Innholdsfortegnelse for July 2025 i PC Gamer (US Edition)

HIGHS Top model Larian boss Swen Vincke says fan mods ‘shouldn’t be treated like commercial ventures that infringe on your property.’ Hidden joker Balatro’s creator impressed with his Balatro skills at GDC, and nobody knew who he was. Looking sharp Monster Hunter Wilds will finally let players transmog their weapons. LOWS AI don’t want it A Studio Ghibli AI image trend floods social media, cheered on by OpenAI and denounced by critics as an insult to Hayao Miyazaki. Bloody hell Nintendo’s got a Bloodborne spiritual sequel—The Duskbloods – before PC even got the first game Icarus falls Eidos Montreal lays off “up to 75” employees.…

1 month DOOM: THE DARK AGES RELEASE May 15, 2025 | DEVELOPER id Software Doom goes historical, with the player stepping into the shoes of a living super weapon who fights in a hyper-violent medieval war against hell. There’s a throwable Shield Saw! DUNE: AWAKENING RELEASE May 20, 2025 | DEVELOPER Funcom A massive-scale multiplayer survival game with crafting, ornithopters and, naturally, giant sandworms. Can you survive Arrakis, the most hostile of planets? ELDEN RING: NIGHTREIGN RELEASE May 30, 2025 | DEVELOPER FromSoftware The out of left-field Elden Ring spin-off sees the action RPG transformed into a wild new co-op roguelike RPG. Expect fast runs and the series’ typically epic bosses. 2 months STELLAR BLADE RELEASE June 2025 | DEVELOPER Shift Up Corporation The stunning action-RPG that was a smash…

Den of Wolves makes me feel like I’m drowning. In my brief playtest, a first hands-on for 10 Chambers’ heist ’em up taking place in Tokyo, I found that when the enemies start to push at you from every direction, it’s often all you can do to stay alive, let alone push toward your objectives. If you want to keep your head above the enemy tide hitting you from all directions, you’ll need to stay close to your teammates. We failed near the final hurdle in our first attempt at Den of Wolves, but pulled it out of the bag for the second, extracting with nearly empty weapons, bags full of loot, and a mission well done. Live or die in Den of Wolves, you’ll do it alongside your teammates.…

More pirates, this time in space. Skin Deep comes from Blendo Games, the studio behind Quadrilateral Cowboy and the Flotilla games, and is a first-person shooter sort of immersive thing with cats and sneezing. More sneezing, now that I come to think of it, than I’ve ever seen in a game before. The sneezing doesn’t come from the cats, not from a cat allergy that would turn out to be a serious problem in this spacefaring culture. Despite the fact that the player character is clearly a human—we can see this from her reflection—and the space pirates seem to be too, as their very human-like heads come off when they die so that they can be reborn unless you find a way to stop it (flushing the head down the…

Science fantasy city-building sounds like a good time, and Amberspire has you managing populations and dealing with factional rivalries on an alien moon, but with the addition of dice. These add a degree of uncertainty to proceedings, meaning you won’t know exactly how much of a resource a building will produce, what the conditions will be, or how these events will play out. RELEASE TBA DEVELOPER Lunar Division PUBLISHER Bithell Games LINK s.team/a/3350750…

Welcome, travelers. Sorry to hear about that whole being made redundant and dumped out in the furthest reaches of space thing. But look on the bright side—your former employer Kindred Aerospace probably isn’t even as good as the ‘Fourth best space exploration company’ status it likes to brag about. And now you’re free of its corporate clutches, you’ve got some time on your hands for a heck of a gap year. It’s the perfect opportunity to enjoy the picturesque tundra, distinctive floating rock formation and plentiful fatal drops of Quasadron IX. After exploring its many floating islands, where they can find a vantage point to get some Instagram snaps of the planet’s famous pink gaseous rings up in the sky, most tourists like to head to the central mesa. Food…

I ’ve spent years wandering many an inhospitable wasteland, so Atomfall’s pleasant post-apocalypse is pretty inviting. They’ve got tea here. And bakeries. And it’s extremely green—not because of radiation storms, but because it’s all pastures and woods and verdant hills as far as the eye can see. It’d be a nice place for a hike, if it weren’t for the fire-spewing robots, lethal flora, bandits, cultists, and conspiracies. With its ’50s-inspired retro-futuristic setting, Atomfall has needed to contend with the spectre of Fallout since it was first unveiled, but the similarities are only surface deep. That shallowness is probably Atomfall’s defining feature: it’s chock full of systems and obvious inspirations, but it rarely digs into them and struggles to set itself apart. I this It flirts with Fallout, STALKER, RPGs,…

