Innholdsfortegnelse for September 2025 i PC Gamer (US Edition)

HIGHS Scroll up The project to remake Morrowind in Skyrim just got a progress update. Aw, rats The gigantic rats you have to kill in so many RPGs are real—they’re 85cm long and called subalpine woolly rats. Wicked wilds Indie Fallout wiki joins forces with the Unofficial Elder Scrolls Pages, ensuring a bright future for RPG lore. LOWS A load of Sith Lucasfilm declared creative bankruptcy with an AI-generated Star Wars film. Now you see me An Apex Legends writer got laid off 24 hours after the character she wrote was revealed. Life is a battlefield The Battlefield community’s good vibes nosedived after Dice announced there’ll be no class weapon restrictions in Battlefield 6.…

1 month 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, cross-platform multiplayer and upgraded graphics. WUCHANG: FALLEN FEATHERS RELEASE July 24, 2025 | DEVELOPER Leenzee Set in the land of Shu during the dark and tumultuous late Ming Dynasty, this stylish new Soulslike sees you fight as Wuchang, a skilled pirate warrior struck by amnesia. MAFIA: THE OLD COUNTRY RELEASE August 8, 2025 | DEVELOPER Hangar 13 Prove your worth to the Cosa Nostra in the brutal underworld of 1900s Sicily. Violent third-person action adventure dripping with period detail and authenticity. 2 months METAL GEAR SOLID DELTA: SNAKE EATER RELEASE August 28, 2025 | DEVELOPER Konami…

NEED TO KNOW RELEASE Summer 2025 DEVELOPER River End Games PUBLISHER Nordcurrent Labs LINK eriksholmgame.com Sometimes a game represents more than just another product on the horizon to consume. In the case of Eriksolm: The Stolen Dream—an upcoming stealth adventure from small Swedish studio River End Games—it feels like a glimpse at the future of mid-budget games, and a potential intro to stealth for genre newcomers, too. With the game due for launch before the year’s end, River End Games let me have a poke around a polished but short preview build as well as a chance to sit down and have a chat with creative director Anders Hejdenberg, front-man for this newly formed studio of just 17 full-time industry veterans, working on a budget that he described as, “Quite…

NEED TO K NOW RELEASE TBA DEVELOPER Windflower PUBLISHER Windflower LINK s.team/a/2477600 Have you ever played that Mario game on the Switch where the plumber starts in 3D then plays 2D levels set into the walls of the buildings he explores? Offscreen inverts that, starting as a 2D game with 3D sections you can access after your robot gets a chip upgrade. PLAYED IT First, it needs to be said that the Steam demo of Offscreen installed with its language set to Russian. This caused it to be less than easy to play until I worked out how to set it to English with the aid of Google Translate on my phone. Even then, some parts used the Cyrillic alphabet, but this is a demo version of the game and…

Start up the Half Sword demo on Steam—which, it’s important to note, calls itself a tech demo rather than a gameplay demo—and you’ll be able to stab your own avatar in the face on what appears to be a character creation screen. From there he’s dumped into the Abyss, a foggy (or dark) void in which crates of clothing and weapons sit marked by candles waiting to be pillaged, and given very little in the way of guidance. Alternatively, you can take part in fights against one or more opponents, in which your avatar’s ability to move his arms independently leads to all kinds of awkward flailing about until blood is spilled. Half Sword has ambitions, this much is clear. It’s a physics-based brawler with historically accurate 15th century weapons…

Skin Deep lays bare a truth about the immersive sims we anoint to holiness: beneath a veneer of grizzled assassins and sunglassed corpo agents, beyond the virtues of player choice and non-linear level design, is a genre by and for goofballs. The allure of a hackable computer or pickable pockets is catnip for troublemakers—a license to orchestrate pranks on NPCs who can’t send you to the principal’s office, and laugh in their faces. Immersive sims are the sacred virtualization of shenanigans, and Skin Deep is the patron saint of slipping on banana peels. Death by peel is only the 15th funniest way I’ve solved a problem in Skin Deep, Blendo Games’ latest, built with the 21-year-old id Tech 4 engine. In the bare feet of Nina Passedena, a MIAO Corp…

