Innholdsfortegnelse for April 2025 i PC Gamer (US Edition)

HIGHS Critical hit Larian’s Swen Vincke called out the game industry and told it to start putting devs and players first. Power through Underselling indie game Endlight putting out 20 seasons of content. Royal flush Balatro has absorbed eight new crossovers in its quest to turn all videogames into playing cards. LOWS Busted flush PEGI won’t budge on Balatro’s 18+ rating, despite games with actual gambling getting lower age limits. Belongs in a museum Did you get a free Indiana Jones key from Humble? No you didn’t: the storefront revoked them all even if you already redeemed yours. Where there’s smoke… Banned CoD players are in uproar about its new bong gun. Hmm.…

Finally this month, shoot ’em up fans can grab an updated version of classic vertical scroller Cho Ren Sha 68K, which has not only been updated by its original creator, Koichi Yoshida, but is also 100% playable on modern Windows systems. Cho Ren Sha 68K, which translates in English to Super Rapid Fire 68K, was originally released back in 1995 on the Sharp X68000, a now legendary Japanese-exclusive PC, and soon became known as one of the system’s very best games. If you like technicolor bullet hell shmups that boast numerous power-ups and huge bosses, then Super Rapid Fire 68K is well worth grabbing. shorturl.at/12R1l…

Following the ports of Marvel’s Spider- Man Remastered and Miles Morales back in 2022, Sony has now sped up the process of PlayStation to PC with Marvel’s Spider-Man 2. So, what better way to kick off 2025 than swinging through the streets with the highest performance and fidelity possible? In fact, this is now a 15-month turnaround for Marvel’s Spider-Man 2 compared to the 47 months fans had to wait for the first Spidey release on Windows, and two years for the Miles spinoff. It seems Sony is finally realizing the financial benefits of bringing its biggest titles to the platform, while those on Steam and the Epic Games Store can revel in accessing one of the best games of this generation earlier than anticipated. Even though the official specs have…

Following the Hospital and Campus, the Two Point formula now takes on history with its usual reverence and seriousness. The game switches things up from previous games with a change of focus: now, instead of caring for the patients or students, building the museum itself and making it interesting is the goal, something that looks like an improvement. Museums are cool. No really, they are. RELEASE March 4 2025 DEVELOPER Two Point Studios PUBLISHER Sega LINK s.team/a/2185060…

Obsidian’s day wasn’t going well. Barely escaping a Nautiloid after becoming infected with a Mind Flayer parasite was one thing. Being interrupted in her singular mission to build Faerûn’s greatest ever library in Baldur’s Gate? Devastating. She possesses power and wit, but this Dragonborn sorcerer didn’t sign up for a hero’s quest. I am a filthy hoarder, in and out of videogames. Encumbered is my middle name. If a game has collectable books, I’m doomed. So, I decided to channel this obsession for Obsidian’s journey. The goal? To amass a book collection that rivals Sorcerous Sundries and open a library in Baldur’s Gate. AKA dump a lot of books in a vacant, preferably free, plot. I would describe Obsidian as a blend of The Mummy’s Evelyn O’ Connell and Final…

Across the great salt desert there is a jungled plateau encircled by mountains and speckled with the ruins of an advanced, ancient civilization. At its center lies the Spindle, a towering cable that stretches into and through the heavens. This is where your stranger arrives, the protagonist in an epic science-fantasy RPG full of engrossing stories and elegantly designed, deep world simulation. It’s the best one I’ve ever played. Caves of Qud is a traditional roguelike RPG in form, a top-down, turn-based game that relies on text and simple-yet-evocative graphics to convey its world. It doesn’t stick hard and fast to permanent death, though, instead letting you choose whether you want save points and even tweak how much fighting you’ll have to do. Nor does Qud stick hard and fast…

I played Mouthwashing entirely in one sitting and had to lie down for a while afterward to recover. I felt vile, unsettled at what I’d seen over the previous three hours. Mouthwashing is about as classic a walking simulator as you can get mechanically, and while its stabs at more intensive gameplay fall a little flat for me, its narrative, vision, and atmosphere make it one of this winter’s standouts, a people’s champion of indie horror for very good reason. The game begins with you playing as Captain Curly of the long haul delivery space ship Tulpar, purposefully setting the vessel on a collision course with an asteroid. After crash landing, the ship is compromised while Curly is horrifically maimed and burned in the crash, leaving him unable to speak…

