Innholdsfortegnelse for Holiday 2023 i PC Gamer (US Edition)

HIGHS Cyberpunk 2.0 Cyberpunk 2077’s update 2.0 is a free patch that reworks huge chunks of the vanilla game. Default controls Armored Core 6 feels truly born for mouse and keyboard. Skin deep Turns out your abyssal tattoos in Baldur’s Gate III are full of in-jokes. LOWS DisUnity Unity announced surprise changes to its pricing model and has already executed a partial U-turn. Diablol A Diablo IV stats boffin played over 400 Nightmare dungeons, and the higher tiers aren’t worth it. Red Flag Assassin’s Creed 4: Black Flag was pulled from sale on Steam.…

During and after university, Kirsty Gillmore studied – and had a passion for—drama; after university, she did both music and arts degrees. A post grad in sound engineering, and then a move to the UK, followed. The rest of her storied career up until now could easily take up the whole page; but it includes directing actors and acting herself, work for the BBC, and setting up her own business. For nine years, this included directing, producing and writing other actors’ voice reels. “Over the years that I did that,” she explains, “I realized what I wanted to do was more directing.” Fast forward to 2023, and she’s been involved in audio dramas, multiple animation projects (including for streaming giant Netflix) and, of course, several games. Modern Warfare II, Baldur’s…

I’m not going to claim Star Trucker was the best thing I saw at Gamescom, per se, but I did come away from my hands-on demo thinking: yes, I understand exactly what this is, and I would like to play more of it. It’s a trucking game, but in space. That’s it. That’s the pitch. In the announcement trailer you get a feel for the vibe: diners, country music, CB radios—a nod to the mythologized trucking culture of the ’70s. That it’s all happening in deep space means it would be very easy for Star Trucker to lean into the comedy of the conceit, but as far as I can tell, that’s not what’s happening here. Sure, the conversations on your CB radio seem lighthearted in tone, but otherwise it’s…

History is littered with defeated Civilization-likes, from Humankind to GalCiv 4. Try as they might, no one’s knocked old Sid Meier off his perch just yet, even six games in and 27 years on. But that doesn’t mean devs will stop trying. Enter Millennia, a new 4X strategy game from C Prompt published by Paradox Interactive. For big chunks of Millennia’s demo, I didn’t necessarily need the tutorial tips. On a micro level, plenty of what you’ll find works just like it does in Civ. You’ve got your cities, your settlers, your major competitors and the minor, single-city bit-players you’re competing for influence over. You’ll fend off barbarians and rush for space and resources in the early game, send scouts to explore the frontier, and set workers to improve the…

EZIO STARTS THE HUNT FOR TEMPLAR LEADER RODRIGO BORGIA, THE FUTURE POPE ALEXANDER VI One of the best sequels in gaming steered an unexpected new course to achieve new heights of popularity, and its secret weapon was its hero. No, not Desmond, but his 15th century Italian ancestor: Ezio Auditore da Firenze. A suave bachelor of the Renaissance, Ezio is vivid and possessed of youthful naivete when we meet him, where Altaïr was merely a silhouette. When members of his family are executed in Florence’s Piazza della Signoria as part of a Templar plot, Ezio starts the hunt for Templar leader Rodrigo Borgia, the future Pope Alexander VI. While its sci-fi framing continued, the historical narrative saw Ezio recruit allies in Leonardo da Vinci, Caterina Sforza and Niccolò Machiavelli across…

Armed with rebuilt technology, Unity took players to Paris in 1789. Where better to showcase its tricks than a city of slums and appointed palaces at the forefront of modernity, riven by revolutionary chaos? This diorama is more fully realized than any before it, where a swathe of the city’s buildings can be entered and whose alleys teem with Parisians, doused in smoke and shot through by stunning light. Among them stalked a new hidden blade: Arno, a debonair noble reminiscent of Ezio. Unity wasn’t all art and engineering. It featured co-op missions, a series-first skill tree and ambitious equipment customization. Yet its attempt to mix-up the stealth system proved divisive, and though parkour looked better, in practice it often felt prescribed.…

