Innholdsfortegnelse for July 2022 i PC Gamer (US Edition)

HIGHS Epic gesture Epic donated two weeks of Fortnite profits to help Ukraine. Elden running Speedrunners have well and truly hit the Lands Between and the record is now 18 minutes to complete it. Colossal comeback Ken and Roberta Williams, Sierra Online founders, are working together again after 20 years on a remake of Colossal Cave Adventure. Twitch Pro-no! Twitch trialled a feature called Boost Train except it got hijacked, became the Porn Train, and is on hiatus. COD fish COD streamer Kenji was accused of cheating: he disputed it by sharing clips that… showed wallhacks. PS wow! Sony is re-jigging its PlayStation Plus service tiers, which matters to PC gamers because accessing PS Now is going to double in price. LOWS…

Since Baldur’s Gate III’s announcement in 2019, Larian has made an art of the disaster demo. It usually happens like this: During an onstage presentation, creative director Swen Vincke deviates from the ‘golden path’—a pre-approved route through the game, tested and made bug-free for demonstration purposes. He clicks on something he shouldn’t, and that thing breaks, in front of a large crowd. “If our developers are in the audience, they’re losing their minds,” says Larian’s director of publishing, Michael Douse. “But everyone on my team and the audience are laughing their asses off. Even our first showing of the game at PAX was an absolute shitshow. It’s so antithetical to what a presentation should be, but it is funny. Funny is such an important word.” Comedy is Larian’s secret weapon…

Halfway through Discovery’s first season, I accepted that it wasn’t my kind of Star Trek. The modern series’ grim war felt tonally off for a series that’s always been about exploration and humanity, and when it did spend time on its crew, the melodrama dial was stuck at 11. Good or bad, it wasn’t my Trek. I had the opposite experience when I played a new demo of Star Trek: Resurgence, a story-focused adventure from former Telltale developers at new studio Dramatic Labs. Within five minutes, Resurgence’s captain was lamenting a catastrophic warp core malfunction and dropping technobabble like “10,000 teradynes per second” while he stared out a viewport. Twenty minutes later and the senior officers were sitting across a table from Ambassador Spock, talking about their mission to negotiate…

This clever sim lets you manage a medieval kingdom through a royal family of avatars. What has me intrigued is all the stories it can create—the medieval setting is a messy sandbox for catty rivalries between clans and nobles, and the more I spoke with developer Dmitry Glaznev, the more excited at the possibilities I became. You start with a misfit noble family. Getting to customize their skills, personality traits, and appearance is a given, with other character attributes “still in development”, Glaznev tells me. As your family grows, they’ll pass on the “talents and curses” of their lineage, assuming they live long enough. Your family represents the most direct control you’ll have in Norland. In order to get things done, you’ll have to give orders to each member, sending…

In the late 1800s, towering metal pylons loom over the Victorian city of Nightingale, crackling with magical energy. In this alt-history timeline, ancient mystical creatures from another realm known as the Fae revealed themselves to the world in the 1500s, changing the course of human history by introducing us to magic. Nightingale essentially became the new center of the world as people flocked to the city to learn the ways of arcane sorcery and put it to use in science and industry. Magic portals were opened and human explorers, known as Realmwalkers, began stepping through them to explore unknown worlds, returning with new resources, discoveries, and a whole lot of treasure. But in 1889 this bold new age of magic came crashing to an end. A mysterious cataclysm called the…

In the dead of night, a local busybody comes straight to the door of your apartment with gossip. Evidently, there’s no Facebook in Abermore. “The puddle’s back,” he says. This pool of liquid sits on the city’s thoroughfares, apparently, and looks normal enough at a glance. But when carriages pass through, it doesn’t splash. And while reflective, it never shows an image. Residents suspect it’s fathoms deep. Oh, and that anything falling in turns to metal. “Transports itself across the city, coming and going as it pleases,” says the busybody. “It’s a small patch of wrong.” If only there were just one small patch of wrong in Abermore. Somewhere below the surface of this game, there’s a perfectly charming heist simulator that channels Thief and Skyrim’s Dark Brotherhood quests. But…

