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46 Articles

“INZOI LOOKS LIKE IT IS SET TO STEAL THE SIMS’ LIFE SIM CROWN” ROBERT JONES Twitter @rnicholasj This month Discovered that PC Gamer Towers is actually run by a big white fluffy cat called Peeceecat. Was tasked with bringing the boss a meowtini. Shaken, not purred, of course. There’s no doubting that, 25 years after The Sims first graced monitors around the world, it has been the life sim series of choice for millions of PC gamers. Its impact on the genre and PC gaming in general should be celebrated, as few other series have managed to deliver so much fun and escapism for players so consistently. However, the reign of any king eventually comes to an end, and Krafton’s stunning new life sim game, inZOI, looks like it is…

A GHOST OF ITSELF

Bloomberg reports that, following EA’s layoffs and restructuring at BioWare, the studio now has fewer than 100 employees, down from more than 200 during the development of Dragon Age: The Veilguard. Meanwhile, at its peak, BioWare consisted of three studios and, conservatively, over 400 employees. Interestingly, Bloomberg’s sources say that the plan to “loan” BioWare developers to other EA studios while the next Mass Effect was in pre-production was put in place shortly after Veilguard launched, but before its sales failure came to light. Solid numbers are hard to come by, but even conservatively, I think we can estimate that peak BioWare was around 400-500 employees strong for much of the last decade, based on reporting from across that period. Even with BioWare’s reported internal struggles with a slapdash crunch…

A GHOST OF ITSELF

HIGHS Could and should GOG has resurrected Dini Crisis 1 and 2. Under the sea Retro YouTuber Clint Basinger built 25-year dynasty of aquarium screensavers just because he hated the one in Windows 95. Artificial Stupidity Scalping bots are hoovering up RTX 5090s on eBay, so some sellers are just listing framed pictures gaming, of the GPU for $1,000s to trick them. Suffering Succotash MultiVersus’ game director said of issues: “When there are threats to harm it’s crossing the line.” Flying solo The drone operator who damaged an LA firefighting plane was Peter Akemann, who co-founded Treyarch. Brass balls OpenAI is complaining about DeepSeek scraping its data. The same data it’s been scraping from everyone else. LOWS…

The PC gaming icon that is Half-Life 2 turned 20 last November, and Valve pulled out all the stops to celebrate: a major new update, a commentary track and a documentary absolutely crammed with digressions about the challenge the studio set itself. And one of them was lighting. The development of Half-Life 2 was rooted in what multiple staff describe as “the tech wishlist,” which would take six years to fully realize and was absolutely foundational to what Valve wanted to achieve with the game. “[It] was a main feature that the light felt very, very realistic and intuitive because of the Source engine and the work, the collaboration between artists and engineers,” says Half-Life 2’s lead artist Viktor Antonov, before introducing our hero. “Ken Birdwell, he was a fan…

KUNITSU-GAMI: PATH OF THE GODDESS

Kunitsu-Gami: Path of the Goddess was one of 2024’s best but, ultimately, underrated games, with its maker Capcom left surprised by its low sales compared to its high quality and breakthrough innovations, the latter for which the game was nominated at the Game Awards 2024 for Best Sim/Strategy Game. But, in good news for PC gamers around the world, Kunitsu-Gami: Path of the Goddess is now playable on PC Game Pass, and if you haven’t yet given this little gem some attention, then I feel now is the time, as this is a very high-quality Japanese game that all gamers should play at least once in their life. The game, which is produced by Capcom’s Biohazard/Resident Evil studio and released on the Resident Evil engine, is about a Shintoist sorceress…

KUNITSU-GAMI: PATH OF THE GODDESS

NINJA GAIDEN 2 BLACK

Soon after the legendary game designer Tomonobu Itagaki left Tecmo in 2008, Team Ninja gave birth to what is considered the peak of this evergreen IP. Now, Ninja Gaiden 2 Black is a remake of that sequel to the Ninja Gaiden series first released in 2008 but back with a bang. Following its initial release, the game was then ported to Sony’s PlayStation 3 a year later, but rebranded as Ninja Gaiden Sigma 2 and also remixed some both technically, such as in the graphics department, where polygon rates were reduced, but also in terms of gameplay, with new characters and missions added, blood color changed, and various other smaller tweaks made. Now, 15 years later, PC gamers get to finally enjoy the best of both worlds, with Ninja Gaiden 2 Black…

