Innholdsfortegnelse for March 2026 i PC Gamer (US Edition)

HIGHS Non-participation trophy Megabonk got a nom for Best Debut Indie at The Game Awards, then withdrew because it’s not a debut. Kid gloves A new Baldur’s Gate III strat exists. But it involves conscripting an army of child soldiers. Maybe this is a low… Lord of the Dance CD Projekt only cast Charles Dance in The Witcher 3 because it needed an announcement before the countdown on its website reached 0. No Rust on Deck Rust’s developer has ‘no plans’ for Linux or Proton support. ®eally? Microsoft once broke its Windows Bluetooth driver code, all because it stuck a ® symbol in the name of its own mouse. TMI Sweeney Epic boss Tim Sweeney thinks stores like Steam should stop labelling games as being made with AI. LOWS…

There are few names in gaming more intimidating than Pathologic. First person survival adventures, bleak, challenging, and heavy on the theatrical prose, Pathologic 3 looks to be the most complex and involved yet. But it also might also be the most accessible starting point for new players thanks to its charming, irascible protagonist. First, a little context. The original Pathologic debuted in 2005, a first-person narrative adventure paying tribute to classic, soul-scouringly bleak Russian theater and literature. The game pits three mismatched turn-of-the-century healers against an all-consuming plague threatening a strange and hostile steppe town that doesn’t seem to want to be saved. Pathologic 2 wasn’t so much a sequel as the first part of a grand plan to give each of the janky original game’s characters their own distinct,…

Given how often horrible bio-monster related disasters seem to happen in the world of Resident Evil, getting dragged into survival horror hell is probably just a regular workplace hazard, especially if you’re an FBI agent. Doubly likely if you’re at all related to a previous (if obscure) RE protagonist. We’re just a couple months from the release of Resident Evil Requiem (aka Resident Evil 9), and Capcom has kept announcements on the game dialed down to spoiler-resistant drip-feed. This time round, players will be stepping into the office shoes of young FBI agent Grace Ashcroft, daughter of Alyssa Ashcroft, reporter, Raccoon City survivor and one of the playable characters from the co-op Outbreak series way back on PS2. Family lines are powerful conduits for disaster in this series, and Capcom’s…

At last, a game that answers the age-old question ‘what if dinosaurs had access to iron-age weapons that weren’t particularly well adapted to their bodies?’. In Dinoblade, dinosaurs wield swords and other spiky things in their mouths, not caring for a moment that they’re already pretty well armed with claws and teeth. You play as a spinosaurus—objectively the best dinosaur—who comes across a huge greatsword following a cataclysmic event. Other dinosaurs take up weapons too, and what follows is an action-RPG in which you fight duels against rivals and become more powerful with every victory, upgrading your skills and weaponry. Combat is highly dependent on timing, and some fights leave you feeling like your opponent will hit you no matter how perfectly you dodge. There’s a Soulslike feel to the game as…

Not a Shakespeare spoiler, but the new game from Grasshopper Manufacture, the studio behind No More Heroes and Killer7. It’s another ultraviolent third-person action game, following an agent of the space/time police hunting down both time-traveling criminals and his missing girlfriend (Juliet, naturally) while blowing the heads off the former with ridiculous weapons. This looks completely absurd, and is likely to play that way, too. RELEASE Feb 11, 2026 DEVELOPER Grasshopper Manufacture PUBLISHER Grasshopper Manufacture LINK steam.pm/app/3050900…

As someone who still carries a torch for Telltale narrative adventures, I really wanted AdHoc Studio’s Dispatch—a superhero workplace comedy full of HR violations—to be great, even as I had my doubts about the return of the episodic release model and the prevalence of celebrity streamers in the cast. Those doubts were a distant memory by the end of the second episode, thankfully, and the rest of the eight-episode run only served to cement this as a brilliant piece of interactive TV. I am genuinely sad that it’s over and desperately hoping for a second season. With such a large cast, many of whom have more experience streaming than voice acting, like Jacksepticeye and MoistCr1TiKaL, I expected there to be at least a couple of duds, but nope! Everyone kills…

