Innholdsfortegnelse for June 2022 i PC Gamer (US Edition)

Finding the Eye of Horus and placing it on an altar in Trismegistus is an unforgettable event. The entire world fades away before returning as a warped version of itself, cloaked in ominous purple hues. It feels like the kind of trick Trismegistus just shouldn’t be able to pull off, considering how it was made: As an original adventure built with the 22-year-old Sword of Moonlight: King’s Field Making Tool, a dungeon crawler construction set released on PC by FromSoftware long before Dark Souls or Elden Ring. Building a game with FromSoftware’s ancient tools took creator Thomas Eversole “multiple hours out of each day” over six months of toil. The effort shows. Strange monsters await your move on a chess-like floor. Serene pools are replaced with fiery lava. The playable…

The moment I laid eyes on Onbu in The Wandering Village I was smitten. Onbu is a massive six-legged megasaur and I’m in charge of the village that sits on its back. I love this lumbering giant, and all I want is to make sure it loves me back. That takes some doing and a lot of hard work. In The Wandering Village, a city building sim from Swiss developer Stray Fawn Studio, the planet is slowly being destroyed by toxic spores, and the only hope of survival is to create a sturdy little society on the back of this massive, gentle creature as it trudges across the world. That means the village experiences different biomes as Onbu wanders through them, like arid zones where water is hard to come…

Norco is a Nmany-headed creature—a narrative hydra of place, personhood, nostalgia, and spirituality. But to start with the basics, it’s a real Louisiana town named for the New Orleans Refining Company, a monumental piece of psychogeographical storytelling, and in February 2022, I’m ready to call it my game of the year. Note: There will be some spoilers for the game from this point onward. The tiny dev collective Geography of Robots has called Norco’s style ‘petroleum blues’, a nod to the area’s relationship with the oil corporation that has defined both the town and the environmental decline that colors its existence. The game pointedly avoids the disaster porn and fetishization that tend to dominate media portrayals of the Deep South, and while a big part of Norco revolves around grief and…

THE LOGICAL PUTDOWN Sam: Give me some intelligence or you’ll be pushing up daisies in a cemetery full of guys just like you. Guard: I don’t have any intelligence. Sam: Hey, you just called yourself stupid. THE REMINDER WHO’S IN CHARGE Sam: What are you doing here? Guard: I would ask you the same. Sam: I have a knife. You go first. THE FAKE ORDERS FROM ‘HIGHER UP’ Sam to HQ: “He’s not talking, should I kill him? HQ to Sam: “Negative, Negative” Sam to Guard: “OK, they say I should kill you so…” ‘THIS IS JUST A DRILL SO PLAY ALONG’ ROUTINE Guard: Wait a minute, is this a training exercise? Sam: Ugh, damn. Support! This guy knows it’s an exercise, who let the cat out of the bag?…

PRAWN GUY He stole a necklace, but lets you buy it back. He boils prawns and sells them. An unhappy fellow. RANNI THE WITCH A witch that has plans for you. Though gentle, she doesn’t seem like she’s telling you the full truth. WAR COUNSELOR IJI Kind giant with a peculiar helmet. He’s the only trustworthy NPC in the game; protect him! KENNETH Kenneth is a noble sort that asks for a favor. He appears innocent, but I don’t believe him.…

Since its release, Destiny 2 has been cursed to reinvent itself with each expansion. Starting with Forsaken, and through to 2020’s Beyond Light, Bungie has overhauled every aspect of the game multiple times—weapons, armor, abilities, activities—each solving some issues, but introducing new problems that inevitably led to the cycle repeating. No matter what changes were made, Destiny 2 always felt a few major tweaks away from being truly brilliant. If The Witch Queen does one thing right—and, in fact, it does many—it’s that it brings a sense of consistency and stability to the game. It adds new features, yes, but they’re all enhancements and progressions of systems and ideas introduced in Beyond Light. That rare sense of continuity allows The Witch Queen to instead stand out in a more meaningful…

