Should run on nearly anything as well.

In the game you are stealing stuff from spaceships, killing certain people, or rescuing people. It has deep "system" interactions with the various gadgets you can get.

Streets of Rogue, Dicey Dungeons, OpenTTD, OpenRCT2, Stardew Valley, Project Highrise, Project Zomboid, Merchant of the Skies, TheoTown, Cat Quest, Bakcpack Hero, Broforce, Cassette Beasts, Dorfromantik, Mr.Shifty, Peglin, Power to the People, Prison Architect, Factorio (turn off bugs and polution), Saints Row The Third, Terraria and FTL

Bastion is one of the most beautiful games I've ever played, it's emotional and runs on an unbaked potato.

I will never stop recommending Slay The Spire. I have around 1500 hours in it and it just doesn't get old for me.

Get Retroarch and go to 'a site' and play anything from NES to PS2

*Stardew Valley is a nice indie game with a great developer, who is active with the fan base and does release updates to it that adds new things to it. Also great selection of bachelors and bachelorettes.
*The Bard's Tale. A ARPG that has Cary Elwes as the Bard, so it is humorous.
*Dragon's Dogma: Dark Arisen. Capcom's cult classic rpg (that is finally getting a sequel), whose creator made it as a love letter to Western Style RPGs, but manages to stand on it's own.
*Endless Sky. Not really Space exploration game that is opened sourced. Probably the most unpolished game on this list, but hey its free.
*Far Cry 2 probably the more dated one on here in terms of actual gameplay. This one does have a fire system that was praised for being innovated at time of release (which Ubisoft did nothing with).
*Hotline Miami 1 and 2, both are published by Devolver Digital, both gives a fast paced, bloody experience.
*System Shock (the original one), which I think is similar the original Deus Ex.
*Bioshock games. Even if you can't run the remasters on your laptop, they do give you the original Bioshock 1 and 2, for free.
*Hitman: Blood Money, what is considered to be the peak of the Hitman franchise or do people considered the World of Assassination trilogy the new one? Is the AI really stupid? Yes. Will the guards just rush your last known position in hopes that their bodies kills you as you mow them down in mass? Yes. Is is really satisfying to get to the targets with out any issues? Yes it is.
*The original Thief games should also run on your computer. Just avoid the 2014 one, it is not good.
*Fallout 1 - 3 and New Vegas. The first two are probably one of the more opened ended of this franchise and probably the most unforgiving. And with Three and New Vegas there is mod call Tale of Two Wastlands that adds 3 to the more "modern" engine that New Vegas has (really the same engine with more modern things like aim down sights). Just make sure with 3 and New Vegas you get the mods that fixes bugs and issues.
*Metro 2033 redux. Basically Russian version of the Fallout franchise, which is the point because the books that the games are based on, the author did took inspiration from Fallout. But it is somehow more terrifying than Fallout.

Edit: forgot a word and added some things

The Shadowrun Trilogy (Returns, Dragonfall & Hong Kong)
Anything in the Vampire Survivors/Bullet Heaven genre will probably run.
Jazzpunk
Neverwinter Nights (it's free on Amazon Prime Gaming right now and can be redeemed on GOG)
Power Bomberman (It's a fan made completely free Bomberman game with soooo many features including online play)
Project Zomboid (maybe it might be too much, drop the settings)

Hotline Miami 1+2 : Top down shooter/beat em up with one hit kills and deaths. Also has a shockingly good story if you dig into it.

1000000 and You Must Build a Boat: Fun match 3 game and its sequel.

Blood: Brutally hard but fantastic boomer shooter from the 90's.

Doom mods: Too many to list, go dighing and you'll find a limitless amount to love.

Breath of Death VII and Cthulu Saves The World: fun little games in the style of classic JRPG's.

Dicey Dungeons: fun little dice based rogue like.

Slay the Spire: One of the best games ever made, the reason deck building roguelikes took off.

Entropy Zero 1 +2: The first is just a good standalone Half Life 2 mod, but its sequel may as well be a new half life game its so good.

Guacamelee 1+2: Stellar platform beat em up metroidvanias with luchadore flair.

I Have No Mouth And I Must Scream: brutal, depressing, highly influential and astonishing point and click adventure game.

Kingsway: What if an RPG was an operating system in the style of windows 95?

The Last Door 1+2: Lovecraftian horror pixel point and click with a stellar story.

One Finger Death Punch: You use two buttons, attack left or right when an enemy is close enough. High paced twitch reaction game thats more addictive then you would think.

Terraria: so much more than 2D minecraft.

Thief Series: Immersive sims that helped put stealth gameplay more to the front of gaming.

ULTRAKILL: Its optimized pretty good but might lag when it gets intense. If devil may cry was an fps.

Vulture for Nethack: a GUI for the grand daddy of rogue likes, Nethack. Can help make the game less inscrutable.

Stardew Valley? A great number of the pixel graphics farming sims are really lightweight and have tons of playtime if you enjoy the genre

I'm in the same position.