15% SHOOTING You spend less time shooting but, and I must emphasize this, it’s the best videogame shooting you’ll ever experience. 20% HIDING Hear another player? See another player? Time to hide and take aim. 30% GETTING LOST Tarkov’s learning curve is steep, but mastering its maps is a pleasure. 20% SORTING & SELLING Hope you like inventories, because you’re gonna spend a LOT of time inventorizing. 15% LOADING Tarkov’s unique way of matching players means some hefty waits.…

It only takes a single mission in Black Ops 7’s atrocious co-op campaign to figure out what the scheme with this year’s entry is: welding together the campaign, multiplayer, Warzone and Zombies modes, so as to streamline the asset generation pipeline and drastically cut down on the requirement for one-off assets and complex scripting. This drive for efficiency is felt across the whole of Black Ops 7, but nowhere more so than in the campaign, a grinding slog through the forthcoming Warzone map update and the occasional multiplayer map retooled for wave defense against mindless AI hordes. The premise of the campaign itself is complete nonsense: after being dosed with the Cradle bio-weapon from Black Ops 6, Alex Mason’s son has to retread the memories of his father (and, confusingly,…

Inside me there are two wolves—Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Persona—so it’s hard for me to resist howling when ’90s high schoolers kick demon tail in between quizzes and making out with each other. The way Demonschool weaves apocalyptic vibes with tactics-based combat brought out the beast. Faye’s a self-proclaimed demon hunter on her way to enrol in a school on the mysterious Hemsk Island. Why? Because the apocalypse is coming and the island promises to be a veritable hub of demon activity. Which it is. Demonschool operates on an explore-talk-fight loop: main story quests advance the day, with each segment broken up by a fight. Each new day brings new NPCs to talk to, or party members begging for karaoke to advance their friendship (aka future makeout prospect) meter.…

The thought of having to plunge back into the rental market fills me with dread. After playing Don’t Get Your Hopes Up, I think it might have overtaken spiders on my fear leaderboard. It’s a visual novel about the soul-destroying act of trying to pay people to live in their empty house: the lengths you’ll go to in order to secure the property, and the compromises you might be willing to make. Each day begins in the same way: by firing out applications for rental properties. You do this by furiously clicking on the logos for rental websites, as a frankly dispiriting tally accumulates and the obsequious contents of your letters are splashed on-screen. The day then progresses to a house viewing, which you attend with your partner, and explore…

WWE superstar Mankind, one of the three deranged personas of Mick Foley, was unique in the wrestling world because he had two different theme tunes. He’d enter the ring to an unsettling string arrangement—music to be listened to with your one remaining ear—and, once his opponent was destroyed, he’d leave to a genteel piano refrain, finally at peace with the world and himself. Hotline Miami is a bit like this. When you’re in the full flow of the game, you enter something of a fugue state, entirely detached from the violence you’re inflicting. You never stop to interrogate why you’re clawing out someone’s eyeballs like a gelatiere with a broken scoop—you just worry about how long it’ll take you. Then, when everyone in the building is dead, the music calms…

Have you ever played one of those coinpusher machines? The ones where you drop coins down onto a shelf that moves back and forth, hoping to cause a chain reaction that will dislodge a little avalanche of money into the prize tray? If you’re anything like me, your memory is one of frustration. Designed by the most nefarious minds in engineering, they are the ultimate anticlimax generators, always seeming tantalizingly close to a payout, and always stubbornly refusing to give one up. On the one hand, Raccoin is a roguelike based on coin-pusher machines. But on the other, it’s my emotional catharsis simulator. I can finally let those frustrating memories go—Raccoin’s machines will let me win, and win spectacularly. The structure is simple—each round, I get a certain number of…

I used to be good at this. At one point in my life I was a Minecraft expert—I could build intricate cityscapes and fight the Ender Dragon easy peasy. Heck, I even used to run a kids magazine that was exclusively about Minecraft… and yet here I am. Utterly lost. I ended up here after my kid started showing interest in the game, so I thought I’d jump back in, go on a little adventure, maybe build something, and show off a bit about how much of a ‘cool’ parent I am… but things didn’t go to plan. My foray back into the world of cheery blocks started pretty well—I started a new survival world, and spawned into a forest full of plenty of wood to get a craft table…