Rise of the Ronin on PC has kept me guessing for all the wrong reasons. Don’t get me wrong, I love a rambling systems-heavy open-world action RPG romp as much as the next guy. I’m fond of being led on countless wild goose chases across fantastical lands with ambiguous historical grounding. And I’m partial to layered combat systems, brutal melee combinations, and enemies who scale in difficulty as I become increasingly adept at waving a pretend wooden stick around while clicking my real-life mouse at the exact right moment. Lest I cop one in the mouth myself, of course. What I’m less into is unpredictable performance issues. I’m far less enamored by fps counts that shuttle between single and triple digits faster than a round of Family Feud, and I…

Two Point Studios has successfully cornered the niche market of contorting straight-laced concepts into zany shenanigans all wrapped up in a stellar management sim, and Two Point Museum very well be the developer’s best iteration to date. With five museums to manage, Two Point Museum’s campaign had me bouncing between each one to progress and unlock new items or mechanics. Memento Mile is your bog-standard fossil exhibition, while Passwater Cove sports an aquarium vibe, and Pebberley Heights puts you on a platform in the clouds where exhibits fall from the sky. Responsibilities start at little more than sending staff out on expeditions to retrieve new goods to display and decorate. Eventually I’m spinning multiple plates: watching out for vandals, hosting tours, keeping poltergeists from going mad and terrorizing guests. Each…

Vendrán las aves (‘The birds will come’, according to the internet) is a game about dealing with work-induced burnout—or not dealing, as the case may be. In this narrative time management game from the developer of The Red Strings Club, you’ve taken a year off from your job and bought a new electric guitar, which is surely the perfect recipe for a year of joyful musical expression from the comfort of your flat. Er, about that. Turns out humans rely on (checks notes) energy, which is in short supply after work has drained the last joule from you. So while you might want to ‘shred’ your ‘axe’ (how do you do, fellow musos), the reality is that you have just enough energy to have a shower or cook a hot…

There’s a zaniness to the Yakuza series that suggests a total disregard for normalcy and structure. It features men in their mid-50s who are capable of defeating hundreds of assailants. It’s a series that finds excuses to feature dangerous predators with the express purpose of making you eventually batter them. At one point, in Like a Dragon, you fist fight a digger. It’s hopefully a measure of the game’s ambition, then, when I say that the very structure of Like a Dragon represents the most absurdist move the series has ever pulled. Firstly, for the bulk of the game, it moves you out of the cosy neon glow of Kabukicho, the Shinjuku red-light district synonymous with the series. Then it introduces Ichiban Kasuga, an entirely new protagonist who feels like…

What a difference a spot of nostalgia can make. Back in January, it felt like Bungie could do nothing right—a weak, overly grindy season compounding more longstanding complaints to create some truly rancid vibes among the Destiny 2 community. The playerbase dwindled. The subreddit revolted. The future looked bleak. And then Bungie released a new episode, Heresy, and suddenly Destiny 2 was good again. I could be glib and chalk this down to Bungie pressing the emergency ‘deploy fan-favorite location’ button, but it’s deeper than that. The return of Destiny 1’s Dreadnaught is a welcome chance to revisit a beloved slice of the game’s history. And the reemergence of Oryx has piqued players’ interest. This is all good stuff—a much needed departure from the tedium of the last big update. But…

As someone who’s been playing games since he was six, I’ve committed a lot ofcrimes. Some of them have been the kind you’d think were cute if a dog did them, such as petty pilfering for comedy purposes and graffiti. Though if your dog can do graffiti, you might want to get that on TV, rather than sitting there reading a magazine. Obviously, all this crime is canceled out by the sheer number of times I’ve saved the universe, in recognition of which I should have been left immune from taxation for the rest of my life and the recipient of free lattes every time I go into a coffee shop. But life’s never fair, is it? What I haven’t done, up to this point, is commit tax evasion. I’ve…