Where its predecessor was a game about crossing a dried-up seabed, Far: Changing Tides presents you with the opposite problem: There’s really rather a lot of water here, so much that civilization has seemingly washed away on the tide. What remains is you and your boat, which you acquire shortly after the game begins. As you learn the boat’s peculiar ways, Far keeps unveiling new surprises. By the end, I knew every nuance of this trusty vessel, like a beloved car. When you liberate the boat, the only things you have to worry about are the wind and natural or man-made obstacles. The latter are generally cleared by hopping back off the boat and solving (mostly intuitive) mechanical puzzles, while the wind is something you manage from atop the deck.…

Not many games do doom correctly. But the second Banner Saga comes close to making the gathering storm of probably-death strangely compelling. And yet, what should be more depressing than a Mike Leigh film about lost balloons manages to retain its vital spirit—something humane and powerful that makes you want to keep fighting for survival, no matter how much you lose along the way. The presentation helps. The art remains breathtaking, and the music is perfect for making even giants feel small. Some niggling UI issues linger from the first game, but it’s still an experience that makesme want to stand on a mountainside and contemplate sad things. 81…

I recently learned about ‘false epiphanies’. Apparently, the euphoric sensation you feel when you solve a puzzle can be triggered whether or not you’ve actually found the correct solution, and because we associate that ‘eureka’ feeling with being right, it can fool us into believing we’ve genuinely uncovered a hidden truth. The Vice article I read was talking about psychedelic drugs, but while killing time in a Battlefield 2042 Portal server, it occurred to me that I was experiencing something similar. A ‘false killstreak’ let’s say. Portal allows Battlefield 2042 players to design and host their own game modes, and they range from sophisticated deathmatch variants to the shooter equivalent of Cookie Clicker. The server I was in was the latter type: a custom ‘zombies’ mode that pit a few…

Although I enjoy hidden object games that are centered around darker tales, there’s nothing I appreciate more in the genre than a game that’s oozing with cheese—and I say that with zero shame. My love for these games dates back to the mid-to-late 2000s, when the Spintop Games’ website fell into my lap, and I fell into a hole of trying to do some damage control as an incredibly busy wedding planner in the Dream Day series. Since then, I’ve been searching high and low for a title that brings me the same level of light-hearted escapism that Dream Day Wedding does. Thankfully, I’ve managed to find just that in First Time in Paris, a game that evokes the exact same joy I’d felt all those years ago. It’s an…

1 ALL OGRE The wayward Ogre tribes have spread the length and breadth of the Warhammer world with a humble goal in their hearts: Steal what you can’t eat, and eat what you can’t steal. 2 PIN CUSHIONS Though a lumbering tide of hungry, hungry humanoids may be unnerving, know that a strong line of spearmen and a few volleys of missile fire sends these ruffians running back to the mountains. 3 FRIENDS NOT FOOD Ever the entrepreneurial spirits when it comes to their next meal, Ogres can be hired as mercenaries for your army if any region a camp is present, and make for excellent shock troops.…

1 Go to the Linux desktop and use a browser to download the Epic Windows installer (Steam+X opens the keyboard). 2 Steam, select Game > Add a Non-Steam Game To My Library. Click Browse, go to “/home/deck/Downloads” and change the file type to All Files. 3 Right-click Epic in Steam, Properties > Compatibility. Check the box. Select the latest Proton. Click Play to install. 4 Open the file explorer and hit the menu in the top-right to “Show Hidden Files.” Navigate to this path: “Home/.local/share/Steam/steamapps/compatdata” to find a bunch of numbered folders. The Epic folder will have a much larger number than regular Steam games. Dive into the “pfx/drive_c/Program Files (x86)” folders within until you find Epic Games. When you do, go to: “Epic Games/Launcher/Portal/Binaries/Win64”. Find EpicGames Launcher.exe. Right-click >…

