Innholdsfortegnelse for Holiday 2025 i PC Gamer (US Edition)

HIGHS Todd Xx forbid x The Lusty Argonian Maid only got into Elder Scrolls because its writer snuck it past Todd Howard. Culture Xx vulture x Witcher creator Andrzej Sapkowski got a gold Polish culture medal. Phar bigger A Silksong gumshoe pixel-counted both games to compare the size of their worlds, and Pharloom looks twice as big as Hallownest. LOWS Not proud RuneScape boss says he killed new Pride events to keep things going “as apolitically as possible”. Ninten(please)don’t A videogame IP lawyer says Nintendo’s latest patents on Pokémon mechanics “should not have happened, full stop”. Zhongwen bu hao Silksong sank to ‘mostly negative’ Steam review status among Chinese gamers over its poor translation.…

1 month BATTLEFIELD 6 RELEASE October 10, 2025 | DEVELOPER Battlefield Studios Multiplayer and singleplayer FPS action returns in the new all-out warfare experience. Drive tanks, fly planes and helicopters, as well as shoot on foot with your squad. VAMPIRE: THE MASQUERADE—BLOODLINES 2 RELEASE October 2025 | DEVELOPER The Chinese Room Fight your way through a modern-day Seattle on the brink of an open war as an elder vampire. The long-awaited first-person World of Darkness RPG is almost here. Hype! THE OUTER WORLDS 2 RELEASE October 29, 2025 | DEVELOPER Obsidian Entertainment Further interplanetary action and adventure from Obsidian, with both a revolution and an invasion taking place in a galaxy that reacts to your decisions. 2 months EUROPA UNIVERSALIS V RELEASE November 4, 2025 | DEVELOPER Paradox Tinto Paradox…

For those who’ve ever sat watching a superhero team-up movie and thought it looks like a logistical and HR nightmare—and we know you’re out there—then AdHoc Studio has got the game for you. In Dispatch, you’re the guy who decides which hero attends which calls for help. It’s not a new idea, but one that gets a fresh presentation from some visual design that makes it look like the best superhero TV show you’ve never watched, and a Telltale-style gameplay loop that sees you spending as much time talking to your hero team as you do sending them to get cats out of trees. Funnily enough, several members of AdHoc Studio worked at the original Telltale Games on the Walking Dead games, and while the developer famous for The Wolf…

I love a good horror game, even if my frayed nerves really don’t. And not just any old jumpscare-filled adventure, but a properly terrifying experience that’ll send shivers down my spine and keep me awake at night for weeks to come. So I was looking forward to jumping headfirst into Bloober Team’s new survival horror game Cronos: The New Dawn and seeking out its grotesque zombie-like oddities named Orphans, vile medical horrors, and some confusing and tension-filled time-travel horror. Unfortunately, I often find that survival horror delivers weaker frights. Monsters just don’t seem that scary when I’m piled high with guns, ammo, and every single explosive I can get my hands on. So, in this respect, I want the survival horror games I play to excel in different areas, like…

Given that every platformer is a Metroidvania now, and every Metroidvania is a Soulslike, discovering Shalguy was like stepping back in time to the days of early indie classics. The joy of discovery is the order of the day in this scribbly platform game. Although I suppose it’s more of an adventure game than a platformer, given that there are no real platforming challenges, no combat to bog things down, and plenty of collectible items to find new uses for. However, it’s all in service of exploring a peaceful, minimalist world populated by interesting creatures and with pixel art that manages to be childlike yet packed with background detail. You might find a sailable boat, a large hotel with new sights waiting on every floor, or [third thing redacted to…

Finally in our collection of lawyer-adjacent games is Syberia: a title that manages to elegantly bridge the gap between automatons (not robots, please) being charming and nightmarishly sinister. I struggle to think of a game where I’ve been so captivated and repulsed at the same time. As suspiciously attractive American lawyer Kate Archer, your job is to oversee the corporate takeover of a toy factory. It’s the sort of setup that is surprising precisely because it’s so boring, even if you already know how it ends. No hero, in any form of media ever, has followed their dream of an aggressive buyout of a toy manufacturer. If it wasn’t already enough like a Hallmark Christmas movie, Kate’s fiancé is cheating on her and there’s snow everywhere. It’s a nice surprise,…

Once upon a time, not that long ago, you’d be laughed out of a meeting or seminar for opening up a gaming laptop. I’ve had it happen to me, during my early days writing about hardware. I took a gaming laptop to an event filled with tech journos and was roundly made fun of when I had to desperately find a power outlet in a meeting room, of which there were none, to try and save my ailing battery and any semblance of my dignity. As gaming laptops have evolved, that’s no longer something to worry about, though. TUF A14 (2025) ASUS $1,700 Bit of everything 1 The Asus TUF A14 has been reformed for 2025. It’s largely the same laptop we’ve come to appreciate over the past year—not much has…

