Innholdsfortegnelse for March 2019 i PC Gamer

HIGHS RTX 2060 Nvidia’s £340 graphics card is the most appealingly priced option from their RTX lineup. AGDQ 2019 The speedrunning event pulled in $2.4m for charity. Our highlight was Spootybiscuit’s Necrodancer run. Tiny Bird Garden Deluxe A low-key joy, you can just leave this mobile game expansion open as you work and check in on its visitors. LOWS Star Wars EA reportedly cancelled its Vancouver studio’s Star Wars game. We find its lack of faith disturbing. Assassin’s Creed Ubisoft’s latest Odyssey DLCmissed the mark so badly with player agency the studio had to apologise. Atlas Where to start? Bugs, a compromised admin account, a server rollback, stability issues...…

Cash payments. Exclusive development support. Marketing features with increased visibility. These are just a few of the incentives that may be offered to a developer in return for committing to a new platform early. An ecosystem needs projects supporting it, and devs need to ensure that they have a substantial audience to sell their games to. However, when a platform is actual hardware that takes up space, the costs and considerations developers face can vary wildly. “THERE’S A JOY IN CREATING SOMETHING SURPRISING OUT OF REALLY CHEAP PARTS” “I first got to try the Magic Leap 1 as part of a contract early in 2018, and I immediately knew that I wanted to find a way to work with the device,” says veteran independent developer and consultant Ryan Evans. “[Magic…

It was all going well until my potato farm exploded. There I was, erecting a few villager houses on the outskirts of my burgeoning mill town, when suddenly, ka-blam! Fire and mash everywhere. I’m still somewhat mystified by this turn of events. I mean, how do you blow up a potato farm? The scene is chaos. People are screaming, and several buildings have caught fire. I deploy the volunteer fire brigade to douse the conflagration, but the local newspaper pounces with a front page story on my ‘inadequate’ response to the potato farm explosion. The one that occurred five minutes ago and was the least predictable event in history. I could edit the paper to make myself look better, but as an advocate of press freedom, I let the rag…

Rows of assembly machines stretch further than the eye can see. Conveyor belts run through like blood vessels, carrying their cargo to the heart of this self-sustaining machine. Fields of accumulators crackle through the night, storing the energy from a sea of solar panels. Trains work tirelessly ferrying who-knows-what to who-knows-where. I did not build this place. My forays into Factorio’s mix of construction, resource gathering and automation have been basic. The opening moments will feel familiar if you’ve played any building or survival game. You craft a pickaxe and gather iron ore, copper ore, stone and wood. You build a furnace and refine those base resources into building materials to craft more complicated things. Those things are expensive. You’ll need plenty of iron sheets and copper wires, which means…

Interactive storytelling is nothing new, but something as mainstream as Netflix embracing the concept is a big deal. Bandersnatch, the newest episode of Black Mirror, lets you make choices that determine the path the story takes. And you can access it using just Netflix and a TV remote. I talked with writer Charlie Brooker about the episode, how it was made and what inspired it. How did you pitch the idea of an interactive Black Mirror story to Netflix? They actually asked us. We had a meeting at their headquarters in Los Angeles – which, by the way, has M&M dispensers on every floor. That’s my overriding memory. Todd Yellin and Carla Engelbrecht from the tech division showed us some of their interactive capabilities, which were quite rudimentary at the…

00%-09% Broken or offensively bad; absolutely no value. Example Leisure Suit Larry: Magna Cum Laude 10%-19% We might be able to find one nice thing to say about it, but still not worth anyone’s time or money. Example Gettysburg: Armored Warfare 20%-29% Completely falls short of its goals. Very few redeeming qualities. Examples Family Guy: Back to the Multiverse 30%-39% An entirely clumsy or derivative effort. There’s little reason to play this game over a similar, better one. Examples Trials of the Blood Dragon 40%-49% Flawed and disappointing. Examples Aliens: Colonial Marines 50%-59% Mediocre. Other games probably do it better, or its unique qualities aren’t executed well. Examples Primordia, Homefront: The Revolution 60%-69% There’s something to like here, but it can only be recommended with major caveats. Examples No Man’s…