AVOWED avowed.obsidian.net The first RPG I’ve played that lets me carefully adjust the shape and color of my character’s eyes, and then decide to entirely cover them with mushrooms. Combat’s fun, and it’s prettier than I expected even on my slightly aged PC—though all my character’s seeing is fungus. SPLIT FICTION hazelight.se The latest co-op adventure from the It Takes Two developer. I’ve only played a few levels, and my co-op partner was game director Josef Fares himself—yours may not be as infectiously energetic—but I thought its relentless variety was great. I turned into a pig and rode a dragon. FACTORIO factorio.com If artificial intelligence really takes all our jobs, at least we’ll have more time to play automation games (until the power’s switched off, at least). I’ve come to…

ROUNDHAY GARDEN SCENE The oldest silent film on record, filmed in 1888 by one Louis Le Prince at a whopping 7fps. NIGHT OF DRE AMS Cinematic innovator Douglas Trumbull’s short movie was the first shot in 60fps, back in 1978. FOX AND BE AR DEMO The first DirectX application to support 60fps natively, running on Windows 95 and released in ’96. WHEN YOU HIT 6 0 IN CRYSIS Some years after its release, probably about 2012, you finally managed it. The holy grail.…

While every game should be preserved, not even a masterful team can turn fool’s gold into true buried treasure. That seems a fair takeaway from the second Tomb Raider Remastered trilogy, released in February, and featuring the less-loved latter three of Core Design’s Tomb Raider games, including Angel Of Darkness. I asked Jordan Reese, product manager at Aspyr, whether remastering all six games was the initial plan, especially considering how Lara’s reputation began to crumble a bit after her third outing. He confirmed that they were in for the long-haul from the start. “Remastering the entire collection of classic Tomb Raider games was our goal from the start, so we’re really happy with where we’ve gone with Tomb Raider I-VI Remastered,” he said. It’s a fine plan on paper, but…

NEED TO KNOW RELEASE 2025 DEVELOPER Remedy Etertainment PUBLISHER Remedy Etertainment LINK tinyurl.com/3z8y8ajb For nearly 30 years developer Remedy Entertainment has been in the business of making narrative-driven singleplayer games. Just look at the levels Remedy has gone to in Alan Wake 2 to knit it into what is now known as the Remedy Connected Universe, which sees lore, characters, and narrative threads from various of the studio’s other singleplayer games shared to some degree. All of which ensures that, however you slice it, the biggest question hanging over its upcoming co-op shooter, FBC: Firebreak, is ‘why?’ With its multiplayer, systems-driven action and absence of cutscenes or scripted story sequences, it’s certainly not the Control follow-up diehard Remedy fans would be expecting. “You should expect the unexpected from Remedy!” says…

Sometime in the first or second century AD, the ancient Greek mathematician Heron of Alexandria invented the world’s first steam engine. In Echoes of Elysium, an upcoming survival game from Loric Games, Heron didn’t stop there: he punched a hole into Elysium, the mythic paradise of Greco-Roman mythology, where he’s harvesting the souls of heroes to power a legion of automatons. During a hands-on preview demo at this year’s GDC, Loric Games told me that, by reclaiming Elysium from Heron’s mechanical hordes, I would be battling “the hubris of man”. And as we all know, the best weapon against mankind’s hubris is a sick airship. Echoes of Elysium is the latest in a line of recent survival games trading the genre tradition of tree-punching and stationary base-building for mobile base…

Company of Heroes dev Relic unveiled this species-blurring tactics game back in February to some consternation. How could the studio behind CoH3 have made something so cartoony? Setting aside that one of the game’s influences is Advance Wars, not noted for its gritty realism. In 2003 Relic released Impossible Creatures via Microsoft. It’s a strategy game with a strong Island of Doctor Moreau seam running through it, as to create your armies, you blend animals together to combine their traits. So creating a tiger with lobster parts gives you an armored killing machine, while an electric eel and camel would produce something that can go for long periods without water and zap bad guys with electricity. Or possibly power a pump more reliably than a solar panel. The idea has…