Gaming mice come in all shapes and sizes, but the competitive FPS gamers among you might already know that weight is actually one of the most important factors. Lugging a veritable sack of potatoes across your mousepad can make hitting those flickshots difficult. I’ve grown what some might mistakenly call obsessive over lightweight gaming mice. They’ve really gotten good over the last few years, to the extent that there are now incredibly light mice that somehow still have decent battery life and sturdy shells. Not all lightweight mice are equal, though, as the wildly different price tags can attest to. Some are cheap and cheerful, while others offer top-of-the-line specs that might even be overkill for competitive gamers. DeathAdder V4 Pro RAZER $170 Flawless for a price 1 This mouse is…

PC gaming loves simulators. They put you in charge of exciting machines such as passenger aircraft, heavy goods vehicles, and even the space shuttle. What marks them out from games structured around combat or speed is the satisfaction you get from doing an otherwise mundane task well, rather than a kill count or a shiny trophy. In a simulator, you may never get a reward for your actions, no matter how well you perform. Public transport is another simulator target that can seem strange to outsiders. While trains are constrained by their reliance on rails and thick books of regulations, driving a bus around a city to a timetable means providing an essential service to the NPCs, but does it tickle the reward centers of the brain in the same…

An underappreciated part of Telltale-style narrative adventures is finding out what choices other players made, but in Tides of Tomorrow—next from Road 96 studio Digixart—they’re flipping the script. You get to discover what your predecessors did before you arrived, and deal with the fallout of their decisions. Set on the scenic water planet of Elynd, the human residents live in floating ramshackle cities surrounded by cartoonish levels of floating plastic junk. Things wouldn’t be so bad were it not for Plastemia, a waterborne disease affecting much of the population. Forget microplastics; those afflicted seem to be slowly transforming into pearlescent mannequins. Good news: you’re a Tidewalker, a prophesied time-bending herald who might save the world. Bad news: Tidewalkers seem to spawn directly out of the ocean with a head full…

PREVIEW The Last Caretaker PLAYED IT Not a game about looking after a school, or a mountaintop hotel during a snowy winter, but rather about saving the entire human race. The Last Caretaker is a survival/crafting game that casts you as a helpful robot on an Earth that’s disappeared beneath a rising ocean. It begins in a dark room, your sleep frame, desk, and wonderfully retro computer all able to be picked up and carried thanks to some sort of magnetic beam within your hands. You’re soon connecting electrical cables between a battery and power system to get the lights back on, which also allows you to inspect your surroundings more carefully. Other inactive robots slump on their beds, while posters on the walls and toys tell a story of a…

Vikings make great videogame characters. They’ve got everything—distinctive appearance, bladed weaponry, a tendency to charge at things while screaming bloodcurdling battlecries. They’re also, according to Norse: Oath of Blood, simple farmers just looking for somewhere to live, before a murder sends one of them on an epic quest for vengeance. Norse is a turn-based tactics and base-building game set in Norway, and attempts to make its setting as authentic to the Vikings as possible. That means no dragons or other monsters, but the other humans living in the Scandinavian forests are bad enough. So when Gunnar arrives at the piece of land he’s been promised to build his settlement, it’s a surprise to find people already living there. He does a deal with them: to use his warriors to take…

I’m not gonna Ido it: I’m not going to open this feature by quoting the GOAT, Ron Perlman, and his eternal refrain from the beginning of every Fallout game. But I know you can hear it in your head as you read this, and that’s because everybody has played Fallout. It’s been ten years since the last mainline Fallout game, and seven since the release of its multiplayer spinoff, Fallout 76, but it paradoxically feels like there’s never been a better time to be a fan of these postapocalyptic RPGs. Their breadth and depth lends them an inherent longevity, encouraging replay after replay, while they’ve also received varying degrees of mod and official support. The Fallout TV show, the second season of which is imminent at the time of writing,…

I loved Cultic Chapter One when it came out in 2022. Now, with the release of its second chapter, the full game is one of the best shooters of 2025. This exercise in demon worshipper annihilation is a meat and potatoes boomer shooter that primarily distinguishes itself by executing everything at a very high level: Great maps, great guns, great enemies, plus one-of-a-kind art direction and suffocating jaunts into pure horror. Cultic has an arsenal of staple FPS guns—pistol, shotgun, magnum, machine gun, etc—but they hit different. They all have great feedback and sound effects, with headshots turning noggins into geysers of raspberry preserves, as well as gorgeous spritework for their viewmodels. I love that creator Jasoszz went with the funkiest historical firearm for every weapon: The starting pistol is…