INK RIBBONS But only on the hardcore difficulty setting. Saves are free in the other modes, but save too often and it affects your rank. ITEM BOXES They work the same way they always have, letting you magically access your stockpile of items from multiple locations. BONUS MODES The Fourth Survivor and The Tofu Survivor, starring Hunk and a block of tofu respectively, are unlockable in the remake. LOADING DOORS You don’t have to watch a door slowly opening every time you move into a new room: it’s all completely seamless now. FIXED CAMERA ANGLES The whole game is third-person, similar to Resident Evil 4, but that doesn’t make exploring the RPD building any less tense. ORIGINAL MUSIC The remake has its own new score, but if you buy the…

A nice ‘fuck you’ on your way out has a defiant appeal, but dying is no excuse for sloppy handwriting. Spookiness: 1/10 Style: 7/10 Execution: 1/10 This one’s elegantly self-explanatory. Where shouldn’t you go? The ruins. Where should you go? Not the ruins. Spookiness: 7/10 Style: 4/10 Execution: 8/10 That’s the spirit! Just because you’re dying doesn’t mean you can’t put some positivity into the world. Spookiness: 2/10 Style: 4/10 Execution: 6/10 Oh my god, get out of there. GET OUT OF THERE! Spookiness: 10/10 Style: 10/10 Execution: 10/10…

GIRAFFES VOLLEYBALL CHAMPIONSHIP 2016 Remi Forcadell’s game lets giraffes dunk each other. LOVELY PLANET Prior to Pikuniku, sound designer Calum Bowen worked on this charmingly cute, speedy first-person shooter. 0RBITALIS Dev and lecturer Alan Zucconi made this physics puzzler about using gravity and launching satellites into orbit. REIGNS: HER MAJESTY Arnaud De Bock did the art for this strategy title and the Reigns: Game of Thrones crossover.…

SHIN MEGAMI TENSEI 3: NOCTURNE I loved this moody JRPG, which is like a more grown-up Pokémon, featuring Dante from DMC for some reason. PERSONA 4 The Persona games blend RPGs and life sims together in a way that’s really interesting – and this game’s small town setting is a neat backdrop. PERSONA 5 The latest entry in the series is considered its best yet, and Phil spent over 100 hours binging it on his couch to deal with mag deadlines.…

It’s tough being a surgeon, doubly so if your operating table is a ramshackle tent in the middle of a warzone. I know this because I’ve just been saving lives (and violently ending them) in the rather bluntly titled Fixin’ To Die . It’s a hectic doctoring sim that presents your harried little surgeon dude with a procession of wounded soldiers, each with grievous injuries that will kill them if they’re not treated in time. As with NHS hospitals in the UK, there are only so many beds – in this case just two – so in each stage there will be a queue of patients waiting desperately for the healing touch of your, um, hacksaw. You begin the caring process by heaving a patient onto your…

MOTHERBOARD Z370 Tomahawk MSI £144 This is a nice-looking bit of kit at a good price. Couple that with two M.2 slots, and it’s the perfect place to house that Core i5. PROCESSOR Core i5-8400 Intel £181 Better default gaming performance and a lower price puts this chip ahead of the AMD Ryzen 2600X. GRAPHICS CARD GeForce RTX 2060 Founders Ed. Nvidia £329 Faster and cheaper than a 1070, and ray tracing-ready. Expect an overclocked third-party replacement next month. COOLER MasterLiquid Lite 240 CoolerMaster £50 This 240mm, dual-fan, all-in-one liquid CPU cooler is ludicrously cheap, but performs well and stays quiet, too. MEMORY Vengeance LPX 16GB (2x8GB) @2666 Corsair £118 16GB is the minimum amount of RAM we’d recommend for a system of this calibre. POWER SUPPLY RMx 650W Corsair…

