Innholdsfortegnelse for March 2018 i PC Gamer (US Edition)

Lordran, the dusky, desolate world of the original Dark Souls, is a famously punitive place. The grueling atmosphere extends to the game’s optional multiplayer, which enables other players to ‘invade’ your game and ambush you for your hard-earned resources. Now, just over six years after the game’s debut, franchise fans turn to the community to give both returning veterans and fresh blood the same sense of unease and competition that they experienced back at launch. “What originally prompted the event was the celebration of /r/darksouls hitting 100,000 subscribers,” says Cody, also known as e_0, a moderator of the Dark Souls subreddit, and the organizer of the event. “A user by the name of JoeDaddy92 suggested that we host a ‘Restart Day’, that would encourage massive online play—similar to Return to…

NEED TO KNOW RELEASE “When it’s finished” PUBLISHER In-house DEVELOPER Subset Games LINK www.subsetgames.com PLAYED IT From the creator of FTL: Faster Than Light, Into The Breach condenses down XCOM-style turn-based combat into bitesize chunks. Rather than long, drawn out missions, each skirmish lasts around five turns, as you attempt to protect a settlement from an onslaught of giant killer bugs. It’s a game about short, incredibly intense missions that each require experimentation and forward thinking in order to achieve victory. RATHER THAN LONG, DRAWN OUT MISSIONS, EACH SKIRMISH LASTS JUST FOUR TURNS The small-scale scope might make it sound limited, but there’s an incredible depth of options. The specific rules around each system—be it a weapon’s effect, an enemy’s behavior or an environmental hazard—means there’s always plenty to think…

NEED TO KNOW RELEASE Early 2018 DEVELOPER Dumb and Fat Games PUBLISHER In-house LINK www.wanderso.ng PLAYED IT You retrieve the great sword, but are ambushed by a terrible foe. You raise the sword above your head, swing… and miss. Sorry, but you’re no hero. You’re a bard—one not blessed with the physical attributes necessary to wield a giant, badass sword. Helpless, you revert to your preferred means of attack: Song. Fortunately, your foe is no terrifying beast, but rather the messenger of the goddess Eya, who’s messing with you in your dreams. This is how Wandersong begins, subverting traditional fantasy by reveling in the fact that its lead character is kind of a doofus. Which isn’t to say there’s no peril. The messenger, who digs your tunes, informs you that…

EVANS HAD TO RETHINK HOW SOMEONE INTERACTS WITH THE SCENE Growbot is the first game by illustrator Lisa Evans. A point-and-click adventure about a robot saving her home from a dark crystaline force, Growbot takes the adorable fantasy worlds of Evans’ static art, and translates them into a space station you can play with, full of plants and aliens. “I love creating detailed images, the kind where you can discover little hidden characters and subplots,” says Evans. “Part of the incentive to make a game was to indulge in this by allowing players to click around the images and explore them a lot more deeply.” Although there’s a shared aesthetic between her illustrations and her game, the move from book spreads to playable spaces meant Evans had to rethink how…

Seven: The Days Long Gone is a smorgasbord of genres and settings colliding to create something uniquely unusual. A real-time isometric RPG, a stealth sandbox, a post-apocalyptic sci-fi universe with just enough mysticism to make it fantasy-adjacent— there’s a lot to digest. It almost tries to be too many things, spinning all of these different plates, but developer Fool’s Theory manages to stop them from coming crashing down. Most of the time. At its heart, though, it’s a game about being a sticky-fingered thief. Specifically, a sticky-fingered thief known as Teriel. A master crook, Teriel finds himself shunted off to the prison island of Peh to be a god-like emperor’s newest undercover agent. His mission: Search for an ancient hidden spaceship. Oh yes, and he’s been bonded to a daemon,…

Haunted Cities Volume 2 Kitty Horrorshow makes some of the best first-person exploration games, creating moody worlds that feature elements of horror, roleplaying and adventure gaming. You might be familiar with her VHS horror story Anatomy, but now Horrorshow has released her second compilation. There are four experiences in Haunted Cities Volume 2, with each game taking you to a fascinating universe operating under its own set of rules. First up is the cheerily-titled Gloompuke, a medieval fantasy adventure that reminded me of Might & Magic and Ravenloft, if their worlds were compressed to the size of a soccer field and populated by anthropomorphic NPCs spouting surreal dialogue. With its deliberately old-fashioned controls, its chunky low-poly environments, and its low-res sprites and textures, Gloompuke harkens back to what was probably the CRPG’s…