I play OSRS, and Super Smash Bros. Melee online (amazing netcode, matchmaking, and general experience).

Oh also Hardcore D2 with classic graphics is a great experience.

If your PC could run games released around the 7th generation of consoles it would be graet, because around that time certain standards such as Xinput and DirectX9+ became solidified, reducing the odds of some annoying game compatibility issues. But as that's not the case, I'd stick with emulation in general, and 2D indie titles (metroidvanias are great).

Unfortunately many PC games from the 6th console generation era are sub-par ports, and a considerable number of them is abandonware these days (=not avaiable through legal stores).

You could try Enter the Gungeon if you like rougelites/bullet hells and pixel art. Super fun and plenty of replayability with some easter eggs thrown in too

Plenty of great DOOM mods exist. Some of my favorites include:

• Ashes 2063
  A mod for DOOM II that transforms it into a post-apocalyptic shooter similar to Fallout.

• Aliens: Eradication
  Great mod for DOOM II that hearkens back to DOOM's Alien inspirations.

• Blade of Agony
  Mod that turns DOOM into Wolfenstein, lol.

Other than that, there are great indie games I'd recommend.

• FTL

• The Escapists 1 and 2

• Terraria

• Papers Please

Just a little list I wrote up in a couple minutes.

SimCity4, still the best city game to date IMO.

Specs?

Any specific kind of games that you like?

Limbo - it broke my heart
Shadowrun: Dragonfall - old style RPG with turn-based combat
Magicka - fun and awesome magic system
Homeworld 2 - space Strategy in 3D
Sins of a solar empire series - Space 4x
Per aspera - mars station building sim with a twist
Frostpunk - Survival sim
…
I got more, what are you looking for?

World of Horror
Fear and Hunger
The coma 2
Luck be a landlord
Vampire Survivors

If you're fine with anime games, the INTI-CREATES games are amazing fun and run on any toaster. Check out the Gunvolt, Blaster Master Zero and Bloodstained (not the metroidvania one) games they made.

Can I recommend World of Goo, Undertale, and Baba Is You? Don't think either of those should be too demanding.

World of Goo is a simple and fun physics-based game. A bunch of sentient goo-balls just hang out and want to be directed into a vacuum in every level. You can use them to build structures amongst each other and can try very experimental and creative solutions. Charismatic and cute game. I played it back in 2010 and it definitely demands less than Borderlands 2 would.

Undertale is an extremely popular indie game built by one dev. JRPG inspired, but very unique in its own way. Won't say much about it as I think you should go into the game blind, but it's a lot of fun.

Baba Is You is a 2D puzzle game. Full of logic-gate fun and requires thinking of out-of-the-box solutions (often literally as well).

I think rocket league has requirements similar to borderlands 2? That game is an absolute time sink for me.

Stardew Valley

Eastward

Chrono Trigger

XCOM

If you like point and click games with riddles, I have very good news for you :)

• Maniac Mansion
• Day of the Tentacle
• King's Quest series, even though I only remember playing 'Heir Today, Gone Tomorrow'
• Rex Nebular
• Eternam

In a different genre, Dune and Dune 2 are games I played an awful lot in my teenage years. Dune 2 especially, it's a nice precursor to StarCraft, which I can't recommend enough, as well as its expansion, Broodwar.

I also remember playing Outpost, where you were sent on other planets to settle a colony, and another game I can't remember the title, where you were leading armies of the Roman Empire and had to conquer countries.

I mentioned all these games as they are from the early to mid 90s era, so your PC should handle them just fine.

Enjoy!

Lord Monarch is a very old Falcom game that is officially in the Dragon Slayer series. It’s a simple real-time strategy game, and it’s pretty easy to just pick up and play. For some reason an English language version is still available on Falcon’s website for 16-bit Windows. If you liked the game you might also be interested in playing the expanded version that they made in conjunction with Sega for the Megadrive; it got a translation patch not too long ago and is compatible with the Mega Mouse.

Coincidentally Falcom also still offers an English version of Vantage Master. It’s not as good of a game but there is no such thing as a bad Falcom game.

Myst and Riven definitely would work, and are titans of the exploration puzzle genre. I haven't played them in a while (my DVD-ROM versions don't work on modern Macs like mine), but I think I saw them updated for Windows and Mac on GOG.

I play a ton of indie games, and most of them are very easy on system requirements, so let me go through a list based on genre.

Roguelike:

Slay the Spire - Card Deckbuilding roguelike. It has inspired an entire genre out of it and there are many more that can be listed as basically a subset of this game. If anyone wants more recommendations off that let me know, but I'll keep it to that one for now.

FTL - Spaceship Roguelike. You have a lot of different options of starting ships, but beyond that anything can be achieved with any ship. With a pause function during battles you don't have to be stressed out if your reaction times aren't great, or a lot of people play the game real time with no pauses.

Peglin - If you've ever played Peggle from Popcap this would look familiar. It's a mash-up of pachinko and slay the spire where you need to upgrade your deck with better balls to shoot, and you do damage based on how you hit the pegs on the board.