Set in a brutal, freezing Canadian wilderness, The Long Dark is quietly one of the best survival games on PC. Set in the aftermath of a bizarre geomagnetic storm that plunged the world into darkness and rendered all technology useless, you have to battle nature to stay alive. A task made difficult by the wolves, blizzards and inhospitable terrain surrounding you. The Long Dark left Early Access in August, 2017 and it was here we got our first taste of Wintermute, its episodic story mode. Previously the game was limited to an open-ended sandbox, but now there was a story to follow, characters to meet and a goal to strive for. Wintermute still has more episodes to go, so the story is still steeped in mystery,…

DRIVE RECKLESSLY FORZA HORIZON 4 www.forzamotorsport.net Some car games don’t have a button dedicated to rewinding time. They make you drive around Laguna Seca and, when you crash on that downhill corkscrew bit, force you to just live with it. Screw that. I don’t want to deal with the consequences of my mistakes. Give me a rewind button. Give me Forza Horizon 4. SHOOT THE ANTS EARTH DEFENSE FORCE 4.1 www.d3p.co.jp Be honest with yourself: you probably need to replace your mattress. You won’t, but you know you should. It’s a nagging irritation in the back of your mind that means you really don’t have the patience for calculating tactical squad buffs right now. Here is a game where you just shoot some ants instead. PLAY THE GAME FIRE PRO…

TOM SENIOR Specialist in Only war Twitter @PCGLudo This month After being deployed to Horsham to see Total War, returned home and played some Warhammer. ANDY KELLY Specialist in Flame wars Twitter @ultrabrilliant This month Quizzed Black Mirror creator Charlie Brooker. It wasn’t so much a war of words as just a nice chat. PHILIPPA WARR Specialist in Name: Warr This month Was drafted into a war against the sea by the buggy spawn points of Early Access MMO Atlas. Discover who won in this month’s Now Playing. STEVEN MESSNER Specialist in Peace (he’s Canadian) Twitter @stevenmessner This month Lost a war against ooze, as detailed in his Early Access feature entry on Caves of Qud.…

The Spy wishes to entertain the possibility of publisharmageddon: the lesser-known cousin of the indiepocalypse. As Bungie breaks free from the grip of Activision and there’s talk of change at the top at Blizzard, there’s a case to be made that this will be the year that cracks form in the industry’s old powerhouses. In particular, let’s consider the uncertain future of EA. Buoyed year-on-year by vastly successful sports games and The Sims, it’s nonetheless been years since the California giant turned out an unqualified smash hit. The launch of Anthem feels like one last test for a set of guiding principles that were put in place several years ago, but have yet to make anybody happy. They go as follows: turn every game into a rolling service, own every…

PORTABLE RECORDER Wu carries a high quality portable recorder for whenever he hears an interesting sound. GAFFER TAPE Being a field recordist involves a lot of taping microphones to things, so Wu always has a few rolls of this to hand. HYDROPHONES Designers love underwater levels, which is where these specialist underwater microphones come in handy. FOLDING CHAIR Wu’s job takes him to some isolated places, and having a chair to hand is essential for long recording sessions.…

TOBII EYE TRACKER The Tobii website boasts over 130 games using its eye-tracking technology. Players can control and interact with games from Hitman to Assassin’s Creed Odyssey, using sets of ‘gaze-based interactions’. RAZER HYDRA This magnetised motion controller might have faded into the memory of obscure peripheral lists everywhere, if not for its ties to Valve. The Razer Hydra Portal 2 bundle has over a dozen levels exclusive to its version of the game. G560 LIGHTSYNC SPEAKERS Using rear-facing LEDs, Logitech’s Lightsync speakers projected colour and significant game information into your physical space in major triple-A games of the time including Battlefield1, CS:GO and GTA V. LEAP MOTION A relatively low cost of entry for hand tracking made the Leap Motion an attractive option for adding physical interaction to independent…