NINJA GAIDEN 2 BLACK

SUIKODEN I & II HD REMASTER

Historically, Suikoden was Konami’s answer to Square’s Final Fantasy, and now, after a long wait of thirty years, the original two entries in this storied JRPG series will be finally playable on PC and in English, too. This is because Konami is currently reviving all of its IPs and, as I’ve reported on previously, is looking keenly at the PC as an area of focus and growth. These HD remasters are not radically changed from the originals, remaining very faithful to the traditional ’90s JRPG style. So there’s no spoken dialog, no revolution in the combat system and no jump to 3D polygons. The art style remains in the pixel-art style of the original releases, but it is now accompanied by new effect animations, higher-quality environmental sound effects and upgraded…

SUIKODEN I & II HD REMASTER

LIKE A DRAGON: PIRATE YAKUZA IN HAWAII

After the departure of Toshihiro Nagoshi (Daytona USA, Scud Race, Virtua Stiker), it seems like the Ryu Ga Gotoku Studio—led now by Masayoshi Yokoyama—may be running a little short of ideas. Case in point, the new game in the long-running Yakuza saga will be set in a world of pirates, with the setting of such piratical escapades being the Honolulu game world already seen in Like a Dragon: Infinite Wealth. However, this time out, the protagonist is Goro Majima, the mad dog character of the Yakuza series. shorturl.at/1ABvy…

LIKE A DRAGON: PIRATE YAKUZA IN HAWAII

DOOM: THE DARK AGES

There are two key things to take away from Doom: The Dark Ages’ showing at the recent Xbox Developer Direct. The first: a release date. id Software’s prequel to 2016’s Doom revival will be with us in just a few months, on May 15. The second: a mission statement. “In Doom Eternal, you felt like a fighter jet. In Doom: The Dark Ages, you’ll be an iron tank,” says game director Hugo Martin. Since the 2016 reboot of Doom, players have been challenged to jump around arenas in a constant acrobatic showcase—always moving, often jumping, always cycling through a tool suite designed to replenish resources and keep you in the fight, constantly on the attack. In Doom Eternal this combat loop was taken to the extreme. For some this was…

DOOM: THE DARK AGES

ELDEN RING NIGHTREIGN

Elden Ring Nightreign clicked the moment I hit level 2. My squad had just dropped into the game’s remixed version of Limgrave. I was a bird man named Guardian, and all I had to know about Guardian is he’s really good at blocking. We dropped 100 feet onto a camp of soldiers, sliced them up in seconds, and bee-lined toward a site of grace to level up. The From Software leveling experience is one reason why I like Souls games, but don’t love them. Agonizing over where to dump points into stats to make meters slightly longer isn’t my idea of satisfying progression, so when I touched a site of grace in Nightreign and watched my stats automatically increase according to my character’s specialties, I thought, “This rules, and it’s…

ELDEN RING NIGHTREIGN

ASSASSIN’S CREED SHADOWS

OK Ubisoft, I’m actually somewhat excited for Assassin’s Creed Shadows. I honestly did not see that coming. When Shadows was announced, I was prepared to give it a big ol’ shrug. Back then it was billed as the next “RPG” Assassin’s Creed in the vein of Odyssey or Valhalla, which sounded like a regression from Mirage. But since then, Ubi has been saying all the right things about Shadows to get a jaded, stealth-loving “we peaked with Ezio” fan to wonder: are we back? One of the protagonists, Naoe, is a shinobi with a hidden blade (cool). Its open-world Japan is smaller than Valhalla, but dense with cities and rooftops (OK, good stuff). There’s a dynamic lighting system and a Splinter Cell-like visibility meter (yes, yes, keep talking). You can…

ASSASSIN’S CREED SHADOWS

As an xennial, the phrase ‘boomer shooter’ is becoming almost offensive. This is not the kind of game my mom would have liked. It’s the kind of game I like. With guns, graves and godlike speed on offer, it’s likely to be the kind of game you like too. The speed at which your character moves is remarkable, as if he’s on ice skates and has been given a great big push across some sort of low-friction surface. Later in the game spring-heeled boots are promised, which will increase his speed even further. I was playing it in 4K on an RTX4080 Super with vsync well and truly switched on, and the absolute smoothness of the game was a joy. It’s a Unity production with some lower-poly, ’90s style character…

