Innholdsfortegnelse for July 2025 i PC Gamer

1 month STELLAR BLADE RELEASE June, 2025 | DEVELOPER Shift Up Corporation The stunning, adrenaline-inducing action-RPG that was a smash hit as PlayStation 5 exclusive gets ported to PC. Expect insane combat and giant bosses. SYSTEM SHOCK 2: 25TH ANNIVERSARY RELEASE June 26, 2025 | DEVELOPER Nightdive Studios Following its well-received System Shock Remaster, Nightdive Studios returns with an updated and upgraded version of the series’ celebrated sequel. Shodan returns! TONY HAWK’S PRO SKATER 3 + 4 RELEASE July 11, 2025 | DEVELOPER Iron Galaxy Studios The now legendary skating sims return with more skaters, new skate parks, gnarlier tricks, fresh beats, cross-platform multiplayer and upgraded graphics. 2 months METAL GEAR SOLID DELTA: SNAKE EATER RELEASE August 28, 2025 | DEVELOPER Konami Snake returns in, arguably, his most memorable mission…

NEED TO KNOW RELEASEMay 22 DEVELOPERStudio Far Out Games PUBLISHERKonami LINK s.team/a/1880610 D eliver at All Costs is not the game you think it is. It actually opens almost like a Fallout, with an aspiring rocket scientist in a 1950s town getting up and starting his day with a letter from his landlord that threatens to evict him. He sticks it onto his fridge with the others… Rather than the town being blown to bits in a nuclear fireball, however, Winston goes out and gets a job as a delivery driver, taking his neighbour’s car and ploughing his way through traffic in one of the bounciest handling models outside of a Grand Theft Auto game. The environment is fully destructible, so when he sets off backwards out of his parking…

RELEASE2025 DEVELOPERHappy Broccoli Games PUBLISHERHappy Broccoli Games LINK s.team/a/2714620 The first Duck Detective game was a lot of fun, as your trench-coated gumshoe wrestled with a salami-based conspiracy while trying to navigate post-divorce life and deal with a serious bread habit. In The Ghost of Glamping, he’s being kicked out of his filthy apartment and is worrying about his ex not responding to his messages. “She might be in danger!” growls the hard-boiled voiceover, and you’re immediately set to work making deducktions about why this might be. To the level of stalking, you might say, though frankly she sounds exactly as stuck up as you’d expect a talking swan to be. Eugene now lives in a junk-filled flat with his sidekick Freddy, who likes to spring surprise trips on him…

YOU PLAY AS A YOUNG WITCH AIMING TO BE AN APPRENTICE, WHO GETS BOOTED OFF A MOUNTAIN Mika and The Witch’s Mountain RELEASED Jan 22, 2025 DEVELOPER Chibig, Nukefist This way up 1 Delivering packages isn’t a glamorous job, but it is an essential one, helping thousands of people get their much needed equipment, knickknacks and, uh, fish bowls, in a timely fashion. Luckily for Mika she gets to do it on a broom rather than a van. You play as a young witch aiming to be an apprentice, who gets booted off a mountain and told to work her way back up it on her own two feet. To do that she’ll need to get a job and earn enough to fix and upgrade her broom. Handily the post…

NEED TO KNOW WHAT IS IT?A self-appointed Command & Conquer successor with modern production values and a few mechanical tweaks EXPECT TO PAY£35 DEVELOPERSlipgate Ironworks PUBLISHER3D Realms, Knights Peak REVIEWED ONAMD Ryzen 5 3600, 32 GB RAM, Nvidia GeForce 2080 Super MULTIPLAYERYes LINK tempestrising.com Calling Tempest Rising a spiritual successor to Command & Conquer would undersell just how fiercely this game wants to be a part of the Westwood dynasty. From the thinly veiled faction analogues to the thundering synth-metal soundtrack, right down to the mission interludes in which your faction’s influence bleeds through the countries of Europe on the campaign map, Slipgate Ironworks’ mimicry of Westwood’s 1995 RTS is utterly brazen. The world has become afflicted by a strange new growth Yet Tempest Rising does more than sneak into…