If the decades-old Shiren the Wanderer series is famous for anything it’s for being shockingly unforgiving, and The Mystery Dungeon of Serpentcoil Island is no exception to that intimidating rule. Life-saving equipment might not appear at all, and traps could be hiding under any and every inch of the floor. Anyone who falls under these harsh conditions loses everything they were carrying and has to start the randomized dungeon crawl all over again. The odd thing is it doesn’t feel that merciless in practice. The first few floors are so keen on getting even complete newcomers up to speed the tutorials don’t just cover simple concepts like attacking and diagonal movement, they even go so far as to explain what the heck a ‘mystery dungeon’ is anyway. Seasoned spelunkers will…

In 2007, a game called Peggle was released. In 2008, the world suffered a global economic crisis. To this day I refuse to believe these two facts were unrelated. Peggle was as all-consumingly moreish as it was simple—it was essentially just a pachinko machine, where you fired a ball into a screen full of ‘pegs’. The only agency you had was the direction you fired the ball in. After that, all you could do is sit back and watch, making it almost entirely luck-based. Once you finally accepted that, the spell would hopefully break, and you could finally uninstall the bloody thing. But now developer newobject has come up with Ballionaire, a twist on pachinko that adds roguelike deckbuilding elements. Essentially Peggle has gone to college, smartened up and gotten…

You’ve been locked in a tower for the good of the kingdom in this interactive adventure, which wouldn’t feel out of place as an episode of The Twilight Zone. This is another example of a short, twisty story told in the adventure game format—one of the best trends of recent years. Your initial goal is not to escape, but initially to do just what is asked of you, by a disembodied voice speaking outside your door. There isn’t much going on in your three small rooms. You’ve been illuminating a manuscript, but sometimes your clothes need washing, or you run out of ink, and all these problems require a bit of thought and a spot of item-combining as in the classic adventure games. Over several days—in fact, over several thousand,…

There’s a certain type of humor that Japanese games manage which often defies the rules of tone and decency. “Yes, there has been a kidnapping, and lives are in danger, but relax! There’s still time to make jokes about my coworker’s screensaver.” You’re not being flippant; just helping break the tension. Instead of ruining the sense of immersion, the often erratic tone of 428: Shibuya Scramble actually helps draw you in. You start to feel like you know the characters, and however odd they are, the narrative dissonance gradually fades into the background over the course of 30 or so hours. It’s surprising that it’s as effective as it is: despite some cinematic sequences and the use of real actors, 90% of the game is a simple visual novel, but…

“Who is Final Fantasy for these days?” is a question without an obvious answer, but it’s one that Square Enix must reckon with. Final Fantasy VII Rebirth and Final Fantasy XVI failed to meet sales expectations according to Square’s own financial report, creating a whirlwind of takes on why, and Final Fantasy’s future in general. What seems clear is that the era of Final Fantasy as the Japanese role-playing game series that comes to mind when the genre comes up has ended. That’s not to say no new Final Fantasy will fly off shelves, but the last 15 years have shown that it is, more often than not, selling a few million copies per game rather than 10 million-plus, like Final Fantasy XV managed. Which means that the issue has…

We said it on these pages back in September 2024 (check issue 401) that Japanese publishers are abandoning Sony’s exclusives policy, and Square Enix’s president Takashi Kiryu truly showed it off last month when, in front of the whole world at The Game Awards, he announced without any prior notice that Final Fantasy VII Rebirth will be available for PC this month. The second instalment of the everlasting JRPG saga sees the remake trilogy continue under the guidance of Yoshinori Kitase and Tetsuya Nomura. Rebirth picks up the FFVII Remake story, following hero Cloud Strife and his companions, after they escape from the dystopian city of Midgar and proceed on an epic adventure across the planet while pursuing series antagonist Sephiroth. Expect plenty of action, as well as chocobo riding.…