UNNATURAL WORLDS

Spinning the camera around a strange dumbbell-shaped world, more of an accretion of shapes than something that has achieved hydrostatic equilibrium, you can’t help but marvel. Scientists wouldn’t call this thing a planet, yet it has life on its surface, building structures and driving trucks, and it’s spoiling for a fight. The unnatural worlds of Unnatural Worlds are 3D objects with complex surfaces. Rather than the hex-pocked flat plains of many RTS games, here you’ve got uneven shapes floating in space. The graphics are simple, but there’s enough to tell you what’s going on, and when enemy units come crusading over a curve that blocks your view, blasting away at your buildings with weapons that leave dotted lines rather than plasma trails, things can get intense. The game is designed…

UNNATURAL WORLDS

Eliss Infinity was not a big PC gaming success, mainly because it was only released on mobile platforms back in 2014. Its mix of color-based puzzles and multi-touch controls looks like it might fit the new generation of portable gaming PCs, but Faraway, from the same developer, is a bit more traditional. It’s certainly a minimal experience, as you control a shooting star that travels through the universe, attempting to create constellations as it passes through solar systems and empty expanses. Constantly in danger of vanishing in a puff of photons, the star must constantly pass close to others of its kind to harvest energy, and its quest to travel, to see what the infinite universe has to offer, leads to the point of light looping and doubling back on itself…

Marine. Sci-fi base. Portals. Demons. Shotgun. Stop me if you’ve heard this one before. Slipgate even goes as far as to show its player character in a green suit of armor, and it’s a classic retro shooter that’s not afraid to show its influences. One of its melee weapons is even a crowbar. There’s no id Tech or GoldSrc on show here, however. The game is made in the 15-year-old FPS Creator engine, which gives it a fully 3D mouselook that’s reminiscent of Quake or Half-Life. It feels more modern than either, as the lighting and texturing is like a brighter Doom 3 in feel (and there’s even a flashlight for the darker places), though some of the level geometry is blocky and just as likely to funnel you down…

This 2D, singleplayer, turn-based indie JRPG has a distinctive look, but it’s the way the game’s visuals tie into the way that it plays that’s the most interesting thing about it. The game’s protagonist is Alma, a photojournalist who finds something odd has happened to her camera. Instead of moaning about it online then taking it to be repaired, she decides to work with its newly discovered prism powers that allow her to shift perspectives and redirect attacks while on the battlefield. Her fisheye lens can send an attack around the back of a pack of enemies, potentially striking them in a weak spot, while a shattered lens (which sounds like an insurance claim to me) splits her attacks into multiple strikes, hitting multiple bad guys at once. Ostensibly set…

Running a tea shop in a magical forest sounds like one of the very best things to do in a videogame, and this cozy narrative title from devs who worked on games such as The Stanley Parable and BioShock sees you learning the stories of the travelers who pass through your shop, before brewing a tea that’s perfect for them using what’s described as an ‘unusual contraption’. Intriguing. RELEASE March 11 DEVELOPER Ivy Road PUBLISHER Annapurna Interactive LINK s.team/a/1299460…

As far as Sims competitors go, inZOI is doing something few others are managing to achieve: actually release. Krafton’s take on the life simulator genre is the closest we’ve come to anything on the size and scope of EA’s series, and the first game that could very well give The Sims a run for its money. Despite that, inZOI director Hyungjun ‘Kjun’ Kim doesn’t view his game as competition. “We see inZOI not as a competitor to The Sims, but rather as another option that fans of this genre can enjoy,” he tells me. “We have great respect for the legacy The Sims has built over the years, since we know that reaching that much depth in such a short period of time is no easy task.” It’s a noble…

