Best RPGs for Ubuntu – Party, Story and Free Role Playing Games

You build a character, gather a party of misfits, and talk, fight or sneak your way through a story that quietly remembers everything.

This is the one to start with if you have never played an RPG before, which sounds backwards for a game this big. It works because almost anything you try is a real option. You can talk a villain out of a fight, shove him off a cliff, or turn into a bear and settle it that way, and the game has an answer ready for all three. Your party argue with you about it afterwards. It runs beautifully on Linux and has done since launch.

You arrive in Night City as a nobody, pick where you came from, and find out how much that one choice shapes everything after it.

We list this game on our action page as well, and it earns a second place here for a reason. On that page it is about the shooting and the driving. Here it is about the fact that the childhood you pick at the start changes who talks to you, which jobs open up, and which of the endings you can even reach. The city is full of people with their own problems, and the game is at its best when you stop and get involved in one. Years of patches turned it into what it was meant to be.

A blacksmith’s son in 15th century Bohemia, in a world with no magic in it, where being unable to read is a genuine problem you have to fix.

This is the most stubborn game on the page and that is the appeal. Henry starts out bad at everything, including holding a sword, and every skill has to be learned from somebody who will only teach you if they like you. Being clean matters. Being drunk matters. It sounds exhausting and it is the opposite, because by the time you can win a fight you feel like you earned it rather than levelled into it. It is also the best looking historical world anyone has built.

The 2006 Elder Scrolls game rebuilt with modern visuals, still full of guilds to join and strangers with terrible ideas.

The remaster is the version to buy, and that is worth saying plainly because the original is cheaper and still on sale. The rebuild fixes the parts that aged worst, mainly the way enemies used to grow stronger alongside you and make progress feel pointless. What survives untouched is the reason people remember it: you can ignore the main story completely and spend fifty hours running the thieves guild or the arena instead. Nobody stops you.

A monster hunter takes paid work across a country that has just been through a war, and the paid work keeps turning into something harder.

Eleven years old and still the one other games get measured against. The reason is the small jobs. A contract to kill something in a well turns into a village keeping a secret, and by the end you are choosing between two answers that both cost somebody something. Geralt is written as a professional rather than a hero, which makes those moments land harder. It also runs on modest hardware now, so it is a genuinely easy recommendation.

The middle part of the Final Fantasy VII rebuild, where the party finally leaves the city and the world opens up in front of them.

You do not need the first game to enjoy this, though it helps. What you get is an enormous world stuffed with things to do and a group of friends who are clearly enjoying each other’s company, which is rarer than it should be. The fighting is quick but you can pause it any time you need to think. It is generous to the point of being silly, and the last few hours are the most talked about ending of the last five years.

A mercenary captain fights to hold his company together across a continent at war, in the newest big budget RPG on this page.

This came out in March 2026 and it is the freshest thing here. It is a game about weight: fights are slow and physical, weather changes what you can do, and climbing somewhere high takes actual effort rather than a button. The world is huge and it does not hold your hand about where to go in it. Reports settled at Gold on Linux with a lot of players behind that rating, which is unusual for a game this new.

Two ageing men with nothing left to lose end up in Hawaii, and the game is by turns very funny and completely sincere about it.

Nothing else manages this mix. One minute you are in a serious conversation about growing old and dying badly, the next you are running a rubbish collection minigame or managing an island resort. It should not hold together and it absolutely does, because the writing takes both halves seriously. Fights are the stop and think kind, so nothing depends on your reflexes. It is also frequently very cheap.

Every year a painted figure writes a number on a monolith, and everyone that age dies. This year the number is 33, and a group sets out to stop it.

The best new RPG of the last two years and it came from a team of about thirty people. Fights are the kind where you pick your move and wait, except you also dodge and parry in real time when it is the enemy’s turn, so you are never just watching. It looks like nothing else, the music is extraordinary, and the story earns its ending rather than shocking you into one. If you only take one game from this page, take this.

A fantasy kingdom holds an election for its next ruler, and you are the outsider candidate nobody expects to survive the campaign.

From the team behind Persona, and it takes their best idea somewhere new. Your days are split between travelling, fighting, and simply talking to people, and the friendships you invest in make you stronger in a way that actually makes sense in the story. The election framing gives the whole thing urgency that most fantasy games lack. It looks superb and it is one of the most reliable Proton titles on this page.

A group of Tokyo students spend their days at school and their nights breaking into the minds of adults who have done real harm.

The style is the first thing people mention and the school year is the reason it sticks. You have a limited number of days, so time spent getting better at cooking is time not spent with a friend, and the game never lets you have everything. That pressure makes small decisions feel weighty. Royal is the complete version with an extra term added on. It is long, and it is worth it.

Four prisoners with magic they are not allowed to have escape a ship, and what happens next is almost entirely up to you.

