Innholdsfortegnelse for August 2025 i PC Gamer (US Edition)

HIGHS Tamriel (more) Rebuilt Tamriel Rebuilt, which aims to rebuild all of Morrowind, just got a new huge expansion. Promises made Swen Vincke says he’ll have news about Larian’s next game no later than 2030, because his wife will leave if it takes longer. Really long dark The end of The Long Dark is in sight after over a decade in development. Uh oh Discord confirms it’s moving toward ‘becoming a public company’ as it hires a former Activision executive as its new CEO. Bunch of jokers YouTube is conducting a review after mistakenly hitting Balatro videos with an age restriction. Oblivion Demastered Oblivion Remastered’s first update broke upscaling on Game Pass (it’s fixed now). LOWS…

1 month STELLAR BLADE RELEASE June, 2025 | DEVELOPER Shift Up Corporation The stunning, adrenalin-inducing action-RPG that was a smash hit as PlayStation 5 exclusive gets ported to PC. Expect insane combat and giant bosses. SYSTEM SHOCK 2: 25TH ANNIVERSARY RELEASE June 26, 2025 | DEVELOPER Nightdive Studios Following its well-received System Shock Remaster, Nightdive Studios returns with an updated and upgraded version of the series’ celebrated sequel. Shodan returns! TONY HAWK’S PRO SKATER 3 + 4 RELEASE July 11, 2025 | DEVELOPER Iron Galaxy Studios The now legendary skating sims return with more skaters, new skate parks, gnarlier tricks, fresh beats, crossplatform multiplayer, and upgraded graphics. 2 months METAL GEAR SOLID DELTA: SNAKE EATER RELEASE August 28, 2025 | DEVELOPER Konami Snake returns in, arguably, his most memorable mission…

Coral, coral, coral, as far as my mechanical eyes can see. I didn’t know quite what to expect when building camps to claim territories and plonking down coral spreaders in my role as leader of a faction of part-mech, part-tendrilly oddities, but it certainly wasn’t anything so drastic as half the world becoming carpeted in purple sprouting flora (or is it fauna?) in a matter of hours. As much as I’m in support of regrowing the reefs and so on, I can’t help but feel that here on Endless Legend 2’s world of Saiadha I’m propagating some kind of fuchsia-colored ecological disaster. But from the perspective of the Aspects faction, this is a (ahem) core-al mechanic; it improves tile yields, heals my armies, and acts as a super-highway by letting…

Deliver at All Costs is not the game you think it is. It actually opens almost like a Fallout, with an aspiring rocket scientist in a 1950s town getting up and starting his day with a letter from his landlord that threatens to evict him. He sticks it onto his fridge with the others… PLAYED IT Rather than the town being blown to bits in a nuclear fireball, however, Winston goes out and gets a job as a delivery driver, taking his neighbor’s car and ploughing his way through traffic in one of the bounciest handling models outside of a Grand Theft Auto game. The environment is fully destructible, so when he sets off backwards out of his parking space, the building behind him collapses while the car itself appears…

The first Duck Detective game was a lot of fun, as your trench-coated gumshoe wrestled with a salami-based conspiracy while trying to navigate post-divorce life and deal with a serious bread habit. In The Ghost of Glamping, he’s being kicked out of his filthy apartment and is worrying about his ex not responding to his messages. “She might be in danger!” growls the hard-boiled voiceover, and you’re immediately set to work making deducktions about why this might be. To the level of stalking, you might say, though frankly she sounds exactly as stuck up as you’d expect a talking swan to be. FIRST LOOK Eugene now lives in a junk-filled flat with his sidekick Freddy, who likes to spring surprise trips on him (and who has salami on top of…

In 2006 Final Fantasy XII was a brand new PlayStation 2 game, the Xbox 360’s hard drive was at least in spirit still an optional extra, and horse armor DLC was the biggest corporate issue surrounding Oblivion’s launch. I didn’t play the game back then, because I thought I didn’t need to—I had Morrowind, a smug sense of superiority, and no use for a sequel. I might have been wrong about that. Although Oblivion’s tutorial-laden intro, starring the most obviously doomed MacGuffin-carrying Emperor who ever briefly lived, didn’t do a great job of convincing me otherwise. Was a rat-filled sewer, the most clichéd RPG environment of them all, honestly the best opening they could come up with? And then I escaped that boring place, and all of my grumbles were…