NEED TO KNOW WHAT IS IT? Detective game where you have to solve and cover up the crime EXPECT TO PAY £13 DEVELOPER Inkle PUBLISHER Inkle REVIEWED ON Intel Core i5 12500H, 16GB RAM, Nvidia GeForce RTX 4060 MULTIPLAYER No STEAM DECK Yes LINK store.steampowered.com/app/2963890/ Expelled/a As a horrible person, I was delighted when I found out we were getting another Overboard game. Overboard was a delightfully nasty reverse-murder mystery, a timeloop adventure in which each run began with you tossing your screaming husband off a cruise ship. You then had to cover up your crime by framing others, outsmarting a Poirot-wannabe, sleeping your way to success, or even killing the entire crew. I adored it. Learn the benefits of lobbing a hockey stick out a window Expelled takes…

NEED TO KNOW WHAT IS IT? A Southern Gothic action-adventure inspired by Deep South folklore, superstitions and history EXPECT TO PAY £35 DEVELOPER Compulsion Games PUBLISHER Xbox Game Studios REVIEWED ON AMD Ryzen 7 9800X3D, 64GB RAM, Nvidia GeForce RTX 4080 MULTIPLAYER No LINK compulsiongames.com Not long into playing South of Midnight, I had to stop and take a moment. Not because I’d taken offence to its portrayals of the American South – that’s something you learn to brace for growing up in Mississippi – but the opposite. The Southern Gothic action-adventure had me feeling woefully sentimental over its attention to the smallest details, and its compassionate protagonist, Hazel Flood, is the perfect embodiment of Deep South born and raised. Share the pain, then stitch whatever remains back together…

NEED TO KNOW EXPECT TO PAY Free DEVELOPER Devin P. Quinn LINK bit.ly/DullAcres I started Dull Acres wondering which way to go, trying to keep track of where I had been, and where I had not. That’s very much not the point of this game about wandering around a forest, where you should just follow your feet to see where they take you. Dull Acres is essentially a series of encounters, as the little protagonist trudges from screen to screen and finds similar stick-people in various dire, strange or funny situations. I happened upon a concert, swapped places with a peculiar tree and met some unlucky people that were dragged into the trees by some sort of monster. I found people philosophising about their fates, I encountered beautiful things…

NEED TO KNOW EXPECT TO PAY £6 DEVELOPERadamgryu PUBLISHERadamgryu There are loads of actions in games that we compulsively complete without even noticing. Reloading guns after firing one round. Checking to see if curtains are swooshy. And climbing literally anything, just because it’s there. A Short Hike is like the ultimate final form of the desire to scamper up every surface. It’s also very much about getting back down again. In most cases this involves sliding helplessly down slopes like a toddler going the wrong way up a damp slide. I also found myself stumbling off the edge of the game’s cosy precipices, delightfully unbothered about losing the progress I’d made. And this is the loveliest thing about A Short Hike: even though it reinvents Breath of the Wild’s energy-based…

A young(er) Bill Gates said, “640K ought to be enough for anybody,” about the IBM PC’s memory back in 1981 while onstage at a computer conference. Or at least, that’s how the story goes. Firstly, it’s impossible to imagine the Microsoft cofounder as truly young. Some people seem to be born aged about 48, and Gates is among them. Secondly, nobody seems to remember precisely which computer conference this took place at, or the precise quote. In fact Gates himself now claims he never said it. But let’s not let the truth get in the way of a good maxim, and that’s how the pace of change quickly makes boasting about specs sound foolish. 640KB of information, as we know now, was not enough for anybody. Throughout the 1980s and…

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 RS ASRock £112 This is as cheap as we want to go while still offering room for expansion and upgrades down the line. PROCESSOR Core i5 13400F Intel £140 Intels’ budget chip is still fantastic value and a solid all-rounder GRAPHICS CARD Radeon RX 7600 AMD £300 AMD delivers what we need for a…