I HAVE WOKEN UP IN AN ABANDONED BUILDING IN SEATTLE, A CENTURIES-OLD VAMPIRE WHO HAS BEEN IN A TORPOR FOR 100 YEARS. WHO FORCED ME INTO A SURPRISE SLUMBER? HOW DID I GET TO SEATTLE? AND WHY THE HECK AM I HEARING ANOTHER VAMPIRE IN MY HEAD? THESE TANTALIZING QUESTIONS ARE JUST THE TIP OF THE ICEBERG IN A GAME THAT UNEXPECTEDLY FEELS LIKE A CLASSIC PULP NOIR DETECTIVE YARN. WELCOME TO VAMPIRE: THE MASQUERADE—BLOODLINES 2 Vampire: The Masquerade—Bloodlines 2, from my double helping of the game’s prologue, is very keen to let you embrace the power fantasy of being a supernatural predator, but it equally focuses on solving mysteries and crimes. Imagine splicing Anne Rice’s Vampire Chronicles with Raymond Chandler’s The Big Sleep, and you’re close. But let’s jump…

When you’ve been floating through the featureless vacuum of space for a while, everyone starts to crave the same thing from their next vacation destination: a humid swamp full of insects. Welcome to Stellaris Prime, home of the famous New Florida, where the bugs are as plentiful as the unsafe drinking water and the needle-sharp cacti. How to sum up the experience in a word? “Moist,” says art director Erick Bilodeau. “It’s a tropical kind of planet… there’s lots of cacti and various sorts of desert oases as well.” The scenery here can be stunning, especially if you’ve just spent several weeks on the barren desert planet of Xephyr. But tourists here report that they’re rarely able to pause and take in the spectacular views, on account of the local…

Ice and fire rarely meet in nature, for reasons that the best minds at Kindred Aerospace have yet to establish. However once place they do convene is on Zenithian Rift, a planet of contrasts, where you’re just as likely to be immolated and have your remains lost to the flow of molten rock as you are to succumb to sub-zero temperatures and petrify solid out in the deadly winds. Shall we book you in for, say, 14 nights? While there, you’ll have the chance to take in tourist traps such as Brrrt’s Frozen Grotto, an underground cave network formed within the ice, Chikit’s Pools, where volcanic gases warm the water to create a gorgeous coral reef, and the Summit of Ruin – recommended for expert hikers only due to the…

ASSASSINS’ CREED ORIGINS 2017 Rewind the clock back to Ancient Egypt’s Ptolemaic period from 49 to 38 BC. Watch out for the River Nile’s crocodiles. ASSASSIN’S CREED ODYSSEY 2018 Assassinate during the Peloponnesian War between Athens and Sparta, from 431 to 422 BC. Don’t forget your sandals. ASSASSIN’S CREED VALHALLA 2020 Live out a Viking fantasy throughout the years of 872–878 AD by rowing, fighting, and plundering. ASSASSIN’S CREED MIRAGE 2023 Stab and parkour your way across 9th-century Baghdad as Basim Ibn Ishaq, a street thief who joins the Hidden Ones.…

CAPTAIN SIMS Leader of the zone’s armed forces (known as Protocol), Sims is mostly interested in law and order, but he’s sick of being stuck here. Help him out, and he might let you escape with him. DOCTOR GARROW A callous genius, Garrow knows more about this place than anyone else, but she only cares about science. Her goals are a mystery, but her knowledge might help you escape. THE VOICE A mysterious voice communicating through phone boxes. He tells you to trust nobody but him, while giving you little information. He always knows where you are and what you’re up to.…

What if, while playing a competitive shooter, you could force your opponents to fire their weapon every five seconds? What if you could instantly teleport them back to their spawn when they take damage? What if you could toss aside a weapon to turn it into a mini-turret? Every match, Fragpunk tosses out half a dozen gimmicks that could anchor entire videogames with its incredible Shard Card system. These act like cheat codes that break the rules of traditional shooters. While Fragpunk takes the basic formula of Counter-Strike and Valorant, with each 5v5 Shard Clash match consisting of defenders protecting a bomb site and attackers trying to plant the bomb, matches are much shorter. Quick play is the first to four round wins, and ranked is the first to six.…

Some of my favorite moments in roguelikes (and -lites) are when I beat the odds and clawed my way to victory on my very first run. Grit and Valor—1949 didn’t give me the opportunity. It wanted me to die first, and it tied one of my hands behind my back to get its wish. I had to fight, grind, and unlock the privilege of not being doomed. This isn’t to say that Grit and Valor is a drag. Combat is snappy and engaging, boss fights are multi-phase slobberknockers and squad compositions come together satisfyingly to wipe out entire waves of fascists. But between battles, progression comes more from time than learning the nuances of combat. Every new pile of points poured into boosting a pilot’s special ability, or fresh set…