Not long into playing South of Midnight, I had to stop and take a moment. Not because I’d taken offence to its portrayals of the American South—that’s something you learn to brace for, growing up in Mississippi—but the opposite. The Southern Gothic action-adventure had me feeling woefully sentimental over its attention to the smallest details, and its compassionate protagonist, Hazel Flood, is the perfect embodiment of Deep South born and raised. South of Midnight isn’t a few hours of kitschy antebellum aesthetics, sanitised bedtime stories, or exploitative violence. It’s a supernatural tale with magic powers and creatures, but that doesn’t stop it from being an earnest, empathetic look at that often forgotten stretch of land between eastern Texas and the Atlantic seaboard by a team that truly gives a damn.…

Istarted Dull Acres wondering which way to go, trying to keep track of where I had been, and where I had not. That’s very much not the point of this game about wandering around a forest, where you should just follow your feet to see where they take you. Dull Acres is essentially a series of encounters, as the little protagonist trudges from screen to screen and finds similar stick-people in various dire, strange or funny situations. I happened upon a concert, swapped places with a peculiar tree and met some unlucky people that were dragged into the trees by some sort of monster. I found people philosophizing about their fates, I encountered beautiful things and creepy things, as I gave up on reaching a destination and as the forest…

There are loads of actions in games that we compulsively complete without even noticing. Reloading guns after firing one round. Checking to see if curtains are swooshy. And climbing literally anything, just because it’s there. A Short Hike is like the ultimate final form of the desire to scamper up every surface. It’s also very much about getting back down again. In most cases this involves sliding helplessly down slopes like a toddler going the wrong way up a damp slide. I also found myself stumbling off the edge of the game’s cosy precipices, delightfully unbothered about losing the progress I’d made. And this is the loveliest thing about A Short Hike: even though it reinvents Breath of the Wild’s energy-based clambering mechanic, it doesn’t really matter if you have…

Like many people, I really want to go on holiday to Japan to enjoy nerdy pursuits in Tokyo and take in some sights in Kyoto. I last went more than eight years ago, but with the state and cost of everything these days, it’s unlikely I’ll get the chance to go back anytime soon. Luckily Assassin’s Creed Shadows, with its gorgeous take on feudal Japan and attention to detail, is here to help me scratch that traveling itch. Heroes Naoe and Yasuke might be out for revenge, but I just want to be a tourist. Kyoto is packed with temples both in the game and real life, so I set out on a little tour to the historic versions of places I could go see today. I started with Nijo…

1 MEMORY Vengeance 32 GB DDR5-6000 Corsair $140 Dual-channel memory? Yes, but with a twist. I’ve opted for a pair of 16 GB sticks of Corsair’s speedy Vengeance RAM here, as that’s enough to make the most of the two channels available on this system. These sticks are rated to 6000 MT/s, which is right at the level that AMD recommends for use with its latest Ryzen chips. But is that four sticks? It is, and the other two are just empty shells with pretty lights attached. They’re what Corsair calls its Light Enhancement Kit and, yes, they’re a vanity project, but we’re not above that here. 2 MOTHERBOARD B850 LiveMixer WiFi ASRock $190 There’s something appealing about the glossy silver styling of the LiveMixer, and it has tons of Type-A USB…

DUST Letting dust accumulate on your componentry is like putting it in a fur coat made of lint and your dead skin. Best avoided. POOR AIRFLOW It’s not just internal cables that affect this. Inadequate space outside the case for hot air to escape is also a major contributor. A BROK EN FAN It’s not always immediately obvious when this happens, since their blades are so silent these days. Use an app to monitor temps. SUNLIGHT If you’ve got beams hitting your tempered glass panel, your GPU’s going to feel like an ant under a magnifying glass.…