Divinity Original Sin II. Finally playing it co-op with a friend. No matter how many times we try to break the quests, the game doubles down and laughs at our stupid, stupid faces. UrbaNebula Exhibit #1,459 in our research into the fact that gamers are basically all masochists. I definitely won’t get in the magazine for tweeting about being amazed that my mid-range PC can emulate the Wii U version of Mario Kart 8 flawlessly. Ryan Ha, joke’s on you! You did get in the magazine, and now you’ll be going to videogames jail. Morrowind. But I’m trapped in a cave. And there are wolves outside. And I have no magic left. And I sold all my weapons for a spell. 10/10. Great, realistic experience. N0tAnErr0r_404 What life have you…

The Stillness of the Wind , while not an ear-grabbing name, is instantly recognisable as the work of Coyan Cardenas. It’s actually an expanded version of his contemplative 2017 game, Where the Goats Are , and uses the same rich palette of yellows and oranges, flecked with turquoise, to sketch a remote farmstead and its lone inhabitant, Talma. At the start The Stillness of the Wind presents a rural idyll of sorts, where you guide Talma through a daily routine of gardening, milking goats, collecting eggs, making cheese and chatting to a pedlar who pops by to barter or drop off mail. But the shotgun leaning against the wall of the outhouse speaks to a certain degree of hardship or threat. It’s soon joined by other…

You start life in Kynseed’s world of Quill as a 12 year-old, immediately buried under a mountain of chores. For the first few hours this means mostly running errands and figuring out how exactly things work. You feed the family pig, harvest vegetables and go out to buy tools. When it comes to completing tasks, Kynseed is, by turns, detail-oriented and delightfully unconcerned. You can pass on your legacy to your children and continue from there You can milk a cow by simply standing next to it, but you need a bucket. You harvest crops instantly by clicking, but if you just leave them they’ll rot. Granted, virtually nothing ever takes itself too seriously, as you would expect of a game designed…

Given this is a review section, I have a review for you. M&S custard creams aren’t as tasty as Sainsbury’s custard creams. They may look identical, but there is a gulf of taste between them. These M&S biscuits have a weird aftertaste/mouthfeel. It’s somewhere between the squeaky tongue effect of overbrewed tea and the cloying mouthfeel after cheap takeout. Irritatingly, this led me to check the ingredients and I’m now thinking the nice custard creams might be nice because they contain higher amounts of regular sugar AND a bunch of icing sugar. Even more irritatingly, both the bad and the good custard creams contain palm oil so I now need to figure out my stance on that complex issue. Biscuits: 7/10. LET US KNOW WHAT YOU THINK Email us via…

ANDY KELLY Specialist in Waiting, wandering Currently playing DayZ This month Hung out in a lot of fields and got very excited about finding cans of beans. PHIL IWANIUK Specialist in Jet setting Currently playing Ace Combat 7 This month Belted out Kenny Loggins’ Danger Zone for five hours straight. Because authenticity. IAN BIRNBAUM Specialist in Homages Currently playing Dusk This month Bunny-hopped so hard he now travels at lightspeed through all ’90s shooters. PHILIPPA WARR Specialist in Custard creams Currently playing Pikuniku This month Appreciated playing as a protagonist who solves problems by kicking them. JOE DONNELLY Specialist in Soulslikes Currently playing Ashen This month Committed to figuring out when “Soulslike” is a good thing and when it’s a mortal insult. SAMUEL ROBERTS Specialist in The past Currently playing…

QUAKE CHAMPIONS Price: Free-to-play Link: www.bit.ly/quakechamps It’s the old-school gunplay of a ’90s arena shooter combined with more modern FPS touches, including a roster of characters all with distinct abilities. Amazingly, it works. XONOTIC Price: Free Link: www.xonotic.org If you want your arena action more pure and open, Xonotic is your best bet. Thanks to an active community of creators, it offers thousands of custom maps and modes. DEVIL DAGGERS Price: £4 Link: www.devildaggers.com Short on time? A round of Devil Daggers can last just seconds. This is an intense and eerie arcade shooter that asks how long you can survive against a hellish horde.…