Make time for THE SPHINX OF TIME It’s the rare adventure game these days that prioritizes puzzles, so it was a delight to fire up The Sphinx of Time and be presented with puzzles that would fit in nicely in the genre’s golden age. Time has stopped, and you’ve flown to a space museum to start it. In your mission to summon the Sphinx of Time, who has the power to repair the universe, you have to switch on and operate an alien machine, although this is easier said than done. It’s a puzzle that will have you traveling back and forth through the museum, making notes as you switch between two characters. I cheated a bit to get me on the right track, like I do in most adventure…

The low hum of mild conversation at the ambassadorial reception. I take another Ferrero Rocher from the gilded tray and continue my anecdote. “And, in 2002, they released a Command & Conquer shooter, in which you could shift perspectives and play as a commando named Havoc!” Delighted titters from my rapt, handsome audience. As you might gather, Renegade is a strange beast. The characterization is hilariously broad. Havoc is like the evolution of Snake Plissken: a furious, angular wheelie bin of a man who has zero respect for his superiors. His superior is just a wall of medals with a head, who insists on being called sir then does nothing when it doesn’t happen. One character’s personality type is just ‘woman’. And yet, when the game begins, it’s full of…

The Half-Life RTX demo is now out, so I thought I’d give this fully retraced remake of the classic FPS a whirl. And, while there are currently only the Ravenholm and Nova Prospect levels available to play through, rather than the full game, what we’ve got here sure is damn impressive. Well, it’s damn impressive providing you have the graphics card to run it, with my GeForce RTX 3090 Ti system puffing to run the game at a high framerate on Ultra settings at 4K resolution. So, why is that? Half-Life 2 RTX is an unofficial, modder-led remaster of Half-Life 2 that is built using Nvidia’s RTX Remix modding platform, and that means that while you need to have a copy of the original game to play it, this version…

Kingdom Come: Deliverance II: it ain’t Skyrim. That’s not a criticism, mind you, just a hard truth. They’re both RPGs, but KCDII is aiming for a more authentic experience when it comes to combat, travel, alchemy, and many of its other systems—heck, even wearing a helmet and putting the visor down isn’t all that straightforward in KCDII. The deliberate and meticulous nature of Kingdom Come: Deliverance II’s systems are a big part of what makes it such a great and immersive experience, but that doesn’t mean everything about these systems is universally beloved. Tweaking a few systems to make them less labor intensive isn’t unthinkable, which is why the mods that sprung up so quickly for the RPG mostly focus on making the game a bit easier. OUR SAVIOR The most popular mod for KCDII…

The first analog gaming keyboard was released nearly ten years ago. The Wooting One. It promised a paradigm shift in keyboard movement, using specialized switches. These aren’t your average mechanical numbers, they use optical sensors to monitor the entire range of a key’s travel, top to bottom. But it’s no longer just Wooting in the game. It has spawned many alternatives, some of which I’m testing here today. Gone are the optical switches, replaced by Hall effect, and with so many options, I’m here to help you make the right choice. 80 HE WOOTING $200 The original 1 One of the best examples of a modern Hall effect keyboard is the Wooting 80HE. It’s a little extravagant for its see-through chassis and light bar, but it really stands out for its…

Here are three things that recently happened to me: Until Dawn released in remastered form for PC. NBA 2K25 happened. Nvidia launched its new generation of GPUs, but then forgot to manufacture any. To the untrained eye, these might appear to be unrelated, but I see them for what they are, a triumvirate of conspirators hellbent on forcing me to come to terms with playing things at 40fps and/or some graphics options turned down to medium. Supermassive’s interactive teen slasher flick was never exactly esports-grade optimized over on PlayStation, so I shouldn’t have been surprised that my RTX 2080 Ti would have its work cut out to render all those snowy footprints and blood smears at max settings. This alone would not have been a significant event. For NBA 2K’s…

Good news, GTA fans: a dedicated modder has gone to great lengths to create a playable version of GTA VI’s map in GTA V. Bad news, GTA fans: Take-Two has already decided it’s not having any of that, and dispatched a battalion of lawyers to obliterate videos of it from the internet. As a result, our modder has also put the kibosh on people downloading it. “In case you don’t know, I basically created a playable GTA V map based on the leaks and the trailer shots of GTA VI,” explains map creator Dark Space in a recent YouTube video. Dark Space based his project on a GTA VI community mapping project, one that’s attempting to model the upcoming game’s world based on trailers and leaks. It didn’t come as…