Once upon a time, I happily handed over $170 for Ys: The Oath in Felghana for my trusty Windows XP machine. It certainly felt like a lot, but I didn’t regret my purchase. That was just what a rare, obscure, never-to-be-translated (as we believed at the time) Japanese PC exclusive cost back then – I either paid up or missed out. In the distant past of 2005, the entirety of Falcom’s PC catalog was little more than impenetrable curiosities of next to no interest to most people, only available via tiny boutique websites or by emailing a guy who knew a guy. Their embossed, oversized boxes looked special, and by extension, they made me feel special too—proof I’d put in the time, money, and effort. Thanks to Steam my old…

Every now and then, a game comes along that seems unassuming at first, but totally blows away all of your expectations and reveals itself to be something special. Rematch is one of those games. Yes, it’s soccer, but it’s far closer to the likes of Rocket League and Overwatch than it is to FIFA, and is all about action and teamplay. Trailers really don’t do this game justice. Watching people run around a pitch, even when extremely stylish, can’t capture just how good this feels to play. A skilled, action-based team game, Rematch is the closest I’ve come to feeling like I’m actually playing a game of soccer, thanks to how reactive and tight the gameplay is. Instead of playing as a whole team, like in FIFA and other soccer…

Can a work of cosmic horror still be successful if there’s no unknowns left to fear? First-person survival horror romp Stygian: Outer Gods is superficially an impressive production for a smaller studio, but after playing through the current Early Access version, I feel like I’ve seen it all done before, and better elsewhere. Set in a universe that can best be summarized as ‘all of Lovecraft’s stories put in a blender set to puree’, Outer Gods casts players as a former soldier haunted by spooky dreams and setting off on an expedition to find out why a small coastal village has gone silent. The twist: it’s not fishmen! It’s witches. But they might as well just be zombies, given how they mostly just shamble slowly towards you, occasionally swinging an…

I’ve never climbed a mountain, but having played Cairn I now feel like I have, even more so than after Jusant or The Climb. Cairn’s control system is brilliant, and perfectly judged, while its cel-shaded graphics capture the majesty of the mountains while looking a little like a Zelda game, too. Cairn doesn’t just point you at a rock and let you run at it while holding a button, a la Assassin’s Creed. Instead, it gives you control over individual limbs – automatically selected from the traditional four, though there is a mode in which you make the choice yourself—and you position the foot or hand on the end on an appropriate handheld. The UI melts away—there’s no stamina bar to tell you you’re about to fall – and you…

FIRST LOOK Slapstick humor is sadly underused in PC gaming, but A Gentleman’s Dispute brings the art of hoofing your opponent over a house roaring back. Alternatively, whack them with a baseball bat and get them eaten by a shark. There’s something decidedly ungentlemanly about A Gentleman’s Dispute, though the luxurious Victorian moustaches of the participants in this battle royale add some class. RELEASE 2025 DEVELOPER Blast Furnace Games PUBLISHER Blast Furnace Games LINK s.team/a/3106770…

Calling Tempest Rising a spiritual successor to Command & Conquer would undersell just how fiercely this game wants to be a part of the Westwood dynasty. From the thinly veiled faction analogs, to the thundering synth-metal soundtrack, right down to the mission interludes in which your faction’s influence bleeds through the countries of Europe on the campaign map, Slipgate Ironworks’ mimicry of Westwood’s 1995 RTS is utterly brazen. Yet, Tempest Rising does more than sneak into Command & Conquer’s room and prance about in its clothes. It understands what made Westwood’s RTS such a timeless classic, enriching those elements to suit a modern audience. Its RTS action is pacey and spectacular, its dual factions are tactically divergent and demonstrate surprising strategic depth. Most importantly of all, its twin campaigns are…

Time travel is perhaps the most deliciously compelling of all the sci-fi conceits, because it taps into something so incredibly human and primal that we’re all burdened with: regret. By turning back the clock, we can fix all of our mistakes. A better version of our lives is just one time jump away—at least in Wadjet Eye’s brilliant new adventure game, Old Skies. Not for Fia Quinn, though. A ChronoZen agent in 2060s New York, she serves as guide, bodyguard and fixer for tourists with enough money to book some time in the past. In this tantalizingly close future, she gets to watch people make their time tweaks, and all the changes they create just wash over her. See, like her fellow ChronoZen agents—and important historical events, people, and even…

