Innholdsfortegnelse for February 2020 i PC Gamer (US Edition)

HIGHS Netflix’s The Witcher The show will air on Netflix on December 20, and a second season’s already been greenlit. Path of Exile 2 The sequel to Grinding Gear’s action-RPG was announced at this year’s ExileCon. EA is returning to Steam The publisher’s once again putting games on the store, starting with Star Wars Jedi: Fallen Order. Fallout 76 Bethesda’s launch of a Fallout 1st premium subscription has inspired outrage and an in-game class war. Red Dead Redemption 2 Rockstar’s cowboy game is finally on PC, but it’s been plagued by performance issues and crashes. Fortnite YouTuber Faze Jarvis was handed a permanent ban after openly using an aimbot in Epic’s battle royale. LOWS…

To the trained eye—or rather the trained ear—there is a heavy metal logic to the world of Brütal Legend. From Black Sabbath come the Ironheades, blue collar headbangers with bulging neck muscles. Their class war is with the Hair Metal Militia, the glam sellouts who got into bed with The Man. And the threat to everyone are the goths, who threaten to pull us all down into their gloomy mire. Then there’s Fletus. A pond-green greaser who races you in side missions, he doesn’t have anything to do with the other demons of this fantasy metal world. “I’m too ugly,” he explains. Squint a bit and you can make out the gruff Geordie demeanor and signature flat cap of AC/DC frontman Brian Johnson. In a land where everybody else has…

NEED TO KNOW RELEASE 2020 DEVELOPER Blizzard Entertainment PUBLISHER In-house LINK www.worldofwarcraft.com This is the eighth major expansion for World of Warcraft, and it’s the most dramatic since Cataclysm tore the world apart. Sylvanas Windrunner has pierced the veil between Azeroth and the realm of the dead, granting players access to the titular Shadowlands: An eerie afterlife featuring five brand new zones to explore. FIRST LOOK One of the biggest changes in Shadowlands can be found in the leveling system. When they enter the Shadowlands max level players will be dropped from level 120 to 50, and work towards the new level cap of 60. The idea is to make levels feel meaningful again. “I don’t think we did a great job between levels 110 and 120,” admits Patrick Dawson,…

Meteorfall: Krumit’s Tale NEED TO KNOW RELEASE 2020 DEVELOPER Slothwerks PUBLISHER In-house LINK krumits-tale.com Unfortunately, I was not blessed with the greatest patience in life, and this carries through to videogames. I like punchy combat and quick fights—games that require me to think about strategy are not usually my vibe. But when I spied the loopy characters and tongue-in-cheek art style of Meteorfall: Krumit’s Tale, I was charmed from the off. It’s a deck-building roguelike that takes place in one of the weirdest settings I’ve ever experienced in a game: Inside a cardboard box. You have been summoned to battle through this card-based dungeon by a mysterious shopkeeper named Krumit, and he has asked you to complete his quest to retrieve some magical items. It’s a mystery what you get…

Chris: No matter what kind of pirate you are, Rare added something to Sea of Thieves for you this year. Fishing is the perfect activity for solo players, with a nice array of fish that can only be caught in certain parts of the world, and sometimes only in specific conditions. PvP-hungry pirates got the option for finding quick, chaotic matches in the Arena instead of having to sail for ages to find human opponents. And the lore-heavy Tall Tales are perfect for a few hours of co-op sailing and puzzle solving with friends, and most Tales are even doable alone. Plus, if you’re the kind of pirate who likes to spend real dubloons, there are pets now, too. The beautiful world of Sea of Thieves always had potential, but…

Harry: Like many, I suspect, I considered giving up on Sekiro. I wasn’t even very far, either, but my stumbling block came in the shape of a nondescript general: Tenzen Yamauchi. To jog your memory, this is the foe with a smattering of soldiers around his perimeter, and an aggravating sentry that loves nothing better than to bang his drum and tell everyone where you are. Once you find a method for defeating them, that part is easy. Unless you get repeatedly murdered by their superior. With each demise, I got sloppier. If I did manage to challenge Yamauchi unscathed, I’d be promptly sent packing. I felt like crying. I was beginning to think that perhaps these games just weren’t for me. I’d heard that Sekiro was a game that…