KIMBERLEY BALLARD THIS MONTH Gnawed on ribs while trying not to dirty her party dress. ALSO PLAYED Tokyo Dark Mina is the kind of protagonist many girls will empathize with. She frequently falls into bed with all her clothes on, always seems to have messy hair, and is too shy to point out to her innkeeper that, no, actually, she isn’t a young lad. She’s also fed up with living with her parents in the middle of nowhere, and dreams of making something of herself in the big city. I empathize with Mina, but most of all I empathize with her love for food. After stealing money from her parents and running away to the kingdom of Victusia, she enters a tournament to win a place among the Chef Brigade, a…

GROUP TEST Over the years, wireless mice have got a lot better, so much so that the latest models offer exceptional performance. Many prefer the reliability of wired mice, but for most users wireless models are now good enough. What’s more, many wireless mice now offer the best of both worlds, with you able to plug in a cable when needed. It’s therefore intriguing to note that several of the big names in peripherals don’t currently offer a wireless mouse solution. Still, Logitech, and Razer are doing their best to hold up the wireless end, with both companies offering several models—in fact, they make five of the seven models on test here. We’ve put all seven mice on this test through their paces, looking at performance and features, as well as…

At the most basic level, and regardless of perspective (first-person, third-person, isometric, etc),” begins developer Trent Polack, “a camera system is the player’s eyeballs in a game world. It is the single most defining system by which a player interacts with a game.” With over a decade of experience in the industry, Polack would know. Before you can figure out a game’s control scheme (which is often camera-dependent), or even gain a sense of investment in its world, you need to be able to see. In isometric real-time tactics game Brigador, solving this issue proved far more complicated than the developers expected. Jack Monahan, one of Brigador’s developers, recounted the difficulties of creating levels and assets within this perspective. “An area ‘behind’ (from the camera’s perspective) of a city block…

NEED TO KNOW RELEASE TBA DEVELOPER Whoop Group PUBLISHER Excalibur Games LINK www.excalibur-publishing.com PLAYED IT Train delays take many forms. I’ve known leaves on the line, snow on the line, another train on the line and, once, bandits on the line who had just robbed a post office. The current hold-up for my Tracks passengers, though, is because I am building a route to a station with no fewer than five jumps. Tracks—The Train Set Game is a sandbox game where you build fantastical wooden railways. There’s the draw of nostalgia—I’ve been remembering my own Brio bits which I’d assemble around furniture. There’s also the pleasure of building a railway then switching perspective to drive the train around. The meat of the game is in designing these courses, placing platforms…

DECISIONS YOU MADE IN THE DYRWOOD WILL CARRY OVER PILLARS OF ETERNITY II: DEADFIRE The Watcher is back, this time hunting the god Eothas across the Deadfire, an island chain where you’ll encounter pirates and erupting volcanoes. You can navigate these islands on your ship, the Defiant, recruiting a crew to help you take Eothas down. But there’ll be plenty of time to sail away from the critical path, and developer Obsidian is promising unexplored islands and other secrets to discover on the high fantasy seas. Edér, Aloth, and Pallegina will return for this adventure, but there are new faces too, including an aumaua ranger called Maia, and Serafen, an orlan pirate. And if you import your save from the first game, some of the decisions you made in the…

Working under the name Cosmo D, Greg Heffernan creates rich, surreal spaces full of oddities which reward your attention and exploration. Off-Peak and The Norwood Suite are both densely packed with characters and objects to consider, but never spill into feeling crowded. The overall effect is that of a finely balanced collage. The Norwood Suite is focused around internationally-celebrated pianist Peter Norwood who, you discover, vanished in 1983, leaving his mansion to be transformed into an odd hotel. It’s this building which you explore, teasing out its secrets and enjoying how the cocktail of influences (from urban romanticism of Wong Kar-wai, and the ‘living buildings’ and strange characters of early Jeunet and Caro movies) has come together. “My first thought was to make this hotel feel like a big, cosy…