If you were around for the release of The Last of Us, you’ll remember that it felt like a watershed moment for the medium. There had been plenty of good videogame stories before, but few with such good performance capture as to draw comparisons with film and prestige television. The Last of Us Part 2 came out in a different time, seven years after the first game sent its waves through the industry. Performance fares well enough the first few hours on my RTX 3060 Ti with the opening’s snowy landscapes only harried by a texture bug here and there, but once I got to the game’s iconic cityscapes the lack of optimization became more obvious. There’s often stuttering when encountering dense areas for the first time, there are more…

Bernard’s Watch this is not. Instead, a magical pocketwatch that can control time has landed into the wrong hands—yours. Will you use it for good or… OK, it’s evil. You’ll use it for evil. Without spoiling too much, you have found a new, dark use for the power of time travel. After an event from your past takes you out of your hometown and to an unfamiliar city, you have to go about your daily business, walking to your job at a local bookshop, and cleaning it up while your boss has a go at you for being late. A run-in with a mysterious character brings the pocketwatch into your possession, although it’s a while before the timepiece reveals its power. It’s always interesting to see how story-focused games portion…

The themes this month could be birds, since they feature quite prominently in all three games, but it’s actually the great outdoors. Nature. The outside-o-rama. And nothing expresses man’s fragile interplay with the natural world than purchasing the most powerful rifle money can buy and shooting deer up their harmless bumholes. It’s perhaps a weird thing to say about a game that it’s exclusively about all the different and exciting ways to murder wildlife, but my favorite bits of Call of the Wild often happen outside of the actual killing. And I say this as a country bumpkin who fired his first shotgun when he was four years old. I love the cautious, careful tracking of animals, and the way it makes you engage with the environment. I love how…

CARAVAN SANDWITCH caravansandwitch.com → Caravan in tow, you’re set loose to explore the hopeful post-apocalyptic dunes and solve the mystery of your supposed-to-be-dead sister suddenly reappearing. There’s something so charming about cruising around in your van and taking in the sights of Cigalo. SABLE shed-works.co.uk/sable → Sable isn’t so much a game as it is an experience, especially if you’re feeling lost. Gameplay generally just involves picking up odds and ends in a desert. However, the tranquility of it all (and the coming-of-age themes) invites you to contemplate where you are in life, and where you’ll go next. SNOWRUNNER focus-entmt.com → SnowRunner takes what makes trucking sims click and injects it with more carnage and challenge. Through thick mud and even thicker snow, it’s your job to deliver huge cargo…

A young(er) Bill Gates said, “640K ought to be enough for anybody,” about the IBM PC’s memory back in 1981 while onstage at a computer conference. Or at least, that’s how the story goes. Firstly, it’s impossible to imagine the Microsoft cofounder as truly young. Some people seem to be born aged about 48, and Gates is among them. Secondly, nobody seems to remember precisely which computer conference this took place at, or the precise quote. In fact, Gates himself now claims he never said it. But let’s not let the truth get in the way of a good maxim, and that’s how the pace of change quickly makes boasting about specs sound foolish. 640KB of information, as we know now, was not enough for anybody. Throughout the 1980s and…

Summertime’s a conflicting proposition for the individual whose passions generally take place in an RGB-lit chamber where the soft whirr of case exhaust fans is a constant. On one hand, all that vitamin D’s going spare outside. You could be soaking it up for free and decalcifying your winter brain, daring to imagine a life beyond pressing the boost button on the central heating and letting the next episode of Succession autoplay while you warm your hands on a mug of Twinings English Breakfast. On the other: the screen glare. The suffocating heat of sitting near a box full of red-hot componentry. The guilt of pulling the curtains and ignoring nature just beyond them so that you can better pick out the D.Vas and Genjis on your monitor. And above…