Wes: I’m 30 hours into a Three Kingdoms co-op campaign where I’m conquering all of southern China as Sun Jian. Meanwhile, my friend and neighbor Yuan Shu has had to become a vassal, then join an alliance, just to stop Cao Cao from trampling him. I keep giving him food out of pity. It’s been illuminating to see how dramatically differently Three Kingdoms can play out depending on your starting faction. That’s not completely new to Total War, but Three Kingdoms is by far the most character-focused game in the series, and the personality it injects into each faction is its greatest strength. I won a nearly impossible battle against an army double my size by sending Sun Jian himself onto the field to duel a faction leader and killing…

Jody: The Drama skill would like to explain that what makes Disco Elysium great is how it coherently draws together influences from outside of videogames, that it combines 1970s cop dramas with David Fincher deconstructions of detective stories and China Mieville city-building. The Encyclopedia skill feels obliged to mention that it’s also synthesizing the politics of post-Soviet Estonia and, in its glib moments, the hellsite called Twitter. Conceptualization would like to add the importance of its impressionist art style and equally impressionist music, both moody and yet not without color or incident. My Electrochemistry skill really needs a drink if I’m going to carry on with this. Disco Elysium’s skill system, which transforms each of your character’s abilities into NPC companions who pipe up with their own opinions and commentary…

NEED TO KNOW WHAT IS IT? A third person action game set in the Star Wars universe EXPECT TO PAY $60 DEVELOPER Respawn Entertainment PUBLISHER EA REVIEWED ON GTX 970, 8GB RAM, Intel Core i5-4670K MULTIPLAYER No LINK ea.com/games/starwars/jedi-fallen-order You are Cal Kestis, a bland-faced scrapper with too-clean hair and an inexplicable love for ponchos. You are also probably the deadliest person in the universe. Though you spend your days cutting crashed Star Destroyers open for parts, within your cloak you hide the true star of Star Wars Jedi: Fallen Order—a blue lightsaber that you will use to strike down hundreds of Stormtroopers across the course of the game. If you concentrate on main story missions, this is about a 20-hour adventure set across a cluster of themed planets. There’s…

1. Always first in-line for the latest iPhone. 2. “You can’t come in with those shoes.” 3. Runs a lot. Never shuts up about it. 4. Carries a skateboard everywhere. 5. Likes pineapple on their pizza. 6. Chronic attention-seeker. 7. Calls himself a ‘pick-up artist’ like a twonk. 8. Professional man-spreader, in jorts. 9. Closest Heat has to a normal human being. 10. Always wants to tell you about their dreams. 11. Attends conventions, smells. 12. Incapable of wearing clothes properly.…

This oddball indie gem is about decisions and how hard it can be to make them. This is ideal, because I’ve spent at least an hour deliberating over whether it’s too emotionally challenging for a deliberately prosaic They’re Back column. And, after completing it at least eight times, I’ve decided that yes, it’s definitely too exciting, but I’m going to include it anyway out of a sense of slavish self-determination. NEED TO KNOW WHAT IS IT? If Douglas Adams wrote The Office EXPECT TO PAY $15 DEVELOPER Galactic Cafe PUBLISHER Galactic Cafe REVIEWED ON Intel Core i7-7700 CUP @ 3.60GHz, 16 GB RAM, NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1070, Windows 10 MULTIPLAYER None LINK store.steampowered.com That said, I manage to get what I think might be the most tedious ending entirely by…

The loose theme of this month’s games has been mundanity done right. Offworld Trading Company is a finance sim that just happens to take place on Mars. It’s an RTS, but there are no military forces. Instead your battles take place in rapidly fluctuating markets. You mine, buy, and sell resources in a world where every sale affects the value of a product. I love it, but I’d honestly be more relaxed if I was sitting down for a game of Amnesia. Much as if I was running my own business, I enjoy a few hours of prosperity before giving up and letting fatigue and the inexorable march of capitalism consume me. 82…