Odyssey would resemble a veneer over Origins if not for the Adrestia, the Greek battleship that made the Aegean Sea your hunting ground. Odyssey wired the naval combat, management and exploration of Black Flag into its world and placed at your side your new mate Herodotus—a classisicst’s dream. As Spartan mercenary Kassandra (although you could also play as her brother Alexios), we set out on a quest tinged with Sophoclean trim to avenge our murdered father, caught in the feud with Athens that was the Peloponnesian War. It’s an excuse to travel the vast map, which is too vast really, and its stunning islands and characters alluding to all manner of myths and legends. In other ways Odyssey saw the franchise’s transformation complete. Origins had hardly been without irrelevant side-activities,…

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Bomb Rush Cyberfunk is a futuristic time capsule that bursts with sonic and ocular swag. There’s a primordial videogame joy in these sick combos and great tunes, which pulled me through 25 hours of skating off walls, dodging cops and spray-painting labyrinthine levels. It’s rare to play a game with such a fervent sense of self, even when it’s channeling such clear Y2K-era inspirations. Bomb Rush Cyberfunk is so fun. In the first 20 minutes, an evil DJ decapitates my protagonist with a vinyl record, my friends rebuild me into a cyborg, and I’m off on a revenge mission to overthrow this tyrant and ‘Go All City’ becoming the definitive spray painting crew. Before I gush about the great stuff, which there is a lot of, I have to say…

You’ve probably heard the expression ‘sea of stars’, but The Anglerfish Project takes that a step further, by giving you a fishing rod and a lure to cast into the cosmos. You take aim and cast, and if successful bring back a snippet of story, in this novel and whimsical narrative adventure. You’re Padraig, a fisherman who has swapped plaice for deep-space message recovery. Camping out a little planetoid, you have to trudge round with your fishing rod, using it to fling a probe into anomalies. Somehow, these space phenomena have recorded snippets of private chats, and a company named The Foundation wants you to hoover all of them up. It’s all in a day’s work to find the anomalies as they appear in the sky, and manage your strength…

There are two plots in Rage. The first involves an asteroid colliding with the planet, environmental disaster, the collapse of civilization and a brave, US marine lieutenant who awakes from stasis to help save humanity. The second is simply ‘what if muscle cars plus apocalypse?’ So it’s massively familiar stuff, then. The story is so rote that it almost feels like a team of great minds sat down and named everything in a way that means you never have to actually think. Sinister, technologically-advanced organization trying to maintain control at any cost? Let’s call them The Authority. Rebellious forces fighting against them? That’s The Resistance. Winged stick boomerang? It’s a wingstick. It’s one step away from calling the protagonist Hiro Gunman. I’m not sure if it’s really clever or really…

My spaceship is serviced, painted and its engines are primed for take-off. My hired crew member, Marika, is chipper and raring to go hunt some bounties. And my armory of weapons now includes a Rapidshot tactical shotgun, Furious Orion laser rifle and, what can only be described as a lethal Ashta Tamer explosive projectile launcher. I’m cocked, locked and ready to rock Starfield’s Settled Systems. But instead, I’m picking out a fetch green sari from EIT Clothiers in New Atlantis, and afterwards I’m going to wear it, grab a coffee, and then go stroll around the leafy, wooded parkland in the city’s Mast District. It’s going to be a pleasant morning. Because after the barrage of hype surrounding Starfield, I’m trying to take my foot of the gas a bit…

A dream shared by PC gamers everywhere has been to take our entire gaming PCs on-the-go. From LAN parties to powerful gaming laptops, we’ve gotten close to portable gaming nirvana, yet no solution has been quite as simple as pulling out one of the latest generation of PC gaming handhelds and gaming from near enough anywhere. It took a few good mobile processors to make the dream a reality. The first handhelds out of the gate were a little underpowered, then Valve made the Steam Deck and now we’re all interested. VALVE HAS COMMISSIONED ITS OWN LINUX OS, STEAMOS, TO RUN ON THE DEVICE Deck STEAM $399 Best value 1 The Steam Deck is the handheld device that I could only dream of as a child; a compact, cheap gaming PC than…

Lockdown brought out many strange habits in us all. Frenzied walking around parks. Giving ourselves haircuts. All the endless hellish baking. And for me and my pals, a renewed enthusiasm for Slightly Mad Studios’ 2017 racing sim, Project CARS 2. While the world was laugh-crying at the hilarious antics of those colorful little beans in Fall Guys and shouting at Phasmophobia’s ghosts, we whiled away what for all we knew was the apocalypse by adjusting radiator cooling ducts and rake angles. I’m exaggerating for effect. Obviously we played all of those in-vogue titles too, but Project CARS 2 was the one that stuck. It was so malleable, so sandboxy for a racing sim. I created 100-lap Indycar oval races in the snow with x60 day-night cycles. I made us all…