LOVE’S LABORS LIBRARY PART TWO

Obsidian calmly Osifts through books in her new library, while Warren and Karlach unceremoniously chuck corpses out onto the street in broad daylight and Gale tries to use the Create Water spell to remove the bloodstains. In fairness, the corpses had no business being there and were merely an obstruction. How did I get here? Well, dear reader, we last saw Obsidian and Warren in the Blighted Village (and in issue 394)—unaware of the corpse-strewn future ahead of them. Though, they probably should have expected it, all things considered. Obsidian’s skills escalated to a terrifying degree in her pursuit for books, her sharpened silver tongue slicing through the Shadow-Cursed Lands. She talked every major enemy to death, barring Balthazar, Ketheric Thorm, and the legendary Myrkul. Spider lad and Absolute fanatic…

LOVE’S LABORS LIBRARY PART TWO

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THE BEST GAME DESIGN PROGRAMS RANKED BY THE PRINCETON REVIEW 2025

Charting a path for your education isn’t as easy as videogames make it out to be. As much as we’d love to become masters of our crafts by placing points into a skill tree or reading the right book cover to cover, it actually calls for a skill even more impressive than acrobatics or speech: picking the right university for your needs. If you’re interested in a career in game design, or curious about where you could fit in on a team of talented artists, here’s your first stop. Every year, the Princeton Review ranks the 50 best undergraduate and 25 best graduate programs for video game design, rated through a set of criteria from graduate employment percentage to notable alumni and faculty quality. These are the best of the…

THE BEST GAME DESIGN PROGRAMS RANKED BY THE PRINCETON REVIEW 2025

THE TOP 50 GAME DESIGN UNDERGRADUATE PROGRAMS

1 UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA 2024 Grads Hired: 61% 2024 Grads Mean Salary: $115,000 Faculty: TreaAndrea Russworm (Author, “Gaming Representation”), Mark Bolas (Founder, Fakespace Labs) Graduates: Jenova Chen (Thatgamecompany), Brent Strong (Disney) 2 NEW YORK UNIVERSITY 2024 Grads Hired: 24% 2024 Grads Mean Salary: $76,400 Faculty: Eric Zimmerman (Gamelab), Dr. Mitu Khandaker (Spirit AI) Graduates: Jenny Jiao-Hsia (IGF), Carol Mertz (Exploding Kittens) 3 CLARK UNIVERSITY 2024 Grads Hired: 65% 2024 Grads Mean Salary: $69,000 Faculty: Ezra Cove (Lord of the Rings Online, Turbine), Scott Niemi Graduates: Gary Goldberg (Fable Vision Studios), Stanley Pierre-Louis (ESA) 4 UNIVERSITY OF UTAH 2024 Grads Hired: 52% 2024 Grads Mean Salary: $72,304 Faculty: Michael Young PhD, Jose Zagal PhD (Game Studies) Graduates: Doug Bowser (COO of Nintendo), Nolan Bushnell (Founder of Atari) 5. UNIVERSITY OF…

THE TOP 50 GAME DESIGN UNDERGRADUATE PROGRAMS

Setting the tone and telling stories with level design

At the core of a level designer’s job is to create challenges for players that feel like a natural escalation of what’s come before. The level team often has the difficult (but rewarding) task of teaching players about new mechanics or conveying information without a heavy-handed tutorial, be it a weapon, a way forward, or a puzzle solution hidden in plain sight. In The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom. Nintendo slowly introduced the ability to glue objects together with a series of environmental puzzles: In one, planks of wood and a fan are placed on the bank of a river, suggesting they could build a raft to cross it. In another, a metal rail connects to floating islands. Most players craft a makeshift ski lift with a nearby…

Setting the tone and telling stories with level design

Competitive communication

EXAMPLE: In 2019. Respawn Entertainment emerged with its battle royale FPS Apex Legends and tackled the genre’s communication problems head-on. Next to its novel respawn mechanic, one of the most distinctive features of Apex Legends was its dynamic ping, a button that creates an on-screen marker wherever you’re pointing. The genius of Apex Legends’ ping, and what set it apart from shooters that’d used simpler marking systems in the past, is that it’s contextual: If you point at an enemy and ping, a red mark with a unique “enemy” symbol appears. If you point at a gun. it marks the weapon and a voice line asks if anyone on the squad wants it. Hold the ping button and you can choose from preset callouts like “Let’s go here” or “Someone’s…