ROBIN VALENTINE THIS MONTH Created some truly filthy Nightmare Amalgams. ALSO PLAYED Disco Elysium, Yaga Of all the genre phenomenons over the last decade, auto battlers are the most baffling. Not only impossible to explain to anyone who hasn’t played one, the likes of Dota Underlords, Autochess and Teamfight Tactics are also reliant on players being fluent in the characters and conventions of another existing game to have even a hope of getting started. As editor of the world’s leading PC gaming magazine, it was a source of embarrassment that I’d failed to make that leap myself. Hearthstone’s new Battlegrounds mode was at first a great relief—finally the genre comes to a game I not only know well, but that deals in accessibility and clarity more than almost any other.…

Great spellcasting in a fantasy game requires three things: a wide selection of spells to learn and employ, amazing effects that make your spells feel powerful and otherworldly, and a creative and varied system that allows for a spread of different playstyles. I think vanilla Skyrim does a decent job with spells—they look pretty cool for 2011, there’s a healthy amount of them, and you can combine them with stealth and steel to create the type of mage you want to play. But there’s definitely a lot of room for improvement, and Arcanum: A New Age of Magic takes spellcasting to a higher plane of variety, power, and flexibility. With this mod installed, you’ll be summoning pillars of energy and tornadoes from the heavens, flinging tremendous and explosive fiery orbs and deadly electrical lances,…

I placed hotdog stands too close to the entrance of my rollercoaster, and now people are puking on the sidewalk. My janitors are threatening to strike because they can’t clean the puke up fast enough, but I chose to install bathroom security cameras to stop kids from setting off stink bombs instead. My janitors strike. The puke festers on the ground. People puke from the puke. No one ever said running a theme park was easy. SimCoaster tests your ability to play PR, HR, marketer, and designer at the same time. You not only have to manage a robust employee roster of gardeners, security guards, janitors, engineers, and entertainers, but you also have to monitor guest satisfaction with every feature of your park, right down to every last plant. Do…

Early on a Friday morning, a small group of protesters gathered around a fountain in front of BlizzCon 2019’s main security checkpoint. A few convention employees stood facing the black-clad group, passively watching the protestors unpack boxes of t-shirts while holding signs that said “Questions?” on long poles, as if they were Swiss Guards. Not many had questions. The attendees already knew the score. Security is directly ahead. Protesters in Hong Kong demand increased autonomy from mainland China. Backpacks should be open for inspection. Blizzard angered fans by punishing Hearthstone champ Ng Wai Chung, aka Blitzchung, after he called for the ‘liberation’ of Hong Kong on an official stream. Professional video and audio equipment is prohibited. Blizzard is also in hot water for punishing the two casters who were present.…

NEED TO KNOW RELEASE TBC DEVELOPER Blizzard PUBLISHER In-house LINK diablo.blizzard.com Diablo IV ’s crypts are more hateful than Diablo III’s. They’re darker and dustier, with Bloody Piles that explode like popped blisters in slow-mo. It’s also shinier, but in a dour way. Lightning shimmers across wet stone and fleshy creatures, and it sometimes rains, dynamically generating muddy puddles. Path of Exile feels cheerful by comparison. I’m hesitant to draw any big conclusions about Diablo IV because I imagine it’ll be quite different whenever it releases, and Blizzard says that probably won’t be soon. The demo was quite easy, for one thing. I’d guess Blizzard didn’t want players getting frustrated, especially those who had to stand in a long line at BlizzCon, so they outfitted us with strong characters. I played the 20-minute…

