Innholdsfortegnelse for May 2025 i PC Gamer

1 month CLAIR OBSCUR: EXPEDITION 33 RELEASE April 24, 2025 | DEVELOPER Sandfall Interactive Lead the members of Expedition 33 on their quest to destroy the Paintress so that she can never paint death again. Turn-based RPG with lush UE5 graphics. FATAL FURY: CITY OF THE WOLVES RELEASE April 24, 2025 | DEVELOPER SNK A legendary versus fighting series returns with a sequel to the 1999 classic, Garou: Mark of the Wolves. Fight in the iconic world of South Town with a day one PC release. DOOM: THE DARK AGES RELEASE May 15, 2025 | DEVELOPER id Software Doom goes historical, with the player stepping into the shoes of a living super weapon who fights in a hyper-violent medieval war against hell. There’s a throwable Shield Saw! 2 months ELDEN…

RELEASE2025 DEVELOPERMesshof PUBLISHERAnnapurna Interactive LINK s.team/a/1497460 Saving the world from collapse by riding your bicycle really fast is a bold proposition even for a videogame. As a cyclist in an open world filled with races and other two-wheeled things to do, your main task is to collect legendary bike parts that have been stolen, and use them to perform some sort of destiny-fulfilling ritual, which sounds just vague enough that it might just work out in the end.…

NEED TO KNOW WHAT IS IT?A Yakuza spin-off on the Hawaiian seas that’s a little too reminiscent of Yakuza 8 EXPECT TO PAY£60 DEVELOPERRyu Ga Gotoku Studio PUBLISHERSega REVIEWED ONIntel Core i5 12500H, 16GB RAM, Nvidia GeForce RTX 4060 STEAM DECK VERIFIEDYes MULTIPLAYERNo LINK store.steampowered.com/agecheck/app/3061810 My pirate ship is sailing through the Hawaiin seas, pursuing a speedboat. I successfully chase it into a Bond-villain style base, whereupon I continue the pursuit on foot, jumping over laser traps, fleeing a giant cannonball that rolls towards me Indiana Jones-style, and then finish up with a sword fight against a giant robot. How can I possibly give a game that contains all that any less than PC Gamer’s first ever 100% score? Well… the ‘boat chase’ is just a cutscene, the lasers have…

NEED TO KNOW EXPECT TO PAYFree DEVELOPERTwo Tiny Dice LINK bit.ly/LowlandKeepers This deckbuilding roguelike peers into the guts of the genre and makes some big changes on a mechanical level. It’s still a case of playing your cards to defeat or delay enemies before they can hurt you, but you only have four cards to play with – and each card is actually a character. These characters adhere to basic archetypes in Lowland Keepers. One deals direct damage, one sets enemies alight, another steals enemy mana so you can buy a few extra goes during your turn. It’s difficult to decide who to play during a turn, as the resources you use to play them are all shared between them. Sure, mana regenerates every turn, but you can also get…

NEED TO KNOW EXPECT TO PAY£12 DEVELOPERIn house PUBLISHERYoung Horses Here’s a metaphor for you: what if, instead of being an octopus pretending to be a man, Octodad was actually a quite ordinary game pretending to be a decent one? Because coming back to it after some time away, I’m amazed as many people enjoyed the game’s single repeated joke as consistently as they seemed to. The sinister world of cephalopod conspiracy rounds off our office-adjacent list this month, within which Ocotodad is included primarily because he a) wears a suit and b) has a job. And, as mentioned above, it’s an interesting one to come back to. The setting is either smart and sweet or deeply sinister, depending on your perspective; however much I love my daughter, I like…

Top three worst feelings in PC gaming? Third place is opening Steam after a week away and having to download 3.9 petabytes of updates. Second is obviously RGB radiation sickness. Top, spot, though? It has to be a hardware upgrade gone awry. For starters, the stakes are so high. Particularly in this preposterous 2025 reality we find ourselves in, when one graphics card alone costs five times more than a console. Damaging a RTX 5090 is almost akin to writing off your car now, except worse, because you don’t need your car to play Cyberpunk 2077. But then there’s the sheer amount of work involved in rectifying the mistake. Generally, the extent of your knowledge is ‘it doesn’t turn on’ or ‘it doesn’t boot to Windows’. The number of variables…