The game that made Baldur’s Gate 3 possible, and in some ways it is still the more inventive of the two. Fights take place on a map you can set on fire, freeze, or electrify, and the game encourages every stupid idea you have. You can play the whole thing with a friend, including the part where you both want different endings. It is older and slightly rougher around the edges, and it is still one of the finest RPGs ever made.

A dark, unhappy world seen from just above your character’s head, where you clear it out one room at a time and get steadily stronger.

This is the comfortable one. You pick a class, you head out, and the loop of finding better gear and watching your damage numbers climb is as satisfying as it has always been. The story is grim and well acted, and there is a steady stream of new seasons if you want a reason to come back. It asks a fair bit of a graphics card, which is why we have put a streaming option on it.

The same kind of game as Diablo, built by a smaller team, with time travel as the excuse for visiting the same places in different eras.

This is the friendlier option of the two. It explains its own systems properly, it lets you change your mind about your character without starting again, and it runs happily on a laptop that would struggle elsewhere. There is an offline mode, which matters if your connection is not reliable. It has been getting steady updates for years and shows no sign of stopping.

You track enormous animals across a living desert, study how they move, and slowly learn to beat them without the game ever explaining how.

Every hunt is a small research project. The first time you meet something you lose, and you go away and change your kit and come back and lose less. Doing that on your own is fine, and doing it with three other people is where most of the stories come from. It is the most demanding game on this page by a distance, so check what your machine can manage before buying.

Note: Boosteroid lists this one as not optimised, so streaming it is likely to be a rougher ride than the other games on this page.

Two children born to control the sun and the moon set out on a hand drawn adventure that looks like the best game you remember from 1995.

It is a love letter to a particular kind of old game, and it is far more than a copy. Fights ask you to press a button at the right moment to strengthen a hit, which keeps you paying attention without needing quick reactions. There is no wasted time in it, no busywork, and the map is a pleasure to move around. The Sunset Edition adds a whole extra chunk for free.

You are an escaped worker in a mind built from a copied human, scraping a living on the edge of a system that wants you back.

Each day you get a handful of dice, and each thing you want to do costs one. A bad roll means a bad day, and the game is honest about that instead of letting you retry. It reads more than it plays, and the writing is worth it: this is science fiction about debt, work and staying alive, and it treats the reader as an adult. It is short, sharp and unlike anything else on this page.

A player inside a fictional online game wakes up unable to speak, and has to work out who she is from the inside of somebody else’s world.

A proper Linux release, no compatibility layer needed, and it is enormous for the price. The fights are quick and physical, the puzzles are genuinely hard, and the setting lets it be funny about online games without being cynical. It is one of the most complete indie RPGs anyone has made and it still gets overlooked. Buy it on sale and it costs less than lunch.

A war between three kingdoms, told through a group of people who mostly did not want to be involved, in a game made largely by one person.

It was built over seven years by a single developer and you would never guess. Fights use a clever balance meter that stops you repeating the same strong move, so every turn asks something of you. There is no busywork, no filler, and the story goes to some genuinely dark places without wallowing. It runs natively on Linux and will start on almost anything you own.

A large shared fantasy world you can play alone, where the whole map turns up to deal with whatever is happening rather than queuing for it.

The best free starting point here. There is no monthly fee, ever, and the base game plus a lot of what came after costs nothing. What makes it unusual is that everyone nearby is on your side by default, so you never compete for the thing you are both trying to kill. You can play hundreds of hours before you are ever asked for money, and it is one of the smoothest Proton titles on this page.

A bleak, enormous action RPG where you fight your way across a cursed continent and shape your character in almost any direction you like.

This is the deep end and it is free. It gives you more freedom over how your character develops than anything else here, which is either the appeal or the reason to pick Last Epoch instead. Nothing you can buy makes you stronger, so the money side is honest. New seasons land regularly and the community around it is enormous, which means help is easy to find when you want it.

Eight separate Star Wars stories set thousands of years before the films, each with its own voice acting and its own ending.

Play it for the stories and ignore the rest. Each of the eight classes has a full campaign written for it, and the imperial agent one in particular is better than most paid games. All of that is free. It is fifteen years old and it still gets updates, and it runs on Linux without complaint. Treat it as eight single player games that happen to share a world.

A shared medieval world with a proper Linux version, where players make nearly everything that exists in it.

The rare thing here is the proper Linux version: no compatibility layer, no tinkering, it just runs. There are no fixed classes, so what you can do is decided by what you are wearing at the time, and you can change your mind whenever you like. Almost every item in the game was made by another player, which gives the economy real weight. It is free to start and it is happy on old hardware.

You control a fast, quiet suit of armour on missions across a solar system, and the story turns out to be far stranger than the opening suggests.

Give it a few hours before you judge it. The first stretch is a fairly ordinary shooter, and then it opens into something with a genuinely odd and well told story behind it. Movement is the best part: once it clicks you are sprinting along walls and never touching the ground. It has been free and generously updated for thirteen years, and nothing worth having is locked behind payment.