GUNS OUT In the original release, Lara somehow managed to misplace one of her famously paired pistols. HINDSIGHT IS 20/20 While the graphics aren’t nearly as striking, there are a lot of previously-unreadable signs cleaned up in TR6. NOW LOADING Despite the ‘overworld’ of Paris being small for 2003, the remaster has ugly loading screens on every other street. NOT REVOLUTIONARY Another area sadly unimproved is AoD’s dull menus. You’ll miss the spinny disc of 3D options from the earlier games.…

Genre hybrids are everywhere these days—just in 2025 so far I’ve already played a turn-based Soulslike and a city-building Tetris deckbuilder—but some new combos are so natural that it seems mad that there aren’t already a hundred games doing the same thing. Absolum’s mix of side-scrolling beat ’em up and roguelike action-RPG is the best example. Beat ’em ups thrive in repetition—the classic formula is a short series of levels that you play over and over trying for a better and better performance. Absolum is the same, but it layers in roguelike progression systems, allowing you to gain abilities and items during a run, and upgrades between runs. The result is really compelling—a beat ’em up that keeps giving me reasons to get excited about starting a new run. Putting…

There are loads of people out there pining for the golden age of Sid Pirates!, I’m certain of it. In the Meier’s absence of another remake, we dig for treasure instead in open-world piratical games that take MicroProse’s work as an inspiration, such as Concept Games’ crowdfunded effort. The main issue with Pirates!, 21 years after its last release, is its repetitive nature. Seven Seas: Adventures attempts to rectify this with 37 different ports to visit, a set of unique starting conditions for your custom character that will affect the way they are received by society, and no dancing minigame. Total War is also on the devs’ list of inspirations, and with nine factions to battle for Caribbean supremacy the chances of pitched naval battles with lines of ships exchanging broadsides…

Voxels were once supposed to be the future of PC games, and yet somehow polygons still endure. Voxile combines voxels and ray-tracing in a way that sounds like it could melt your graphics card if turned up to high enough settings, and as a result looks very much like a copy of Minecraft that fell through a time portal from the year of our lord 2050. Comparisons to Mojang’s somewhat popular title are inevitable, as the world of Voxile is made of blocks, and it’s a survival game, but there’s a lot more shooting going on among the beautifully lit cubes here. Voxile is more of an exploration and combat game, with damage numbers erupting from creatures’ heads as you blast the voxels off them. There’s a plot, too—a tale…

In stark contrast to Quasadron IX’s cliffs and Stellaris Prime’s swamps, Xephyr is the ultimate destination for Tatooine natives, Frank Herbert fans and anyone looking to work up a base tan. The first clues about its climate are evident from orbit—like all the most desirable interplanetary getaways, it’s an arid brown sphere full of hot, angry creatures. “It’s a desert planet,” says Bilodeau, “which is a trope to all that desert sci-fi like [Star Wars’] Tatooine and Dune’s Arrakis.” The perfect place to get moody holiday snaps of cacti and sandstorms while the numerous bites you suffered in New Florida scab over. There’s little in the way of restaurants here, but tourists will be delighted by the way the desert’s secrets unfold as their armory of tools and traversal methods…

Do you remember the moment that Sekiro forced you to start playing by its rules? For me, I was trundling through the game like I was playing Dark Souls when I hit the Lady Butterfly boss, and suddenly there was no room for doubt: if I didn’t properly learn these new combat mechanics, I wasn’t going any further. It’s something I’ve always admired about Sekiro—how it pits you against bosses that force you to engage with its As with many Soulslikes in recent years, Khazan apes quite a few of Sekiro’s more-than-familiar combat mechanics—whether deflecting to build a gauge and stagger a boss, or avoiding unblockable attacks that flash red. But more than perhaps any other Soulslike I’ve played, Khazan successfully adds its own twists to these timeworn mechanics, while…

Go to therapy. That’s the message I received in Wanderstop, a narrative adventure about a warrior running a tea shop. I think it’s great advice, especially since it comes with an important and honest caveat: therapy, helpful as it may be, won’t fix you. It’s just a starting point. In Wanderstop you play as Alta, a fierce warrior who hasn’t known a single defeat in years, but who one day finds herself so weak she can’t even lift her sword. She collapses and awakens in a forest clearing where a cosy teashop owner named Boro suggests she recover her strength while learning how to make tea. What follows is part tea shop management sim and part storydriven adventure as Alta grapples with her mental health and examines her relentless need…