When people talk about Norco, they might mention its discerning use of science fiction, its punk roots, or how it resonates as a universal story about place and personhood. It’s full of social commentary on capitalism in the real-life Louisianan town of the same name. But for all these lofty themes, it also nails something petty: The tiny weaknesses and hypocrisies of people looking for a place to belong. Norco is the first game from the collective Geography of Robots, founded by writer/designer Yuts, who was born and raised in the town. The story follows Kay, a young woman who returns home to Norco to find her brother, Blake, in the wake of their mother’s death. As something of a nomad, she’s been running from her roots in a post-apocalyptic…

When you breed two dogs together in Wobbledogs, you’re treated to a cutscene where a vast stone automaton of a dog mashes the two parents together in its giant hands while little hearts flow out of them. There are no other cutscenes in the game, and it seems to come out of nowhere. It’s great, and out of proportion to the rest of the game, and feels like it’s there for sheer joy. And honestly that is the spirit of Wobbledogs in a nutshell. At a literal level, it is what it says it is. You raise and care for wobbly dogs through different life stages, until they either pass away or you choose to store them, indefinitely, which lets you hang on to their genes for future use. Between…

The mere existence of Stranger of Paradise: Final Fantasy Origin is, well, strange. When Square Enix announced it was remaking Final Fantasy VII, it made sense. It was, after all, the game that put the world’s most ironically named series on the map. An action spin-off inspired by and serving as sort-ofprequel to the now 35 year old and largely forgotten first game in the franchise, however, is an odd choice. The resulting game is even odder. Stranger of Paradise offers a new take on the bare-bones narrative of its pixelated predecessor, with developer Team Ninja injecting the series with a more edgy tone. At least that’s what it was going for, but cringe-worthy dialogue from over-the-top characters sees the game sail right by the realm of cool and land squarely…

Some PlayStation-style games are convincing, while others feel like modern games with a couple of filters applied. Happily, House of Necrosis is the former. It’s a traditional, turn-based roguelike mixed with a gory survival horror. As in most traditional roguelikes, positioning is hugely important, as you close the gap between you and your enemies. If you move next to the enemy, you can hit them with your melee weapon, but they’ll get an attack in return. This can really gouge your health bar, although there are ways to mitigate it. Firstly, you can shoot them from afar, using your pistol and its limited ammo. You can also level up in power, by deliberately seeking out enemies. The one thing you don’t want to do is approach a monster from the…

For me, the mark of a good point-and-click adventure is how much I actually want to listen to the descriptions. It’s fine filling a scene with pointless stuff I can click on, but if the results aren’t mildly amusing, what’s the point? Kathy Rain, against my expectations, is surprisingly great at this, to the point I can’t progress past the opening scene until I’ve examined my Christian roommate’s God things and tried to mess up her bed. The ’90s setting and spiky protagonist make me wish this was on cable when I was a teenager—the sort of show you watch before your mom calls you downstairs for turkey and fries. 74…

“The best invasions are ones where you’re greeted by a friendly crate” I’m an invader. The nuisance who drops into games to wreak havoc on folks just trying to overcome challenges. About halfway through my first playthrough I realized I might like fighting other players more than bosses, and the easiest way to do that is by being a pain in the ass. Except, well, lately my invasions have gotten a bit weird. It all started, as many things do, with fashion. Deep underground in the Ainsel River lies the Eternal City Nokstella—and when I first set eyes on the ten-foot tall swordswomen that reside there, I knew I had to get their fit. But once my cosplay was assembled, I had another thought: What if I invaded people here,…