Fan-made remakes of popular games are a risky thing. You never know when you’re going to sink years of your life into a passion project, only to eat a cease and desist letter from an expensive lawyer representing a faceless corporate overlord that forces you to either change it up or shut it down entirely. That seemed like a real risk for Skyblivion, the ambitious, long-running effort to recreate Oblivion in the Skyrim engine, especially after it became clear that Bethesda was working on its own official Oblivion remaster. Happily, in this case the outcome was very different: Instead of forcing an end to Skyblivion to protect its commercial interests, Bethesda sent a key for Oblivion Remastered to everyone working on it. “Huge thanks to our friends @bethesdastudios.com for their…

NO HEIST REQUIRED Ninja Five-O’s mix of agile platforming and arcade-style absurdity is still a treasure—even without a high price tag. FISHY BUSINESS It’s never been easier to give the weird world of Umihara Kawase’s bouncy fishing line adventure a try. SHMUPS ON SALE Radiant Silvergun, the shmup everybody wanted but nobody could afford, is now just another game to throw in a cart. BUNDLED UP What’s better than one great old game? Four of them. Especially when they’re as cheap as Castlevania Advance Collection.…

As I played through the tutorial of Ninja Gaiden: Ragebound, I started to feel a fear very specific to videogames. You know the one. “If I’m already struggling in the training level, what chance am I going to have in the rest of the game?” I know, I know, get all your games journalist jokes out of the way now. But I did have reason to be nervous with this one. But the tools Ragebound gives you are as powerful as they are precise, and as my confidence with them grew, I found I was much more in control than I thought I was. A few hundred dead demons later, and I don’t think it’s quite as hard as you might expect—but it certainly is satisfying. Like Blasphemous, Ragebound is…

Here’s the easy part: Marathon is an extraction shooter in which crews of three runners race against the clock, using 3D-printed cybernetic bodies to strip resources from a mysteriously abandoned colony on Tau Ceti IV. In your way stand rival runners, robot forces left behind by the colony’s owner, and even some local alien wildlife. Before we get to the hurdles in Marathon’s way, let’s break the gameplay down. Each trip to Tau Ceti IV lasts up to 25 minutes. At the beginning of a run you’re given an exfiltration point to reach. Along the way you can choose to investigate any of the other points of interest on the map, taking on events like UESC incursions, solving simple puzzles, and even tackling what Bungie describes as boss encounters. Objectives…

There’s more than a hint of Fallen London about the situation your ship captain finds himself in in Void Sails. Rather than navigating the Sunless Sea, however, you’re plying your trade between floating islands, your solar-powered ship capable of a few tricks to help you on your way. PLAYED IT The demo begins with an origin story. The captain summoned to his ship by the mysterious Man in Yellow is the scholarly sort, prepared for his adventures by a lifetime spent with books, and the owner of an enchanted pair of gloves. He’s hoping to track down his missing father, but is immediately accosted by the ship’s first mate, a chatty sort, and is required to show some sign of suitability for the job. Luckily, our captain is perceptive, and…

Around 20 years ago, CD Projekt founders Marcin Iwiński and Michał Kiciński flew to meet the men they hoped to dethrone—the ‘BioWare doctors’ Ray Muzyka and Greg Zeschuk. Accompanying them was Adam Badowski, today the joint-CEO of CD Projekt RED, who had the task of wowing the then-undisputed kings of RPG-making with a demo for The Witcher that the CDP leadership had tucked under its arm. “This demo wasn’t great,” recalls Badowski in 2025, but back then it didn’t matter in the slightest. CD Projekt had the bulletproof confidence of youth on its side. “Ray and Greg, they asked the question, ‘So, what do you want to achieve?’” Well, wasn’t the answer obvious? “We would like to be the biggest, the best RPG team in the industry,” Badowski remembers answering.…

I love Blue Prince so much I’m going to spend this entire review telling you as little about it as possible. Unraveling its many mysteries and solving its multitude of puzzles—several of which I’m still working on even after finishing the game—is best done if you go in with nearly no information. Don’t watch videos. Don’t Google solutions. Don’t even finish reading this review. Just go play it, and you’ll discover one of the best puzzle games in years. Still reading? Fine. In this first-person strategy roguelike puzzler, you’ve inherited a sprawling mansion from an eccentric relative, but to prove you’re worthy of such a gift, you have to complete a simple task: explore the 45-room manor, then find and enter its hidden 46th room. The tricky bit? You’re building…