Super Hexagon is the king of the beeping games. It’s a distillation of what makes bullet hell shooters, dance games and arcade racers fun, rendered in lines and using only two buttons (or one stick). You must guide a small triangle out of a shape, which is often a hexagon and sometimes a square. The walls close in! Point at the gaps. Do so to the beat. Touch the sides and fail. Start again. It’s a direct interface between your lizard brain and the machine you control, but with excellent music and lights that make the monkey brain happy, too. That might sound a little reductive, but I mean it differently: in a medium that can do a lot, this feels fundamental. 94…

What makes for the best gaming headset? Well, the obvious answer is sound quality. Sure, you can make a pair of cans as feature-packed as possible, but if you don’t have rumbling bass, pinpoint surround sound and decent noise-cancelling then you’re never going to be the best. I put all the following gaming headsets through their paces, with a wide variety of games, but also with music, videos and movies. If you’re spending decent money on the best cans you can, you want to know they’ll be good for more than just gaming (even if that’s their primary role). HOW WE TEST We recently put more than 60 headset units through a $50,000 testing setup to produce empirical data we could use to quantify our picks. We’ll endeavour to make…

MOTHERBOARD Strix X470-F Gaming Asus £188 Get the most from the new AMD Ryzen 2700X with this matching X470 motherboard that’s packed with features. PROCESSOR Ryzen 7 2700X AMD £315 Easy to overclock and with huge performance out of the box, AMD’s new flagship CPU is the one to go for. GRAPHICS CARD GeForce RTX 2080Ti Nvidia £1,099 For now, Nvidia’s own 2080 Ti model is the best GPU pick – tremendous power for little more than a 1080 Ti. COOLER Kraken X62 NZXT £140 The Kraken is the culmination of three of our favourite things: an infinity mirror, a 280mm radiator and slick braided cooling. MEMORY Vengeance LED RGB 32GB @3200 Corsair £275 Ryzen is the one processor that does benefit hugely from higher-frequency memory. This kit is perfect…

RABBITSKIN HAT Skin a few rabbits and you can craft this headgear. It has a huge warmth bonus, but it’s heavy and adds a lot of carry weight. BEARSKIN COAT You’ll need to kill a bear for this, but it’s worth it. Not only is it warm, but it will intimidate wolves, making them less aggressive. WOOL LONGJOHNS This underlayer is one of the warmest, and rarest, pieces of clothing. The downside is they need to be repaired often. SKI BOOTS These hefty boots offer warmth and resistance to wind chill, but they’re clunky and give you a large penalty to your mobility.…

THE COLOUR OF MAGIC 1986 A text adventure based on the first novel, and the only Discworld game adapted from a book. DISCWORLD 1995 A humorous point-and-click adventure starring useless wizard Rincewind, who’s played brilliantly by Monty Python’s Eric Idle. DISCWORLD II 1996 Rincewind’s journey continues with the fool being tasked with convincing Death himself to come out of retirement. DISCWORLD NOIR 1999 An atmospheric adventure set in the city of Ankh-Morpork, inspired by classic film noir and pulp detective fiction.…

ISSUE 198, March 2009 ON THE COVER Empire: Total War IN THE CHARTS The Fear – Lily Allen 1 World of Warcraft launched in 2004 and made a lot of money. Other publishers looked at all the money and asked, ‘But what if it was ours?’ And so the late-’00s were awash with also-ran MMOs. Fiveyears into WoW’sdominance,PC Gamer rounded up the best of the rest. Many of these MMOs are still alive today, albeit as free-to-play monstrosities with just a handful of players. 2 Hey, look at that, a Total War game on the cover. How times have changed. An Empire: Total War review was the star of the issue, earning an enthusiastic 94%. 3 PC gamers may remember being horrifiedby Dragon Age: Origins’ pre-release trailer, which was set…