TED LITCHFIELD THIS MONTHGot my Ranger on in flagrant violation of AD&D regulations. ALSO PLAYEDAvowed, Metal Gear Solid: Peace Walker When I originally got into Baldur’s Gate in high school, the first game was a dragon I never managed to slay. All those massive early game wilderness areas bored me to tears, impenetrable Advanced Dungeons & Dragons jargon wore down my spirit, and I was always worried that I was playing wrong or maybe committing to a character that’d fall apart when brought forward to Shadows of Amn. Now I’ve got the opposite problem: I’m fresh off my third completion of Baldur’s Gate in the past few years without ever having rolled credits on its sequel or Beamdog’s 2016 interquel expansion Siege of Dragonspear. I’ve got high hopes for this…

DANIELLA LUCAS THIS MONTHLooked for treasure, found logs instead ALSO PLAYEDInfinity Nikki, Mail Time A few months ago I got together with some friends in FFXIV and went hunting for treasure. It was silly and chaotic with surprise enemies, golden llamas and bad luck barring our paths, but it made for one hell of an evening. Raiding is fun, but there’s nothing quite like the unpredictable nature of hunting down treasure maps and praying for magic portals. I wanted to recreate that night, but with none of my friends around I decided to wing it with some strangers, what could go wrong? Treasure maps are one of FFXIV’s many pieces of side content with new versions added every expansion for parties of up to eight players, though you can usually…

NEED TO KNOW RELEASEJune 18, 2002 PUBLISHERInfogrames DEVELOPERBioWare LINK store.steampowered.com Back when the idea of approximating Dungeons & Dragons – gasp – on a computer was a lofty ambition, Westwood ruled the roost with RPGs like Hillsfar and Eye of the Beholder. There’s no denying the blobber style of dungeon crawler is showing its age, what with its grid-based sword flailing and UI that swallows two thirds of the screen. And while modern releases of those Gold Box classics have done some heavy lifting to modernise the old formula, it might be an easier sell if it were truly brought into the 21st century. That’s right; I’m talking about the bleeding-edge, breakthrough year of 2002, when Neverwinter Nights took us boldly into the 3rd edition of Dungeons & Dragons…

NEED TO KNOW RELEASE2025 DEVELOPERAmazing Seasun Games PUBLISHERAmazing Seasun Games LINK mechabreak.seasungames.com The free-to-play monetisation is already rankling eager mech pilots in the beta, but the actual combat in Mecha Break should have Pacific Rim fans salivating. Its dazzling multiplayer mecha combat is mechanically sound, and putting loot box concerns aside, it’s loaded with customisation options for both my mech and pilot. Choosing a Break Striker, Mecha Break’s name for its robots, is as difficult as choosing a favourite hero in Overwatch. The classes – attackers, snipers, supporters, brawlers and defenders – and their weapons, drone deployments, shields and secondary abilities each come with different playstyles. Manoeuvrability – which Amazing Seasun believes to be the core of what makes a mech game work – is phenomenal in Mecha Break. Whether…

NEED TO KNOW RELEASETBA DEVELOPERNullpointer Games PUBLISHERNullpointer Games, Outersloth LINK s.team/a/2836860 This deckbuilding narrative RPG is set in a haunted house and has serious gothic novel vibes. There’s also a big hit of Cluedo in there too, as your characters move around the building, each with a task to perform, discovering secret tunnels and other mysterious things as they do. The deckbuilding comes from the way your team investigates the house. The Ackeron family has fallen into disrepute among rumours of dark pacts and shadowy rituals, and has disappeared. The mayor of the local town has sent a group in to investigate. There’s a secret organisation of mystics known as the ‘Seekers Communion’ at work, pointing to exactly the sort of cosmic horror you might expect from a game with…

It’s easy to take the revival of fast-moving, exploration-heavy ‘boomer shooters’ for granted in 2025, but nine years ago, Doom 2016 hit the industry like a bolt from the blue, with nary an iron sight or cover system to speak of. The entire genre leapt to crib off id’s notes. These days, id Software is far from the old man on the ropes trying to prove there’s an audience for this sort of game that it was in the early 2010s. A 2020 sequel, Doom Eternal, showed that id’s second wind wasn’t some fleeting thing, that the long John-less (that is, Romero and Carmack) FPS trailblazer has what it takes to go the distance. Alongside neo-Doom, there’s been an explosion of indie ‘boomer shooters’ imitating ’90s sensibilities and aesthetics, and…