You know how comedy geniuses and chronic dieters will say their favorite brand of chips is ‘dangerous’, because once you rip open the bag it’s a swift trip to the bottom? That’s sort of me with JRPGs; these games demand you live in them for a while, slowly fostering a bunch of level one nobodies into god-killing besties, and I’m susceptible enough to that demand I go into JRPGs prepared to get lost in them, love them and succumb to them. Games like Kingdom Hearts and Xenoblade Chronicles etched lifelong preferences into my brain with their showy visuals, wild worlds, and massive casts. Clair Obscur’s offbeat take on Belle Époque France promised blockbuster action, a cast of brooding sorcerers to mold into an apocalypse prevention squad, and a battle system…

Growing up watching Narnia has made me look at paintings in a different way: as potential portals to other worlds, if you happen to catch them on a good day. Ephemeral Frame has, remarkably, captured that feeling, by turning portal fantasy into a clever puzzle mechanic. Just click on a photo, as you explore these worlds in first-person, and you will instantly be transported to the world inside the frame. The game starts off in a series of abstract environments reminiscent of Twin Peaks’ red room, and it’s already an interesting puzzler as you hop inside stationary picture frames to collect photo fragments. But there are more exciting worlds out there, and seeing a photo of a busy street, or a poster for a rock concert and instantly stepping inside…

Never underestimate the power of a glum intro. It’s why everyone remembers the brutal opening of Pixar’s Up, but not the stupid monster parrot. And it’s the reason that Firewatch is so immediately effective. By the time the game actually begins, you’ve made a lifetime’s worth of decisions, and you can feel time slipping through your fingers, like the ashes of a loved one spilling from a shattered urn. It immediately puts me on the defensive. Protagonist Henry’s responses to his new boss, Delilah, are uncharacteristically spiky for me, even though it’s not actually my partner who’s suffering from early onset dementia. It’s a testament to how good the setup is in Firewatch that I’m lugging the emotional baggage that was only packed five minutes beforehand. It’s also a stark,…

Ex-Yakuza Goro Majima and I are a perfect match, he has amnesia and I’m almost entirely blind to the rest of the Yakuza (Like a Dragon) series. But, if you’re open to whatever Like a Dragon: Pirate Yakuza in Hawaii throws at you, you’re in for a wild ride. After more than 30 hours I can’t wipe this maniacal grin off my face. It hurts, I have no idea what’s happening, but I’m having the time of my life. I’m not too proud to admit I miss the puerile simplicity of Saints Row before its more recent reboot—which wasn’t as awful as it was broken, but had absolutely lost its magic; showing mere flashes of the Row I used to know. It’s one of the franchise deaths I’ve mourned the…

Webcams are one of those devices I always forget to think about when setting up a gaming rig. Being the best way of showing your face to friends (outside of leaving the house), it’s pretty rare for your monitor to come with a little camera, and even then, I’d opt for something dedicated most of the time anyway. They’re important little devices in many a gamer’s setup, but can’t be so expensive that most everyday users would be better off with a dedicated camera and tripod instead. From tiny 4K wonders to solid 1080p drivers, we’ve tested many a webcam at PC Gamer. Striking the balance between ‘it shows an image, I suppose’ and ‘this could be used by NASA’ is how you pick the best webcam for you. We’ve…

IBM 305 R AMAC The first 1MB hard drive cost a million dollars and weighed more than 2,000lbs when it arrived in 1956. DATARAM BULK CORE Introduced in 1976, the world’s first SSD had a massive 2MB capacity, and the coolest name a drive’s ever been given. SAMSUNG 32GB NAND In 2006 Samsung changed the game with a mass market, 32GB SSD, featuring 57MB/s and 32MB/s read/writes. HITACHI DESKSTAR 7K1000 The world’s first 1TB disk drive, released in 2008 for you to put all the 480p movies you illegally downloaded onto.…

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…