PlateUp! - It's a cooking game roguelike similar to that of Overcooked. It's very challenging in both single player mode but can be played up to 4 player as well and provide their own challenges.

Turn Based Tactics Games:

The Banner Saga - A strong collection of 3 games that have a compelling storyline on top of good turn based strategy mechanics.

Fell Seal: Arbiters Mark - This is a game that leans very heavily on the system set up in Final Fantasy Tactics for inspiration. That being said it doesn't feel derivative but makes the system it sets up its own.

Horizon's Gate - Turn based strategy combat with a ship based overworld economy. Buy supplies and sell them at other ports for money, or go for piracy and steal ships from other factions, or your own faction. The storyline is very light, but it gets out of its own way to let you play the game how you want.

WarGroove - A spiritual sequel to the Advance Wars franchise. It improves a lot of quality of life things from the old series and adds in a lot of its own, but for the large part if you've played advance wars you'll know how to play this game.

Battle Brothers - This is a game with a heavy caveat for me. There is a very sheer learning cliff to this game. Starting it out with no knowledge is extremely difficult and punishing, but if you like learning pretty heavy systems and building up out of nothing this is an incredibly good game. This is one of those games where learning about it from youtube videos will help get you started because without that it's very very tough.

Real Time Strategy:

Age of Empires 2 Definitive Edition - AoE2 originally came out back in 1999 but always managed to keep a solid fanbase that kept playing. Microsoft eventually picked the game back up and made an HD Edition in 2016, but then kept putting more time and effort into the game adding more to it. Now we have the DE and it is still an awesome real time strategy game that still runs on relatively weak machines. It has strong online matchmaking and there are lots of high level players in the game so you will never be lacking for a challenge.

They Are Billions - This is a zombie real time strategy game which is single player only. I don't tend to be big into multiplayer games, but most RTS games are built around playing others, not the computer. As such this is a really strong entry for that single player mode while getting that itch for an RTS game. It runs quite smoothly on a lot of my old equipment so it shouldn't be a problem.

Puzzle Games:

Islanders - This is an extremely chill city-building puzzle game. It's not a Sim-City type of game but more about design and planning. You place buildings down and it gives you points based on the types of buildings or nature around it which opens up new buildings to place. If you get enough points on your island it opens up the next island and you can just keep it going. There is no time limits or pressure on them and you'll learn how to set up the cities in the game naturally.

Poly Bridge 2 - Pretty simple bridge constructor game. Not always easy but it runs quite simply and leaves a lot of room open for design.

Hexcells - A very good puzzle game that's minesweeper meets sudoku.

Papers Please - A decently short indie puzzle game where you are checking the papers at the border of your fascist country. Trying to make sure that you get enough done per day to feed and heat your family. It's got a pretty good storyline and the gameplay is actually quite good if you like analyzing things.

Resource Management Building:

Stardew Valley - A very chill farming game with good characters and a lot of different things to do. One of my most played games of all time.

Factorio - The opposite of chill this game is about designing your factory bit by bit, adding in new supplies and building new parts to use to make even more complex items in your factory. If you like planning and design this is one of the best games for it.

Ending Notes:

And to close up I have an entire supply of cheap story-line driven indie games which are very compelling but it would take forever to list here. If you're interested let me know and I can give you a recommendation list. But these are a good supply of my favorite games that I have put tons of hours into that don't take a whole lot of effort to get running. I've played most of them on a cheap laptop that I take around for travels. Some might require a bit of finessing the settings to get to a good location of working but not crippling yourself with it, but all are highly recommended.

I'd recommend League of Legends. It's a really popular MOBA that's known for being pretty low-spec-friendly. Though, if I were to give a word of caution, the game is not particularly nice to beginners.

Scorched Earth. Just remember to press the button for 33MHz because 66MHz is way too fast.

Torchlight 2.

I'd have to say Loop Hero. It's an indie game published by Devolver Digital. It's got a bangin' soundtrack and lovely retro-inspired graphics. It's an arcadey/roguelite game where you have to balance your ability to kill waves of monsters in an endless series of loops with your desire for more and better loot.

Your character is stuck in a timeloop caused by an evil lich essentially devouring the universe. As you progress through each loop and fight monsters, you "remember" different aspects of the world, which you can place on the map to either give you bonuses or spawn more monsters. You also collect resources along the way to improve the village of survivors you encountered and give yourself some good bonuses.

It has quite a bit of depth to it, for its seemingly simplistic appearance. Plus, it runs on my crappy laptop :)

It’s a very niche corner of gaming - historically accurate real time strategy - but the Paradox games ran decently well on my old computer. If you don’t want the latest and greatest, I know Europa Universalis III ran without a hitch. IV might have a couple skips but otherwise shouldn’t be too bad. Crusader Kings II wasn’t too bad, I haven’t played III yet. I could never get my head around Victoria or Hearts of Iron though, lol.