Competitive communication

Bringing videogames to life with beautiful animation

Not only do game animations call for precise, hand-animated sequences strewn together in a minutes-long cutscene, but the same department is also responsible for crafting gameplay animations that change depending on where the player chooses to go—running, walking, jumping, grabbing a ledge, the transition between a dead sprint or sudden stop. It takes constant iteration and smart deployment of technology to make these animations look right in various contexts, and in the case of 3D games, from every possible angle. We see some of the most detailed animation work in The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom, where Link’s mannerisms will change when he’s too hot or cold, or in Red Dead Redemption 2, where Arthur Morgan has bespoke animations for minor interactions like opening doors, climbing the short…

Bringing videogames to life with beautiful animation

THE TOP 25 BEST GAME DESIGN GRADUATE PROGRAMS

1 NEW YORK UNIVERSITY 2024 Grads Hired: 87% 2024 Grads Mean Salary: $76,400 Faculty: Eric Zimmerman (Gamelab), Dr. Mitu Khandaker (Spirit AI) Graduates: Jenny Jlao-Hsia (IGF), Carol Mertz (Exploding Kittens) 2 UNIVERSITY OF CENTRAL FLORIODA 2024 Grads Hired: 80% 2024 Grads Mean Salary: $81,303 Faculty: Benjamin Nod (EA), Nicholas Zuccarello (Sony) Graduates: Carlos Barbosa (WB Games), Brian DeSanti (Blizzard) 3 UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA 2024 Grads Hired: 82% 2024 Grads Mean Salary: $96,750 Faculty: TreaAndrea Russworm (Author, “Gaming Representation”), Mark Bolas (Fakespace Labs) Graduates: Jenova Chen (Thatgamecompany), Brent Strong (Disney) 4 UNIVERSITY OF UTAH 2024 Grads Hired: 74% 2024 Grads Mean Salary: $91,096 Faculty: Michael Young PhD, Jose Zagal PhD Graduates: Doug Bowser (COO of Nintendo America), Nolan Bushnell (Founder of Atari) 5. CLARK UNIVERSITY 2024 Grads Hired: 72% 2024…

THE TOP 25 BEST GAME DESIGN GRADUATE PROGRAMS

Meaningful exploration

One of the most popular genres in videogames is the open world adventure, and for decades, developers have experimented with how players should travel through the sandbox they’ve created. The most common method is fast travel, a shortcut that usually allows players to teleport to locations they’ve already been to. This way. players can quickly cross the map and efficiently complete quests without too much repetitive backtracking. But fast travel often has a tradeoff: How do you encourage players to explore the world you’ve spent years creating when it’s possible to skip the journey? EXAMPLE: Dragon’s Dogma 2. one of PC Gamer’s best-reviewed games of 2024, takes a novel approach to fast travel that prioritizes exploration. Each of the world’s major cities become fast travel points after visiting them for…

Meaningful exploration

CIVI-LITE-ZATION

Founded in the pre-SVGA age of gaming antiquity, Civilization’s randomized yet celebratory take on human history has stood the test of time. Over three decades on, you can still put me down in front of any of the games in the series, and I will spend half my waking hours for a week straight guiding my people through the ages via war, diplomacy, exploration, culture-bombing, and plonking down World Wonders before my rivals. Over its first several entries, the series evolved to better encapsulate the vibrancy of human history in a turn-based strategy format. But in recent outings, it’s become more about rejigging rather than revolutionizing that cavemen-to-cosmos saga. Yes, Civilization V’s de-stacked units made warfare more tactical, while Civ VI spread cities across multiple tiles to allow for more…

CIVI-LITE-ZATION

BOHEMIAN RHAPSODY

KingdomCome: Deliverance 2 might be the most specific RPG I’ve ever played. Everything from its location, to its era, to its combat, to its clothing feels hyper-tuned, dialed in with precision to suit oddball tastes. Looking for a sweeping fantasy romp? You won’t find one. Like its predecessor, this is a game whose story springs inevitably from the politics of its time and place: the Kingdom of Bohemia in 1403. Want to mow down your foes by the dozen? Good luck. Combat is a strange dance of positioning both your hands and feet relative to those of your enemies, and charging into the fray even in the late game is liable to get you cut apart. Want to equip a hauberk without first equipping a padded gambeson beneath it? What…