NOW PLAYING | UPDATE | MOD SPOTLIGHT | HOW TO | DIARY | WHY I LOVE | REINSTALL | MUST PLAY I'm often in two minds about the games of Hideo Kojima. He’s great at delivering novel ideas with a pretty frequent hit rate. The sniper battle with the End from Metal Gear Solid 3 or the scene where Psycho Mantis reads your memory card? Great stuff. But hour long cutscenes filled with dreadful dialogue? A habit of objectifying women of his games? The worst. Death Stranding represents the highest peaks and deepest depths in terms of quality. The same overblown story and overlong cutscenes intrude in a game which otherwise excels at communicating such a strong sense of place. Ropey combat and stealth feel like a hangover from Metal…

Larian Studios always goes all-in. After nearly bankrupting itself to make Divinity: Original Sin in 2015, Larian tripled in size to pull off an ambitious sequel, growing to 150 developers. With one of the best RPGs of the decade under its belt, Larian then set out to make Baldur’s Gate III. A year in pre-production let them make a call on how much work this even more ambitious game would take. “We thought we had it all figured out. We even estimated how big we’d have to become,” said Larian founder Swen Vincke. They were wrong. “I never expected us to be 400 people to make Baldur’s Gate III,” Vincke told me. “Nobody expected it. But it’s literally what we needed to do it.” Appropriately for an RPG studio that…

Education is the foundation of our society. Students are expected to get great marks through elementary, high school, and for some, college too. As a student I diligently concentrated on my grades… sometimes. But as an institutional boss in Two Point Campus, I was more concerned with placing the staff room dart board. Two Point Campus puts you in the shoes of a school administrator looking to build the best educational environment possible for the students of Two Point County. You’ll have to cater to their wants and needs, from library desks to food vendors. Balancing work and play for both teachers and students is of the utmost importance. And although you may get yourself into debt, see some students drop out, and struggle to keep your staff energized, it’s…

Games that are a bit like Doom but not actually Doom have a chequered history. While few remember Blood or Painkiller, there are those games like Serious Sam that refuse to die. ‘Demons with guns that run at you’ is a fertile furrow to grow games in, turns out. Enter three-person Scottish developer Damage State, which has hitched its plough to id’s tractor and is trying to out-fertilise Doom. In Scathe you play as, well, Scathe, an enforcer of the legions of Hell forged from the earth by the Divine Creator. That’s quite a thing to have embossed on your business card. For, y’know, reasons, Scathe is required to prove its worth by running through a maze and shooting everything that gets in its way. There’s lava, a biomechanical feel…

As a lover of sci-fi and a Singaporean, playing Chinatown Detective Agency was a rare experience. Not long after entering this near-future version of my home country, it became clear that this game has two layers, aimed at two audiences: One is a point-and-click adventure for folks who grew up with Broderbund’s Carmen Sandiego series which took them all over the world. The other is a game made especially for Singaporeans. In 2037, the country has gone through the unthinkable process of deregulation, there’s anti-government graffiti on the train, droids are a routine sight, and there’s only one human librarian left in the country. You play as Amira Darma, an ex-cop starting out as a private investigator. As she takes on cases and meets clients, Amira gets to travel the…

I knew I was in for a good time with Lego Star Wars: The Skywalker Saga when I began the Prequel Trilogy portion and saw Qui Gon Jinn and Obi Wan’s ship get stopped at a traffic gate floating in space. After a quick video conference with the Trade Federation, which saw them hastily try and hide their evil plans labelled “evil plans”, Qui Gon and Obi Wan breeze through the gate, accidentally knocking a hapless battle droid, sending it floating off into space. The Skywalker Saga pushes its charm, with practically every cutscene featuring some visual gag or punchline at the film series’ expense. Kylo Ren is pumping iron and flexing as Rey contacts him in that infamous scene from The Last Jedi. Ben Kenobi pops some popcorn before…

Since the release of End of Dragons, I’ve spent as much time in Guild Wars 2’s older maps as I have in its new Canthan region. This is an MMO that, in the nine years since its release, has never raised its level cap. The gear and weapons you earned before remain just as relevant today. In that context, End of Dragons doesn’t just need to be good in isolation, but has to weave itself into the larger tapestry of the endgame. Even now, a month after launch, it’s hard to predict what its enduring legacy will be. But one thing is for certain: End of Dragons makes a great first impression. The campaign is the strongest Guild Wars 2 has delivered yet. In pursuit of a band of sky…

