Innholdsfortegnelse for April 2022 i PC Gamer

As soon as we got a Steam Deck in the office, it was all anyone could talk about. As we crowded around, each taking our turn to put it through its paces, it was immediately obvious we were in possession of something special. Will it change the face of PC gaming? That’s hard to predict. But what we can certainly say is that Valve has created a fascinating piece of hardware – and we couldn’t wait to share our experiences with it with you. Our huge feature was even partly written on the Steam Deck itself. How’s that for really committing to a story? ROBIN VALENTINE Twitter @robinlvalentine This month Became truly portable. (His partner made him go for a walk.)…

HIGHS Announcement storm Blizzard’s announced two new ‘unannounced’ projects (don’t ask). ARM & a leg Nvidia is no longer buying Arm from SoftBank, following resistance to its proposed $40 billion takeover. Resi 4 HD HD A Resident Evil 4 HD fan mod that was eight years in the making has finally been released. Hero to Zero Guitar Hero record-setter Schmooey admitted he’s a fake following heroic internet detective work. MineScam One of the latest NFT rug-pulls involved Blockverse. It raised over $1 million: then disappeared… Battlefailed 2042 EA is down on Battlefield 2042 and developer DICE has gone into salvage mode on a game that feels like it didn’t launch in a good state. LOWS…

Once or twice a decade we get one of my favourite treats: a new game engine tech demo. These are not actual games. They’re better: they’re promises of what games could be, pure spectacle showcases for the majesty of a million more polygons on screen and bumpy tessellated surfaces and lifelike ray-traced lighting. Tech demos are raw power and unhinged artistry mashed together, gleefully disregarding pesky problems like ‘writing’ and ‘design’ that have to go into proper videogames. Maybe the best of them was 2011’s Unreal Engine 3 Samaritan demo, a three minute slice of gritty sci-fi (still more evocative today than playing Cyberpunk 2077 in 2021 turned out to be). In 2005 Square Enix created a tech demo of Final Fantasy VII for the PlayStation 3 that ended up…

Who are OFK? The answer is slightly complicated. They’re a sort of virtual band, starring in a game about how they got together and started making introspective indie pop. Imagine a low key, achingly hip, hyper progressive Gorillaz, and you’re… probably a bit lost. But that’s OK, because in chapter one of this narrative-driven experience, OFK are a bit lost too. Pianist Itsumi and singer/songwriter Luca are adrift, living in LA but struggling to figure out their dreams, let alone follow them. That is, until a chance encounter with a disarmingly confident music producer sets them on a new path. The drama is almost comically low in stakes. There’s anxiety, and heartbreak, and creative burnout, but no real threat or conflict. The characters live laid-back lives, enjoying a near endless…

The Steam Deck is one of the most versatile, most intriguing gaming PCs I’ve ever played with. It’s a handheld device that will draw immediate, probably unfair comparisons with Nintendo’s Switch, but is 100% PC in both the best and worst ways. It’s important to note I’m writing this before launch, with a 512GB version of the Steam Deck that still has to be considered unfinished. But that’s only in relation to the software side of the equation and, while that is absolutely vital to the smooth running of the device, the hardware itself is final. And really impressive. Core to the whole thing, and the piece of the puzzle most responsible for the Deck actually being a genuine gaming PC, is the AMD silicon sizzling away at its heart.…

Warframe’s latest chapter in its strange sci-fi saga packed a lot of revelations and twists into its running time, and dived into some of the story’s oldest questions. Be warned, the article ahead contains spoilers for the whole story to date. Rebecca Ford, live operations and community director for Digital Extremes, spoke with me about the quest and their pride in delivering it at long last. “It may not have been what players expected overall, but it was such a true testament to the story we wanted to tell, and I’m just happy that people cared enough to come back and try it.” Perhaps the biggest surprise for players who had been teased for so long was that The New War wasn’t really about the war itself. The system-spanning battle…

Yu-Gi-Oh! at one point was nearly as ubiquitous as Pokémon, but what was once a simple collectible card game where you’d summon one monster and set a couple traps now regularly involves ten minute turns. It’s extremely complicated, but the basic appeal of TCGs remains: the agony and ecstasy at the intersection of skill and luck. Special praise has to be given to the spectacular soundtrack After years of exploitative Yu-Gi-Oh! gacha games, buggy efforts at multiplayer, and anime tie-ins that were fun but more targeted at kids, Yu-Gi-Oh! Master Duel has dragged the card game into the free-to-play PvP age far more elegantly than anyone could have expected. The learning curve will be rather steep for any newcomers and there isn’t really much of an offering outside of the…