1 month SID MEIER’S CIVILIZATION VII RELEASE February 11, 2025 | DEVELOPER Firaxis Games The latest installment in the long-running 4X strategy series, Civ VII lets you create kingdoms and rule as many legendary leaders throughout history. KINGDOM COME: DELIVERANCE II RELEASE February 11, 2025 | DEVELOPER Warhorse Studios Henry and Hans return for more medieval adventures. A massive open world that’s twice the size of the original game as well as expanded combat system are on offer. AVOWED RELEASE February 18, 2025 | DEVELOPER Obsidian The anticipated first-person fantasy RPG that is definitely not like Skyrim. A small delay means Skyrim fans can now look forward to playing it in February, 2025. 2 months KILLING FLOOR 3 RELEASE March, 2025 | DEVELOPER Tripwire Interactive In the far future of…

I’ve never needed much story from Monster Hunter. Each game’s plot follows a predictable pattern: something is upsetting the ecology, and you need to battle a few dozen frenzied lizards until you and the Hunter’s Guild uncover what never-before-seen creature is responsible for the turmoil. But Monster Hunter never suffered for it. Its megafauna are majestic enough, its combat climactic enough, its cast of pun-slinging NPCs charming enough that even a barebones narrative could suffice. After playing through the first five hours of Monster Hunter Wilds, however, I’m just as excited to see more of its storytelling as I am for indulging in its latest iteration of dinosaur swordfights. In late November, I visited Capcom’s headquarters in Osaka to spend a few hours with the game and speak to its…

Most 4X games have you start from nothing and building an empire that reaches the stars, or at least achieves a cultural victory over your opponents, but Yeild! does things differently. At the beginning of the game there is a monolithic central power, and you are one of a scrappy bunch of upstarts trying to bring it down. Now, if you spend much time thinking about the Roman Empire, you’ll know this is roughly what happened. It’s 401AD, and the peninsula-dwelling pasta-lovers are in decline. The empire is struggling to govern such a vast realm, and around the edges there are opportunities for other powers to nibble chunks out of its lands. Which of course is exactly what you do. As one of eight playable factions, such as the Huns…

If you were to tell me that the game director of the now legendary single-player open-world dark fantasy action-RPG, The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt, had decided to leave CD Projekt, establish a new studio, and then create his own original single-player open-world dark fantasy action-RPG, then you’d have my attention. But if you told me he was doing that with a team of passionate, experienced, creatively free developers who, together, were building on that storied legacy by evolving the genre in some genuinely fresh, exciting ways, then you’d find me flying out to Warsaw, Poland, to speak with Konrad Tomaszkiewicz, along with other key game developers, posthaste. And what I discovered at Rebel Wolves was one the most exciting new virtual worlds in gaming. EMERGING FROM SHADOW Let’s cut to the…

It seems like every moment of my spare time nowadays is spent in a hero shooter. When I’m not fighting for my life in Valorant, I’m doing the same thing in Overwatch 2 or with the bots in Team Fortress 2. So the last thing I really need is a hero shooter I actually enjoy and will, therefore, carve more time out of my day playing it: enter Marvel Rivals. I didn’t expect Marvel Rivals to get a grips on me so quickly, but I’m having a good time feeling out the kits of its 33 launch heroes divided into three classes: vanguard, duelist, and strategist (tank, DPS, and support), every one of which also includes unique ‘team-up’ abilities activated by building the right team composition. I’ve been maining Hawkeye,…

Six months. That’s how long poor Red Candle Games spent trying to come up with a combat move for its debut Metroidvania that was as unique as Hollow Knight’s downward slash. Personally, I would have given up after six minutes. Thankfully, the developer was made of more disciplined stuff, and its efforts have paid off magnificently. Because I think Nine Sols’ swordplay has every Soulslike of recent times beat (yes, even the one about the shadowy tree). You play as Yi, a feline samurai who looks cute, but is actually as shadily motivated and untrustworthy as my actual cat. After taking a seemingly fatal tumble off a cliff, Yi cashes in one of his nine lives and recovers in a village full of actual humans. But when the village engages…

I can think of few better places to appreciate art than a mountaintop ringed with walkways and containing a photogrammeterized cat, but such are the upsides when you pluck art out of the physical realm and into a goddamn video game. The Zium Exposition is an interactive gallery mixing traditionally flat pictures, animated 3D sculptures and, excitingly, more interactive pieces, which whisk you off to separate worlds for more involved, enclosed experiences. It’s a fascinating blending of worlds. In a regular art gallery, you’re expected to slow down and to contemplate, to smell the roses without actually putting your nose up against the glass. However, in a game you expect to stick your nose into every nook and cranny, to prod whatever you want to prod, to leap over barriers…