There’s a realm between spooky and cosy that Frog Familiar has carved a comfy little nook in. In this top-down adventure game, you play as a witch’s amphibian familiar, who has to hop around a compact forest in search of ingredients. Imagine The Legend of Zelda, but un-imagine the combat and dungeons, and you’ll know what you’re in store for: a game of exploration and running errands for the charming forest folk. Your main quest, and it’s a fairly low-stakes one, is to gather various bits from around the low-res environment. We’re talking mushrooms, herbs, bones, and a magic crystal, if you can find one. These items are dotted around the coupledozen screens that comprise the game, leading you subtly to the many denizens that call it home, be they…

Sometimes, trying to find the fun in a game is like looking for a lost contact lens. You scrabble around on the bathroom floor, with your knees pock-marked from the filth-encrusted mat and having ancient pubes sticking to your sweating, desperate paws. Then you look at the mirror, and realize that the contact lens was stuck to your forehead the entire time. There’s probably a way of describing Bulletstorm that gives a less-revealing picture about the cleanliness of my lavatory, but hopefully you get the point. Some games hide the enjoyment under the blanket of story. Bulletstorm doesn’t. It’s obvious to the point of obscenity, but playing it again now feels like a rebirth. It’s a game that understands what’s brilliant about shooting baddies. There are no pretensions to high…

This month’s theme, apparently, is ‘games that are weatheradjacent’. So Sunset Overdrive is a slight cop-out. But in my defence, you can’t have a sunset without the sun. It’s also an excuse to talk about a game that’s fascinating just because it’s so close to being awful. At times it feels like it was grown in a lab using memes and Mountain Dew. But despite being so self-referential it’s thrice disappeared up its own backside, Sunset Overdrive is adorably, inexplicably great. It’s like an uninvited stranger turning up to your house party with a guitar, then learning they know all your favorite songs and they’re not trying to bed your partner. 82…

We thought it might never happen. GPU prices have been wildly inflated for as long as Nvidia’s been trying to explain ray tracing. Through a perfect storm of market conditions, it’s been nigh-on impossible to buy an RTX 3-series card since their release in September 2020 and just as exhausting trying to get a high-end 2-series card before that. But at long last, prices are starting to fall. Just in case you’re emerging after several years from a Fallout esque vault, this pickle was created in the first place primarily by the coronavirus pandemic. Cryptocurrencies, particularly Bitcoin, saw a massive increase in value during lockdown, and that encouraged crypto farmers to buy all the available high-powered GPUs on the market. When Nvidia launched its new RTX 3080 TI, it became…

KEY Budget build PC gaming is for everyone. Pick the parts you want to build a new, well-rounded PC for a good price. Mid-range build You want to run every new game at 1080p 60fps. This recommended build will see you through. Advanced build You’re looking for the best PC on the market and superior components. But you still want to spend smart. BUDGET BUILD Enjoy 1080p gaming without breaking the bank NEW ENTRY MOTHERBOARD B660M Pro RS ASRock $120 This is as cheap as we want to go while still offering room for expansion and upgrades down the line. NEW ENTRY PROCESSOR Core i5 12400F Intel $180 There’s no iGPU on this chip, but it’s a little cheaper as a result, and will work great for this particular build.…

CD Projekt has announced that a new Witcher game is in development “kicking off a new saga for the franchise”. While the details are scarce at this stage, the most immediately noticeable part of the announcement is that—after basically building the studio on it—CD Projekt is leaving behind its latest iteration of REDengine, the tech behind Cyberpunk 2077, and moving to Unreal Engine 5. Ever since the Witcher 3’s final DLC, players have been ravenous to find out what’s next: But Cyberpunk 2077 put that on the back-burner for many years, and that game’s story looms large here. The simple version is that, while this was always coming at some point, CDPR’s reputation took a battering over Cyberpunk’s release while the Witcher TV series brought the series to new heights of…