Nobody Saves the World puts the grin in grind. DrinkBox’s dungeon-crawler isn’t ashamed of its XP farming demands, and won’t let you quickly mainline its story without them. But neither is it harshly traditional, withholding challenges until you’ve eaten your greens, with occasional stat boosts to demonstrate the nutritional benefits. Rather, it asks, what if the grind wasn’t a means to an end or an imposition, but satisfyingly playful in itself? Saving the world feels secondary here to simply enjoying the process. Yes, there’s a story, as protagonist Nobody sets out to gather five crystal fragments that will stop a cataclysmic spread of malignant fungus. But as with DrinkBox’s previous work, Guacamelee, it comes with an ironic nod to genre cliches, and nobody but Nobody is expected to take it…

If Guitar Hero is about the fantasy of being a rock legend, A Musical Story is about the reality. This is a tough, unusual rhythm game that insists on perfection for each of its instrumental songs. That’s perfection through repetition, through learning each rhythm and getting a feel for the music. Probably, it’s more accurate to the process of learning to play a song. Real rock stars don’t get a timeline showing them when, exactly, they need to hit each note. So it goes in A Musical Story, a game where the timeline has (mostly) disappeared. Instead, you’ll feel the tempo and rhythm of each tune (tapping your toes or nodding your head helps). It’s an uncompromising rhythm game, and I like it for that. After passing each exam-like song…

This is the best detective game I’ve played in years, and it’s mostly about staring at plants. As the new owner of a small shop in a quaint little town, I’ve only got three things at my disposal: a small collection of unusual and unidentified plants, an ageing botany book with a handful of entries, and my wits. With them I manage to solve dozens of wonderful little mysteries, untangle a few major ones, and even save the world. Then I played through it again and didn’t save the world, but I did unleash an unspeakable horror upon it. Also, this one time? I straight-up poisoned a guy with some plants because he was a little bit rude to me. There’s all sorts of satisfying fiddly business to do as…

Be a witch, they said. It’ll be fun, they said. Then how come I’m spending every moment frantically brewing potions for demanding customers? Crazy Cauldron gives you the keys to the hottest potion shop in the realm, but keeping up with demand is an increasingly stressful process. As they appear at your window, with little speech bubbles telling you what they want, you have to gather ingredients, then plonk the right ones in your bubbling cauldron. You’re trying to match your potion’s hue with that in the bubble above each customer’s head. If successful, they’ll disappear in a flurry of points. It’s not explained what these brews actually do; you’re only playing with colours here, for instance by mixing a red bug and a yellow plant to make an orange…

There was a period during the late ’90s when it was near-impossible to buy a T-shirt that didn’t have a bold Japanese design emblazoned on the front. We rarely knew what they said. And we never looked as cool as we hoped. But revisiting the gorgeous, sumi-e artwork of Okamiis a reminder of why we got obsessed in the first place. Much like this review, Okami has a languid start, but it’s deeply compelling once you get into it – the sort of game where you’ll want to paint over every maligned element with your magic brush just to get that sense of refreshing completion. And, unlike a shirt from 1997, Okamifeels authentic, artistic and pleasing to revisit.…

Intel’s 12th Gen processors are stuffed with loads of new features, but they’re also fit to burst last generation’s motherboards, courtesy of their larger footprint. That means you need a new 600-series motherboard to put Alder Lake to use in your gaming PC, and we’ve tested the latest and greatest to help you narrow down your search. You have a few motherboard chipsets to choose from: Z690, H670, H610, and B660. The most fully-featured of the lot are the Z690s, though they’re also likely to be the most expensive. If you find they’re out of your budget, you ant to look towards mor gaming ds. These offer Z690 Aorus Pro GIGABYTE £290 An actually affordable high-end Z690 1 By 2010’s standards, the Gigabyte Z690 Aorus Pro would be positively pricey. In…