FORT-LESS 1 The room didn’t always have its distinctive opposing forts. Instead it was a ‘T’ shaped space – two lofted bunk beds joined by a single set of stairs between them. The forts idea came around the same time as Calvin’s death by swingset story. LOW ENTRY 2 Crawling into the room, you can only see Calvin’s side – a ten-year-old’s room. “The player gets an immediate read of ‘kids room’ — but when they stand and turn and see Sam’s liquor and cigarettes and camera tripod, it’s a surprise,” says Bell. MOVING ON 3 Little touches make it clear Sam outlived Calvin. Sam’s height marking on the door leave Calvin’s behind, Sam’s fort bridge has been taken down and the fort itself is used for box storage. Sam…

Not renewing I’m not renewing my subscription because, a) you showed a horrible looking snippet from a Windows XP VM defrag.exe (it’s 2019), and b) in the last three issues not one of the Buyer’s Guide desktop rigs show an RTX graphics card. Jeff Phil: What can I say? XP’s defrag tool is just more aesthetically interesting than Win 10’s static menu. As for the Buyer’s Guide, you’d notice – were you still a subscriber – that now we’ve had a bit more time with Nvidia’s new cards we’ve added them to the mid-range and advanced builds. Nevertheless, I apologise for failing you in these two incredibly specific instances. May appeal The Arizona Department of Corrections has determined that your publication described below contains Unauthorized Content as defined in Department…

Despite the number at the end of its name, you’d be forgiven for assuming Rage 2 has little to do with its predecessor. The original Rage was dry, mostly linear and often described as ‘solid’ – a critical shorthand for ‘yeah, this is good, but…’ The sequel feels brash, vibrant and silly. In short, Rage 2 is the sort of game that has Andrew W.K. playing over its trailer. “The first thing I wrote on the whiteboard when I met with the team was ‘more crazy than Rage’,” says Tim Willits, id’s studio director. “Time and time again we told those guys, ‘Everything is on the table. Everything is possible.’ If they’d wanted to make 12-foot cockroaches that…

Dr. Emma Fisher is having a bad day. Her space station, which is supposed to orbit the Earth, is now floating near Saturn. The rest of the crew are missing. Things keep breaking down. And SAM, the station’s soft-voiced AI assistant, seems to have become self aware. But here’s the cool thing: you control SAM, and so you are, essentially, his self awareness. Last time I played Observation, a new game from the creators of horror anthology Stories Untold, it was a pretty gentle introduction to the idea of being an AI. For the first hour, Fisher doesn’t even know her station has drifted away from Earth quite so severely. And so you help her restore power, open doors, and fix problems around the station. But when the grim truth…

It all started with Black Mesa. Firstly, because the stars aligned in Christmas 1998 such that my first taste of PC gaming happened to be Half-Life , the best shooter ever made. Santa Claus delivered a personal computer to our home that year – a Packard Bell Platinum 350, since you ask. A 350MHz Pentium II lay within it. A 3DFX Voodoo 2 with 8MB onboard memory. 16MB of RAM and 6GB of hard drive space. These were formidable gaming specs, and when I was given the luxury of choosing a new PC game to accompany it under the tree I relied on the wisdom of PC Gamer, who sure were keen on this Half-Life game. That Christmas was magical. But…

We review each game on its own merits, and try to match it to a reviewer who’s a passionate expert in the field. The main aim of reviews is to help you make buying decisions. To this end, we’re selective about what we review, and try to focus on the notable, interesting, exciting or surprising. DOWNLOADABLE CONTENT DLC might be new missions for a game, or it might be a single new item. If we think you want to know about it, we’ll review it. EARLY ACCESS Any released alpha, beta, or otherwise unfinished game that you can currently pay for. For these games, we won’t assign a score, but we will tell you whether they’re worth your time. THEY’RE BACK Whenever there’s a bargain or re-release of a significant…

A WARM WELCOME I got into a bar fight by shitmouthing a local. Town guards streamed into the bar, battered them to near-death and dumped them in the street. SLAVE TO GRAVE I dropped a bounty off, only to find all the cells full. To make room, I broke a prisoner out. The freed captive was then killed for being a fugitive. TAX INVASION A nearby city sent a squad to rough me up for tax evasion. I hired some mercs, made a murder party in my camp and looted all the bodies.…