HORIZON: ZERO DAWN Sony’s PC ports have a consistently high standard when it comes to taking snaps, and it all started with Aloy’s first jaunt. GHOST OF TSUSHIMA Unsullied 13th-century Japanese countryside, a feature-rich camera, and only the occasional risk of decapitation. RED DE AD REDEMPTION 2 Whereas actual frontier-era photography involved sitting very still for nine hours, RDR2’s camera options are bleeding-edge. NO MAN’S SK Y If ever there was a universe worth photographing, it’s one in which giant land-dwelling jellyfish stegosaurus hybrids occur.…

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 MID-RANGE BUILD Our recommended build for playing the latest games ADVANCED BUILD Go above and beyond with a PC powerful enough to end worlds…

Hollow Knight: Silksong isn’t Grand Theft Auto VI, but the number of games that scurried away from its September 4 release date, announced as a surprise just two weeks ahead of time, gave it the air of a game nothing could compete with. But what does competing mean when the game in question is a 2D platformer sequel with a cult-like following? Of the delayed games, you can easily see why a Metroidvania sequel like Aeterna Lucis would be sweating. But what about the games that are less obviously aimed at the same exact players? Shouldn’t they be fine even if Silksong’s a mega hit, considering there are more PC gamers than ever? “You can go to the likes of GameDiscoverCo and look at data for past high-performing titles with…

Having toiled in the trenches of World War II, Expression Games is going airborne with Hell Let Loose: Vietnam, a robust, baffling, and thrilling multiplayer shooter with an intimidating learning curve. It shares its toughness, historical nuance, and team gameplay with its predecessor. But this time, one side has helicopters. The extravagant 50 versus 50 battles of Hell Let Loose: Vietnam unfold over sprawling maps and embrace six game modes, including the original’s objective based Offensive mode and Warfare, which is a grand tug-of-war for control of strongpoints. The twist here is the asymmetry. The original game’s fairly matched teams have been bent out of shape. Instead, players opt for the technologically advanced United States forces, or the North Vietnamese Army who deploy tunnels to help them maneuver in stealth.…

A fellow student of wizarding school stands beneath the arches of the quadrangle, looking out onto an immaculate lawn. “Everyone’s always getting crunched around here,” he confides breathlessly, in the earnest tone of an Enid Blyton character. “Whenever I get crunched, I end up having to spend the rest of the week in the medical ward.” I ponder what he means as I wander into an adjacent bathroom and spot a bright pink wizard biscuit hovering above a raised tile. As I pick up the treat, the tile sinks into the floor, and a pillar above ploughs into my tousled head. Crunch. The thing is, I haven’t got all week to spend in recovery. Every time I get crunched, or set on fire by a torch, or tricked into falling…

PILLARS OF ETERNITY Obsidian’s series is a great interpretation of what the early Baldur’s Gate games might’ve looked like were they made today. Stunning backdrops and a top-down perspective. DRAGON AGE: ORIGINS If you can look past the muddy late 2000s aesthetic, BioWare’s (and David Gaider’s) own Baldur’s Gate spiritual successor is a worthy follow-up, with fun companions and good combat. BALDUR’S GATE III Larian’s stab at the IP is further removed from the Baldur’s Gate style than other games, instead opting for the toyboxy Larian style the studio honed through its Divinity games. PATHFINDER: WRATH OF THE RIGHTEOUS While the Pathfinder rules will take some learning for those used to D&D and Baldur’s Gate, doing so unlocks an impressively deep RPG adventure.…

Punching a man’s head clean off his shoulders with a single swing of my fist is darn satisfying. It’s not like Dying Light: The Beast needed to make me super-strong—I regularly launch zombies off rooftops with my two-footed flying kick and slice enemies in half lengthwise with an electrified machete I built in my bedroom—but I do appreciate the opportunity to hulk out with a bare handed decapitation every so often. This time around, Techland’s zombie parkour horror is going to the country, and the setting isn’t the only thing that’s changed. Dying Light: The Beast swaps the dense skyscraper forest of the last game, Stay Human, for a quaint village nestled in a rural landscape, and dispenses with a lot of the bells and whistles. No more claiming sections…

It was easy to think when Deep Rock Galactic: Survivor was first announced that it was a cynical project. A spin-off of a popular game from a different developer, jumping on a new genre bandwagon, and seemingly built with reused assets. But over the last few years, I’ve played a lot of different Vampire Survivors imitators, and all the way through Deep Rock Galactic: Survivor’s run in Early Access, it’s been the king of the pack. The core action of DRG:S is deceptively simple. Your dwarf miner is dropped onto an alien asteroid and tasked with mining for resources and surviving against escalating hordes of bugs. Your weapons fire automatically, and as you level up you’re able to add new guns and fine-tune them with stat upgrades and modifiers. DRG:S’s special sauce…