MONITOR An incredibly lavish monitor, since you don’t need to buy a GPU. Heck, you could even splash out on an ultra-wide one. CONTROLLER An Xbox Elite controller for the final, unnecessarily decadent touch. Put those levers to good use. WI-FI A Wi-Fi 6 router and receiver to keep those frames coming in at a sprint, and so you don’t complain about lag. HEADPHONES Audiophile-grade headphones with the spare change from the above so you can really hear the online heckling.…

A top a crag amid the mountains beside Grothmar Valley, the band begins to play. “We are Metal Legion,” croaks frontman Varus Chainrazor, “and we’re here to put the ‘band’ back in ‘warband’”. Beside me, Fraser is losing his mind. I never expected my friends to give Guild Wars 2 an earnest try. As a longtime player, I would jokingly suggest it as our weekly co-op gaming group bounced between various games. When our interest in any one waned, I’d mention the good times we could be having in Tyria. Eventually, it worked. In late-2021, a handful of current and former PC Gamer staffers downloaded the game. As the veteran, it was now my responsibility to keep them playing. My tactic was to take it slow: to gradually portion out…

Every outlaw, at one point or another, tries to walk the straight and narrow path. Retire from crime and go legit. Get a real job. With the Jobs Mod for Red Dead Redemption 2, you can give your outlaw a chance to start over, not as a bank robber or loan shark, but as an honest working Joe. Or, you can try. I didn’t find it all that easy to keep my outlaw out of trouble, even with the nice selection of jobs the mod adds to the game. No matter what I tried – bartender, sheep herder, delivery man, miner, dock worker – I just couldn’t keep jobs from going wrong. As the saying goes, you can take the cowboy out of the gang, but you can’t take the…

1 MANAGEABLE COMMUTE Making your home in a built-up area will mean you’re surrounded by undead, but too far away and you’ll be using too much petrol scavenging for supplies. Find a happy medium. 2 MULTIPLE ENTRANCES Ideally you should have a durable main entrance, like a garage door, and another door through which you can escape. Everything else you should barricade, and all windows should be blocked. 3 HUNTER GATHERER Make sure a river or a forest is close so you’ve got a ready supply of fish and game with which to keep yourself nourished. Meals pilfered from abandoned kitchens won’t last forever.…

FINAL FANTASY VI: THE INTERACTIVE CG GAME 1995 This Silicon Graphics demo seemed like a precursor to a Nintendo 64 Final Fantasy. FINAL FANTASY VII TECHNICAL DEMO 2005 Square recreated FFVII’s opening to show off what the PS3 would be capable of. UNREAL ENGINE 3: SAMARITAN 2011 Epic made Samaritan to show the power of new DirectX 11 tech. THE MATRIX AWAKENS 2021 This staggeringly detailed city environment shows off the potential of UE5’s Nanite geometry system.…

The subject of the names sheep give themselves is not one that has often troubled the minds of PC Gamer, but it turns out some sheep are called Bah. Others Byyh. Still more take the name Boh, or even Baah. And don’t get us started on the chickens. Then there are the humans. Meet Vuk, who is 27 years old and has seven children. Vuk is a member of the Ulygash Hegemony, and lives in its capital of Ashombe (current size: one hut). It’s all been generated by the game since Vuk was placed, with some sheep, chickens, and two other humans, around a beehive in the centre of an island. They were then left to get on with it, the expectation being that, humans being humans, a large honey-glazed…

There’s going to be a whole cottage industry of Steam Deck accessories – the versatile USB-C dock, the fastest micro SD card, the most convenient travel keyboard and mouse – but I’m here to tell you that the single best Steam Deck accessory is a throw pillow. It turns out that the small, overly firm decorative pillows have been on our couches all this time just waiting for a higher calling: a Steam Deck to plop down on top of them. After hours of gaming on Valve’s new handheld PC I’m amazed by how capable it is, but that power comes at a heavy price. As in, like, the Steam Deck is really heavy. It’s inescapably a bulky device, weighing 68% more than the Nintendo Switch and 38% more than…

I land a flying kick into a bandit and send him screaming off the edge of a roof and onto the zombie-filled streets below. In Dying Light 2 this has become my singular goal: kick dudes off roofs. The city is in peril, I have a half-dozen unfinished sidequests in my journal, and my map is littered with icons imploring me to scavenge resources, discover new locations and undertake parkour challenges. Apologies. I can’t actually deal with any of that right now. Somewhere in the city another bandit is standing too close to the edge of another rooftop and he needs booting off it. And reaching that rooftop is just as much fun as kicking someone off it. A huge playground for crunchy, kinetic, two-footed combat To get there I…