What next, Persona 5 on PC? It’s hard not to believe that’ll happen someday soon, now that I have got Catherine in my Steam library. It’s been an exciting few years for previously console-only cult classics coming to PC, especially from the likes of SEGA. Catherine is a real oddity: part-relationship and life simulator, and part-pretty good block-climbing puzzle game. It’s about figuring out your next few moves in advance What’s appealing is its unusual subject matter. You’re Vincent, a 30-something in a long-term relationship with Katherine, who wants to settle down, and for Vincent to find a better-paying job. Vincent, though, wakes up next to another girl called Catherine. After cheating, he begins to experience nightmares where…

INTERNATIONAL HOTEL A half-destroyed hotel located in the city of Chernogorsk, with the charred remains of a plane nearby. The infection must’ve spread to its passengers while it was in the air. CARGO SHIP On the northeastern shoreline of Chernarus, you’ll find this wrecked ship. And an opening in the hull lets you access its interior and the valuable loot within. GREEN MOUNTAIN Northeast of the village of Zelenogorsk, Green Mountain can be seen for miles around. On it you’ll find a massive radio tower and a military base filled with loot. ELEKTROZAVODSK This city is one of the most populated areas in Chernarus, popular with survivors for its abundance of loot, ambush spots and hiding places. Newcomers should stay away.…

I suppose the games that I love the most are the ones that act as a toolkit for people to express themselves with: whether that’s through fiction or action or finesse. Dota 2 is special because it acts as a showcase of almost everything that is good and bad about people trying to co-operate with one another. Its sheer complexity relative to other comparable MOBAs isn’t an obstacle to this: it accentuates it. It’s hard! People can be mean! People can also exceed your expectations, pull victories out of the bag, come together when it counts. I appreciate that I gave Dota 2 92 when I re-reviewed it for PCGamer.com last year, but I’m doing a bit, so… 94…

MOTHERBOARD B360M-DS3H Gigabyte £70 It lacks overclocking options, but the new B360 chipset is far cheaper than the Z370 and is perfect for this budget build. PROCESSOR Core i3-8100 Intel £114 A great processor for out-of-the-box gaming performance. Opt for the AMD Ryzen 1300X if you’d like to overclock. GRAPHICS CARD GeForce GTX 1060 Windforce OC 3GB Gigabyte £210 Amidst fluctuating GPU prices, Gigabyte’s compact 1060 model offers the best value. COOLER Hyper 212 Evo CoolerMaster £25 Even a budget build can benefit from a good CPU cooler, letting you enjoy a quieter, cooler system. MEMORY Vengeance LPX 8GB (2x4GB) @2400MHz Corsair £62 DDR4 prices are still high, however this Corsair pair is a good value option. POWER SUPPLY CX-M Series CX550M Corsair £55 A UK price spike in our…

The Dishonored games are often described as being about choice, but it might be more fitting to say they are about judgement. After all, when you make decisions in Dishonored , you aren’t simply  selecting from a list of potential actions, as you would order a dish from a takeaway menu. Instead, those decisions are always made with a view to their potential consequences. What’s the best way to clear out this room? Or what’s the best way to sneak through it? How should I kill this person? Actually, should I kill them at all? This notion of judgement is most evident in the assassination targets Corvo and Emily pursue in each mission, who can be dispatched via lethal or nonlethal methods. Dishonored…

NIGHTMARES FROM THE DEEP Follow the escapades of Sarah Black, a museum curator who must repeatedly deal with undead menace Davy Jones. GRIM LEGENDS This series of puzzlers uses the trappings of fairytales to tell stories of mysterious ruined weddings, cursed families and powerful artefacts. MURDER SHE WROTE Available through Big Fish’s own platform, in this game amateur detective Jessica Fletcher pokes around crime scenes solving five murders. DARK PARABLES These twists on traditional fairy stories use hidden object scenes that focus on pieces of an object, not an arbitrary list.…