NEED TO KNOW WHAT IS IT?An action game about fighting giant lizards and turning them into pants EXPECT TO PAY£60 DEVELOPERCapcom PUBLISHERCapcom REVIEWED ONIntel Core i7 14700KF, 32 GB RAM, GeForce RTX 4070 Super MULTIPLAYERYes LINK monsterhunter.com Monster Hunter Wilds is a return to meat-and-potatoes monster combat and a dramatic revision of the hunting format. It’s a more approachable lizard-slaying sandbox, and it’s a tangle of multiplayer quirks that still feels like something out of 2007. It’s the cleanest Monster Hunter has ever played, and it’s a temperamental piece of software that might crash if you tab back in at the wrong time. If there’s a word for Wilds, it’s streamlined. A more straightforward, cinematic story, gives way to a seamless wilderness of rotating seasons and roaming beasts, where any…

NEED TO KNOW WHAT IS IT?A citybuilding survival game in which you build all the walls, brick by brick EXPECT TO PAY£25 DEVELOPERDigital Sun PUBLISHERHooded Horse REVIEWED ONIntel Core i7-10750H, 16GB RAM, Nvidia GeForce RTX 2060 MULTIPLAYERNo LINK digitalsungames.com/games/cataclismo Cataclismo’s been in Early Access since last year, and it’s a testament to how well-realised the concept was that this is the same game, just with extra bits on. The biggest bits are the additional campaign missions, which round out the story of Iris, the mystical overseer on a mission to save humanity from the Horrors. It’s not a huge campaign, but the environments, units and structures are beautiful and the world is dripping with atmosphere. The game’s hook is just as strong as it prepares to exit Early Access. You…

NEED TO KNOW WHAT IS IT?Minesweeper but with dragons and other monsters. The clue’s in the name. EXPECT TO PAYFree DEVELOPERDaniel Benmergui PUBLISHERDaniel Benmergui REVIEWED ONIntel Core i7-10750H, 16GB RAM, Nvidia GeForce RTX 2060 MULTIPLAYERNo LINK bit.ly/dragonsweeper Like its inspiration, Minesweeper, Dragonsweeper is a game about intently staring at a big grid of numbers and making calculated gambles. Unlike Minesweeper, this is also an RPG. The mines are still here, of course – and clicking on one is still an instant game over – but they’re joined by rats, slimes and, yes, a big dragon, who you’re ultimately trying to defeat. Turns out that’s pretty tough – even tougher than Minesweeper. Dragonsweeper is tough because it’s more cagy with its information. The numbers on the floor, as you would expect,…

NEED TO KNOW WHAT IS IT?If John Woo remade The Brutalist after binging Severance EXPECT TO PAY£35 DEVELOPERIn house PUBLISHERRemedy Entertainment REVIEWED ONIntel Core i7-7700, 16 GB RAM, Nvidia GeForce GTX 1070 MULTIPLAYERNo LINK store.steampowered.com/app/870780/Control_Ultimate_ Edition One of my most hated games writing tropes is when reviewers take delight in pointing out that the setting of a game is more interesting than the main character. “But as everyone knows, Spencer Mansion,” *takes a sip of G Fuel martini*, “is the real hero here.” Control is perhaps the one instance where that assertion is entirely justified. This is partially because Jesse Faden fades into the background when compared to the shifting, unsettling specificity of the game’s setting. It’s not that she’s poorly performed or clumsily written, more that she feels standardised.…

They might not be as flashy as graphics cards or gaming keyboards, but like a samurai’s katana, a good, reliable external SSD can become an extension of yourself. And there are more uses for one than you might initially think. The most obvious use for an external drive is to take your big files around with you. But they’re also great to use as portable game library storage for handhelds and laptops. And even if you rarely travel, they can be useful for the occasional system backup or pre-Windows reinstall file backup. They’re not all similarly square, unassuming, no-nonsense external SSDs these days, either. In this group test we’re looking at everything from such options to extravagant press-to-expand glass cannons and dinky keychain drives. And as you’ll see from my…

ROBERT JONES THIS MONTHBested a large number of spiders. One was called Jeff. ALSO PLAYEDMonster Hunter Wilds, Indiana Jones and the Great Circle One of the things I’d somehow overlooked with Avowed is that it is set in the same universe as Obsidian’s Pillars of Eternity series. I was aware of this information at least on some level, with an echo rattling around in the back of my skull, but I think I’d relegated it to my mind’s forgotten realms due to the fact that, really, Avowed’s marketing had not leaned into it in any major way. And I felt that lack of push pointed to a game that, while technically based in the same universe, would move away from it and its deep lore in order to chase a…