TREYARCH Treyarch’s 1998 debut, Die by the Sword, has about 14 devs credited. The COD studio now has 550+ employees. TRAVELLER’S TALES Thirteen credited developers worked on 1989’s Leander. Today the Lego studio has around 300 employees. ROCKSTEADY STUDIOS About 30 devs worked on Urban Chaos. 250+ are at the studio now, as it makes Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League. AMPLITUDE STUDIOS Amplitude made its first 4X, Endless Space, with about 20 devs. Now owned by Sega, the studio has 150+ employees.…

I’m no ghost scientist, but there are a few things I’m confident ghosts do: Spin office chairs as a gag, fry electronics at the worst times, and make soda machines eject cans like fizzy ballistic missiles. I was able to do all three in Ghostbusters: Spirits Unleashed, so at the very least it passes my amateur ghostology test with slimy colors. Ghostbusters is Illfonic’s third licensed, 4v1 multiplayer game after Friday the 13th and Predator: Hunting Grounds. While the first two have come and gone while Dead by Daylight keeps on trucking and Left 4 Dead 2 settles into old age, I don’t think Ghostbusters is really trying to supplant either. This time Illfonic’s really doing its own thing, making an asymmetrical game where one team never gets torn limb…

OK, so we’re all a little tired of superheroes at this point. With the ever growing Marvel Cinematic Universe and however many Batmans we have now, you probably think you’ve had enough of both great powers and great responsibilities. But I promise you you’ve never seen superheroes quite like the ones in Superfuse. This action-RPG takes place far in the future, a time when the people of Earth have gone on to populate other areas of space led by gods. And by gods, we’re talking billionaires evolved by science to the point they’re undying, domineering dictators of the universe. You play one of their lackeys. Not only have these gods altered themselves, but they’ve also taken on an army of supercharged mercenaries (that’s you) called Enforcers. Which doesn’t exactly make…

It’s been a long time since Cities XXL or Cities: Skylines, and even longer since SimCity 4. The wave of city building games from indie developers continues, however, with Frostpunk and its upcoming sequel as the spearhead. Highrise City doesn’t promise the ability to send children to the coal mines, but intrigues nonetheless. It promises a ‘modern take on the genre’, which I hope involves ray tracing and postmodernism rather than NFTs and lockdowns, Highrise comes from Fourexo Entertainment, a German team looking to merge city building and tycoon games into an economy-focused title rather than just a competition about building the biggest skyscrapers. PLAYED IT Running on the Unreal engine, there’s a lot to like about Highrise’s presentation. We’re promised voxel-based terrain, enormous maps of almost 200 square kilometres, and…

Tiny Tina’s Assault on Dragon Keep, the Borderlands 2 expansion that doubled as a loving parody of Dungeons & Dragons, came out in 2013. That was a year before fifth edition revitalized interest in Dungeons & Dragons, two years before Critical Role premiered. At the time, jokes about Dungeons & Dragons seemed pretty niche. It was a surprising move for a shooter expansion, but it sure did pay off, hitting an untapped vein and quickly becoming everyone’s favorite DLC. In 2022, though? D&D is popular as it’s ever been, approaching cultural oversaturation, and Tiny Tina’s Wonderlands returns to a well that’s close to running dry. While it looks like a bouncy fantasycomedy, it plays like Borderlands. Specifically, Borderlands 3. Some of the guns shoot crossbow bolts and the grenades have…

Beware of Tunic’s cute exterior. On the surface, its lovely art style and charming tone bear a striking resemblance to Nintendo’s Zelda series. But below this cheery surface lies a game intent on testing your resolve. Tunic’s world is teeming with enemies who are all too willing to knock the stuffing out of you. And you’d best be prepared to die—it has as much in common with Dark Souls as it does any of Link’s previous outings. Some games go to painstaking lengths to explain their mechanics, Tunic is not one of those. The most important lesson you learn is that the game actually does offer guidance, and in an unusual way—by having you collect the pages of an instruction manual. If you’re stumped about where to go next or…