BOHEMIAN RHAPSODY

I don’t even have to waste my time trekking across boring expanses of open field to reach the things that have caught my eye, as this compact game is broken up into a series of carefully crafted areas attached to a homely hub. It reminds me of Monster Hunter more than a seamless but flabby open world sprawl of #content. The missions I undertake in these areas often overlap in some way, so even though one character’s request to collect glowing plants at night didn’t exactly have me rushing out of camp, I ended up easily gathering everything I needed anyway when I later found myself in the same area as part of an expedition. The weather, shown on a summary screen for the area before heading out, matters as…

Nazis are pretty much the definitive bad guys. They’re perfect videogame fodder because you never have to feel bad about punching, shooting or exploding them. And for sad real-world reasons, it’s never felt more cathartic to do so. Sniper Elite: Resistance couldn’t have come along at a better time. Channeling the spirit of a classic World War II movie, there’s daring romps and blockbuster beats aplenty. Sniper Elite: Resistance is the first spin-off for the Sniper Elite series that doesn’t have you fighting zombies, and it’s clearly hoping to capture some of the magic of 2022’s Sniper Elite 5. You play as new recruit to the series Harry Hawker, fighting arm in arm with several of the French Resistance characters from Sniper Elite 5 and romping around the countryside. It…

Final Fantasy VII Rebirth gave me the world’s most luxurious vacation. From cruises, to resorts, to the world’s greatest amusement park, I was shuffled like a hurried tourist from one dazzling experience to the next, showered with endless shiny new things to admire. But the indoor kid in me must be too strong, because it didn’t take long before I was tired of all the sights and sounds and just wanted to go home. The middle entry in Square Enix’s ambitious planned trilogy remaking one of the most iconic games of all time, Rebirth sees the cast of 2020’s Final Fantasy VII Remake on the road, having escaped from the industrial city Midgar to travel the world and hunt down the evil hottie Sephiroth. As Square Enix proudly claims, it’s…

“It totally works for the red-string-corkboard I call a brain”

Now, I know what you’re thinking, “A visual novel awarded a score of only 50%? Oof.” But I knew I was onto a winner from the very first word. I wasn’t the only one, either; my mom often falls asleep when I’m showing her a new game, but for Grasshopper Manufacture’s debut thriller, she stayed awake. Debuting on the original PlayStation as a Japan-exclusive in 1999, The Silver Case was remastered, re-released, and finally localized for English-speaking PC Gamers back in 2016. To be fair to the contemporaneous review, it has definitely not aged gracefully in a number of ways. The clunky movement is bad enough, but exploration also requires you to mode shift before you can interact with anything; it takes far too many button presses to do something…

“It totally works for the red-string-corkboard I call a brain”

“Tifa and Aerith are double trouble”

Being stuck between two beautiful women is not something that most people would find troublesome. However, when there’s previous and potential romantic baggage circling, too, things become a little bit more complicated. You see, there’s undoubted chemistry between hero of the hour, Cloud Strife, and Aerith Gainsborough, the frequently flirtatious flower seller turned magic-wielding resistance fighter. They’ve been good friends, fought side-by-side against the Shinra Electric Power Company, and have shared plenty of emotional moments during their escape from Midgar to here, the expansive wild countryside that encircles around the great city. So Cloud and Aerith make sense. There have been awkward moments of silence, gazes that rested on each other for slightly too long, as well as some good old emotional confusion thrown in to boot. However, there’s no…

“Tifa and Aerith are double trouble”

“It’s brilliantly effective, but it succeeds by adding complexity”

One of the most surprising success stories of the last few years in PC gaming has been the rise of both Vampire Survivors and its genre of copycats. So nascent we don’t even have a proper name for it yet. Survivors-likes? Bullet heaven? Auto-shooters? Whatever you call them, they’re a phenomenon. Because they don’t call for complex animation or level design, thrive on repetition, and can be built out of very simple assets or even ones already created for another project, they’re relatively quick and easy to make. That’s led to an explosion of different games, each rapidly evolving the genre. The funny thing is, some of the best and boldest examples of that iteration are really just working backwards. Halls of Torment is my latest obsession. It combines the…

“It’s brilliantly effective, but it succeeds by adding complexity”

“Indy’s shadow provides all the information you need”