As the magazine was going to press, Valve published its Steam statistics for 2021: Yes, most companies do this at the start of the year, but it’s good to experience a bit of Valve time again, don’t you think? What is astonishing is the scale Steam is operating at, and how quickly users have stacked. The platform now boasts 69 million daily active players, and 132 million unique monthly users. The first number is higher than the population of the United Kingdom (67.89 million), while the second is more people than live in Mexico (128.9 million), and would make Steam the tenth biggest country on Earth. Er, if it was a country, that is. Valve’s preferred metric for measuring Steam’s success has always been highest concurrent player count: In 2015…

DARK DESTINY With the titular dark destiny hanging in the air and voices haunting his dreams, the protagonist sets off for Melenat. HEIR OF GRANATYKI A mysterious darkness sweeps the land in this engrossing and traditional King’s Field prequel. RETURN TO MELENAT An interesting mix of the old with the new keeps this post-King’s Field 3 experience feeling fresh and exciting. TRISMEGISTUS This original adventure focuses on puzzles over combat, taking the gamemaking tool in a whole new direction.…

Taking the strategy adventure concept and bringing it into the new millenium, Songs of Conquest just might be the kind of indie to start a genre revival. Backed by Satisfactory, Deep Rock Galactic, and Valheim publisher Coffee Stain, developer Lavapotion is rebuilding a strategy genre abandoned by the gaming mainstream. Strategy adventure games haven’t wholly disappeared, what with the revived Age of Wonders games so well-received, but there’s still something to be said for the concept of the old Might & Magic games. Songs of Conquest gets that, and it sets you up for the blend of tactical combat and strategic exploration that made those so beloved. “We look at this as a revitalization of a genre that should never have gone away,” said Magnus Alm, a designer at Lavapotion. That goes all the way back…

Orgy is a word laden with expectation, but in this context it comes paired with the words ‘of destruction’. Build a vehicle, drive it into things, destroy them, fulfil an objective, then unlock new blades and smashy things to upgrade your vehicle for the next level. That’s about it, though there’s a sandbox too. And if that sounds a bit like Besiege, Abriss, or Teardown, well, it kind of is. Currently in Early Access, extra parts for your destructive vehicles are being added all the time, so today’s wheeled wagon with blades might become tomorrow’s tracked terror covered with circular saws. A level begins with your vehicle floating in space, a weight and value limit imposed on what you can create. While it’s easy to write this time off as…

Platinum Games’ inspiration for its first foray into the live-service market is certainly an ironic one. The once great and revered Babylonian empire, now reduced to ruins, serves as a fitting metaphor for the game itself. Far from boasting the high-octane combat, unique characters, and fascinating worlds that the studio is synonymous with, Babylon’s Fall crumbles under the weight of repetitive gameplay and prioritization of paywalls over players. You play as a Sentinel, a prisoner forced to scale the Ziggurat—based on the mythical Tower of Babel—at the behest of your Neo-Babylonian masters. Equipped with a mysterious artefact called a Gideon Coffin, you ascend the structure’s many floors, battling blue-hued enemies known as the Gallu. It’s not the most inspired of stories, but it does serve as a mildly entertaining means…

I’ve been here before. An encouraging, rosy-cheeked Saxon campaign, full of possibility and promise. Britain to the west, ripe and ready for plucking. Whole empires forming a bulwark between me and the Huns. It’s like starting a new job and seeing a clean, empty Google inbox. It’ll be different this time! I can taste the hope. I’m feeling so positive, in fact, that the first objective—‘survive till the year 400’—seems faintly insulting. It takes three turns before things go irreparably wrong. I’ve approached this like a normal Total War game, in which your sleepy neighbors barely notice until you forcibly nudge them off their thrones. I use the grace period Total War games usually afford me to improve trade and build farms, safe in the knowledge that the other barbarians…

I’m reminded of an ancient Bhuddist saying, “If you walk, just walk. If you sit, just sit. But don’t wobble.” The opening of Viking: Battle For Asgard reveals a game at peace with being a rental special. The sort of game you’d hire because the cover looked metal. And, to be fair, 2008-me would be pretty chuffed. It looks striking, in that vaseline-smeared way naughties games often do; the combat feels like a clod-hopping precursor to Shadow of Mordor. The cast includes Richard Ridings, who Creative Assembly fans will recognize as the voice ofThorgrim Grudgebearer. Or, more famously, Peppa Pig’s dad. Snort! 66…