NEED TO KNOW RELEASE 2020 DEVELOPER First Watch Games PUBLISHER Hi-Rez Studios LINK roguecompany.com Jumping out of a hoverplane with the rest of my four-person crew, I cast an eye across Rogue Company’s industrial canal map. I can see the opposing team in the sky, their red contrails giving me some basic information on where they’ll make landfall. PLAYED IT Rogue Company is Hi-Rez’s third-person multiplayer shooter. I’m playing the 4v4 Extraction mode where you earn victory from hacking an objective, counter-hacking an objective, or—because this is a shooter—mowing down every one of the opposing team, and forcing them to sit through a replay of your winning kill. You start the game with a secondary weapon and some loose change—enough for a grenade of some kind, or maybe an upgrade…

Considering the name, it’s odd how little war there is in Warframe. Plenty of blood is shed as players carve their way through procedural corridors and open-world zones, turning mutant soldiers and cyborg super-capitalists into gravy. But the only real, full-scale battle in Warframe’s universe happened centuries ago, an event that looms over the Origin System like an apocalyptic hangover. Until now. Digital Extremes’ next two updates, called Empyrean and The New War, usher in a new era of chaos and conflict as players unite to repel an all-out invasion by an alien force known as the Sentients. To even the odds, squads will work together to build and pilot a ship in hectic space while also uncovering the truth behind some of Warframe’s biggest unanswered questions. And at the…

Wes: This is just primo grade-A videogame, right here. Capcom updated a classic, tightly designed game with smooth modern action and managed to retain the low-level anxiety and occasional bursts of terror that early Resident Evil excelled at. As the series got bigger and more bombastic, it lost what Resident Evil 2 did so well: Giving you an explorable space small enough to keep in your brain as you poke around. That’s what makes it so pleasurable to criss-cross the police station, opening up new paths between rooms and solving goofy puzzles. It remains a tight game, finishable in ten hours, but with enough secrets and weapon choices to be fun a second time through. It’s a shame Capcom didn’t make Claire and Leon’s campaigns more distinct, but that’s the…

Tyler: Control’s brand of weirdness is familiar—Neil Gaiman, Stephen King, and George Saunders come to mind—and that’s Remedy’s thing: It never hides the influences of its metaphysical playgrounds. But it’d be unfair to call Control a pastiche just because it’s smooching on Stanley Kubrick and internet creepypasta so hard. It’s Remedy’s funniest game, bursting with original, creative micro-stories about rubber duck stalkers, redacted catastrophes, and hyperreal motels. Its protagonist isn’t the most interesting person, but every single note found in its 1950s office building of cosmic anomalies and interdimensional monsters is worth reading. Rachel: An unassuming office building—not a typical setting for an action-packed supernatural game, but Control turns the at-first banal environs into something wonderfully sinister. Everywhere the order of bureaucracy and paperwork is corrupted by chaotic, malevolent forces. Investigating…

Steven: I’m just going to go ahead and say it: Final Fantasy XIV is the best Final Fantasy game ever made. Though it’s an MMO, Square Enix has stuffed it full of the endearing characters and exciting fantasy worlds you’d find in any of the single-player games, only here they’re a part of a seven-years-and-counting incredible journey that gives Final Fantasy XIV an unparalleled sense of scope and adventure. Shadowbringers, its latest expansion, is the Avengers: Endgame of Final Fantasy XIV—a thrillingly high-stakes story that pulls upon the previous seven years of world-building to create an intricate and surprisingly human story. Sending the main cast into an alternate dimension at such a critical moment in the main story might seem like a needless diversion, but Square Enix doesn’t squander the…

Evan: Walking in the footsteps of other PC Gamer GOTYs of yore (Into the Breach, FTL, Spelunky) Slay the Spire is a series of difficult, pleasant epiphanies that you acquire through failure. Oh, relics might be more important than cards. And huh, maybe removing cards is just as important as adding them. I’m starting to think block is more important than damage. Wait, this boss isn’t the real end boss? A lot is owed to how transparent Slay the Spire makes information and enemy intents, which stacks some certainty into each shuffle. Tyler: I love that it’s not just about getting to the last fight. You have to be godlike enough to live through it. I take a lot of risks during each run, because I know it’s all for…