That this beat ’em up has a roster of 15 different playable Marvel superheroes is immediately impressive. But what’s really amazing is every single one of them feels completely distinct, fun to play, and truly super. I just wish Marvel Cosmic Invasion offered more for them all to do. This is an unabashedly old-school side-scroller. Bad guys appear, you punch them until they’re all gone, then you move a bit further right and more bad guys appear. Repeat until you reach a boss fight. Simple, nostalgic, satisfying. But more modern ideas enhance the action. Blocks, parries, and dodges make it easier to stay on your feet than in the old classics, for example, and launchers and timing windows allow you to string together combos and juggle foes in the air…

It’s never a good thing when a creepy shadow-woman bursts into a murder of crows during a thunderstorm, is it? This is just The Seance of Blake Manor’s way of saying hello before leaving me trapped inside an Irish hotel with some would-be murderers a few days before Halloween. I’m here to solve the disappearance of Evelyn Deane, and to do this I’ve got to use clues found amongst half-burnt notes and polite dinner conversations to piece it all together. This is classic murder mystery—and also where adventure games can quickly lose grip of their own plot. But Blake Manor never does. There are dozens of suspects to work through and even more rooms to explore, all spread across a three-day timetable that sees everyone moving to new and equally…

Priorities. That’s what managing a medieval city is all about. Farms are important for long-term survival, but fishing and gathering makes more sense if people need food quickly. Chopping logs into planks means construction on new buildings can commence, but if people are freezing in their homes, that timber should be turned into firewood instead. And assigning laborers to salvage nearby ruins for resources should be put on hold if—and here’s just one quick example—a giant angry bear is rampaging through the town brutally mauling everybody to death. Yeah, a murder-bear can shuffle a city’s priorities real fast. Forget fishing and firewood: every single citizen’s job right now is to find something sharp and become an expert bear-stabber. Ravenous wildlife is just one of the many, many dangers you face…

You could hardly pick a more peaceful setting for a horror game: a cosy house full of light and plants, and a sun-dappled garden, where birds have made their nests in many of the birdhouses scattered around. Birdhouse’s world is idyllic, even as uneasiness begins to infiltrate it. With your mother ill in bed, it’s up to you to take care of the household chores, which include watering said plants and feeding said birds in the garden. The suitably overbearing soundtrack establishes the peaceful yet unquiet mood, while the detailed artwork brings the characters, and the eventual horror elements, vividly to life. Wisely, and impressively, the big reveals are expressed through well-drawn close-ups and creepy animation sequences. Mood and pacing are two of the most important elements of a horror…

There are two types of people in this world: those who, while controlling a radio DJ in Killer Frequency, can listen to a terrified caller and resist the urge to add the banana skin sound effect after every panicked interjection. And then there are people like me. [Comedic slide whistle] It’s a cool premise for a game: you’re given full control of the decks, and can live mix music as you take calls. It doesn’t quite work as a convincing DJ game: there are moments of hilarious dead air, and I’m free to wander around the station looking for clues while certain songs play, but it’s close enough that I appreciate the elevated premise and the effort that’s gone into bringing it to life. Once you realize that it isn’t…

EQUIPMENT Gear up with five new guns and one new melee weapon. My personal favorites are the SOR-300SC carbine and the incredibly nimble Mini Scout sniper. REDSEC Battlefield’s second attempt at making a battle royale isn’t just better than Firestorm, it’s a strong competitor in the overcrowded genre. Even if you’d never asked for a Battlefield BR, you should at least give it a go. BATTLEFIELDS Wage war in Blackwell Fields, a compact oil field, and Eastwood, a suburb in California. Blackwell Fields isn’t anything to write home about, but Eastwood might just be one of my favorites. DRESS TO IMPRESS Season 1 adds the battle pass system we all knew was coming. While the cosmetics are hit and miss, there’s bound to be something you like that you can…

