Innholdsfortegnelse for May 2021 i PC Gamer (US Edition)

HIGHS Gamestop stocks in Jan A wild investment campaign on reddit saw the stock of US retailer Gamestop go through the roof. Resi’s tall vampire lady Folks went wild over the upcoming Resident Evil Village’s very tall Lady Dimitrescu—the devs have officially announced she’s nine foot six. GoldenEye Rare’s unreleased remaster of the N64’s GoldenEye 007 has leaked. LOWS Gamestop stocks in Feb After peaking at $483/share the stocks crashed to $88/share. Stadia shutdown Google announced the closure of its first-party studios as it backs away from streaming service Stadia. Epic mistake A four-year-old’s family was questioned by UK police after the boy was reported for talking about his dad’s “guns and bombs”. He was talking about how they play Fortnite.…

Last year there was Monster Train, before that Slay the Spire, before that Dream Quest. The digital deckbuilder is in the ‘Doom-clone’ stage. All these games about constructing the perfect set of cards to survive randomized battles, victory based on some huge combo, differentiated by their looks. Aesthetically, Roguebook is a winner. It’s designed by Abrakam, responsible for the under-rated CCG Faeria, and Roguebook shares its setting as well as visuals that are part Miyazaki forest, part children’s fairytale book. Glowing orbs waft through trees, sinister beasts with antlers emerge from the undergrowth. A Disney witch crooks her finger and a louche ogre king lounges like a Skyrim jarl. There are a lot of fluffy yak creatures. I’ve been defeated more than once by raccoon jerks who fling yaks out of…

I don’t really understand the science behind Wobbledogs’ mutating pups, but I do love my new wibbly-wobbly dog family. In this 3D pet sim, you breed and raise a bunch of odd canines whose DNA changes depending on their diet and how you raise them. The dogs start out relatively normal, but feeding them different kinds of chow will cause their bodies to change in shape and color. Since you have control over what the dogs eat, you ultimately decide how to mold and shape their rapid evolution, placing you in the peculiar position of both pup parent and gene-splicing scientist. Wobbledogs aren’t the fastest breed of canine companions and have tremendous trouble moving around, meaning that they’ll need a bit of help. Keeping track of all the dogs feels like…

HAYSTACK HALLWAYS 1 “Haystack Hallways, is maybe the quintessential example of a maze. In a way, I think this is the worst maze. It’s boring, long and the volume of dead ends is something like three times the length of the critical path. Many of these dead ends have other dead ends branching off of them, so it’s hard to know if you’ve found the right path.” 2 “But halfway through, there is a bridge which you can climb to get a vantage point over the entire maze. From here you can plan the rest of your route. Additionally, there are several logs interspersed throughout, those little patches of white, which can either serve as landmarks or block off routes—sometimes both.” FOUNTAIN FOOTPATH 1 “A two-tiered hedge maze with a…

Stumbling into the first boss after slashing through a riverside village beset by demons, I begin to chip away at a screen-dominating health bar with my looted purple ninja knife. Little falls off before it roars, plunging me into a dark world and then summarily killing me with its saw-bladed cleaver. “Yeah, yeah,” I nod, “I’ve played Dark Souls, I know you’re not meant to be able to beat the first boss. It’s just flavor.” Then I respawn, and realize this is just the start of the mountain to come after all. The large arsenal of possible weapons aren’t your only tools for spilling hot yokai blood. Your custom character is half-yokai themselves. Not only does this mean you can spend meter to enter a powered-up state of demon-slapping fury,…

The grappling hook, which everyone knows is gaming’s best mechanic, has a new star. Olija features an eldritch harpoon that grapples on to enemies and orange-eyed black tentacles, and you can teleport to it with a slash. It’s a simple design which sits at the center of this dark action adventure as both a combat tool and a way to traverse its levels, and which constantly delivers a sense of choice and movement. It’s not without issues. The harpoon can be fiddly because it requires two separate double-inputs, first to throw it, and then to push in its direction while hitting the throw button again to teleport. Hit throw without a direction and it’ll return. In battle, it’s easy to find yourself fighting without the harpoon, which is your main…

The most doomed thing you can be in a videogame is a tutorial dad. If you’re a father reading this and you’ve recently taught your child how to shoot apples or duck under fallen logs, take out life insurance immediately—you’re never making it into act two. This is how A Plague Tale begins, and, unfortunately, for the first hour, it feels cloyingly familiar. You watch your family get butchered. The baddies are cartoonishly bad. And you can only escape by scampering around the Inquisition’s inept search team. It’s a shaky start, and one that highlights the game’s absurd stealth mechanics. Three people can become invisible by squatting in a thicket mere inches away from the elite soldier hunting them. Once you get over that, however, A Plague Tale clicks. There…