DOOM 2016 id Software reboots Doom 12 years after Doom 3, with a very familiar demons-invading-Mars-base plot. PC Gamer gives it a score of 88%. DOOM ETERNAL 2020 The company then releases Doom Eternal, a more balletic and fast-moving incarnation of the FPS set on Earth. PC Gamer gives it 94%. DOOM: THE DARK AGES 2025 id recalibrates the FPS, trading Eternal’s balletic elements for more stand-up-and-fight combat. PCG gives it 80%.…

The power of the jump cut is still largely underutilised in games. Was nothing learned from Thirty Flights of Loving? But at long last, here’s another narrative-focused adventure that utilizes jump cuts to devastating effect. The difference is that, this time, the effect is to induce horror—oh so much horror. Fused 240 is an impressive work of body horror that imagines a world in which humans have been merged with automobiles. It all begins with a column of white light, which smacks into you at the beginning of the apocalypse to fuse your body with the car you were driving. Now you’re trapped inside it, which would be difficult enough if it were the whole vehicle. But nope, your flesh was grafted into a half-car that trundles slowly around the…

Part of me thinks Death Stranding is a social experiment cooked up by Hideo Kojima to see what players will endure if the surrounding fluff is interesting enough. Stealth sections. Cutscenes. Wobbling. It’s as if he’s collected all the gaming elements he knows will hurt us just to see if we keep playing, like rats gnawing electrified cheese in a lab. This would already be challenging enough. But the framework that surrounds it is relentlessly, defiantly odd. The Metal Gear series gets away with loads because we’re media literate enough to understand the concept of dangerous soldier men doing secret special forces things. Yes, some of them are bees and there’s a plant lady in pantyhose. But the basic concepts are tangible. Death Stranding, by contrast, asks you to be…

It’s quite the challenge stepping away from a Yakuza game, even for a short time. When you’re in the full flow of it, it’s magnificent, distracting, all consuming. All that matters in the next fight, substory, or absurd story beat. You can’t remember a time when you weren’t battering goons with bikes and replenishing your health with ramen. Stop playing for even a week, however, and coming back to it is bewildering. You find yourself smoking on an oil rig repurposed as a coliseum frequented by sociopathic proto-Musks, dressed in a gold suit, with only the most basic concepts of who betrayed who, when, and why. It’s all part of the process though. To be fair, The Man Who Erased His Name is even more convoluted than most Yakuza games,…

STARDEW VALLEY Not a surprise that 2001’s finest software can hack those 16-bit visuals, but the scale is beyond noughties gaming. DARK SOULS Even the later Prepare To Die edition runs fine on XP, which is just as impressive as beating Ornstein and Smough first time. CUPHEAD It’ll run, but you’ll wish it didn’t, because now you’ve got to memorize a malicious train’s projectile patterns. SKYRIM You know, just in case the last 17 re-releases passed you by. No promises about the mods, though.…

BLUE SHIFT How BLUE’S NEWS stayed alive and evaded ‘enshittification’ for 30 years You’ve been feeling it too, haven’t you? You try to scroll on a website and the ads crowd out the text so thoroughly you have to reload. You want a short guide for collectibles in a new RPG, but beneath Google’s flat-out wrong AI summary there’s only a parade of bloated videos. Pressures to survive in the attention economy have turned countless websites into labyrinths of engagement and monetization tactics. This specter of quality decay—this ‘enshittification’ as it was dubbed by journalist Cory Doctorow—extends to just about any service that exists in proximity to capital. Perhaps that’s why Stephen ‘Blue’ Heaslip’s site Blue’s News is such a stable time capsule of the quaint, uncynical frontier the early…

NEED TO K NOW RELEASE 2025 DEVELOPER Ubisoft Mainz PUBLISHER Ubisoft LINK tinyurl.com/hm3hdj4u I do not typically recommend completely tanking a city’s economy, potentially ruining the lives of all of its citizens, and being heralded as a complete idiot, as a way to learn a valuable lesson. But this is exactly what happened to me in Anno 117: Pax Romana, and I came out the other side really vibing with the direction Ubisoft is taking it in interesting ways. The latest entry in the long-running city building series has been kicked back to the golden age of the Roman Empire, but as I began my first foray into colonizing antiquity, it didn’t feel a million miles away from my sojourn as a governor in Anno 1800. Everything from the moment-to-moment…

