What are the best games on PlayStation 5? Hard as it is to believe, the PS5 is — by Sony’s own admission — already well past the halfway point of its life-cycle. (It’s even time to start thinking about PS6.) It’s fair to say that PS5 hasn’t been deluged with classics, and the rate of must-play new releases is slower than it has been on previous PlayStations. What’s sure to be the console’s defining game, Grand Theft Auto 6, isn’t even out until later this year.
Even so, the PS5’s library has grown to the extent that there’s a lot to sort through, and new and old PS5 owners will be wondering what to play. So here’s our living list of the best video games we’ve played on the platform — influenced by the personal tastes of the Polygon team — to be updated as more games come out.
Our latest update to this list on April 22 added Pragmata.
How we pick the best games on PS5
The Polygon staff plays a lot of video games, and everything in this list comes personally recommended by at least one of us. We determined what should be on our list of the best PlayStation 5 games by looking at the quality of each title, but also with an eye for breadth and variety — so you should find something on the list you’ll enjoy, no matter what genres of game you like, how much time you have, or what vibe you are after.
Pragmata
Capcom has completed a swift one-two punch in early 2026 by following Resident Evil Requiem with an unexpected gem of a sci-fi action game. Like all of Capcom’s best work, Pragmata is both a slick, modern blockbuster and steeped in deep, old-school video game vibes. It’s a cinematically ambitious game about fatherhood and the AI threat. But also you’re a dude in a spacesuit shooting robots on a moon base, eking out your resources and testing your reflexes between save points.
This is a time-honored template (albeit one that makes for a pleasant gear-change in the here and now). Capcom mixes it up with Diana, your childlike android companion, who disrupts both the storytelling and the gameplay in interesting ways. She sweetly draws the best out of the protagonist, Hugh, while potentially fooling both Hugh and the player that she’s any different from the AI army they combat. And her hacking ability, which plays out as a grid-based minigame, is Pragmata‘s chief gameplay innovation; it blends surprisingly compelling quickfire puzzles into the third-person shooting to brilliant effect — so much so that, when you earn the ability to bypass it, you’ll probably choose not to. Pragmata plays solidly, looks sharp, and most importantly, feels fresh. It’s a class act. —Oli Welsh
Read Austin Manchester’s full review of Pragmata.
Alan Wake 2