Evan: A year in, it’s the athleticism of Apex Legends that elevates it above its FPS and battle royale peers. Apex contains a decathlon worth of verbs: Crouch-slides, dropship nosedives, trampoline leaps, zipline ambushes. These moves aren’t gimmicks, but tactical and expressive maneuvers that service the inherent fun of transitioning between biomes while under fire: Adopting a better defense by zipping your friends to a higher elevation, pulling off an epic Kraber headshot while sledding your body down a glacier, or simply crouch-sliding between a set of supply bins so your looting is six seconds more efficient. This is a shooter about the urgency of movement. But it’s also meaningfully slower than games that make up its DNA, like Call of Duty. Because its time-to-kill is one of the longest…

NEED TO KNOW WHAT IS IT? An open world western drama EXPECT TO PAY $60 DEVELOPER Rockstar Studios PUBLISHER Rockstar Games REVIEWED ON RTX 2080, i9-9900k, 32 GB RAM, SSD MULTIPLAYER Yes LINK rockstargames.com/reddeadredemption2/ Oh Jesus Christ, what have you done?” ThomasChen978 wants to know why a dozen bodies and a couple horse corpses are piled onto the train tracks bordering St Denis. “You just murdered half the village.” “No,” I reply, “These are our bodies.” We’re on round two of growing the recursive corpse pile. My posse got the idea to jump in front of the train after a few rounds of ‘Lasso Your Friends And Toss Them Into The Sea’. Red Dead Redemption 2 has its own bowling minigame, we explain to Chen in a roundabout way, his…

Yes, the venerable classic is being wheeled out again—not quite new, but definitely improved. It wears its two decades well, but the years are still there hidden beneath polish and new art and myriad tweaks. Age of Empires II: Definitive Edition wavers between remaster and remake, updating nearly everything from the art to the AI, but reverence for the original means that the changes, though broad and welcome, are somewhat restrained. NEED TO KNOW WHAT IS IT? A remaster of the classic RTS with some new additions EXPECT TO PAY $20 DEVELOPER Forgotten Empires, Tantalus Media PUBLISHER Xbox Game Studios REVIEWED ON GTX 1080Ti, Intel i7-8086K, 16GB RAM MULTIPLAYER Yes LINK ageofempires.com/games/aoeii This remaster makes it easier to appreciate why the original had the impact it did. Finally, in 2019, Age of…

NEED TO KNOW WHAT IS IT? A first-person physics puzzler with impossible architecture EXPECT TO PAY $20 DEVELOPER William Chyr Studio PUBLISHER In-house REVIEWED ON AMD A4-6300@3.7GHz, 6GB RAM, GeForce GT 610 MULTIPLAYER No LINK manifold.garden There have been quite a few games that play with the fun of gravity. Antichamber’s mind-bending puzzles, Dandara’s explosive wall-jumping and the upcoming Boundary’s zero-G shooting—all grant the player the ability to defy physics. William Chyr’s first-person physics-based puzzler, Manifold Garden, also lets you mess with the force of gravity, but in this game your playground is the never-ending, mind-bending realms of infinity. Waltz up to any visible surface in Manifold Garden’s geometric world and you’ll automatically flip gravity so that the wall becomes the floor. Using this ability, players are tasked with solving…

NEED TO KNOW WHAT IS IT? A management sim about running a series of zoos EXPECT TO PAY $45 DEVELOPER Frontier Developments PUBLISHER Frontier Developments REVIEWED ON Intel i7-9700K 3.6GHz, NVIDIA GeForce RTX 2080 8GB MULTIPLAYER No, though you can share creations LINK planetzoogame.com The difference between a roller coaster and a ring-tailed lemur is that when one has a problem it’s a mild irritation, and when the other has a problem it’s a cause of unbridled panic and guilt. There are stressful components to every management simulation game, but where Planet Coaster’s mechanical breakdowns make me worry briefly about profits, Planet Zoo’s biological breakdowns make me feel like a neglectful, abusive monster who should be dragged off to jail and never allowed near another living thing ever again. Planet…