I can’t imagine many things worse than coming home from a bad day at work—usually, in this case, one resulting in my death—only to find a distant relative hidden in the crawlspace of my home. But in the case of Children of Morta it’s a positive thing, because it usually signifies the necessary upgrades to progress slightly deeper into the horrible dungeon that festers in your basement. Combat is simple and sharp, and the unfolding narrative takes the edge off your inevitable failure. 78…

We like phat pipes, and we cannot lie. And over the past 20 years we’ve seen internet connections change from dial-up to ADSL over copper wire, to today’s fiber-optics. So what’s next for how we transfer data? Imagine a network that, instead of using pulses of light to send signals, uses the properties of photons themselves. This is a quantum network, and it relies on something Einstein wasn’t very fond of: Quantum entanglement. Decried as ‘spooky action at a distance’ by the moustachioed relativity-theorizer, entanglement means creating a pair of photons in such a way that, when you measure the quantum state of one, you immediately know the same property of the other no matter how far apart they are. Transferring information in this way is known as quantum teleportation,…

Hitman 3 is an enormous PC game—at least if you own Hitman 1 and 2, which Hitman 3 can import to bring the entire trilogy into a single package. That sounds like a recipe for an install size big enough to make an SSD cry, because Hitman 2, with the first game’s levels imported, is currently 149 gigabytes. Hitman 2 is one of the mightiest storage hogs on PC, second only to Call of Duty. But Hitman 3 will actually shrink instead of grow, retroactively optimizing the first two Hitman games into a dramatically smaller package. How did IO Interactive manage to halve the install size? We asked the developer to break down the technology and techniques it used to cut 80 gigabytes out of the trilogy. “With all content…

“Look,” David Walgrave pleads with his fellow Larian developers. “The player will respect the fact that they’re a bear. They will not fit through the door, they’ll just have to change back. If my dungeon master told me ‘You can’t get in that house, you’re a huge bear’, I would go ‘OK, you’re the DM, you make the rules’. You just have to accept it.” Walgrave is a producer, and producers are the reason you’ve ever played a finished game. They are the bulwark against feature creep, the developers who say ‘no’ when everyone else is saying yes. In Baldur’s Gate terms, they are Elminster—the sage advisor who shows up in the woods to remind wayward adventurers of their purpose in the game. It’s not clear what Walgrave did wrong…

My weird disc-shaped spacecraft is hurtling through the blood-red skies of an alien world. Countless fiery meteors are falling from the upper atmosphere and crashing into the angry seas below with massive explosive force. Amidst all the chaos, my little ship gracefully glides through the sky—and I’ve never felt more at peace. That’s what I love about Exo One. The worlds you find yourself visiting are unpredictable and dangerous, but you can always escape to the skies. This is a sci-fi exploration game that sends you on a journey through time and space, in search of an unfortunate team of astronauts in need of your help. You pilot a strange, shape-shifting aircraft that uses gravity and momentum to move. The ship can transform into a ball that zips across the ground…

It’s telling of Left 4 Dead’s quality that there still isn’t a co-op shooter that has quite outdone it. Unlike many popular multiplayer games of 2021, Left 4 Dead doesn’t ask you to theorycraft a build or study a meta. There’s nothing to understand beyond a few core principles: Shoot and keep moving. That purity is why it was a foundational game for my friends and I over a decade ago and why we still squad up to mow down zombies 13 years later. We’ve seen plenty of fantastic games riff on Turtle Rock Studios’ original template since the series was unceremoniously shelved in 2009, but only now are its original creators jumping back into fray. With Back 4 Blood, Turtle Rock is staking its flag in the ground and…

The history of mazes and labyrinths is a maze itself. The first recorded labyrinth was commissioned by the Egyptian king Amenemhet III thousands of years ago: Unlike the Minotaur labyrinth of Greek myth, this was built to be lived in, with banqueting halls, temples, and offices. Since then, mazes have been cut from turf, mosaicked on cathedral floors, stamped on coins, hacked into cornfields, formed by parking tourbuses, and fashioned from hedgerows as dallying spots for English aristocrats. Mazes and labyrinths generate a surprising range of emotions. Partly, this is because the former isn’t quite the same as the latter. The associations of the noun ‘maze’ are largely negative, referring to bewilderment, deceit, and worldly distraction. A labyrinth is a similarly confusing structure, but the word has acquired more positive senses…