Lost Arkis a game with zero chill. A Korean hybrid of ARPG and MMO, it embodies the best and the worst traits of both genres. Ambitious to a fault, it offers a vast and spectacular fantasy adventure elevated by a stunning combat system and an astonishing sense of scale, although its grand plans are hindered by hackneyed storytelling and a repetitive quest structure. Right from the off, Lost Ark’s mantra is ‘why fight one enemy when you can fight 20?’ and it gives you the combat skills to facilitate this. You start the game at level ten, with five abilities already unlocked. For the Paladin – the class I spent most of my time with – this includes powers like Spin Slash, a powerful one-two punch of an attack that…

1 PIPPED Your tapping is accompanied by a faint popping sound that sullies the soundtrack. When playing with headphones, however, I could barely hear it. 2 LP Songs can last for a very long amount of time, if you keep screwing up, or over in a flash if you ace them first time. Unfortunately this can be unsatisfying. 3 STARMAN Each song rewards you with a star if you don’t make any mistakes. If you manage to collect all the stars, you’ll unlock a bonus chapter and get to play more.…

Mortal Sin builds a riveting combat system from only a handful of elements. The most vital of these is your melee weapon. There’s a compelling rhythm to combat, which interrupts tense, cramped, first-person dungeon-crawling with sudden bursts of frantic mouse-clicking (or button-hammering). Similar to Dead Space, you need to dismember enemies to kill them. There are a lot of heads and limbs being flung around. Fighting is the core of Mortal Sin: an action roguelite draped in a stark, grungy visual style. This is not a game that wastes time on things like story or fancy menu design. You begin each run dumped in a chapel ruin, before you tackle one of the randomised gauntlets. You have to watch your durability just as much as your health When you enter…

You can see why wells are scary: they’re big, dark holes in the ground, perfect for ghosts to crawl out of, or people to fall into in horror stories, or any old TV show starring an animal. So it goes in Lily’s Well, which is one of those cryptic horror games that only reveals its secrets after much repetition, and where nothing (obviously) is what it seems. You play as Lily, a nine year old raised in the woods by her father, who disappears just as she hears a voice calling desperately for help. The voice is emanating from the well, and Lily’s determined to get to the bottom of it. Unfortunately, there’s no ladder, and no handy massive coil of rope, so she’ll have to cobble one together out…

It’s been said countless times before, but there’s something weird about playing HD remasters of old games and some incorrect part of your brain deciding they look and feel the same as the originals. It’s especially deranged in the case of Fable Anniversary, with its god rays, wafting leaves, and upgraded faces, which now no longer resemble manhandled plasticine. But there’s a very good reason why returning to Albion feels so cosily familiar. My childhood decisions don’t have the weight Molyneux promised It’s a lot to do with sound. It helps that everything is cued up by Danny Elfman’s sweeping opening theme. Hearing it stirs up all sorts of buried memories, like smelling the same flavour of Lynx you wore on your first date with the person who shattered your…

It would be easy to be massively cynical about Ori and the Blind Forest, with its withered trees and forest spirits and tragic coming-of-age narrative. It’s achingly sincere. And it wastes no time before stamping on your worthless human heart, crafting vulnerable, loving protagonists who are immediately ripped apart. But raising even a slightly questioning eyebrow at such a wholesome game feels wrong, like armpit-farting cover versions of Enya songs. Ori deserves better. We probably don’t need to talk about how beautiful it all is, although it’s worth pointing out that screenshots barely do it justice. There’s a glowing, heartfelt warmth to it all that’s like ASMR for the eyes. The arresting presentation is deceptive, too – it looks and sounds like the sort of game where you hold right…

It’s two years into the pandemic and I must have lost it, because I decided to finally play A Plague Tale: Innocence. I’m not a fan of children or plagues, so I’m not sure what inspired me to fire up this stealth romp, but I’m actually glad I did. For all the flesh-eating rats, inquisitors, and, yes, magic, A Plague Tale is really about a pair of siblings who don’t know each other coming together after their lives are upturned. Maybe my nephews have softened me up, because I did not hate spending a couple of days with Amicia and her wee brother Hugo. Amicia is a capable kid with a streak of hotheadedness, and the game’s protagonist, charged to look after a brother she’s hardly ever seen. Hugo is…