Wolfenstein: The New Order and New Colossus developer MachineGames obviously loves shooters. But even within the studio there’s a circle of devs whose love transcends the norm: The Quake Club. This crew of creatives are responsible for fresh expansions bundled into the recent Nightdive remasters of Quake and now Quake 2. There’s a long history here: for one of MachineGames’ founders, Jerk Gustafsson, Quake 2 is linked to his career in game development. “The whole reason I got into the industry at all—as for many, I’m sure, is Quake 1. I didn’t even buy my first computer until 1996, when Quake 1 came out,” he says. “I quite quickly realised that I could actually do something myself and be creative on my own when I started to see these maps…

I’m not sure anything has ever made as much sense to me as the fact that Rod Humble—studio head of Life by You maker Paradox Tectonic—used to work high-up on both The Sims and Second Life. Watching the game in motion in a demo at this year’s Gamescom, how could it be otherwise? The game looks like a strange, ungainly, but undeniably intriguing mixture of both: part life sim, part modders’ toolkit, part chaos generation engine. Where The Sims has been polished to a (relative) mirror sheen over the course of four main games, two decades of development, and a number of expansions only rivaled by, well, Paradox games, Life by You is an ambitious and slightly ramshackle-looking thing. At times, it threatens to spill over into calamity as the…

We’ve all been burned by the corporate life. The daily rigmarole can certainly take its toll. That’s where we find trainee lawyer Luisa in Dungeons of Hinterbeg, who ventures to the Austrian region to solve puzzles, master magic, slay monsters and even enjoy a coffee with friends by the lake. Amidst Gamescom 2023 in Cologne, Germany, I had a 30-minute hands-on with Dungeons of Hinterberg, quickly enamored by its charm. The singleplayer experience juxtaposes its fast-paced action with mellow moments to great effect, driving its lead character to be more than just another avatar. Starting in the Alpine hills, the vivid colors displayed from mountain tops are nothing short of stunning. While this area was certainly designed as the action-loading part, I took several moments to take in the pastel…

The moment Cities: Skylines II clicked for me was when I unlocked farms. One of several specialist industries included in the city-building sequel, farms produce a variety of crops and livestock from a circular outline around the central farming structure. Because of this, each farm occupies a large expanse of land, giving these areas a very different vibe from your dense and bustling town center. In the first Skylines, having a small number of buildings occupy so much space would have been impractical. But Skylines II is built to accommodate more dispersed, low density settlements. “When you are building the city, you don’t necessarily have to think about a huge city, you can actually have these more rural spaces,” says Mariina Hallikainen, CEO of developer Colossal Order. “It’s completely up…

Revelations wrapped up Ezio’s trilogy, sending a our hero eastwards to Constantinople. Revelations was originally to be a mobile game, and it sometimes feels like it, with Constantinople contrasting with previous settings mostly in art direction. It’s a work of narrative surgery: Ezio’s journey in Revelations in fact begins, and ends, with him poking through an assassin library at Masyaf, turning Ezio’s last act into a farewell for Altaïr as well. Desmond’s tale, meanwhile, approaches its climax: in a coma since Brotherhood, his excavation of what Altaïr did with his Apple of Eden via Ezio is key to discovering a way to avert an impending solar flare.…

The supreme pirate experience, Black Flag was assembled entirely around a diversion introduced in Assassin’s Creed III: naval battles and a ship to captain through them. The heart of the game lay aboard the Jackdaw, a sleek and scrappy vessel which players used to exert piratical terror on the West Indies of the early 1700s. Finally, here were vital new mechanics which placed Black Flag at the zenith of swashbuckling exploration games. The Jackdaw is the nautical extension of protagonist Edward Kenway, grandfather of III’s Connor. Wearing the garb of an Assassin he kills in a Cuban cove, Kenway is a reluctant hero in facing a Templar conspiracy to deploy an ancient relic, but an archetypal pirate. He prowls island paradises, cracks treasure maps and ascends Spanish Colonial churches. It’s…