Here’s my Dragon’s Den pitch: AirBnB, but it’s all locations from games. High on my list, just after Whiterun’s Drunken Huntsman, is Frogwares’ rendition of 221B Baker Street: a space where the deductive skills can flourish in comfort. A tumble of Persian rugs, elegant furniture, rustling notes and an invigorating sense of gentlemanly purpose. You can practically smell the crushed velvet and opiates. I’d even pay money to stay at Crimes and Punishments’ Evesham station, the site of a missing train in the game’s second case, Riddle on the Rails. It’s a bleak and weary place, like the last stop in the afterlife for railway operating company executives before they reach hell. It’s the end of the line, the train has gone, and all you’ve got to keep you warm…

If you’re a millennial like me, you probably grew up in an age of kitschy little browser-based MMOs where the main function was, let’s be honest, the chatroom. Games like Club Penguin and Toontown are relics of a bygone era, not just because what players want has changed, but because the internet itself has changed, too. If games like Roblox, Club Penguin and Toontown feel like the shutdown of gentrified malls you used to hang out in, Webfishing feels like an abandoned warehouse that’s been retrofitted out of spite. It’s an adorable little fishing game where you go to the lake or the ocean, fish, and turn those fish into dollars. That cash money can then be used to upgrade your rod, lures, bait and so on—or you could just…

Yes, you’re sick of seeing those two particular characters in print. Everyone is, at this point. Nevertheless, Nvidia’s increasing focus on artificial intelligence bears some scrutiny. Because when the company that’s previously held an historic stranglehold on the computer graphics market suddenly sees all its profits coming from elsewhere, there are going to be consequences. Asked which use case of AI excited him the most at the Goldman Sachs Communacopia + Technology Conference in San Francisco earlier this year, Nvidia boss Jensen Huang told the audience it was computer graphics. “We can’t do computer graphics any more without artificial intelligence,” he said. “We compute one pixel, we infer the other 32. I mean, it’s incredible… And so we hallucinate, if you will, the other 32, and it looks temporally stable,…

After thousands of hours spent in combat with orcs, androids and enemy militants, it’s become harder to find novelty in videogame violence. While Steam overflows with trucks, farms and city builders for when I’ve grown battle-weary, violence remains the mode of interaction, even in triple-A RPGs that tout player freedom. Fallout co-creator Tim Cain says that’s not going to change as long as we all keep buying it. In a YouTube video that went public on New Year’s Day, Cain responded to a viewer who asked whether he thinks we’ll ever see triple-A RPGs move beyond violence as the default way for players to interact with the world. Cain’s answer was simple: big-budget RPGs will center combat as long as combat sells. “Companies make games—and in general, products—that people will…

Considered by Famitsu to be one of the best games of all time, Tales of Graces is the foremost chapter of this long-running JPRG saga. The Tales series has been Namco’s response to the RPG genre for, literally, decades, but Tales of Graces was initially released in Japan only on Wii. However, its stratospheric sales, forced Bandai Namco to release it for the PS3 too, which saw its sales top almost 200,000. And now, due to a new-found focus on PC gaming within the Japanese gaming industry, Bandai Namco is releasing the remastered version of Tales of Graces for PC, too. Minimum specs start at an Intel Core i3-8100/AMD Ryzen 3 3100 and an Nvidia GeForce GTX 550Ti/AMD Radeon HD 7770, while recommended specs sit at an Intel Core i5-8400/AMD Ryzen 5…

Witchfire is one of those games that’s hard to even define without context. Its store Wpage describes it as a ‘dark fantasy RPG shooter’, which could describe any of a dozen FPS wizard ’em ups. So let’s set the record straight, and let me explain why you shouldn’t be sleeping on this deeply compelling Early Access tribute to Destiny’s combat sandbox. Now, to call Witchfire a Destiny clone would also be deeply reductive. This is a rich, meaty stew of elements and ideas borrowed from other games, put together in a way that feels familiar and comforting for lifelong FPS freaks, but also distinct. There’s a little bit of Dark Souls in there, a pinch of Bloodborne (especially in its grim gunslinging gothic fantasy setting), a little bit of Slay…