NEED TO KNOW RELEASE February 27, 2025 PUBLISHER Capcom DEVELOPER Capcom LINK monsterhunter.com Monster Hunter Wilds hasn’t had the warmest reception on PC. Sure, it’s sold millions of copies and it’s just about the best game you’ll find about hitting dinosaurs with giant hammers, but there have been plenty of technical problems along the way. Visit its Steam page and you’ll see Capcom’s open-world action game hasn’t pulled out of its reviews nosedive, with a score of ‘Mixed’ and about a 65% approval rating since its launch in February. Unfortunately modders can’t fix everything, but they’re always willing to give it their best shot, aren’t they? Dozens of mods popped up the same day Monster Hunter Wilds launched, and that was just the beginning as expert enthusiasts began creating…

NEED TO KNOW RELEASETBA DEVELOPERMisterial Games PUBLISHERFulqrum Publishing LINK misterial.com C an a work of cosmic horror still be successful if there’s no unknowns left to fear? First-person survival horror romp Stygian: Outer Gods is superficially an impressive production for a smaller studio, but after playing through the current Early Access version, I feel like I’ve seen it all done before, and better elsewhere. Set in a universe that can best be summarised as ‘all of Lovecraft’s stories put in a blender set to puree’, Outer Gods casts players as a former soldier haunted by spooky dreams and setting off on an expedition to find out why a small coastal village has gone silent. The twist: it’s not fishmen! It’s witches. But they might as well just be zombies, given…

NEED TO KNOW RELEASETBA DEVELOPERThe Game Bakers PUBLISHERThe Game Bakers LINK s.team/a/1588550 I ’ve never climbed a mountain, but having played Cairn I now feel like I have, even more so than after Jusant or The Climb. Cairn’s control system is brilliant, and perfectly judged, while its cel-shaded graphics capture the majesty of the mountains while looking a little like a Zelda game, too. Cairn doesn’t just point you at a rock and let you run at it while holding a button, a la Assassin’s Creed. Instead, it gives you control over individual limbs – automatically selected from the traditional four, though there is a mode in which you make the choice yourself – and you position the foot or hand on the end on an appropriate handheld. The UI…

RELEASE2025 DEVELOPERBlast Furnace Games PUBLISHERBlast Furnace Games LINK s.team/a/3106770 Slapstick humour is sadly underused in PC gaming, but A Gentleman’s Dispute brings the art of hoofing your opponent over a house roaring back. Alternatively, whack them with a baseball bat and get them eaten by a shark. There’s something decidedly ungentlemanly about A Gentleman’s Dispute, though the luxurious Victorian moustaches of the participants in this battle royale add some class.…

NEED TO KNOW WHAT IS IT?A first-person puzzle strategy adventure set in a mysterious, shifting mansion EXPECT TO PAY£25 DEVELOPERDogubomb PUBLISHERRaw Fury REVIEWED ONIntel Core i7 9700K, 16GB RAM, Nvidia GeForce RTX 4070 MULTIPLAYERNo STEAM DECKPlayable LINK blueprincegame.com I love Blue Prince so much I’m going to spend this entire review telling you as little about it as possible. Unravelling its many mysteries and solving its multitude of puzzles – several of which I’m still working on even after finishing the game – is best done if you go in with nearly no information. Don’t watch videos. Don’t Google solutions. Don’t even finish reading this review. Just go play it and you’ll discover one of the best puzzle games in years. Still reading? Fine. In this first-person strategy roguelike puzzler,…

NEED TO KNOW WHAT IS IT? A French take on the JRPG with stunning visuals and a sombre story EXPECT TO PAY £50 DEVELOPER Sandfall Interactive PUBLISHER Kepler Interactive REVIEWED ON Intel Core i7-12700F, 16 GB RAM, Nvidia GeForce RTX 3060 Ti MULTIPLAYER No LINK steampowered.com/app/1903340/ Clair_Obscur_ Expedition_33 You know how comedy geniuses and chronic dieters will say their favourite brand of chips is ‘dangerous’, because once you rip open the bag it’s a swift trip to the bottom? That’s sort of me with JRPGs; these games demand you live in them for a while, slowly fostering a bunch of level one nobodies into god-killing besties, and I’m susceptible enough to that demand I go into JRPGs prepared to get lost in them, love them and succumb to them. A…