Syndicate had the poor luck of following in Unity’s glitchy wake, with the result of disappointing sales for Ubisoft Quebec’s first mainline Assassin’s Creed game which otherwise put an original spin on the franchise. The clock moved onwards a half-century to Victorian London. Its depiction of contrasts, of poverty, excess, vice and vitality, helped make the furnace of the modern world fathomable. Players switched between twins Jacob and Evie Frye, each harnessing different playstyles. The setting was leveraged for new gadgets including a fantastical steampunk zipline launcher which created new routes across the smoggy London skyline.…

Few long-running series have reinvented themselves for the modern era as successfully as Mortal Kombat. Since the 2011 reboot found a fresh yet familiar formula for its brawls, and finally made some sense of its sprawling lore, each new entry has had its own distinct and exciting identity, from X’s explosion of new characters to 11’s clash of past and present. So the question is, what’s Mortal Kombat 1’s new take on the series? NetherRealm has pitched this as another soft reboot for the series—a fresh entry point that sheds much of the confusing backstory and welcomes in new players. But that’s not really what we’ve got. Instead, Mortal Kombat 1 feels more entrenched in the series’ past than ever, struggling to iterate on its core systems or to tell…

Given Phantom Liberty’s superspy theme, I expected, nay, demanded a good high-society shindig infiltration level, and Cyberpunk 2077’s first and only expansion pack delivered. The centerpiece of the soiree mission was a long, tense dialog puzzle where I had to earn the trust of a pair of deliciously awful French twins while playing high stakes roulette. I had to engage, provoke, and eventually befriend the international con artists all while I watched my funds provided by the FIA (Cyberpunk future CIA) dwindle away. Shoulda bet on black. At the last minute I chose a particularly inflammatory and insulting dialog option and my handler pre-emptively chewed me out over the radio, but the little freaks absolutely ate it up. Maybe I am cut out for this superspy stuff. Phantom Liberty is…

Sea of Stars is another indie RPG built in Chrono Trigger’s image. There’s the seamless battle transition, there’s the techs, sorry—combos, there’s the Yasunori Mitsuda soundtrack. Been there, done that, got the time-traveling T-shirt. What separates Sea of Stars from the ever-increasing pile of RPGs that think they can recapture the spirit of the ’90s is that it understands the difference between ‘inspired by’ and ‘mindlessly copying something’” the game wants to be itself more than it does Famous SNES RPG Clone #7632. The most obvious way it draws a line between itself and the past is through its extremely—almost excessively—well-animated world. Anything that can sway in an unseen breeze does so, and every mundane NPC or minor story event I came across seemed to have some unique flourish I…

To celebrate the tenth anniversary of Papers, Please, developers Lucas and Keiko Pope have created a demake/spin-off that lets you control the border of glorious Arstotzka from a simple LCD screen. Well, alright, a simulated LCD screen displayed on your high-end monitor—but just look at that simulation for a moment. I’m lucky enough to have owned some LCD games, and the accuracy of LCD, Please is uncanny. It’s there in the bassy, bleepy sound effects, in the subtle screen glare and light screen scratches, and it understands how sprites were drawn on LCD devices. That is, everything from HUD elements to characters would permanently reserve sections of the tiny screens, even when they were not being shown. That last one is a massive limitation, but it’s not the only one,…

Rounding up this month’s list is Mad Max, a game that reminds us, much like the films, that Max is actually significantly less mad than most other people in the crumbling world around him. This is one of those titles that sits comfortably in the pantheon of beautifully average games; the 7/10 experiences you can recommend to friends even though you know they’re not perfect. The story is basically a romantic comedy with cars: with the help of a disfigured mechanic called Chumbucket, Max builds a new car so he can take revenge on the people who robbed him and get his favorite ride back. Maybe he’ll learn to love the new car instead? Maybe cars were actually the friends we made along the way? It honestly doesn’t matter. Because…

I recently returned home from competing in my first Tekken 7 major, which means I’m in that posttournament training stage. I still suck pretty bad at the game. I don’t compete in these things to win, I compete to be around my friends, other like-minded people and, most critically, receive instant feedback on how I play. So now I’m taking the constructive criticism I received at the tournament—my impatience, lack of matchup knowledge, pressing buttons when I shouldn’t be—and trying to apply it back home. Yeah, turns out you can’t just mash buttons at these things. Who’d have thought?! I’ve also picked up a new character since my main, Lucky Chloe, seemingly isn’t making it into Tekken 8. Truly heartbreaking stuff. All’s well though, because I have Claudio Serafino to…