A priest opens a door and peers into the darkness. “Indy, is Athat you?” Now, this is a very good question, because despite appearances it’s not Indy, it’s someone wearing Indy like a suit. Throughout Indiana Jones and the Great Circle, MachineGames goes to great lengths to remind you of the identity of the character you’re puppeteering. This can be difficult in a first-person game, which doesn’t support the same kind of identification with a character that a third-person view offers. Playing as a known, named character is a different experience to embodying a character you’ve created yourself, there’s less self-insertion, and the desire to play in a style that matches what you know of the personality you’re inhabiting is stronger. Indy has a recognizable silhouette, one that’s been part…

“Indy’s shadow provides all the information you need”

THE BURTON EQUATION

Sure, Gordon Freeman taking on the Combine in City 17 is pretty cool. But what about a hard-boiled private detective taking on the Combine in 1920s Chicago? Throw in some Tommy guns, trenchcoats, and a gritty voiceover, and you’ve got The Burton Equation, a mod that turns Half-Life 2 into a noir shooter. Don’t worry, it’s not all gunning-down gangsters: there’s plenty of sci-fi in the mod as well. Did I mention there’s time travel? There’s time travel. You may start out in gangland Chicago, but you won’t stay there for long. You can sit this fight out, Dr Freeman: Zachary Burton is on the case. In the world of The Burton Equation, the Combine aren’t quite the extradimensional alien invaders we’re used to. They’re more like an organized crime…

THE BURTON EQUATION

GET STARTED IN KINGDOM COME: DELIVERANCE 2

1 MAKE IT SCHNAPPY Saving your game requires either an owned bed or Saviour Schnapps. You’ll need at least one Belladonna and one Nettle to make the weakest version, so I recommend buying lots of these from Troskowitz apothecary or Aranka at the Nomad Camp, then brewing up. 2 GOOD GRUB Keeping yourself fed and rested during your travels is vital. You can get free food from enemies, steal it from their camps, or eat at the cooking pot in locations where you own a bed. Sleeping is a little trickier—you can rent a room, rest at camps, or have a nap in a bed. 3 TOP PICK You can get your first lockpick from Bara the Beggar once you’re freed from the stocks in Troskowitz. After that you can purchase them from…

GET STARTED IN KINGDOM COME: DELIVERANCE 2

SEARCHING FOR TRUE FREEDOM AND HIGH FASHION IN DIVINITY: ORIGINAL SIN 2 PART 2

I’m beginning to think that prison breaks aren’t all they’re cracked up to be. The esteemed Mister Fibula and his retinue of haughty hangers-on have endured brutal guards, murderous inmates, and a painfully limited selection of couture. Undaunted, they have fought, bargained, and climbed their way out of the infamous Fort Joy, only to remember that—oh yeah—they’re on an island. So, while we’re no longer trapped by imposing walls and capricious guards, our new jailer goes by the name of tedious geographical reality. But it’s not all bad. As an ancient corpse with only a tenuous grasp on what constitutes normal, mortal behavior, Mister Fibula should be safer in these sparsely occupied swamps than he ever was in the crowded confines of Fort Joy. The fleshy, breathing inhabitants of Rivellon…

SEARCHING FOR TRUE FREEDOM AND HIGH FASHION IN DIVINITY: ORIGINAL SIN 2 PART 2

TOTAL WAR: WARHAMMER III

A huge, flashy, cinematic moment, but it’s not just bombast Around a year ago, Creative Assembly released a grand cinematic trailer to commemorate the full release of Immortal Empires: a game mode that fuses together every campaign map from the Total War: Warhammer franchise. The trailer serves almost no functional purpose: instead, it’s crammed with the sort of narrative moments that make Warhammer obsessives go glassy eyed, the significance of which would likely take me another article to explain: there’s Grombrindal and Tyrion fighting back to back; Gotrek and Felix standing off against Skarbrand; and haughty elf lord Teclis accidentally dropping a racial slur in front of the Dwarf High King. Marvel fans have Captain America brandishing Thor’s hammer in Avengers: Endgame; we have Richard Ridings, voice of Daddy Pig and…