At so many points, my main response to Space Warlord Organ Trading Simulator is, “Thanks! I hate it.” It’s that moment of recognising something presented to you is awful and compelling. There’s a touch of the archaic definition of the word ‘awful’, straddling both reverence and dread. Like Strange Scaffold’s previous An Airport for Aliens Currently Run by Dogs, the premise of Space Warlord Organ Trading Simulator is stated upfront. As your mentor lays out at the start of the game, “Everyone has organs, everyone wants organs, and everyone needs organs, which means THEY NEED YOU.” Even with its visceral stakes firmly set, I wasn’t quite prepared for one of the first things I saw to be a counter ticking up the number of breaths I’d taken. Not from an…

Wheels Turn your Steam Deck into a skateboard deck and make yourself more portable than ever! May void the warranty. Hats Honestly, how long is Valve going to be able to resist selling headgear for their hardware? Games for Windows Live Emulator Relive the magic of Microsoft’s lost gaming platform! Come on Gabe, you know you loved it. Bungee Cord Perfect for Elden Ring players – every time you throw your Deck at the wall, it’ll bounce back to your hand! Portable Crowbar A miniature tool that snaps onto your Deck! Perfect for prying open tiny crates, or killing ant-sized Antlions. VR Conversion Kit Strap the Steam Deck to your face for a cheap alternative to a VR headset! The perfect way to play Half-Life: Alyx.…

THE DEAL RAISED QUESTIONS ABOUT ACTIVISION BLIZZARD CEO BOBBY KOTICK Before 2022 had even really began, Microsoft shocked the games industry by announcing it would acquire Activision Blizzard for $68.7 billion. The scale of the buyout is staggering and will give Microsoft control of some of the biggest game series around, including Call of Duty and Overwatch, and overnight make it the third-largest game company in the world by revenue. It’s not a done deal, and the US Federal Trade Commission will be investigating, but the general consensus among business and legal specialists is that it will go through. Microsoft has said that it expects to complete the takeover by July 2023. The deal raised questions about Activision Blizzard CEO Bobby Kotick, who has recently faced strong criticism accusing the…

“One of the tensions throughout my career is that the stuff I want to be making is on the edges of commercial viability,” says Johnnemann Nordhagen. “They’re the sort of thing that, if you get the right niche interested in them, they may pay for themselves – but they’re never going to make a billion dollars.” It’s not as lonely a position as you might think. Nordhagen spent a formative part of his career at Bioshock 2 developer 2K Marin, surrounded by people who loved immersive sims like Thief and Deus Ex. It’s a genre that has always teetered on the boundary of commercial viability – requiring big budgets, but rarely pulling in large audiences. At times, it’s been considered indulgent – a genre more to the tastes of game…

Horror isn’t my thing. A game about ghosts isn’t especially appealing to me – let alone one with headless spirit children. However, a hands-off demo of Ghostwire: Tokyo changed my mind. It’s more like a Japanese ghost-hunting Watch Dogs 2 than a city wide PT, and it looks brilliant. Though developer Tango Gameworks made the dark and scary The Evil Within series, Ghostwire isn’t trying to terrify you in the same way. This early look set my mind at relative ease. I’m not sure that’s entirely a good thing for those who might be searching for a disturbing horror experience, but for me a neon-drenched action game with a ghostly garnish is far more exciting. You play Akito, a man on a mission to save Tokyo, and by extension, your…

Although still in its alpha stages, farming sim Roots of Pacha already has the potential to overtake its genre counterparts. At first glance, it’s easy to assume another duplicate of the much-adored Stardew Valley, but with more intuitive tool systems and a welcome, communal approach to farming, it has enough new ideas to stand out. Studio Soda Den, after a successful Kickstarter run and heaps of attentive tweaking, has begun to cultivate a serene setting and a wholesome, captivating narrative – one that even can be shared with friends in multiplayer mode. Through it, we follow the traditions, innovations and foibles of the peaceful, prehistoric settlement of Pacha – a fictional village inspired by a diverse range of cultures. In a genre where most games are set in the modern…