1 “In an ideal scenario most players would know about the fear production aspect going into the maze […] having that fresh in your head as you take your first trembling steps into the maze adds another layer to the tension [but] the atmosphere in that section needs to be visceral enough to stand on its own.” 2 “We tried a lot of different versions of a more generic maze approach but we didn’t really have a strong structure to follow, not until the idea of the column structure and gating system emerged. From that point it felt like things started to progress without any major obstacles and it was more about tweaking areas.” 3 “Some testers were too occupied with watching their surroundings, looking out for whatever made the…

We’re all going to die some day, so I won’t waste your time: The Medium is one of the best third-person horror games I have ever played. The studio behind Blair Witch and the Layers of Fear series has completely outdone itself with the brilliantly written, emotionally grounded story of Marianne, a troubled young woman who can see and communicate with the dead. The Medium plays like an old-school Resident Evil game, minus the gunplay. You navigate Marianne around crumbling, abandoned hotels and claustrophobic Cold War bunkers from fixed camera angles. It can be a bit cumbersome, but it’s a deliberate and effective design choice. The Medium is excellent at making you feel like you’re always being watched, and that danger could be lurking just out of view at any…

BATMAN: ARKHAM CITY Bats’ grapple is versatile: It lets you haunt buildings’ eves, ready to swoop in for a punch, it pulls goons in a ruck, and it pairs brilliantly with his glide to let you fly. SEKIRO: SHADOWS DIE TWICE In a game as exacting as Sekiro the grapple offers relief, giving you breathing room and opening options as you grapple out of combat and then choose how to re-engage. TITANFALL 2 Oh, the skill. This tool for traversal has elegant depths you can’t imagine when you first use it, allowing the very best tiny soldiers to face its giant mechs as equals.…

The Dead by Daylight premise is simple: Four players take the roles of survivors in a Saw-like bloodsport, fixing generators to power an exit gate before hightailing it to safety. The fifth player is a killer who has to prevent the survivors from escaping, impaling them on meathooks and leaving them for an eldritch force. In 2016, it was received as a way to indulge in a brief blood orgy before migrating to more refined multiplayer games. What I don’t think anyone saw coming was for Dead by Daylight to mature into one of the best multiplayer experiences you can play, with razor-sharp mechanical intrigue, an ultra-complex web of versatile builds and strategies, and a diverse suite of characters. What was a comedy-horror romp mutated into something much closer to…

This is one of those games that feels like it shouldn’t work, but does. How can I play as two characters at once? The answer, it seems, is by making sure that they always remain on the corresponding side of the screen to the thumbstick controlling them. The moment they swap I become paralyzed with confusion. But this just serves to make the multitasking elements of Brothers: A Tale of Two Sons more satisfying. Even simple puzzles feel like some sort of minor triumph. It feels like an odd thing to celebrate such solitary victories in a game about the power of teamwork, but here we are. 82…

I have played close to 20 hours of Hyper Light Drifter, and I still can’t tell you what the story is about. Whatever narrative is lurking in this fever-dream action RPG is so obtuse that I’m not convinced it isn’t just a bunch of striking images strung together by sparkling synth music. The intro cinematic jumps between statues with glowing eyes, a Neon Genesis Evangelion-esque apocalypse, and giant fleshy corpses. It’s impenetrable yet undeniably captivating—but, my god, it’s taken me a few tries to get into it. Though it was released in 2016, it’s taken me this long to beat Hyper Light Drifter because I kept bouncing off it. I love nearly everything about it—the ambience, aesthetic, and combat—but a few hours in I’d be going in circles trying to get to the next…

Above the noise of voice chat, I hear the tell-tale buzzing sound a moment before I see what it’s coming from. Despite that momentary warning, I barely have time to react before I’m skewered through the back by a roided-up mosquito. It’s the latest in a series of threats that my party and I are unprepared for; in the last few minutes, I’ve been picked off by an undead but eagle-eyed archer, gutted by a goblin, and flattened under the hooves a buffalo. After I rise from the bed in our hastily-assembled shack for the umpteenth time, I insist that my fellow adventurers and I head home. After a stretch in the wilderness, that ‘home’ feels almost palatial in comparison to the lean-to shelters we’ve been throwing up as a…

Herobrine is a legend in Minecraft, the star of a creepypasta not dissimilar to Slender Man. The character appears in singleplayer games, so the story went, where he does weird things like carving 2 x 2 tunnels in the rocks or cutting all the leaves off of trees; he looks identical to the default Minecraft skin, but with white, empty eyes. First reported in a 2010 4chan post, Herobrine went unnoticed until a streamer named Copeland shared several images ‘proving’ the odd character’s existence. Stories of the spooky ghost miner began to rise to prominence alongside Minecraft itself in the early 2010s. BRICKING IT Like all good legends, this one had a hook in the real world: Herobrine was reportedly Notch’s dead brother, and theories veered from Notch coding a…