NEED TO KNOW WHAT IS IT? The remastered sequel to a legendary survival-horror adventure game EXPECT TO PAY £50 DEVELOPER Naughty Dog, Nixxes Software, Iron Galaxy Studios PUBLISHER PlayStation Publishing REVIEWED ON Intel Core i7-12700F, 16 GB RAM, Nvidia GeForce RTX 3060 Ti STEAM DECK Verified LINK naughtydog.com If you were around for the release of The Last of Us, you’ll remember that it felt like a watershed moment for the medium. There had been plenty of good videogame stories before, but few with such good performance capture as to draw comparisons with film and prestige television. The Last of Us Part 2 came out in a different time, seven years after the first game sent its waves through the industry. The meat of it is getting wheeled from…

NEED TO KNOW EXPECT TO PAY Free DEVELOPERkulu LINK bit.ly/UntimeGame Bernard’s Watch this is not. Instead, a magical pocketwatch that can control time has landed into the wrong hands – yours. Will you use it for good or… OK, it’s evil. You’ll use it for evil. Without spoiling too much, you have found a new, dark use for the power of time travel. After an event from your past takes you out of your hometown and to an unfamiliar city, you have to go about your daily business, walking to your job at a local bookshop and cleaning it up while your boss has a go at you for being late. A run-in with a mysterious character brings the pocketwatch into your possession, although it’s a while before the…

NEED TO KNOW EXPECT TO PAY £16.75 DEVELOPER Expansive Worlds PUBLISHER Avalanche Studios The themes this month could be birds, since they feature quite prominently in all three games, but it’s actually the great outdoors. Nature. The outside-o-rama. And nothing expresses man’s fragile interplay with the natural world than purchasing the most powerful rifle money can buy and shooting deer up their harmless bumholes. It’s perhaps a weird thing to say about a game that it’s exclusively about all the different and exciting ways to murder wildlife, but my favourite bits of Call of the Wild often happen outside of the actual killing. And I say this as a country bumpkin who fired his first shotgun when he was four years old. I love the cautious, careful tracking of animals,…

Summertime’s a conflicting proposition for the individual whose passions generally take place in an RGB-lit chamber where the soft whirr of case exhaust fans is a constant. On one hand, all that vitamin D’s going spare outside. You could be soaking it up for free and decalcifying your winter brain, daring to imagine a life beyond pressing the boost button on the central heating and letting the next episode of Succession autoplay while you warm your hands on a mug of Twinings English Breakfast. WHEN WAS THE LAST TIME YOU TOOK A OF CAN OF COMPRESSED AIR TO YOUR PC? On the other: the screen glare. The suffocating heat of sitting near a box full of red-hot componentry. The guilt of pulling the curtains and ignoring nature just beyond them…

TED LITCHFIELD THIS MONTH Became the finest gourmet DJ in Off-Peak City. ALSO PLAYED Parking Garage Rally Circuit, Baldur’s Gate For a long time, I knew of Betrayal at Club Low by reputation alone: a game ‘like Disco Elysium’ with exploration, skill checks, dice, all that jazz. Betrayal at Club Low, I apologise. I wasn’t really familiar with your game. I made the mistake of checking out the demo for developer Cosmo D’s upcoming game, Moves of the Diamond Hand, first. This is an artist who’s only getting better at their craft, and the new game has the makings of an indie classic. Even with its similarities to Disco Elysium, it distinguishes itself mechanically. The knockout blow is Cosmo D’s surreal, anarchic sensibility. Betrayal and Diamond Hand both feel like…