With Stellaris not quite being Crusader Kings in space, it’s fallen to indie devs to make games about Dune-esque space feudalism. We’ve had Star Dynasties, and the upcoming Alliance of the Sacred Suns. And, garnering a lot less attention, there are the Stellar Monarch games, quietly expanding while the bigger empires hog the limelight. Like its predecessor, Stellar Monarch 2 puts you in the role of emperor, while stripping away much of the busywork that you really think would be beneath them. Is it really the emperor’s job to move individual ships around and fight tactical battles wherever they crop up? So, battles are automated and off-screen, while settling new worlds will happen even without your input, thanks to AI that defends your interests and expands your empire, on your…

Setup The Deck can swap over to a Linux desktop, which includes a handy app store that can install loads of up-to-date emulators with a click – no terminal fuss! It makes the process of setting up emulators remarkably simple. I used desktop Steam to add them to my library for easier access and controller mapping, then just copied the games I wanted over on a USB-C flash drive. Dolphin I told myself I’d use the Deck to finally finish Paper Mario: The Thousand Year Door, but the second I loaded up Metroid Prime those plans melted away. It runs at a beautiful 60fps (aside from a few frame drops when opening doors) and still has atmosphere off the charts, while getting a projected five-and-a-half hours of battery life. KEY…

I’VE PLAYED RESIDENT EVIL VILLAGE ON THE BUS INTO THE PC GAMER OFFICE, THEN PLUGGED THE DECK INTO MY MONITOR Plug and play 1 Plug the Deck into a dock, connect a keyboard, mouse, and monitor, and you’ve got yourself a whole gaming rig ready to roll. You can go with the standard SteamOS UI, like a modded version of Big Picture Mode, but there is also a desktop mode. This operates like a normal Linux desktop, and functions a lot like the Windows OS you’re used to. USB devices are plug and play, and most of your favourite apps can be loaded from its Discover software centre. The only issue I’ve had so far is lack of DisplayPort support and a complete refusal to output at the 21:9 ratio of…

OlliOlli World isn’t like other skaters. It’s not shredding lines down some asphalt concourse, pissing off security guards and scaring passing shoppers as it slams a 50-50 into the kerb. Roll7’s series of sidescrolling skaters has instead travelled to the far-off shores of Radlandia, a skater’s paradise where the rails are always polished and aspiring shredders compete for the chance to become the next Skate Wizard. OlliOlli World is weirder and wilder than those who Olli’d before it – and it’s all the better for it. More laid-back and approachable than past games The third game in the series follows the template laid out by OlliOlli 1 and 2. You’re tasked with skating a line down a sidescrolling course, using A to push and the left stick to launch into…

Was Sifu’s final cutscene worth the frustration I endured to see it? Not really, but at risk of sounding like I’m quoting some misattributed kung fu aphorism, the experienceof mastering Sifu’s combat is what mattered and I couldn’t get enough of it. That’s down to some of the most enjoyable melee combat ever – fluid, funny, improvisational – and a devilish structure that taunted me with its contemptible fairness. Beating up bouncers in Sifu is exceptionally fun Sifuis a singleplayer-only brawler with just five levels, each of which ends in a two-stage boss fight. Except for the final boss’ annoying immunity to certain attacks, there are no tricks. The bosses can all be defeated just like any other opponent, and the opening credits even show you how to fight them.…

Rainbow Six Extraction was announced in a world we no longer live in: the world of 2019. Back then, the co-op Siege spinoff was called Rainbow Six Quarantine (ha!). It was an unlucky time to be making a game about a virus, but a great time to bring back the co-op zombie shooter. Siege’s Outbreak event was an excellent taste of what Left 4 Siege could be, and I hoped Extraction would blow that mode out into a collection of campaigns. Three years later, and not only is Extractionone of many co-op shooters on the block, but it’s hardly recognisable from the original Outbreakcampaign. It’s the anti-Left 4 Dead – a precise, gruelling survival game about keeping your head down and never poking the bear. If you do, Extraction’s sadistic…

Making up your own curse words is funny, and the developer of Not for Broadcast seems to agree. Having started off with a few conventional swears, it’s not long before all sorts of wibbleclip is added to the list of naughty words. This matters, because it’s your job as the vision mixer of a nightly TV news show to censor them, so as not to offend the sensitive ears of your audience. Which includes the government. As Alex Winston, non-gender-specific spouse to Sam and with two kids, you’re a cleaner at the TV studio when you make the mistake of answering a ringing phone. It’s election night, the Advance party has stormed to victory on a platform slightly to the left of Michael Foot, and for some reason the regular…