We’ve had the climbing game bubble, with games like Beton Brutal, Lorn’s Lure, and Peaks of Yore, and now it’s time for the inverse: games about falling, with style. Getting in on the ground floor—or is it the top floor?—of this new sub-sub-genre is the deviously slippery Fallstruktur, in which you have to hop down a hole filled in with bits and pieces of ruined, mysterious structures. And falling is right, given how many times I slipped to my doom. The atmosphere is pure Dark Souls, specifically Dark Souls 2, which had a few memorable moments of tactically plunging down a big well, or a staircase of coffins. In fact, that coffin staircase is here as well, in what I presume is a nod to From’s sequel. So we have…

One of the great things about videogames, and, more specifically, the work of Ryu Ga Gotoku Studios, is the ease with which they make us believe the impossible. But even in a franchise that lets you fight bears, the single most outrageous lie Yakuza has made me believe is that it’s possible for a 40-year-old man to look cool wearing a wallet chain. But look cool he does. It’s one of the many ways Judgement protagonist Takayuki Yagami fits the classic archetype of a Yakuza protagonist. As an ex-lawyer turned private detective, he’s usually on the correct side of the law, but this, somewhat surprisingly, is pretty standard for the series. It’s hard to think of any Yakuza protagonists committing crimes other than brutalizing other, worse criminals. If anything, Tak…

If you’ve a taste for Metroid-inspired platforming, you are eating good this year. There’s dozens of great examples in 2025 alone. But one game—released this March by debuting solo developer Gallant Leaf—is developing a reputation as a dark horse pick among discerning Metroid sickos, despite humble appearances: Zexion. Weighing in at a mere 30mb download, Zexion looks like an authentic, austere NES-era platformer. It even uses NES accurate chiptunes for its brooding sci-fi soundtrack. But rather than just reheat Metroid, this is a rich, meaty stew of inspirations. Metroid and its exploration is the base, for sure, but it has Mega Man’s eye for gimmick driven level design, and more than a dash of Contra’s eight-way aiming and screen-filling, multi-phase bosses, which you WILL die to. There’s an achievement for…

Alot of games hardware marketing focuses on performance. Esports-ready mice and keyboards. High-refresh-rate monitors that promise you’ll see the enemy faster and aim more accurately. Even in graphics hardware, extra frames and faster performance are generally the basis of any purchase argument. But I think that messaging misses a crucial aspect of what it is to have a powerful PC: sitting back and taking the time to enjoy the visuals. Letting the game happen, instead of imposing your will on it. With Battlefield 6 looming large at the moment, casting its complex, soft edged, anti-aliased shadow over all of PC gaming, it’s especially handy to keep that philosophy in mind. There’s more than one way to enjoy a Battlefield game’s visuals, and I’d argue the best way of all is…

Call of Duty has been around the block a few times, and across the years it’s turned a lot of the world’s countries into videogame enemies. In contemporary or near-future games, though, that can be problematic, as former Call of Duty director Glen Schofield realized when he was promoting the first incarnation of Modern Warfare 3. “I was doing 30 days of press for Modern Warfare 3,” he tells us during a wide-ranging chat about his history with the series. “I’m all over the world, and the last stop is in the UK, and I’m having dinner with some journalists from the UK and I get a call. They say, ‘We need you to go to Russia tomorrow and do some more press’. And by then, I was really tired.…

BABY STEPS Bennett Foddy’s Getting Over It successor gave its “unemployed failson” a two-week reprieve from falling down. CLOVERPIT The “roguelite slot machine nightmare” was meant to release September 3, but jumped to September 26. LIT TLE WITCH IN THE WOODS This cutesy life sim was leaving early access on September 4, but delayed 11 days “given its immense influence”. AETERNA LUCIS The indie Metroidvania sequel hoped to land in September, but decided to move to next year instead.…

Despite its gimmicky-sounding premise, Dinolords is packed with surprises as delightful as its trailer’s reveal of a viking riding a T-rex. It’s also mechanically a much more creative and interesting game than you’re likely expecting. Despite appearances, it’s as much an action RPG as it is an RTS. That’s an unusual hybrid—I’d struggle to name other examples past Brütal Legend—and a lot of what Dinolords does to blend the two genres feels new. Your perspective is locked to your character—an English lord equipped with a sword, a bow, a few special abilities, and, of course, a velociraptor mount. You can pop out into a wider view to manage construction more easily or direct troops more finely, but you can’t move the camera away from your hero, so they always need…