EMMA WITHINGTON THIS MONTH Snapped shots of men in iridescent pants ALSO PLAYED Split Fiction, Cryptmaster Ex-Yakuza Goro Majima and I are a perfect match, he has amnesia and I’m almost entirely blind to the rest of the Yakuza (Like a Dragon) series. But, if you’re open to whatever Like a Dragon: Pirate Yakuza in Hawaii throws at you, you’re in for a wild ride. After more than 30 hours I can’t wipe this maniacal grin off my face. It hurts, I have no idea what’s happening, but I’m having the time of my life. I’m not too proud to admit I miss the puerile simplicity of Saints Row before its more recent reboot – which wasn’t as awful as it was broken, but had absolutely lost its magic; showing…

Fan-made remakes of popular games are a risky thing. You never know when you’re going to sink years of your life into a passion project, only to eat a cease and desist letter from an expensive lawyer representing a faceless corporate overlord that forces you to either change it up or shut it down entirely. That seemed like a real risk for Skyblivion, the ambitious, long-running effort to recreate Oblivion in the Skyrim engine, especially after it became clear that Bethesda was working on its own official Oblivion remaster. IT’D BE NICE TO SEE MORE OF THIS SORT OF THING IN THE FUTURE Happily, in this case the outcome was very different: Instead of forcing an end to Skyblivion to protect its commercial interests, Bethesda sent a key for Oblivion…

Once upon a time I happily handed over $170 for Ys: The Oath in Felghana for my trusty Windows XP machine. It certainly felt like a lot, but I didn’t regret my purchase. That was just what a rare, obscure, never-to-be-translated (as we believed at the time) Japanese PC exclusive cost back then – I either paid up or missed out. In the distant past of 2005 the entirety of Falcom’s PC catalogue was little more than impenetrable curiosities of next to no interest to most people, only available via tiny boutique websites or by emailing a guy who knew a guy. Their embossed, oversized boxes looked special, and by extension they made me feel special too – proof I’d put in the time, money, and effort. Thanks to Steam…

NEED TO KNOW RELEASEMay 14, 2025 DEVELOPERTicking Clock Games PUBLISHERTicking Clock Games LINK s.team/a/3367690 T here’s more than a hint of Fallen London about the situation your ship captain finds himself in in Void Sails. Rather than navigating the Sunless Sea, however, you’re plying your trade between floating islands, your solar-powered ship capable of a few tricks to help you on your way. The demo begins with an origin story. The captain summoned to his ship by the mysterious Man in Yellow is the scholarly sort, prepared for his adventures by a lifetime spent with books, and the owner of an enchanted pair of gloves. He’s hoping to track down his missing father, but is immediately accosted by the ship’s first mate, a chatty sort, and is required to show…

Around 20 years ago, CD Projekt founders Marcin Iwiński and Michał Kiciński flew to meet the men they hoped to dethrone – the ‘BioWare doctors’ Ray Muzyka and Greg Zeschuk. Accompanying them was Adam Badowski, today the joint-CEO of CD Projekt RED, who had the task of wowing the then-undisputed kings of RPG-making with a demo for The Witcher that the CDP leadership had tucked under its arm. THE WITCHER 2 MARKED THE DEBUT OF THE STUDIO’S OWN REDENGINE “This demo wasn’t great,” recalls Badowski in 2025, but back then it didn’t matter in the slightest. CD Projekt had the bulletproof confidence of youth on its side. “Ray and Greg, they asked the question, ‘So, what do you want to achieve?’” Well, wasn’t the answer obvious? “We would like to…

NEED TO KNOW WHAT IS IT?The Oblivion you’ve always known and modded with a few tweaks and a fresh coat of polygons on top EXPECT TO PAY£50 DEVELOPERBethesda Game Studios, Virtuos PUBLISHERBethesda Softworks REVIEWED ONIntel Core i9-13900HX, 32GB RAM, Nvidia GeForce RTX 4090 MULTIPLAYERNo LINK bethesda.net In 2006 Final Fantasy XII was a brand new PlayStation 2 game, the Xbox 360’s hard drive was at least in spirit still an optional extra, and horse armour DLC was the biggest corporate issue surrounding Oblivion’s launch. I didn’t play the game back then because I thought I didn’t need to – I had Morrowind, a smug sense of superiority, and no use for a sequel. I might have been wrong about that. Although Oblivion’s tutorial-laden intro, starring the most obviously doomed MacGuffin-carrying…