Valve’s making a games console. The company that was famed for making Half-Life games might be speaking about its newly revealed Steam Machine as a mini-PC, but let’s call a console a console when we see one. All the selling points about it—the expected low pricing, the bundled controller, the SteamOS UI making everything as user-friendly as possible—are all the tenets that discerned games consoles from PCs for the past four decades. As a quick recap, it’s specced to outperform the company’s own Steam Deck handheld device, offering about six times the graphical heft. It’s built around a six-core, 12-thread AMD Zen 4 CPU, and a semi-bespoke version of AMD’s RDNA 3 GPU, with some bits turned off and just 8GB of VRAM. All that points to the sort of…

I still remember the feeling when I installed my current GPU for the first time. Ray tracing! The future was here, on my desktop machine. Just as soon as I looked up the small list of games that supported it, installed one of them, and went hunting for either a puddle or a car bonnet in one of its levels, to observe its extremely limited implementation for myself and gaze in wonder at it. But in the end, it was neither Battlefield V nor Metro Exodus that gave me the post-upgrade hit I was looking for, as stupendous as their puddles were. The best moment when you buy a new graphics card isn’t the latest visual behemoth you’d yet to try, it’s loading up a game you’d already been playing…

Ahead of the launch for Fallout Season Two, I got the chance to talk to some of the key cast members: Walton Goggins, Ella Purnell, and Aaron Moten. My number one question for the cast: have they played any of the Fallout games? “No, I haven’t sat down to play the games,” says Goggins, who plays pre-war movie star Cooper Howard and his post-war counterpart The Ghoul. “And I won’t. I won’t. I won’t play the games. I’m not interested.” The reason is actually pretty simple: Goggins doesn’t want to think of the world or the characters of Fallout as elements of a game. “I WON’T. I WON’T. I WON’T PLAY THE GAMES. I’M NOT INTERESTED” “All of a sudden, I’m looking at this world from a very different perspective,…

1 month NOVA ROMA RELEASE January 22, 2026 | DEVELOPER Lion Shield In this new historical city-builder, lead a band of citizens as they break away from Rome to create an all-new city. Build, develop supply chains, enact laws, and appease the gods. THE MIDNIGHT WALKERS RELEASE January 28, 2026 | DEVELOPER Oneway Ticket Studio A hardcore FPS game where you must fight, scavenge and extract resources while battling deadly zombies. Craft weapons and armor, upgrade your hideout, then survive. CODE VEIN II RELEASE January 29, 2026 | DEVELOPER Bandai Namco Studios Inc. In a dystopian world overtaken by Revenants, play as a Revenant hunter who must travel into the past with a mysterious girl called Lou in order to save the planet. 2 months DEUS EX REMASTERED RELEASE February…

Instead of going for the traditional MOBA top-down approach, Spellcasters Chronicles opts for third-person. Taking control of a spellcaster, I started with a limited number of summonable grunts and abilities, both things I’d build into as time went on and I leveled up during the match. Every character can also sprint along the ground or fly in the sky for an unlimited amount of time, making it easy to get a good grasp of the battlefield. Matches are 3v3, but each player has the option to summon an increasing number of grunts depending on what perks you pick every time you level up. Games also go on for around 30 minutes, but having played a few matches at this point, it always feels like time passes much faster. With only…

The game your fallible brain remembers the SNES’s Starwing looking like, Wild Blue Skies is an on-rails shooter from a Kyoto studio founded by Giles Goddard, a programmer on Mario 64, Steel Diver and 1080° Snowboarding as well as Fox Mcloud’s most famous adventure. Chuhai Labs, which previously made Cursed to Golf, is going back to its roots for Wild Blue Skies. It’s an on-rails shooter featuring a distinctly canine, rather than vulpine, pilot soaring in his fighter craft across and through colorful landscapes, oceans and deserts in pursuit of enemy waves, aided by wingmen of different species who offer advice over video popups. All while racking up a high score. There are secret routes, boss battles, and probably barrel rolls too, and while little has been released beyond a…