It’s not a reassuring thought that once humans mess up the planet, they’ll do it again in the aftermath, but it’s entirely logical. In Submerged: Hidden Depths, survivors in the ruins of a world lost to the ocean anger a mysterious marine entity known as The Mass, by using its seeds as a power source for their worship of bygone electronics. Its wrath is total, turning everyone into tentacled echoes of their last living moments. Giant, greasy, black vines choke the settlements and surrounding waters. The only way to make things right is for our cursed heroine, Miku, to return the glowing kernels to their host plants. The seeds of destruction are also the literal seeds of rebirth. Or something. The central mechanic here makes immediate sense, but I found…

I’ve lived many lives as I’ve travelled around in Weird West. Bounty hunter, werewolf, pigman—that was a memorable one. And in every body I made the West a little better, or a little worse. As much as it’s a game about constant micro decision-making—stealth or direct assault, Molotov cocktail plus oil barrel or revolver plus John Woo slow-mo dive—Weird West is just as concerned with the bigger picture as other immersive sims, including Dishonored and Prey. That bigger picture begins in a familiar place: With a bounty hunter coming out of retirement. For the first few hours, I was tangling with outlaws in typical Wild West fashion and wondering where the weirdness was. You buy supplies in towns and pick up bounties before heading out, traversing an open world map…

NEED TO KNOW EXPECT TO PAY Free DEVELOPER Horatiu.nyc LINK bit.ly/Traumatarium Roguelikes have become so ubiquitous they’ve invaded history. Here’s a roguelike made for ye olde original Game Boy—as in, you can download the ROM and play it on the actual hardware. You can also play it in your browser, delving into the dungeon to save an imperilled fantasy kingdom. Traumatarium is a pretty simple game. I was reminded of the board game Escape the Dark Castle, which contains a dungeon made up of 15 shuffled event cards. That’s how the world is constructed here, as a series of rooms presented in a random sequence, with randomized events occurring as you search each room. You’re linearly shunted along, before you face the end game boss. It’s a game of taking,…

NEED TO KNOW EXPECT TO PAY $7 DEVELOPER thatgamecompany PUBLISHER Annapurna Interactive Amoment of honesty: Flower was originally going to be one of the shorter entries in this month’s They’re Back, but the prospect of following Bulletstorm with something so achingly earnest was entirely too tempting to pass up. It’s refreshing—almost like a detox for the fingers. The most violent thing that happens in Flower is some rocks almost falling over. But despite the calm, monkish focus, Flower can be exhilarating. There’s a lovely sense of speed and fluidity from zooming around close to the ground and watching the beautiful grass part before you. It’s also a zen experience, even if the effect is lessened for me when I decide that each section is the dying dream of a plant. It…

Most Nancy Drew games hinge on some kind of nefarious, far-fetched criminal enterprise. But a villain using weaponized bad weather is perhaps the most gleefully absurd. It’s the 22nd game in the series, and there’s very little here to set it apart: Sedate puzzling, pointless chores, bad character models. Even among the Nancy Drew hardcore, Trail of the Twister is rightly reviled one of the weaker entries. But at least there are 21 other titles to help ease the sadness. 58…

In my opinion there’s no better peripheral for your PC than a racing wheel. I enjoy VR headsets, though they’re pretty great even without a PC at hand; and a flight stick really feels crucial to a fun flight sim experience. But it’s the racing wheel that I find myself using most often—so much so that one is a permanent fixture on my desk nowadays. There are many different racing wheels vying for your cash, however. You’ll find multiple varying underlying technologies powering each wheel available—each with their own positives and negatives, fans and critics. I’ve tested and reviewed six of the best on the market to see which is really going to deliver a true-to-life tyre-screeching experience for avid and casual driver alike. GT DD Pro FANATEC $699 Direct-drive…