Battlefield is back. For the first time in years, it feels like Dice—and the collection of other dev studios that has assembled like the Avengers to make Battlefield 6 happen—might just have recaptured the series’ magic. A back to basics shooter that emphasizes teamwork and emergent chaos is just what Battlefield needs. The Battlefield 6 beta was hugely successful, showing a streamlined first-person shooter that captures the magic of the series in its earlier days. It’s heavy on the emergent chaos and lighter on big buzzwords and systems that most players didn’t really want to interact with. In its best moments teams surge forwards like ants, and you feel like a cog—step away from a door to reload or heal, and another player would step into your spot. A STREAMLINED FIRST-PERSON…

In 1998, Baldur’s Gate redefined what a computer RPG—and videogame interpretation of the D&D ruleset—could be. Just two years later, Baldur’s Gate II expanded on it so much that development nearly ballooned out of control. This is the story of one of the most influential and ambitious RPGs ever made. Many of the great RPGs are etched into the popular imagination by their beginnings, those tentative first steps in a new fantasy world that tease the vastness ahead, and the freedom to carve your own path through it. Think stepping out of the Census and Excise Office in Morrowind’s Seyda Neen in and realizing you can just march off in any direction, or riding through No Man’s Land in Velen in The Witcher 3, where distant ruins and unknown wilderness call…

Recently, I was Rstruck by an overwhelming urge to play Gunman Chronicles, the 2000 FPS developed by Valve and Rewolf Software. There was no real trigger for it—this sort of thing happens when you’re nearing 40 and grew up on a diet of ’90s shooters. But if I had to identify the origin of this yearning, it would be dinosaurs. Gunman Chronicles is an ambitious shooter, a gunslinging sci-fi adventure that transports you to a variety of locations and features programmable weapons—a fairly unique gimmick 25 years on. But my favorite things about it are the dinosaurs. Appearing early in the game, Gunman’s terrible lizards have this wonderful, plasticine look that could have come straight from the workshop of Ray Harryhausen. Also, when you shoot the velociraptors with a shotgun,…

Nothing prepared me for the Sisyphean exercise that is playing Hollow Knight: Silksong. Part of that is my bad for skipping the original Hollow Knight—I thought I’d have plenty of time to try it before Silksong ever actually came out. But now it’s here, and I’ve spent over 25 hours with the videogame equivalent of sticking your hand into the Dune pain box. Silksong may be one of the most painful 2D action games I’ve played, and the worst part? I inflicted that pain on myself by pressing forward until I’d seen just about every inch of the bug-inhabited land of Pharloom. I may be bruised and sore from the experience, but I’m happy to say that for all the pain Silksong put me through, it was worth it. As…

Few games combine mechanics and theme as well as Love Letters, where you help a lovelorn adolescent express himself in front of his classmate. He’s too nervous to even say a word, so it falls to yours truly to help him speak, by constructing words from a jumbled pile. Each level presents you with a sentence to make, and you have to assemble the words from the box of letters on the right. Circle a letter, or a bunch of them at once, and they will automatically fill in the Hangman-like sentence. However, you have a limited number of circles to play with, and the sizes of the circles is limited as well, meaning you have to envelop as many letters as possible, each time you draw. Picking out letters…

As someone who’s spent over five years studying law, I should be in a position to assure you that no, real-life court cases are nothing like the Ace Attorney series. But have never actually practiced law, part of me chooses to believe that the Phoenix Wright experience is based on fact. I want a world where every case is presided over by a judge with a delicious bushy beard. Where shouting and slamming tables can be a part of the most mundane legal disagreement. Where prosecutors attend court wielding whips and bubbling homoerotic tension underpins every single case. That’s the promise of pretty much all 14 episodes within the first Ace Attorney collection. There’s enough variation within the three games here to keep it interesting, even if they all suffer…

Memories are fickle things—that great movie you remembered as a kid might not hold up today, or that ‘funny’ thing you did as a teen is suddenly really dangerous in hindsight. Annoyingly, I fell trap to this phenomenon when I was lured back to fond memories of the early 2000s, dial-up screeches, and my first ever MMO, Ragnarok Online. A mash-up of the original game with all the classic outfits, monsters and towns I was excited to dip a toe into the anime waters of Ragnarok M: Classic. Unfortunately ‘classic’ is doing a lot of heavy lifting, as this is basically exactly the same as the previous mobile version with a few tweaks to in-game currency. That’s it. It is not the nostalgia-fest I wanted. Things had started off OK—I…

It isn’t just graphics cards that cost a lot more today than they did recently. It’s the same story for basically every other consumer purchase, from the games we run to make those GPUs sweat, to the teabags that sustain us during that vital scientific testing, and the electricity used to boil the kettle—as has been well documented, it’s all gone through the roof. But this is PC gaming. A subculture whose very origins are founded in the art of bending hardware to our will, making it do things it wasn’t designed for. The first home computers weren’t for gaming, they were for doing boring things, like looking at numbers. If they were meant for fun, they wouldn’t have manufactured them all in hearing-aid beige. Playing games on PCs was…