Stop me if you’ve heard this one. You and your party of adventurers are running around some dimly lit cavern or sneaking through a crumbling temple or entering a spooky, abandoned little town. It’s quiet. A little too quiet. Surely, not everything is as it seems. Then you hear a sound: a dice roll. It’s a perception check, and you’ve failed it! Your entire party, in fact, one by one, has completely failed to spot… well, something. So, you stop in your tracks because even though you didn’t notice anything, you did notice that you didn’t notice anything. It’s pretty funny to fail a perception check, but it can be a little immersion-breaking, too. That doesn’t just happen in Dungeons & Dragons when your DM rolls a few dice behind…

Sony’s Gran Turismo movie hit cinemas this summer, telling the remarkable story of Jann Mardenborough’s transition from talented sim racer to decorated racing driver. It’s significant for several reasons, not least of which being the idea that a two-hour movie about gaming is now considered summer blockbuster material. But what we’ll remember the most about it is that it represents that last moment such a story would be out of the ordinary. In the near future, this would just be a story about a racing driver getting his break. F1’s new generation of drivers are as well-versed and as passionate about sim racing as they are about Formula One itself. That’s not hyperbole—McLaren’s Lando Norris has several times gone on record to say he prefers virtual racing, and world champion…

F1 23 The all-new F1 World mode has a surprising variety of online events. Hotlap leaderboards are still the main event though. ASSETTO CORSA Gives you total control over track conditions, rules and race formats. And if you can think of a car, someone’s made that mod. AUTOMOBILISTA 2 An incredibly versatile sim racing platform cut from the rFactor mold—extremely modder-friendly and malleable. FORZA MOTORSPORT Turn 10’s upcoming racer has an impressively huge car and track list. We should get years of online battles out of it.…

Bethesda’s Todd Howard has been on the interview circuit for the launch of Starfield, and some of the questions have been doozies. An early highlight was an interview with Bloomberg Technology, where Bethesda’s director was asked a stark and crowd-sourced question: why did you not optimize this game for PC? “Uh… we did,” says Howard, as Xbox head Phil Spencer fails to suppress a chuckle. “It’s running great. It is a next-gen PC game, we really do push the technology, so you may need to upgrade your PC for this game, but it’s got a lot of great stuff going on in it and the fans are responding awesome.” He means people fans, not case fans. Howard does occasionally get a little spicy, such as when he was asked why…

AMBIENT OCCLUSION This technique adds depth to scenes by making corners and seams darker, because they get less light. PHONG SHADING Adjusts shading across low-poly surfaces to make them look rounded without adding more sides. TRANSLUCENT SURFACES Back in 1998 the big, fancy new thing in Quake 2 was that it had more than one colour of light. MUZZLE FLASHES Sometimes you couldn’t tell who was shooting at you in Quake 2. Here’s that sorted.…

Congratulations, you have survived the end of the world. Set 30 years after the original game, Frostpunk 2 puts you in charge of a city no longer battling for its very life. Sure, the world outside is still frozen and harsh. It’s still possible to die of hunger and lack of resources, but the worst is over. So what now? That’s the question at the heart of the sequel. It’s not a case of can you survive. Instead, now that you have survived, what do you want your future to be? I get to see part of a playthrough of Frostpunk 2’s sandbox mode, called Utopia Builder. During campaign creation, in addition to the standard city builder customization options, you also pick two communities who will make up the population…

One of the best of the many first-person puzzlers that followed in Portal’s wake, The Talos Principle offered what felt like a complete experience. The possibility space of its puzzles was thoroughly explored. And its story, in part explored through text prompt conversations with a nihilistic contrarian, was complete. Where’s even left to go? In The Talos Principle 2, the answer is far into the future. My hands-off demo starts with a short boot-up sequence that mimics the style, architecture and puzzles of the original game. It’s after this that The Talos Principle 2 reveals itself. You are born into the world—the 1,000th robotic citizen of the city of New Jerusalem, and, according to the rules of their society, also the last. In an effort to avoid the mistakes of…