Every time I make a kill in Escape from Tarkov, it’s over in a flash. This is not down to skill. Sometimes in Tarkov, you’ll be sitting there minding your own business when two players blithely walk by, no idea you’re there, and even with a pop gun it will be the easiest double kill you’ll ever score. Death is almost always instantaneous in Tarkov, and it’s everywhere. The last thing you do after a kill is loot the corpse. Nearby players will have heard the shots, and scavs in particular will swarm to the area. You might as well have sent up a flare. Start sorting through those pockets, and you’re dead meat. I bravely hide in a nearby corner, watching the corpse, and mentally run through my next…

The modern world can be a frightening place, and Pool Friday captures something of its anxious essence. Its world is a patchwork quilt of mixed media images, where pixel art rubs shoulders with claymation figures, and clipped-out photos float in the background, in place of clouds. It shouldn’t work, perhaps, but the quality of the varied images ties the whole aesthetic together. You suspect that developer Bruno Medeiros’ exaggerated style would come across in nearly any medium, and whether they are made from low-resolution pixel art or detailed claymation people, these lurid characters belong to the same universe. Most are just background characters, NPCs you can’t even chat to, but you could spend the length of the game again just fully exploring each environment, to better appreciate the odd sights…

Ionce went to a Bonfire Night celebration during which one of the attendants accidentally set himself alight. Every millennial in earshot bellowed ‘stop, drop, and roll!’; proof of an upbringing that prepared us for lives full of chip pan fires, spontaneous combustion and quicksand. But it’s not the only lie the ’80s told us. I grew up being ever ready to walk right through a decaying urban hellscape, piledriving gang members through dustbins. Thus far, my limited schmup skills have never been required to repel an alien invasion. And precisely none of my romantic partners have been kidnapped by gorillas. But 198X beautifully encapsulates the promise of these things, and the joyful discovery of the escapism of games. It’s simple and short, but something about the presentation really resonates with…

When the hell are you going to get the internet?” bellowed my friend Mike as he handed me a wad of folded up sheets of A4 paper on the school playing field. Knowing I loved Command & Conquer, and that I basically lived in a cave on the coast in 2000, he’d very kindly printed off sheets and sheets of web pages covering Westwood’s new announcement: Red Alert 2. Tiberian Sun defined my summer in 1999, sharing its time with Half-Life, Medal of Honor and others behind my barricaded bedroom door, exams looming. But now only a few months later, the excitement of Mike’s Red Alert 2 print-offs had me on tenterhooks. The same way I pored over PC Gamer’s pages of Tiberian Sun coverage, now I stared for hours…

SYNDICATE bit.ly/GOGsynd → Bringing a bit of 2077 to the 1990s, Syndicate has it all, with cybernetic agents slaughtering and kidnapping their way through a corporate hellscape under the control of a man in a hot air balloon. Unbeatable RTS action, with extra points for the awful effects of the flamethrower. WOLFENSTEIN 3D bit.ly/GOGwolf3d → One of the demos that made cover discs great, Wolfenstein 3D surely needs no introduction. If by some chance you were born after about 1980, this wasn’t the first FPS, but the first to really catch on with the right-thinking, PC-gaming public, and the daddy of Doom and Quake. POPULOUS bit.ly/GOGpop → The tale of red vs blue, with each faction controlled by a god who can fire off volcanoes without warning and send knights…

ESPORTS MOUSE Making a peripheral with wild performance claims based on weight/DPI is one of the platform’s last bastions. RGB LIGHT STRIP Like the ones everyone else makes, except it reacts to your Steam library in real time. TAKEAWAY FOOD Exchange your Steam Points for deep fried things, and have them delivered to your door. COMPONENT UPGRADES Buy them all on Steam, and collect their accompanying trading cards as you do.…

The Build 1 CASE Air 5400 Corsair $230 I used to have the old model of this case, and adored it. Its cuboid shape, dual-chamber design, and room for a disk drive made for a case as dynamic as it is boxy. It remains my favorite PC case of all time. Finally, Corsair has put together a replacement. A proper successor: the Air 5400. Rather than two chambers, the Air 5400 has three. That third chamber isolates the AIO’s radiator from the rest of the rig. This leaves the main chamber to a simple and effective chimney design: three fans at the bottom, three fans at the top. 2 PROCESSOR Ryzen 9 9950X3D AMD $699 It has 16 cores, but makes cracking use of them in games thanks to the implementation…

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…