NEED TO KNOW RELEASEMay 2002 PUBLISHERBethesda Softworks DEVELOPERBethesda Game Studios LINK bethesda.net It’s strange experiencing a sense of urgency in a game I’ve played for hundreds of hours. But that’s what happens when I begin a new adventure in Morrowind: a Pavlovian response that makes me want to charge out of the character creation section and start exploring, even though I know I’ve seen it all before. Before I can even get to that, however, are the waves of nostalgia. Hearing the creak of timber ships and the reassuring calm of Azura’s voice rockets me back to 2002, and the overwhelming promise of freedom, the likes of which, back then, I’d never experienced. Watching the intro reminds me of the stories sparked from my previous experiences: vampire knights, noble…

It’s been a truth for ages: console manufacturers have been missing out by not releasing their games on PC. Microsoft long ago gave up on pure Xbox exclusives, and is even releasing games on PlayStation now. Sony, meanwhile, has tacitly acknowledged the fact for years, steadily releasing its PS4 and PS5 back catalogue onto Steam, and then last year, releasing Helldivers 2 on both PS5 and PC to enormous success. Now, former Sony executive Shuhei Yoshida has come out and said it explicitly: releasing its games on PC is a licence for Sony to print money. Speaking to Sacred Symbols+ about his time as head of PlayStation Studios, Yoshida explained he wanted to bring Sony games to PC far earlier than when it eventually happened, but it just wasn’t the…

What is a legacy? I’ve struggled with that question as I’ve tried to write about Virtua Fighter 5 REVO, the latest entry in the series that invented 3D fighting games before eventually fading from the public consciousness. REVO, a new version that hit Steam in late January, is a chance for one of the most beloved fighting games ever made to find a new worldwide audience. The first thing you have to understand about Virtua Fighter 5 is that it’s old. The original game released in Japanese arcades in 2006, a year after the Xbox 360 launched; Halo 3 and Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare were still a year away, Street Fighter IV was two years out and Apple’s App Store didn’t yet exist. “It’s hard to describe the…

NEED TO KNOW RELEASEAvailable now DEVELOPERBlizzard PUBLISHERActivision-Blizzard LINK overwatch.blizzard.com I hope I’m not the only one who saw Blizzard’s reveal of Stadium, Overwatch 2’s big new round-based mode played in third-person, and thought, “Get this nonsense outta here”. The FOV shift struck me as a change you’d come up with to make something seem more different than it actually is. Then I played some Stadium at Blizzard HQ. Overwatch 2 surely doesn’t need a third-person mode, but it does feel surprisingly good. I played some Soldier 76, Mercy and D.Va, and it’s safe to say not every hero’s behind-the-back camera works equally. Soldier 76 moved as naturally as his Marvel Rivals clone, The Punisher, and the higher FOV helped with my decision-making with Mercy. One time as Mercy, the third-person…

NEED TO KNOW RELEASETBA DEVELOPERWadjet Eye Games PUBLISHERWadjet Eye Games LINK s.team/a/1346360 This point-and-click time-travel adventure from the studio behind The Excavation of Hob’s Barrow has been sitting on Steam waiting for a release date since 2022. It still doesn’t have that release date, though the ‘coming soon’ banner gives some hope. It does, however, have a new demo. And that demo begins with some dialogue that’s sure to be foreshadowing in some way – two time travellers talking about someone getting ‘paradoxed out of existence’. The player character is Fia Quinn, who works for the ChronoZen agency and carries a currency unit that can print out money from any era. She has a multitool and a weapon too, in an inventory that descends from the top of the screen…

RELEASETBA DEVELOPERSilent Games PUBLISHERSecret Mode LINK s.team/a/1377700 An expedition to a distant planet uncovers a mysterious monolith in this action-RPG from an indie studio based in Newcastle Upon Tyne. But unlike in that hub of UK game development, the civilisation in Empyreal is a lost one, the planet unexplored but teeming with dangerous automata. The trailers and screens released so far show a game in which weapons can be absolutely massive, with huge glowing blades and enormous guns brought to bear on robotic opponents who tower over the player character while the ruins of an ancient civilisation collapse around them. Combat looks to be acrobatic, with plenty of flips and rolls to get you out of enemy clutches, with shield blocks and ranged attacks used to keep them at bay.…