Delphine Fourneau’s Sacramento offers players a beautiful visit to a vivid, watercolor world—what she describes as “a living sketchbook, in which you can visit strange places distorted by memory”. The inspiration came directly from a watercolor drawing Fourneau made while spending two days on a train traveling across the USA from Chicago to San Francisco. “I spent time chilling, looking at the various landscapes, reading, doing watercolors,” she remembers. “I now only have fuzzy memories about the trip and the different stops we did. I can’t really remember any details because I couldn’t spend enough time in each place to notice them. In San Francisco, we also visited the conservatory of flowers, which was a very dream-like experience.” “I LIKE WHEN GAMES MAKE USE OF TRADITIONAL ART TECHNIQUES” After returning…

Yes, you can skip the intro. If you’ve played Okami before, you’ll know it’s a slow starter—and even if you haven’t, you may well have heard as much. Essentially, it’s 15 minutes or so of scene-setting, literally unfurling across a paper scroll that seems to stretch on forever. Yet the languid storytelling is a patience test: If you can sit through it without fidgeting, then you’re perfectly qualified for the sweeping, serenely-paced saga that follows. At the risk of sounding strange, Okami is a deep bath of a game, an adventure to sink into and luxuriate in. It’s not a game you can play in bitesized pieces, but rather one to clear long evenings and weekends for, to stock up on snacks and drinks and settle down with for the…

Battlerite gathers up the best parts of MOBA, free-to-play, and competitive game design, and frames them in the most flattering light that it can muster. This game of close-fought, tightly crafted arena combat isn’t just one of the best team action games to be released this year, it is a goodwill ambassador for a corner of PC gaming that doesn’t always make the best first impression to newcomers. This spiritual successor to Stunlock’s Bloodline Champions has the top-down perspective and hotbar action of a MOBA, sans the experience and gold-farming strategic layer that makes games like Dota 2 and League of Legends so complex. If you’re among the comparatively small number of people who have invested serious time into MMO PvP then you’ll find familiar elements here. Again, however, Battlerite…

PHIL SAVAGE THIS MONTH Lived up to low expectations. ALSO PLAYED Assassins Creed Origins, Okami HD Up until now I have been avoiding Cuphead. It’s hard, and that makes it dangerous. If you have been on the internet at all, you’ll know that it is not acceptable to be bad at difficult videogames. Die recklessly in Dota, and you will be chased out of your home. Mistime your ult in Overwatch, and you will be excommunicated by the head of the church. We must hide the sin of mediocrity behind a facade of stoic capability. Case in point: a games journalist posted a video of himself being bad at Cuphead’s tutorial, and it generated a 2,666 comment Reddit thread and multiple op-eds asking if people who write about games are allowed to be…

STAR CITIZEN This historical sim has been in development for a while now, and has somehow amassed more crowdfunded dollars than the entire GDP of the Federated Planets of MicroPlymouth. Some fear it’s vaporware, and yet, despite nobody having seen or heard from the developer in nearly two centuries, every few months a new ship is released for purchase. We imagine that using spaceships for interplanetary travel will be a pleasant reminder of what life was like before we could all easily travel thousands of light years simply by having nanomachines painfully tear apart and reassemble us atom by atom, often without warning. HALF-LIFE 187 Legend tells us that humanity once went almost 20 years with no new Half-Life. That all changed, of course, when Valve discovered how to hook…

OPINION TECH GAMES THE PC GAMER VIEW OF THE WORLD Her Story is one of our favorite games, and we were eager to find out what its creator, Sam Barlow, would come up with next. One of those projects is #WarGames, a reboot of the classic 1983 movie. “It’s an experimental interactive series,” says Barlow. “It’s not a conventional choose-your-own adventure story.” In the movie, high school student David Lightman unwittingly hacks into a computer system that controls an arsenal of nuclear weapons and almost triggers World War 3. But this series will take the story in a different, more contemporary direction, following a group of hackers who get tangled up in a conspiracy. “We started writing it under Obama,” says Barlow. “But I think its message is more relevant…