Stay your blade from the flesh of an innocent, hide in plain sight, and never compromise the Brotherhood: the Assassin tenets, as instructed by Master Al-Mualim to an insolent Altaïr early in Assassin’s Creed, set the irresistible conspiratorial tone for the franchise to follow. Assassin’s Creed famously had its roots in a new take on Prince of Persia. Instead, the team at Ubisoft Montreal including Patrice Désilets, who fostered the original concept, delivered an anti-prince. He could still climb, but now the platforms embraced the contours of a city. The freedom in traversal was revelatory, and it’s striking how successful the first iteration still feels overall. The central character they conceived was not a romantic hero who belonged in One Thousand and One Nights, but a cold-hearted killer of princes,…

Brotherhood picked up immediately where Assassin’s Creed II ended, with Ezio escaping the Vatican after having spared Rodrigo Borgia and come face-to-face with a First Civilization entity. Ezio’s first outing was excellent, but his return was even better. The murderous Borgia siblings Cesare and Lucrezia took centre stage on an impressive tableau of Rome, the biggest and deepest city in the series so far. Its ancient and baroque spectacles play host to inventive missions, while its many (but not extraneous) side-activities like the capture of Borgia Towers marry closely with the game’s drive of liberating Rome. The city could be interacted with in other ways; through renovations like Montiriggioni before it, and through the ability to recruit and deploy assassins in battle. Brotherhood introduced something else unique: a multiplayer mode…

Of all the mainline games, Rogue is the slightest, sandwiched between the events of Black Flag on the one hand and III and Unity on the other. It presents Irish American Shay Cormac as an Assassin turned Templar. Tortured by guilt over the former’s consequentialist ethics, seen first-hand when Shay triggers the catastrophic 1755 Lisbon earthquake while on assignment, he sets out to hunt down Assassins in pre-Revolution New York and the North Atlantic’s vistas of snow and water. The final act of the American trilogy, developed by Ubisoft Sofia, aimed to deliver more of what made Black Flag good, and did just that.…

The concept of a wishlist is widespread, but it’s not used anywhere else with quite such a focus on empowering PC gamers than at GOG, where the service’s wishlist is consulted by the GOG team every week to see what games community members are requesting. These wishlist requests impact what old games GOG attempts to secure the rights for and then remaster and release on the service, as well as a which new games it tries to bring to the service, too. So if you want a good old game brought to GOG, DRM-free, then get voting in the wishlist, now.…

UNITED COLONIES They’re space cops, but joining up will give you a quest that’s reminiscent of the movie Aliens. CRIMSON FLEET Space pirates, with a cool lair on a space station. Plus if you join them, pirates won’t attack you. FREESTAR COLLECTIVE More space cops, but at least they’re cowboy-themed so you get to show off some drip. RYUJIN INDUSTRIES Stealthy skullduggery and industrial espionage. The thieves guild, but in space.…

There was a moment, after watching Pinocchio carve through his 200th rampant puppet with a squeal of grinding gears, when I wondered how we got here as a people. Impossibly, in a year where Elden Ring’s expansion is still waiting in the wings and Lords of the Fallen is reusing the name of 2014’s most middling Souls-like, our best shot at an off-brand Dark Souls is a Korean-Italian puppet and his chatterbox cricket companion. But somehow you can put an oversized bonesaw in Pinocchio’s hands and it just feels right. While Lies of P trips over some mechanical clumsiness and can’t escape its inspirations, it’s a competent action game with a unique toolset for experimentation. Maybe more impressively, through the grim spectacle of puppet violence, it’s a successful gothic folktale…

Phantom Liberty launches alongside patch 2.0 for Cyberpunk 2077, which itself delivers some big changes to the game, regardless of if you buy the DLC or not. Patch 2.0 delivers redesigned cyberware, skills, perks and relic abilities, a big AI combat overhaul, including a revamped police force and vehicle combat, as well as a host of new weapons, quests, clothing and gigs. The update is out now and is totally free. Preem!…

South Scrimshaw, Part One has really come out of nowhere, using a familiar framework to show something thrillingly new. It’s sort of a visual novel—but forget the cutout characters and dialogue choices. No, we’re being told the story of the Brillo whale—enormous whales that adorn their bodies with other sea life, in a symbiotic process—and our only choices are whether to hear more of it, when given the option. I’m confident you will, as Scrimshaw guardedly reveals its fascinating backstory, which has made an ocean’s worth of familiar yet different sea creatures available for scientific study. We’re watching a documentary about one specific Brillo whale as he looks out with his adorable Brillo eyes, and contends with the hardships and hard choices that confront his species. What I’m reminded of…