NEED TO KNOW RELEASE Out now (Early Access) DEVELOPER Trickjump Games Ltd PUBLISHER Trickjump Games Ltd LINK tinyurl.com/3d8ajhmt Friends, I have a disease. Not, uh, not one of the bad ones, I mean a disease of the mind. In any management-esque game, I am incapable of planning until it’s too late, until I have layered one haphazard system on another to an extent that I can’t easily go back to the drawing board. I need to slap things together and see how things work to make a plan, but to implement the plan I need to tear apart the ramshackle monster I’ve built and do it all over again. Is this the worst torment a human being has experienced in history? Yes. And yet, I keep playing these games. Today’s…

NEED TO KNOW RELEASE TBC DEVELOPER Wombat Brawler PUBLISHER Wombat Brawler LINK s.team/a/3686530 Anyone who’s played the Stardew Valley fishing minigame will know the stress of trying to reel in one of the slippery lake-dwellers. Thankfully, Cast n Chill isn’t about stress—the clue is in the name—but about sinking your hook in the right place and getting enjoyment from the process. Of course, you can deliberately sink your hook in the wrong place if you want—there’s something supremely relaxing about sitting in a boat with your best friend by your side and not actually catching anything. Catch n Chill is designed as an idle game, a way to waste time when you’ve got nothing to do and aren’t in the mood to exercise your reflexes or puzzle-solving skills. You cast…

FIRST LOOK RELEASE TBA DEVELOPER SUPER AC PUBLISHER SUPER AC LINK s.team/a/3503790 Chicago, the 1930s. Meat is on the menu, but it’s also illegal, so smuggling gangs are bringing shipments of chops, steak and sausages into the city any way they can to feed the ruthless black market. Enter Eliot Ness, who’s a dog but also a cop, and his specialist team of Untouchables who will chew up crime and corruption using stealth and tactics. And make a nice casserole for dinner, presumably.…

1 ENVIRONMENT This battle takes place beneath a vast cathedral you enter at the end of the level. Inside the cathedral’s Nave, the bell drops from above, collapsing the floor and dropping you into a pit where the fight begins. 2 RAT This boss can wander around the arena and chase players through it. According to Anshar, the other bosses in the game will be separated from the play area, mainly because they are considerably larger. 3 BELL When it climbs on the bell, the boss unleashes waves of blood attacks that must be dodged. As with Painkiller’s special enemies, blasting the boss with alt-fire will reveal weakspots, letting you deal additional damage.…

The first thing that hits you is the way your character walks. There you are, excreted out into the furthest reaches of the universe by an uncaring colonization corporation, made redundant by said corporation immediately upon hitting terra firma and left to scrabble around for scattered survival packages that will allow you to just barely continue existing. And yet you’re swaggering around your new home planet like you’re the luckiest space pioneer ever to be laid off. That bouncy walk cycle is a great marker of Revenge of the Savage Planet’s endearingly upbeat take on sci-fi and social commentary, and also a great marker of how well realized that tone is throughout each of the game’s component parts. Alex Hutchinson’s Raccoon Logic studio seems to have diligently branded every wall…

BANANA Throw to squish on impact and create a perfect slip trap, or eat first for a quick snack that replenishes Nina’s health. BLACK PEPPER Throw or otherwise damage to create a cloud that causes enemies to sneeze, opening them up for attack. WALKIE TALKIE The ultimate multitool of Skin Deep used to track guards, call off alarm states, or create a spark for explosions. TRASH CHUTE A mainstay of every feline barge, the trash chute will flush anything (or anyone) on top of it into the vacuum of space.…