For over a decade, Atomfall has been Rebellion CEO Jason Kingsley’s “dream game”, one he was dropping coy, detail-free allusions to in chats with PCG all the way back in 2018. Set in the heart of most barbaric Cumbria in the aftermath of a nuclear disaster, it feels like someone armed a Hovis advert, and it’s part of a proud lineage of pain-in-the-ass games that includes beloved classics like STALKER and Morrowind. No quest markers here, sir. You’ll find your own way or die in the attempt. Perhaps both. But Atomfall also feels like a statement about Rebellion itself: the position it’s obtained and the opportunities it’s opened up for itself after years and years of quietly putting out Sniper Elites, Zombie Armies and the odd Evil Genius. It’s a…

NEED TO KNOW WHAT IS IT?A game in which you fill in a family tree. Much more exciting than it sounds EXPECT TO PAY£16.75 DEVELOPERRobin Ward PUBLISHEREvil Trout REVIEWED ONIntel Core i7-10750H, 16GB RAM, Nvidia GeForce RTX 2060 MULTIPLAYERNo LINK store.steampowered.com/app/2754380/The_Roottrees_are_Dead/ They say detective work is primarily about sitting in front of a computer, and if so, have I got the desktop for you. Armed with Nut OS 1.1, the Cashew PC offers speedy net surfing and thorough database searching – all without the bloat of a modern Windows machine, or the sluggishness of a genuine late ’90s PC. It’s the main tool in your arsenal in The Roottrees are Dead, a game about filling in a massive, tangled family tree. In the wake of a recent tragedy, which has…

NEED TO KNOW WHAT IS IT?A turn-based road trip RPG set in the early 2000s EXPECT TO PAY£15 DEVELOPERYCJY Games PUBLISHERYCJY Games REVIEWED ONIntel Core i7 9700K, 16GB RAM, Nvidia GeForce RTX 4070 Ti MULTIPLAYERNo STEAM DECKPlayable LINK store.steampowered.com/app/2756920/Keep_Driving/ I grew up in a town with nearly no public transportation, so true freedom was only gained as a teenager when I got my first car. It was a hand-me-down from my grandfather, so it wasn’t cool, but it was the only real escape from the drudgery of school, the oppression (real or imagined) of parents, and the growing panic that adulthood, which meant a job, the military, or more damn school, was waiting at the end of the summer. Keep Driving is a turn-based road trip RPG that perfectly captures…

NEED TO KNOW EXPECT TO PAYFree DEVELOPERGooseStranger LINK bit.ly/babelexe The Tower of Babel has been reinterpreted as an enormous server tower in Babel.exe. Different communities have been brought together, with a program translating what they are saying to each other in real-time As a helpful person in a hat, it’s your job to fuel the big tower by collecting logs from the nearby woods, but also to help folks with their problems. Someone wants you to collect flowers, another some of those colourful berries. However, the woods are home to vicious snakes, spiders, frogs and, for some reason, big pits of spikes. Of course, you need instant death pits for a game to feel like a proper ZX Spectrum title. Babel.exe’s retro-style pixel art is my favourite thing about it.…

NEED TO KNOW EXPECT TO PAY£12.80 DEVELOPERIn house PUBLISHERGalactic Cafe Matthew couldn’t help but consider writing this review in the voice of the narrator from The Stanley Parable. Perhaps that would be an astute way of referencing the unique nature of the game. Or, perhaps, it would just be annoying. In the end, Matthew decided to write normally. The Stanley Parable is like a waking nightmare for someone like me: a man who has lost valuable moments of the only life I have deliberating which type of topping to have in bubble tea. So, during the first run, in a very Stanley way, I just do as the narrator tells me: a very meta way of playing a game about a man telling you to control a man who’s deciding…

There are two ways to look at hardware, really. One is to scan the horizon for consumer products that best suit our needs and aesthetic sensibilities, and then assemble them, swapping parts in and out as your tastes change and product specs move on. That consumer behaviour profile is the bedrock that the industry built itself on, but culturally, there’s perhaps an even deeper foundation: making it all yourself. The origins of PC modding, whether you’re talking about cases, peripherals or aesthetic adornments like modern RGB lighting strips, harks back to a time when computing hardware was made with productivity in mind. A time before there was a gaming sector, before marketers realised they could sell us dedicated gaming versions of everything we used to interact with games. It’s inherent…

KEY Budget build PC gaming is for everyone. Pick these parts if 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 MOTHERBOARD B660M Pro RSASRock £112 This is as cheap as we want to go while still offering room for expansion and upgrades down the line. PROCESSOR Core i5 13400FIntel £150 With ten cores, six of them the Performance kind, this Raptor Lake Core i5 is fantastic value and a great all-rounder. GRAPHICS CARD Radeon RX 7600AMD £250…