there don’t seem to be that many on Steam that catch my interest.

I don’t know the situation on consoles, but on the PC…

I am not a pinball expert, though I do enjoy video pinball, but none of these are what I’d call the major PC pinball engines with reasonably-realistic physics, things that do a lot of tables:

• Visual Pinball. I was not able to get this working on Linux the few times I’ve tried or to successfully get access to the forums that distribute tables (some kind of broken registration system). This is, as I understand it, what a typical person uses if they just want to make and distribute a free table. It also has many bootleg implementations of commercial tables. Open-source, though only runs natively on Windows.

• Pinball Arcade. IIRC, these guys used to have a license for some major physical table distributors, like Williams, and had it expire. I have this, and the engine hasn’t been updated. I run a high-refresh-rate monitor, and IIRC it has a limit of 60Hz, probably because the physics engine also runs at that rate. I don’t think that it’s getting a lot of updates, and I had some trouble running it last time I tried.

• Zaccaria Pinball. Good if you want elderly pinball, pre-solid-state-electronics era, electromechanical pinball boards. They have some tables that they developed, not copies of real-world tables, that I personally like more than their real-world tables.

• Pinball FX3 (less old). Not bad, but replaced by the below Pinball FX.

• Pinball FX (despite the name, newer). This is the only one off the top of my head that can do high-refresh-rate, and it’s also being kept current. It has a lot of stuff that I’d call fluff and would rather not have, like toys that animate more than on the real-world boards and sometimes obstruct your view, animations to wait through, and such. Also has some kind of online-DRM system that takes a sec at startup. Some of this can be turned off. Places a lot of emphasis on this virtual pinball basement full of virtual trophies. Has occasional very brief stutters for me. Many of the non-real-life board are wide, designed around a present-day portrait-orientation computer monitor, which feels weird but is more friendly to, say, a laptop with a fixed orientation monitor, though maybe not what you want if you’re going to set up a dedicated pinball computer with portrait-orientation monitor. Lots and lots of non-real-world licensed stuff associated with movies and the like that I’m not really enthusiastic about. This is probably what I’d look at if I were aiming to get one today, as the engine’s the newest.

I think that all of these let you download the engine and try out some basic play (IIRC Zaccaria has time-limited plays on tables that you don’t own, and Pinball FX has a rotating collection that you can try for free), so you can just install them and see what you like, but if you’re looking for a starting point with something reasonably modern and with a bunch of tables, these are probably where you want to look.

If you don’t have a strong preference as to tables and are also just feeling around for something to try, I personally like some classic real-life Williams tables, Medieval Madness and Tales of the Arabian Nights. Neither is too rough in terms of draining down the side channels, in my humble opinion. The Addams Family is also a popular table.

Note that if you haven’t touched video pinball for a long time – like, I played a few games in the late 1990s and then was away from it for a while), these engines also simulate nudging the machine and doing so is expected during play.

EDIT: If you’re willing to hit Reddit for information, /r/videopinball and /r/pinball exist; they were where I got some information back when. If not, there’s [email protected] – not a lot of life yet, but, hey, each additional person adds to it!

EDIT2: My understanding from past reading of said forums is that Visual Pinball is considered to have the best physics, but is fiddly to get working and get tables working on (and I don’t think that this was said from the standpoint of someone trying to run anything on Linux, just Windows).