What’s that you say? A first-person exploration and adventure story-driven game, set in the Slavic fantasy world? A blurred line between myth and reality? Time travel? Yes please. Poland-developed The End of the Sun ticks a lot of PC gaming boxes in a post-Witcher 4 announcement world. And while it’s easy to see the word ‘Poland’ and think Witcher, the series that first springs to mind when watching The End of the Sun is The Elder Scrolls, specifically Oblivion, with its shimmering bloom lighting, forested national park vibe, and the way the camera zooms into objects of interest. A closer comparison, looking beyond the visuals, might be The Chinese Room’s excellent Everybody’s Gone to the Rapture, however, with its focus on a single village filled with secrets. The rural homestead…

An alien biologist crashes on Earth 300,000 years ago, and instead of immediately calling in planet-wide destruction or attempting to mate with the primitive inhabitants instead sets about cultivating the soil and making potions. What sounds like it might be a traumatic experience is rendered in a lovely, sunny graphical style and comes with a relaxed approach to survival. Your three-fingered, blue-skinned, highly educated protagonist requires carbon dioxide to breathe, and so must set up equipment to generate this from the native plant life. There are animals too, along with a newly emerging human population (who you can learn to communicate with), and some are friendlier than others. To tackle marauding creatures you can either hide and avoid them, or brew potions from plants and create clouds of sleeping gas…

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Halls of Torment’s most obvious difference from its most obvious inspiration is that it expects you to click to attack. No sir, none of that Vampire Survivors laxity here. You’ll make inputs to hit enemies and you’ll like it. At least for the ten seconds or so before you head into the settings menu and turn it off. But there’s a reason HoT starts like that: it’s a mission statement. Yes, it’s saying, you’re one little guy against an army of hundreds, thousands, hundreds of thousands of other little guys, and yes, you’re sucking up experience gems by the bucketload, but this isn’t that other autobattler. This is something different, more deliberate, more considered, and altogether less slot-machiney than its razzle-dazzle forebear. HELLBOUND It would be unfair and inaccurate to…

Some detectives are driven by a rigid sense of morality: order must be restored, criminals punished, justice served. In contrast, I’m apparently driven by a sense of ‘let me see what weird shit is inside your pockets’. It’s a righteous bonus if any crimes get solved in the process. Curse of the Golden Idol, for me, is as much about uncovering all those dark personal secrets as it is about deductive reasoning. It’s a game that makes me want to delete all the DMs from my phone and throw away any incriminating receipts, just in case I spontaneously combust and an inquisitive detective has to piece together all the shameful aspects of my life. Morsels of information can be plucked from the still-warm pockets of victims while the harpoons are…

The cat I’ve been looking for is tantalizingly close. I’ve been on its trail for ages and, if I can only go eyes-on with it, then I’m going to really take Indy’s adventure to the next level. I’m not talking about the main plot MacGuffin that kickstarts a globe-trotting romp in Indiana Jones and the Great Circle, one where he needs to track down a stolen cat mummy, but instead the cutesy side-quest in the game’s Vatican hub where you need to find and photograph cats. Yes, Indy has got his priorities straight here. I know the cat is close as I can hear its plaintive meowing, which at this stage of frustrated non-finding is definitely taunting Indy. I literally find myself saying, “Where’s that goddamn cat?!” as I search.…

The humble controller is easily overlooked by a PC gamer. We’re too distracted by our light-up keyboards and ultralight mice. But it’s a good time to start paying attention to. There are a range of new technologies vying to change controllers forever, and the expectation of what’s good is changing constantly. Take the Hall effect, for example. This is popular among gaming keyboards but has become one of the most requested features for controllers over the past couple of years—a request that many manufacturers are keen to meet. Then, when you think the dust has settled, along come TMR sticks that claim to be even better. The best things about the controller market, however, are the prices. Unlike gaming keyboards and mice, the controller market is ruled by two mass-produced…

How our hands have set in place over time. Our muscles and tendons have grown around the WASD keys like the roots of an old tree, permanently warped into the recesses, little finger instinctively hovering over left shift. The same goes for our controllers, a presence once viewed with suspicion on our desks as an interloper from console shores, but now an essential, instinctual way to reach into a game and impose your will on it. But there was a time when that domain, the territory where we rested our digits, was up for grabs. Even before mouselook, and the days of warring keyboard control layouts, one peripheral was at the centre of many a setup, and made you feel like a fighter pilot. There’s no consensus on who first…