There’s nothing quite like Mudrunner for cooling the blood, to paraphrase the classic Flanders and Swann number. There’s something meditative about plunging a truck into brown soup, then spending ten minutes wiggling the left stick and attaching winches to trees in a gradual and patient attempt to free your wheels from the quagmire. It’s a premise that would be considered ponderous or perverse by conventional game design standards, which hold that players should be swept along and kept busy at all times. But Mudrunner didn’t come from conventional game design—it came from the mind of Pavel Zagrebelnyy. Zagrebelnyy was born in St Petersburg, Russia. It was a grounding that would give him access to people, infrastructure, and ultimately work at an internationally known game studio. But it also gave the…

After leaving us guessing for a couple of years, Creative Assembly has spilled the beans on Total War: Warhammer III, and it’s going to be a big ’un, featuring a war of “unprecedented scale” spread across the Realm of Chaos and the Lands of the East. “In campaign map terms, it’s big… roughly twice the size of Warhammer II’s Eye of the Vortex map,” says game director Ian Roxburgh. “And it needs to be, as this is the part of the Warhammer world that gives way to the Realms of Chaos, which take up a significant area in their own right. But I suppose more than anything, you can apply the term ‘unprecedented scale’ to our ambition for the game. We’re aiming to conclude the trilogy in a big way—from the…

As someone who struggles with anything more complicated than putting bread in a toaster, I love cooking games. The joy of mashing potatoes to the exact right consistency, keeping a steady hand as I drain the water from a pasta pot, or expertly managing the temperature of a hearty stew—it’s task-ticking heaven… as long as I don’t have to do it in real life. The main focus in most cooking games is, well, the cooking—they tend to be light on story, with the usual case being that you’re trying to run a restaurant of some kind. But narrative cooking game Venba is taking a completely different approach to the genre. Developed by Visai Games, it’s an attempt to create a cooking game where the narrative is an ingredient in the main…

This spin-off has all the style and confidence of Persona 5, plastered with bold colors and glittery character animations that give each scene the liveliness of a manga panel, down to the menus. A smooth, jazzy soundtrack establishes a psychedelic ’70s spy movie energy, even though we’re dealing with teens taking on criminals throughout Japan. There’s even a 30-hour story with most of the original cast returning. It walks and talks almost exactly like Persona 5, a game that isn’t even on PC yet. But Strikers isn’t Persona 5, and the comparison isn’t flattering for it. Its social elements and combat aren’t as fully-featured or its characters as deeply considered as Persona 5’s, so any expectation of parity will lead to disappointment. Strikers is a wild but bloated visual novel…

With the exception of Spelunky 2’s moles, it’s been a long time since a game has wrung quite as many swears out of me as Gods Will Fall. I’ve turned the air blue with eulogies to fallen comrades, cursed its pantheon, and sworn my way across its god-infested island. Make no mistake: This is a good thing. Most of the time, anyway. The main target for this barrage of f-bombs are the ten deities at the game’s center—a cruel and unusual bunch who rule over humanity with an iron fist. Time to enact the title of the game, with a plan that has the fatal flaw of involving a fleet sent across the sea to attack a group of celestial beings who have control over the elements. And so you…

The Important Writer sat in an inflatable chair in the glittering Citadel of Games Opinions. At his feet, captivated thralls hung on his every word. “Of course,” he said, taking a long drag on his bubble pipe. “The real star of What Remains of Edith Finch isn’t actually any of the people… but the house itself.” His audience wept with joy. Darkness turned to light. The flow of time stopped. He’d saved games journalism again. There are two problems with skewering this take. Firstly, I’ve definitely done it in an attempt to dodder towards my word count. Secondly… the house in Edith Finch really is very good. It feels like a place people lived in. Or, more accurately, died in. It’s the sort of building that makes me look at…

We’re nearly at the end so let’s look into something that breaks the trend of dads that are dead or death-adjacent, and instead look at some that are alive and awkward and slightly thirsty. There are an almost overwhelming number of dads here—it’s like being hit by a wave of Old Spice and air guitar. And while bits of it feel knowingly wry, there’s something pleasingly celebratory about Dream Daddy: A Dad Dating Simulator. It doesn’t so much poke fun at the dad-ness, as revere the ability to be yourself, no matter how husky or unfashionable or aggressively proud of your daughter you are. 71…