NEED TO KNOW EXPECT TO PAY $20 DEVELOPER Empyrean PUBLISHER Frozen District The room I’m improving isn’t ninety-nine percent clean. It’s one percent dirty. This is unacceptable. I’ve reached a point in House Flipper where every project I do has to be perfect, no matter the cost to my enjoyment. It’s the sort of game that encourages you to go that little bit further for reasons I can’t fathom. I redecorate and furnish a nursery for one client, and can’t resist buying some toys to go on the empty bookshelf. It’s the kind of next-level service that’ll win me business with other clients. Soon I’m earning enough cash to start redecorating the reeking cupboard I call home. I sell the tepid motivational photos and replace them with an unflattering, wall-filling photo of…

The world is divided into two types of gamer: Those who don’t understand why anyone would spend their free time playing Euro Truck Simulator 2, and those of us who realize that maintaining the speed limit on continental motorways for an unbroken 20 minutes is as close gaming gets to mindfulness. The only thing in the way of this zen state is the threat of some difficult reverse parking at the other end of the journey. Until then I’m immersed in a warm bath of local radio stations and immaculate autobahns. 82…

ANDY KELLY THIS MONTH Escaped civilization in the freezing Grizzlies. ALSO PLAYED Tetris Effect Travel to the far north of Red Dead Redemption 2’s vast open world and you’ll eventually find yourself in the Grizzlies: a chain of blizzard-battered mountains crawling with bears and dotted with snowy forests. There are a lot of beautiful places to explore in Rockstar’s Wild West, from the bustling St Denis to the plains of the Heartlands. But it’s those cold, isolated Grizzlies, in all their beautiful bleakness, I find myself returning time and time again. Even in the most remote parts of the countryside you’ll find traces of people, whether it’s a hunter setting up camp or a passing stagecoach travelling between towns. But when you’re up there in the Grizzlies it’s just you…

Thanks to X019, Microsoft’s fan event, and BlizzCon, which you can read about in our special report, it’s been a month full of announcements and reveals. At the top of the list is Age of Empires IV. Announced in 2017, Relic’s been pretty quiet about the sequel since, but now we’ve had our first look at the game in action. It’s a departure from Relic’s grimdark 40k games and appropriately gloomy Company of Heroes. The battle shown off in the gameplay reveal is a sun-drenched scuffle between the Mongols and English. Brightly-colored soldiers charge down hills and pour out of a cute model town, and it’s unmistakably Age of Empires, especially when the units start diving into the scrum and the trebuchets start swinging. Age of Empires IV doesn’t have…

NEED TO KNOW RELEASE TBC DEVELOPER Blizzard Entertainment PUBLISHER In-house LINK blizzcon.playoverwatch.com Blizzard’s beloved shooter has needed a pick-me-up for a while. Sure, there’s now 31 heroes, arcade modes, loads of maps, and a healthy esports scene, but if it feels things like seasonal events fell by the wayside it’s because the development team had to split their resources between Overwatch and Overwatch 2. Rumors of a sequel flew around months before BlizzCon, but the official announcement didn’t feel any less exciting—two PvE modes, a new PvP mode, a new hero named Sojurn, and the news that current Overwatch players will be able to use their cosmetics in Overwatch 2. Blizzard doesn’t want to fragment its player bases, and I applaud them for that. However, the Overwatch 2 demo felt…

NEED TO KNOW RELEASE Spring 2020 (Early Access) DEVELOPER Obsidian Entertainment PUBLISHER Microsoft LINK obsidian.net Let’s get two things about Grounded out of the way right now. First, though Obsidian Entertainment is famous for RPGs like Fallout: New Vegas, Grounded is not that. It’s a survival game. Second, it’s definitely not an officially licensed Honey I Shrunk the Kids game, despite how much it looks like one. The spirit of mad scientist Rick Moranis is coursing through this co-op survival game, which casts you as a teenager, shrunk down to ant size. The world is your literal backyard, and all the typical survival mechanics, like hunger, thirst, and building shelters, are viewed through that tiny lens. Grounded’s setting really helps set it apart from the scores of survival games on…