Free to Windows 10 owners and rolling out on a gradual basis, Windows 11 once promised gamers the world. “If you’re a gamer, Windows 11 was made for you,” said the Redmond giant, with all the conviction of a shopping channel presenter. Taken at its word, we’d be best off installing a box-fresh OS as soon as it’s made available to us and enjoying the smorgasbord of excellent features designed specifically for us, the gamers. Few of us have done so since its initial 2021 release, of course. Because we’ve been hurt by this sort of thing before. Steam’s January hardware survey had 13% of the platform’s user base using Windows 11 and over 77% sticking with trusty old Windows 10 64-bit. Since not everyone’s eligible for the upgrade just…

There are two sides to PC gaming, more or less. One of them involves sitting somewhere comfy and playing games on a PC. The other, less clearly defined in the pastime’s name, is about taking stewardship of the machine that makes the games happen. This side of the coin is far less logical than the other, which by contrast is fairly simple intrinsic enjoyment. The knowledge that we could delve inside our PCs and have some agency over the performance they contain is inherently corrupting, like the sacred insights within an Elder Scroll or an uncomfortable Adam Curtis documentary. Things are never the same afterwards. Upgrading one’s personal computer, then, is a natural rite of passage for the subculture. We’re making the machine ours by dictating the exact specification of…

HIGHS Genshin energy Genshin developer MiHoYo invested $63 million into building a tokamek. Dream of Californication? 23 years after the Red Hot Chili Peppers did a video featuring a fake open world game for Californication… a modder went and made all seven stages of it. GPU what? Availability of graphics cards is finally increasing. Serious Hacks A hacker group called Lapsus$ compromised Nvidia and Samsung. Titanfail After thousands in funding indie MMO TitanReach is dead, with an insider alleging the lead developer used the cash to gamble on crypto. eSnoop Dogg Snoop Dogg is now a member of Faze Clan and, yes, he’s going to be called Faze Snoop. LOWS…

Look at Abermore, the new heist RPG from Four Circle Interactive, and you’re likely to see the Thief in it—the dumb waiters, and waiters knocked dumb with blunt instruments. But the inspiration came via an intermediary—The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion. Its notorious Dark Brotherhood questline was designed by Emil Pagliarulo, a veteran of the Thief games who secreted stealth missions into Bethesda’s open world. “The lack of staging and matter-of-factness of the objectives let the player be very broad in their approach, and there was something about that which we really liked,” say Dan Pearce and Daniel Scales of Four Circle. “It’s a feeling that Tom Francis’ excellent Heat Signature gave us, too. Obviously we had an awareness and some familiarity, but Thief is actually an influence we landed on…

1 month LEGO STAR WARS: THE SKYWALKER SAGA RELEASE April 5 | DEVELOPER TT Games An ambitious sequel that promises to not just let us play through the stories of all nine mainline Star Wars movies, but also to revamp the well-worn Lego game formula. GLOVER RELEASE April 20 | DEVELOPER Piko Interactive LLC A cultclassic3Dplatformerwhereyouplayadisembodied, sentient glove. Lovingly remade from the original N64 source code for a modern PC release. KING ARTHUR: KNIGHT’S TALE RELEASE April 26 | DEVELOPER NeocoreGames This dark fantasy turn-based RPG is due for its 1.0 launch out of Early Access. Play as Arthur’s nemesis, Sir Mordred, and slay your old foe, now an undead monstrosity. 3 months WH40K: CHAOS GATE – DAEMONHUNTERS RELEASE May 5 | DEVELOPER Complex Games ‘Warhammer meets XCOM’ is a pitch…