Almost 30 years later, Suikoden 1 and 2 are marvellous adventures that expertly combine supernatural shenanigans with the more worldly horrors of bloody war and the politics behind them, sprinkling the experience with just enough silly minigames and collectibles to give them balance. These remasters remain so close to the originals I can follow old walkthroughs find and the same friends in the same places. Even today, these stories stand out. Sometimes the greater good must be fought for at any cost, and sometimes it’s worth throwing it all away for a childhood friend. The retro-blunt nature of the text, everything short and to the point, only enhances these dramatic scenes. My allies don’t just fight alongside the lead characters in battle, they can also add new features to my…

People need their gravity boots, particularly people floating in mid-air, and it’s your job to supply them in this lovely platform game, which has you selling as fast as you can. You have your own pair, which certainly helps as you invert gravity to help all the folks floating off the ceiling. An obvious touchstone for Gravity Boots Salesman is Terry Cavanagh’s VVVVVV, but this is a looser, friendlier game with no fail conditions and only your high score to beat. You get a point for every person you help, and you do this by mixing crafting components and taking the resulting boots to one of the customers floating on this planet. That’s one way to play the game, but let me share a different tactic with you. You can…

Rounding off our collection of reinvented games is Fallout 3, foremost in a series that has seen more conceptual overhauls than dearly-missed human phantasmagoria David Bowie. Going back to Fallout 3 is like trying to recall a specific Christmas from your childhood. Memories merge with a hazier, collective sense of how it all felt. The tactile feel of tearing thin paper off a new toy is replaced by the joy of punching off a super mutant’s head with a mechanical fist. Crisp winter mornings become leaden skies above a taupe wasteland. And, if I’m honest, my memories are more generous than the reality, especially since they merge with the superior New Vegas. Much of Fallout 3 is shaky. The VATS system is still thrilling, but outside of that the guns…

Somehow finding time in between saving the Living Lands from a fungal soul plague and hunting monsters to fashion them into fancy clothes, I’ve taken to building rather than destroying. You’d think I’d have made the natural choice of a cosy farming sim like Stardew Valley. “Screw that,” I exclaimed as I looked at my mess of Stardew mods, finding the task of updating them all too much bother, “Let’s build a dystopian hellscape!” In Dystopika, you’re free to create your own futuristic city using a variety of buildings, decorations, and procedurally generated features. Piecing these together, you’ll quickly construct a concrete jungle. A neon-drenched ecumenopolis. NEON DREAMS When I first boot up Dystopika, I’m greeted by a shadowy expanse begging to be painted with gloomy skyscrapers and factories. Take a…

Since the Earth’s tectonic plates first cooled sufficiently to sustain living organisms, primitive life forms have been measuring their PCs’ performance in games against one metric. That metric is framerate, and it’s been utterly sacrosanct in PC gaming, an unmovable pillar around which the whole culture has been built. And then AI frame gen came along, scrunched all that received wisdom up into a ball and blew a raspberry while tossing it nonchalantly over its shoulder into a bin. We’re in a strange moment at the start of this RTX 5-series age, one in which framerate is no longer a precise enough metric to describe your experience of how smoothly you enjoy the game being delivered to your monitor, and just before anybody comes up with a better methodology. But…

MOVE TO ALDERSHOT After conducting your daily affairs in this UK hotspot, STALKER 2 on medium looks alright. START LOW Play the first hour of every new game on the lowest settings. Now medium’s an improvement. TOUCH SOME GRASS Those who say this are onto something—next to the jaggies in nature, 2XTAA looks decent. KEEP $2,000 CASH NEARBY Place a wad equivalent to the RTX 5090’s price and when you want to turn soft shadows on, glance at it.…

KEY Budget build PC gaming is for everyone. Pick the parts you want to build a new, well-rounded PC for a good price. Mid-range build You want to run every new game at 1080p 60fps. This recommended build will see you through. Advanced build You’re looking for the best PC on the market and superior components. But you still want to spend smart. BUDGET BUILD Enjoy 1080p gaming without breaking the bank MID-RANGE BUILD Our recommended build for playing the latest games ADVANCED BUILD Go above and beyond with a PC powerful enough to end worlds…