Chris: There’s a weird pleasure to playing a bad guy in games, but it’s often coupled with a bit of guilt over the terrible things you do, and punishment in the form of a ‘bad ending’. Not so in Untitled Goose Game, because you’re not really evil, you’re just supremely annoying. You’re not killing or even hurting anyone, you’re just kind of ruining their afternoon for no reason. And that’s incredibly liberating. You can be an asshole goose with a clear conscience, which makes it all the more fun. Jody: The NPCs treat you like you’re just an asshole goose too. No matter what you take or how much you torment that one kid, they just shoo you off. Steal as many of the farmer’s things as you like, he’s…

Chris: Laughter is often the result of surprise, and there are few games quite as surprising as What the Golf? Each of its holes has three stages, and each stage gives developer Triband another chance to catch you out. That structure itself is a surprise, because the stages don’t always (or even usually) get progressively more difficult, but are instead geared for comedy twists. In stage one, maybe you shoot an arrow at a target (note: What the Golf? is very rarely actually golf, but can include archery, bowling, horseback riding, racing, and even first-person shooting). In stage two, instead of a single arrow a torrent of them bursts from your bow to litter your target—weirdly making it a challenge to miss rather than hit. In stage three, maybe you…

Chris: It’s not just the breadth and beauty of the world Rockstar built, but the amount of things to do in that world and the lack of real pressure to do any of them until you’re ready. RDR2 doesn’t have the desperate insecurity of a Ubisoft world where every metre of the map has a shotgun spray of icons or a rampaging animal bursting from the bushes, as if a mere moment of silence will leave players confused and unsure of what to do. There are plenty of radiant encounters in RDR2, but you’re welcome to ignore them while you ramble, and there are just enough animal attacks and roadside robberies to keep you on your toes. And, of course, it’s a gorgeous and incredibly detailed place to spend your…

Rachel: I’ve put my janky little wooden spaceship through hell in Outer Wilds. Crashing into planets, plummeting into black holes, botching up landings, and spinning wildly through the void is all part of the joyful experience of exploration. I’ve lost count of the number of times I’ve smashed it up beyond repair. Within Outer Wilds’ brilliant time loop, sometimes there’s no time for a pin-point perfect landing, you’ve just got to crash and dash. But when things reset it’d always be back in one piece again, waiting patiently for me—the perfect companion as I solved a mystery that encompasses the outer reaches of the solar system and beyond. Tom: Outer Wilds gives me a sense of wonder. Space phenomena like black holes feel mysterious and dangerous, and the looping time cycle…

NEED TO KNOW WHAT IS IT? An approachable operations-scale World War II wargame EXPECT TO PAY $30 DEVELOPER 2x2 Games, Croteam PUBLISHER Croteam REVIEWED ON Intel Core i5-3330, GeForce GTX 1070 Ti, 8GB RAM MULTIPLAYER Hotseat only LINK unityofcommand.net This confident follow-up is an unambiguous improvement across the board and a triumph of wargame design. From the campaign structure to the simple mechanics and customizable armies, Unity of Command II brings renewed vigor to World War II strategy. One of my high bars for a strategy game’s sequel is that I can unreservedly recommend the game over its predecessor. Unity of Command II is one of those games, though I was initially wary of all the new mechanics added to an otherwise delightfully simple wargame. Unity of Command II has the same…

NEED TO KNOW WHAT IS IT? Entertaining, if obnoxious, open-world racer EXPECT TO PAY $60 DEVELOPER Ghost Games PUBLISHER EA REVIEWED ON Windows 10, AMD Ryzen 5 3600, Nvidia GTX 2080 Super, 32 GB RAM MULTIPLAYER Yes LINK bit.ly/2OrsLVL This inevitable sequel is a decent game, a rich and vibrant open-world racer with a day/night mechanic and thrilling police chases. Imagine the sun-drenched fun of Burnout: Paradise mixed with the duelling of Need For Speed: Rivals, and you’re two thirds of the way to understanding what Need For Speed: Heat is about. All you need to add is the most obnoxious cast of characters ever squeezed out of the sphincter of creation. I swear by Vin Diesel’s right foot, the fighting roster of Mortal Kombat XI is less inherently punch-able than Need…