By the time I was a kid growing up in the late 1990s and early 2000s, arcades were already on their way out. Home gaming on consoles and PCs has long overtaken the hobby’s original home, relegating it to a novelty for nostalgia-baiting barcades in gentrified neighborhoods. Still, I found my way into arcades over the years: a friend’s birthday party at a local pizza joint, or killing time while off on my own during a family vacation. One game that I always ran into without fail was Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Turtles in Time. Turtles in Time and its predecessor, simply titled Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, remain the gold standard of TMNT games to this day, combining simple, yet fast-paced and explosive combat with drop-in, four-player co-op and the…

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THROWN OBJECTS In Chaos Theory, the AI doesn’t just doggedly investigate the place a thrown object lands, but if they see it in flight they’ll first investigate where the object came from. Clever. AI ON EDGE The more suspicious sounds an enemy hears, the more anxious they become; do a little rustling in the bushes and they’ll dismiss it, but do it a few times and they’ll come a-snoopin’. LIGHT LOGIC Every source of light affects your visibility—from overhead bulbs to glowing computer screens and the intermittent red flashes of a bomb you’re trying to defuse. REFLECTIONS These days, games seem to have given up on making mirrors ‘work,’ but in Chaos Theory enemies could spot you through mirrors. Surely it’s time for mirrors to make a comeback……

Shadow Warrior 3 is a fast-paced FPS for adult-aged children. It stars East Asian caricature and human dick joke Lo Wang, whose main character trait is that he sucks. He’s an onslaught of crap one-liners and innuendos, the kind of man who’s rating how bangable the game’s only woman is within moments of meeting her. He’s the answer to a question nobody asked: What if Deadpool was racially insensitive, and you had to be him for many hours? While the legacy of the original 1997 game is better left forgotten, I’d like plenty about Shadow Warrior 3’s throwback shooter rhythm if it was anywhere else. Its singleplayer campaign of combat arenas is a perpetual parkour of air dashing and wall-running, all while rotating through different flavors of carnage as each…

I’m not saying I’m indecisive, but it takes me five minutes to select my units in Bad North just so I can pick exactly the right combination of grunt and goofy portrait. Wait, am I saying I’m indecisive? Perhaps. It’s a jaunty, cartoonish start that makes me wonder if I’ve misunderstood everything I’ve heard about the game. Surely something this cute can’t hurt me? Like the Stay-puft Marshmallow Man, or tree frogs. I begin to understand when I almost lose my most treasured unit. I’ve spent too much gold on Petra. She’s been handsomely upgraded. Her team of archers can pick off most enemies before their boats reach the shores. But I’ve equipped her with an item that lets her deploy twice in a single turn—which is fine—then sent her…

Ubisoft’s historian-bothering apocryphal-’em-up is a pretty big deal, but it gets the short entry this month because it only has seven vikings—notably less than every other entry on this list. For Honor has a childlike enthusiasm that’s hard to resist. It attempts to answer a primal question that has troubled countless great minds for generations: Who would win in a fight between ninjas and pirates? That clarity of purpose, combined with an elegant combat system, makes for an exhilarating game. 77…

THE STEAM DECK IS THE LEATHERMAN OF GAMING HANDHELDS When I pick up the Steam Deck, I think about Leathermans. You know that multitool that your uncle, or somebody’s uncle, loves to bust out to solve any problem? Pliers, scissors, a bottle opener… with all those tools (and more!) a Leatherman is too big for a pocket, so it usually lives in a little belt holster. It’s portable, but it still sticks out. The Steam Deck is the Leatherman of gaming handhelds, or at least one that Leatherman uncles will love. The problem I’ve always had with Leathermans is that the miniature doodads are never as good as the proper tools they replace. And the Steam Deck isn’t completely immune to that jack-of-all-trades problem—it’s not a replacement for my desktop…

START BAR WINDOWS 95 The Start bar is just so intuitive, Microsoft still can’t remove or improve it two decades later. DVD SUPPORT WINDOWS 98 Without it, we’d all have been disc-swapping CD ROMs like disorganized DJs. NT KERNEL WINDOWS XP Multi-threading, memory management, 64-bit operation—still the basis of modern Windows. DIRECTX 10 WINDOWS VISTA Definitely a rose tinted view, but blimey did it ever make games look a whole lot better overnight.…