TOTAL WAR: WARHAMMER III

SOVL: FANTASY WARFARE perwahl.github.io/SOVLRules Your units are color-coded rectangles, with line drawings to represent artillery or monsters. Orcs, elves and humans take turns maneuvering and rolling dice to resolve combat. It&s a Warhammer battle report from an old White Dwarf magazine turned into a game. SONGS OF CONQUEST songsofconquest.com The upcoming Heroes of Might and Magic sequel might turn out good, but if Ubisoft screws up again it won’t matter—we’ve got Songs of Conquest. It has that mix of questing, citybuilding and warfare, only it discourages doomstacks with magic that rewards a diverse unit roster. REGALIA: OF MEN AND MONARCHS x.com/pixelated_milk One of those JRPGs that doesn’t come from Japan, Regalia has the social connection-making of an Atlus game without the grind. If the combat doesn’t grab you, turn the…

Motherboards aren’t super exciting. They’re not the component that we see posted on social media alongside the words, “I can’t believe I got one!!!” Nope, a motherboard is just a slab of PCB and some copper wires. A slab of PCB that connects up your CPU and RAM and ensures both are fed with clean power to run at their best. That is the difference between a high-speed or sluggish SSD. That decides whether you have enough USB ports, fast Wi-Fi, or Bluetooth. That ensures your audio sounds crystal clear. You can see where I’m going with this: a motherboard is pretty important, actually. With the arrival of two new generations of CPU from both AMD and Intel at the tail-end of 2024, we’ve been flooded with motherboards to test…

After all those months of waiting, of slightly mistranslated speculative reports and questionable photos of graphics cards in unnamed factory floors, the 5-series family had gone public. Hooray! And in several cases, the speculation was bang on: Nvidia’s new flagship gaming card, the RTX 5090, cost a shade under $2,000, featured 32GB of memory as many pre-launch reports suggested, and would you believe it, it offered a significant performance advantage over the RTX 4090. At least, that was the inference behind all the bar charts and the split-screen videos Nvidia released to accompany the 5090’s launch at CES. But upon slightly closer inspection, the quadrupled performance in games like Alan Wake 2 and the longstanding benchmark for neon signs reflecting in puddles that is Cyberpunk 2077 are the result not…

First they came for the tribal patterns, and I didn’t speak out because my gaming mouse didn’t feature a tribal pattern. Then they came for the RGB zones on headsets, and I didn’t speak out because you can’t see your headset while you’re wearing it. Eventually, all aspects of that well-established PC gaming aesthetic as we currently know it will become outmoded, and the desk setups we see on streams, subreddits and our own sacred nooks of virtual escapism will bear little to no resemblance to it. Question is, what will take its place? Perhaps taking a look back through history at how the current trends took root will give us a clue. The foundation of the gamer aesthetic, even more fundamental than the multicolored lighting, is this one immutable…

1 GeForce RTX 5090 Nvidia $1,939 Nvidia’s ultimate flagship has finally arrived, and it’s a monster. It might be on the same manufacturing process as its predecessor, but the GPU itself is 23% larger than the RTX 4090. The sheer volume of CUDA, Tensor, and ray tracing cores this thing has is just staggering. In my own testing, across multiple titles, average framerates sat comfortably above the 140fps mark throughout. Without a doubt, right now, this is the best graphics card on the planet; there’s no question. At least if you can find one in stock. 2 CASE H9 Elite NZXT $240 That graphics card demands attention, and there’s no better case than the H9 Elite for that. 3 MOTHERBOARD ROG Strix X870E-E Gaming WiFi Asus $500 The X870E-E is impressive, with phenomenal…

THE PCG INVESTIGATOR

PART 4 "Eddie, if you go to the gaming PC Stanley was using to play Fantasy Crown," I said, "I'm sure you will find the warhammer ensconced within it." "What nonsense," Vivienne snapped, but Eddie, still reeling from the Brody betrayal revelation, stormed out of the tavern before returning with the tower case. Sliding off the side panel, which was emblazoned with the Fantasy Crown logo, revealed the weapon. "You see, this was a crime no one person committed. Carmen struck the final blow, yes, but it was plotted and executed by Vivienne, too. And after Carmen had done the deed, it was you Vivienne who secreted the warhammer upon your person. Then, in the chaos following your supposed discovery of the body, which drew Stanley away from his machine,…

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