Forget about the dull thudding footsteps of the xenomorph in Alien: Isolation or Resi’s zombie dogs; the scariest moment in gaming is receiving your third and final performance violation in Papers, Please when your son is dying and you can’t afford bread. For a game that celebrates the routine, Lucas Pope’s administrate-’em-up can be tremendously stressful. I don’t remember it being this hard. There are tumbles of paper to cross reference with unwieldy guidance notes. Every single day the job I’m lucky to have gets more complicated. It’s a grimly brilliant bit of social commentary with the best-designed stamping mechanism in all of gaming. 86…

ROBERT ZAK THIS MONTH Bought low and sold high. ALSO PLAYED Bloodstained: Ritual of the Night I’m deep into a campaign in Endless Legend, the strange and mesmerizing fantasy 4X game from Amplitude Studios. In my campaign, global power dynamics have been solidified for centuries. The Cultists—mannequin-like beings that assimilate and enslave lesser peoples—are spreading their mysterious teachings, while the regal Drakken can be seen as the self-described ‘goodies’, gaining power through science, knowledge and trade agreements. But behind the scenes I, as leader of the Roving Clans, am exerting soft power through that barely visible force of economics. I control the global marketplace, deciding who gets to be part of it, and taking cuts of every market transaction. I’m accruing wealth beyond measure while others tumble around with wars…

NEED TO KNOW DIFFICULTY Medium TIME Five hours VITAL LINKS Madam Nazar location: bit.ly/2qKCk9L Make quick money: bit.ly/2qGgaph Best horse: bit.ly/33D1XrU OPTIMIZE FOR PC 1 Bask in the true glory of the Wild West now its moseyed its way to personal computers. Expand your field of view to fully drink in the rolling American plains and enable HDR as long as your monitor supports it. YOU’VE BEEN FRAMED 2 RDR2 is demanding on your PC and its storage: You’ll need 150GB of free space before you’ve even broken in your first bronco. Tweak your volumetrics, shadows, and textures to ensure you get those sweet, sweet 60 frames. REBINDING OF ISAAC 3 The default PC controls aren’t great—head to key mapping at the top of the control settings screen to rebind.…

ASSASSIN’S CREED IV Abstergo ran a Montreal developer in this one, and released its games with Ubisoft. BIOSHOCK Take-Two shut down studios in Massachusetts, California, and Australia after Bioshock. RESIDENT EVIL Like Capcom, Umbrella Corp is an international enterprise with subsidiaries across the world. PORTAL We’re all rats in the maze of Valve’s experiments. Aperture Science, eat your heart out.…

The tuning of autoexec.bat files to squeeze a game into memory used to be a common thing. PC RAM was once split into conventional, expended, and expanded, and knowing what a game wanted in terms of each was key to getting it to run nicely. Autoexec files run at PC startup and contain commands such as LOADHIGH that would push device drivers and the like into higher memory, freeing up conventional memory for the game. Remember, 640kb is all the RAM you’ll ever need. You could also use them to set the interrupt requests and direct memory access used by sound cards—some games let you tweak these settings, others didn’t mind what you used, still others demanded precise settings or they wouldn’t work. See, in my day, you used to…

Previously on these pages we’ve looked at advances in quantum computing and the use of carbon nanotubes to build processors. This month we’re stepping further off the path of the conventional than ever before. Yes, we’re going to Bristol. The University of the West of England will teach you a degree course in anything from accountancy to ecology, but is also home to the Center for Unconventional Computing and its professor. The single photograph that features on the center’s website features a toilet roll, a headless skeleton, a fume cupboard, a mechanic’s toolset, oscilloscopes and, disappointingly, only two actual computers. There’s a white lab coat thrown over a chair, it’s that sort of place. The center was set up by Professor Andrew Adamatzky in 2001 “as a response to an…