NEED TO KNOW WHAT IS IT? A time-hopping adventure game set in NYC EXPECT TO PAY £17 DEVELOPER Wadjet Eye Games PUBLISHER Wadjet Eye Games REVIEWED ON Intel Core i9-13900k, 32GB RAM, Nvidia GeForce RTX 4090 MULTIPLAYER No LINK wadjeteyegames.com Time travel is perhaps the most deliciously compelling of all the sci-fi conceits because it taps into something so incredibly human and primal that we’re all burdened with: regret. By turning back the clock, we can fix all of our mistakes. A better version of our lives is just one time jump away – at least in Wadjet Eye’s brilliant new adventure game, Old Skies. Old Skies slowly grows into a cohesive story of love, loss and regret Not for Fia Quinn, though. A ChronoZen agent in 2060s New…

NEED TO KNOW WHAT IS IT? A game where you step inside photographs to solve puzzles EXPECT TO PAY Free DEVELOPER Tsunscreen PUBLISHER Tsunscreen REVIEWED ON Intel Core i7-10750H, 16GB RAM, Nvidia GeForce RTX 2060 MULTIPLAYER No LINK bit.ly/EphemeralFrame Growing up watching Narnia has made me look at paintings in a different way: as potential portals to other worlds, if you happen to catch them on a good day. Ephemeral Frame has, remarkably, captured that feeling, by turning portal fantasy into a clever puzzle mechanic. Just click on a photo, as you explore these worlds in first-person, and you will instantly be transported to the world inside the frame. The best puzzle games are the ones that emerge from thinking deeply The game starts off in a series of…

NEED TO KNOW WHAT IS IT? If The Forest was an Alexander Payne film EXPECT TO PAY £16 DEVELOPER Campo Santo PUBLISHER Panic, Campo Santo REVIEWED ON Intel Core i7-7700, 16 GB RAM, Nvidia GeForce GTX 1070 MULTIPLAYER No LINK store.steampowered.com/app/383870/Firewatch Never underestimate the power of a glum intro. It’s why everyone remembers the brutal opening of Pixar’s Up, but not the stupid monster parrot. And it’s the reason that Firewatch is so immediately effective. By the time the game actually begins, you’ve made a lifetime’s worth of decisions and you can feel time slipping through your fingers like the ashes of a loved one spilling from a shattered urn. I find myself wanting to ask Delilah about everything I stumble across It immediately puts me on the defensive.…

FROM TINY 4K WONDERS TO SOLID 1080P DRIVERS, WE’VE TESTED MANY A WEBCAM Webcams are one of those devices I always forget to think about when setting up a gaming rig. Being the best way of showing your face to friends (outside of leaving the house), it’s pretty rare for your monitor to come with a little camera, and even then, I’d opt for something dedicated most of the time anyway. They’re important little devices in many a gamer’s setup but can’t be so expensive that most everyday users would be better off with a dedicated camera and tripod instead. From tiny 4K wonders to solid 1080p drivers, we’ve tested many a webcam at PC Gamer. Striking the balance between ‘it shows an image, I suppose’ and ‘this could be…

DANIELLA LUCAS THIS MONTH Skipped the story and enjoyed the sights ALSO PLAYED Final Fantasy XIV, Atelier Yumia Like many people I really want to go on holiday to Japan to enjoy nerdy pursuits in Tokyo and take in some sights in Kyoto. I last went more than eight years ago, but with the state and cost of everything these days it’s unlikely I’ll get the chance to go back anytime soon. Luckily Assassin’s Creed Shadows, with its gorgeous take on feudal Japan and attention to detail, is here to help me scratch that travelling itch. Heroes Naoe and Yasuke might be out for revenge, but I just want to be a tourist. Kyoto is packed with temples both in the game and real life, so I set out on…