I’d love to speak to the person on Level 5’s localization team who decided Drippy from Ni No Kuni should not only be Welsh, but richly, creamily, aggressively Welsh, like a male voice choir armed with longbows that fire Gavin and Stacy DVDs. It’s impossible to imagine the Lord High Lord of the Fairies sounding like anyone else. Brilliantly executed localization is perhaps not something we associate with JRPGs. It’s more common for English language versions of Japanese games to feature acting that sounds like a text-to-speech program. But this is one area where Ni No Kuni feels wonderfully different to other similar games, and it’s a measure of the game’s level of production. It feels lavish. The experienced creative hands of the Studio Ghibli team can be felt guiding…

Dungeons & Dragons 5th edition has plenty of written rules—but it’s got its fair share of unwritten ones, too. These days, there are tabletop taboos that are simply not broken in polite company. The thing is, Baldur’s Gate III breaks pretty much all of them. It goes without saying that Baldur’s Gate III is an exceptional RPG, and for my money the best adaptation yet of D&D to the digital realm. But there’s definitely some friction between Larian’s well-honed approach to RPG design, and what a 5e player might expect. In the early history of D&D, absurdly lethal traps were a staple—at some tables, you’d keep a stack of spare characters next to you, ready to swap in when you pressed the wrong button or opened the wrong door. The…

What makes Napoleon a compelling subject? Is it that he came from nothing and conquered everything? Or is it the fear he inspired in his opponents? “My enemies are many, my equals are none,” he declares in Creative Assembly’s sixth Total War. Through my clicks and taps I embody the general himself in the game’s opening Italian campaign, the first of several following Napoleon’s career. It’s April, 1796, and I’ve assumed control of a stalled invasion of Northern Italy aimed at Vienna. The map is a close view of the region, which contrasts with the globespanning schemes of its predecessor Empire. If skeptics don’t like the difference in scale, I’d point to the texture it brings: regions which barely register in Empire stretch across the screen. Turns represent not months…

1 BLOOD OF LATHANDER If you want to bash people over the head with a veritable holy relic, you can find the Blood of Lathander in the Githyanki Creche in the Mountain Pass. This glowy mace can also heal you if you get downed, though be mindful of nasty surprises when you first loot it. 2 NYRULNA Nyrulna is a throwable thunder trident that cannot be dropped, meaning it returns to your hand every time you hurl it. Its Veil of Wind ability also makes you immune to all fall damage. Win Akabi’s Wheel of Wonders in the Circus of the Last Days during Act 3 to get it. 3 MARKOHESHKIR The best staff in Baldur’s Gate III allows you to cast a free spell, while also providing extra resistance through its Kereska’s…

PUNK IN DRUBLIC SHADOWRUN DRAGONFALL paradoxinteractive.com/games/shadowrun-dragonfall-directors-cut My mercenary crew includes a shaman—the Shadowrun RPGs mix cyberpunk with fantasy—who used to be in a punk band. So I ask if he can sing. “I was the front man for a punk band, boss,” he replies, as if I’m an idiot. “Fuck no, I can’t sing.” BARS & STRIPES THE RED STRINGS CLUB deconstructeam.com Bartender Donovan teases information out of his patrons, hacker Brandeis tricks people over the phone and android Akara-184 manipulates emotions by crafting cybernetic implants. Though each is mechanically different, The Red Strings Club is focused on dialog. CLOUD & PROUD FINAL FANTASY VII REMAKE INTERGRADE ffvii-remake-intergrade.square-enix-games.com The remake focuses on the best part of FFVII: the grim futuristic city of Midgar, where the slums are stuck in the…

POLE POSITION 1982 Namco’s arcade racer was praised at the time for unbelievably realistic handling. The cabinet featured a racing wheel. INDIANAPOLIS 500: THE SIMULATION 1989 Probably the first racing title to adopt a hardline simulation stance. RFACTOR 2003 The originator of the ‘sim as a platform’ model that encouraged modders to build whatever series they liked. IRACING 2008 The moment when racing sims started to think seriously about league support, strict rule enforcement and esports.…