The original Neon Struct was a cyberpunk Thief, filled with structures to explore, mainly by crouch-running from shadow to shadow. Now, Minor Key Games has returned to its neon world for a smaller roguelite made for the 7-Day FPS competition. The mission here calls for shooting, and intimidation, rather than very careful sneaking around, as you infiltrate a megacorp to take it down. Over several randomly assembled floors, you have to gather eight keycards, and also make it to the top floor, while contending with a bunch of pesky, patrolling robots. Ammunition is strictly limited, but you can find enough to make do by raiding filing cabinets and plundering the robot corpses. Keycards, meanwhile, can be found on the human staff, who need to be chased down and intimidated with…

Much like the weird, irresistible draw of Scandi interior design, certain games just have a pull. Sometimes all it takes to get me invested is an axe, some runes, and a mellifluous Northern European accent regaling me with tales of gods and giants and sacred wells. Jotun provides all these things and more, feeding me Norse myths while I scamper about hacking roots and thumping rocks. It’s not taxing stuff – and the puzzles feel like they’re dragging things out when I’d rather be bothering monsters – but there’s a pleasantness to Jotunthat’s like the perfect minimalist chair in the corner of a neutral room. Simple but clean, like hygge for your eyes, fingers and thumbs.…

The Telltale formula is so established it’s almost a modern fable itself, distilled and retold until little remains in our collective consciousness beyond the memes. But it’s a system of interactive storytelling that still works, especially in a setting as compelling as Fabletown. The QTE fights feel slightly unsatisfying and some choices lack meaning, but everything else here has aged with dignity – the art style, in particular, still gels brilliantly with the noir-ish comic book setting.…

GeForce Now actually works. Let’s just take a second for that statement to permeate: after a decade of embarrassing showings from cloud gaming services like OnLive and Gaikai that always showed us games smeared in vaseline and with the reaction speeds of a tectonic plate, there’s now one that really does let you play top-end PC games using the strength of your internet connection alone. Well, that and a server farm full of RTX 3080s, which we’ve had a famously hard time getting our hands on at consumer level since release. Still, it’s a profound achievement on technological terms – the two-way transfer of data that can manage precisely timed inputs and high resolution rendered frames at the same time, producing an experience that feels like something close to PC…

I’ve always been dreadful at the Total Wargames. Neither the real-time battles nor the wider strategy of conquering the map have ever felt quite under my control, and I’ve always ended up burning out from sheer incompetence. That was fine back when they were all historical – I just avoided them, because Romans and Napoloeans are boring. But ever since Creative Assembly started making some of the best Warhammer games on PC, it’s been painful to my brand to not be able to embrace the series. Dutifully I booted up Total War: Warhammer III, expecting to once again revel in the attention to detail of its grim fantasy world, but barely scratch the surface of its tactical depth. But lo! CA may have finally found a way to bring even…

In a time when every multiplayer game around operates on a regular seasonal schedule, complete with battle passes and all sorts, I kind of miss the days when games would just randomly get cool patches with new stuff. There’s a spontaneity to the surprise patch that makes even smaller additions feel special, and the closest I get to this feeling today is in Hunt: Showdown, which recently received an interesting set of new gun variants, and some significant balance changes. Crytek does give players a heads-up when an update is on the way, but the lack of a fixed schedule means I was pleasantly surprised to boot up the game a few weeks ago and find three new variants of the Scottfield Model 3 revolver waiting to try out: the…

SILENT NIGHT 1 Crouch as much as possible instead of walking, especially when you’re exploring areas you haven’t scoped out yet. It’s still possible for zombies to discover you in this state, but you’ll be much less audible as you take what you need from houses. SHOOTING BLANKS 2 For the same, and rather obvious reason, steer clear from guns in almost all cases. A single shot will attract all the undead in the vicinity to your location, which isn’t worth it even if you do land a killing blow. It’s best just to run away in these situations. MASTER OF NONE 3 In terms of what you should pick up, find a good balance in your carried supplies. Rather than maxing out your carry weight with an impressive melee-based arsenal of weaponry,…