NEED TO KNOW RELEASE 2018 DEVELOPER CreativeForge Games PUBLISHER Good Shepherd Entertainment LINK www.bit.ly/phantomdoctrine PLAYED IT Theremin is the codename of an enemy agent, and she’s my prisoner. I’ve interrogated her several times, revealing intel that will unlock new missions. But I have another trick up my sleeve. I brainwash her, planting a trigger phrase in her mind that, when spoken, will force her to switch sides. Then I release her, and she rejoins the ranks of the enemy. Later, on one of those missions she helped me discover, I encounter her out in the field. Before she has a chance to attack me, I use the trigger phrase and she joins my agents as an ally. It’s a deeply satisfying moment, and an example of the systems that make…

NEED TO KNOW RELEASE Early 2018 DEVELOPER Amanita Design PUBLISHER In-house LINK www.chuchel.net FIRST LOOK The Czech studio behind Machinarium, Botanicula and the Samorost series has been hard at work on Chuchel, a gorgeously odd adventure starring an animated ball of household dust and grime in hot pursuit of a stolen cherry. Plot-wise it reminds me of the adventures of Ice Age’s squirrel, Scrat, but tonally it’s far closer to surreal kids cartoons. The main character encapsulates the joy and crankiness of a three-year-old in each interaction, delivering genuine laughs as it takes you by surprise time and time again.…

Ooblets Ooblets is beautiful. It’s billed as a game somewhere between Harvest Moon, Pokémon, and Animal Crossing, so a farm builder and a battler where you make a home and build a squad of creatures—the titular ooblets. It’s not playable yet, but gifs and screenshots from development keep popping up, offering glimpses of cute critters and bright, happy scenes. I’m too curious to wait for a hands-on so I email Glumberland—the tiny team of Rebecca Cordingley and Ben Wasser—to find out how the game is progressing. To explain how work on the game divides up, Rebecca is the sole programmer and main artist for Ooblets. “95% of what you’re seeing in the game is her work,” says Wasser. His own role is as game designer, writer and “person who bugs Rebecca…

Prior to its December release, Gorogoa had been in development longer than I’d been a games journalist. It’s a tile-based puzzle story, but that description doesn’t do its intricacy and balance justice— with each repositioned tile you create new scenes which interweave and interact to move your character along. The game started life as an interactive comic, says designer Jason Roberts, “Then it evolved in my mind and became somehow crossed with a card game, maybe because cards can also be pictures inside a rectangular frame—like loose comic panels. “What if the panels in a comic were the cards or tiles used in a game? What if instead of the panels being static images, each was an interactive scene, each like a separate window running its own game? What if…

Jordan Thomas was working as a script doctor at Psygnosis when he heard that Ion Storm Austin was hiring. The studio had just released Deus Ex, and was expanding from one development team to two. “They were hiring a cabal of the very best game designers in the world,” Thomas says. He wanted to be one of them. There was one problem: Thomas had little game design experience. So he created an Unreal Engine level, designed to resemble a mission from Thief, and sent it to Ion Storm. The studio was impressed and granted him an interview, but didn’t give him a job. “I think they wisely realized that my confidence did not match my physical experience,” Thomas says. He was told to get some. Thomas got a job working…

TOM HAT FIELD THIS MONTH Was awaited in Valhalla. ALSO PLAYED Watch Dogs 2, Stellaris After a few hours in Mad Max-y, FTL: Faster Than Light-like Convoy, I’ve found my true love. It’s not any of the missiles, railguns or lasers that you can adorn your trucks with, it’s the purest form of vehicular combat: Ramming. My weapon of choice is the Gila Mk. II AE. It’s the largest possible size of truck, making it better at shoving smaller trucks around. I remove the guns and add a buzzsaw, which means it counts as one size larger for the purposes of ramming. It is now the largest truck in the game plus one. Then I add a chainsaw, which does the same. This is the infinity plus two truck. The Gilabeast.…

Breaking blocks is just about the only thing you can’t do in Wynncraft, a total conversion Minecraft mod that turns the sandbox building game into a fantasy MMORPG. Nevertheless, I’m continually floored by all you can do, from striking out on dialogue-rich quests to forming parties and exploring dungeons. Before I can get to that, I’ve got to choose a class. My old Minecraft avatar was a riff on the iconic creeper, and they never failed to sneak up on me, so I decide to play as an assassin, passing up archer, mage, and warrior. I choose one of the ten servers, enter a silly character name, and load into the tutorial quest. A passing shepherd suggests I kill some pigs, but I’m too entranced by my newfound menus to listen to his…