You’ll remember the drift events in classic Need for Speed. During that era when the games were soundtracked by crunk songs, told quasi-Fast and Furious tales and reached Christmas number one in the charts, NFS introduced drifting as a sort of side-show. There was a totally different physics model underpinning it, one that made ordinary driving nigh-impossible but allowed for some outrageous skidding about in search of a high score. JDM understands the nostalgic appetite for that era of NFS game—you can tell that by its car collection of noughties NFS cover stars. But its ambitions are far higher than the throwaway drift events in EA’s racers, and in fact higher than those games in their entirety. Is it versatile enough to make ordinary driving and drifting alike feel good?…

NEED TO KNOW EXPECT TO PAY Free DEVELOPER Snoring Dog Games LINK bit.ly/FlayedMan In this damned good adventure game, you play as a man enduring torment in Hell. A man who has had his skin flayed off, so every step he takes in the course of puzzle-solving is an exquisite agony. Er, sorry about that, The Flayed Man, but I’m generally quite slow at solving puzzles. Another way this skinless chap differs from most adventure game protagonists is that he can’t think or speak, at least at first. While it’s not long before a demon grants him the ability to comment on the items you examine, it’s a little while longer before the flayed man regains his tongue, something that gives this point-and-click a very different flavor from its brethren.…

NEED TO KNOW EXPECT TO PAY $20 DEVELOPER Gamious PUBLISHER Whitethorn Games Imagine a job that’s so full on that a two-week break doing an entirely different job feels like a holiday. That’s the premise of Lake, a delivery game that’s so sedate compared to Death Stranding that it feels like Sam Porter Bridges’ version of heaven. You play as Meredith Weiss, a high-flying computer person who returns to her parochial lakeside hometown after 22 years away. And that’s literally all I need to write about Lake for you to extrapolate almost every element of the story. You just drive around in your little mail van, chat to the locals, reconnect with estranged friends. The closest you come to conflict is a spiky old shopkeeper pointing out your gray hairs;…

ROBERT JONES THIS MONTH Bickered with Kreia, and it was glorious. ALSO PLAYED Oblivion Remastered, Doom: The Dark Ages What’s the height of Star Wars storytelling? The original trilogy? Ha, simplistic space cowboy nonsense that rips off Kurosawa shamelessly. The prequels? Surprisingly ambitious storytelling, if not particularly well executed. The sequel trilogy? A horrible car crash where all subtlety has been slain. No, the truth is, and always has been, the Knights of the Old Republic series of games. Why? Mature storytelling partnered with uncompromising ideological challenge. Enter KOTOR 2, the weaker game of the pair but the one where the series’ mastery of continuously presenting the player with ideological challenges is most piquant. Here is a game that presents you with constant decisions to be made, continuous moral and…

It’s important to stay cool while gaming, and that applies to you and your processor. Though I only care for one of those things and you won’t be getting any grief from me about shouting at your mates on Discord. No, I only care for keeping your CPU running smoothly, and to that end, I’ve tested six of the latest air coolers to find out how they stack up. Why go for air cooling over liquid cooling? Those I’ve tested here are great for two reasons. The first is they’re often quieter than a chunky liquid cooler, on account of lacking a pump. You probably won’t hear an air cooler over your case fans plus they have fewer fans than many of today’s top liquid coolers, which makes for less…

QUAKE-UP Blue’s News’ first masthead still proudly celebrated Quake; the game’s logo would remain in use on the site for years. SIMPLE AND CLEAN The site’s first original logo was small and simple, a concession made to cut down on load times. HEARTFELT Soon enough, the site’s gag logos would become a tradition, and one that persists to this day every April Fools. GAME CHANGER Readers will catch the temporary game crossover logo. The site’s archived them all the way back to Unreal.…

NEED TO KNOW RELEASE May 15 DEVELOPER Untitled Studio PUBLISHER Hooded Horse LINK hoodedhorse.com Cozy isn’t the word I’d usually reach for when discussing the hot and sweaty labor that comes with running a medieval forge. But even in its Early Access form, Blacksmith Master’s unlikely combination of hard metalwork and decorative drapes brings a pleasantly relaxing vibe to all that smelting and hammering. My little workshop’s comfortably nestled inside an established town, and bustles with activity from dawn to dusk. One blacksmith saws wood while another assembles a sickle at a workbench. An assistant might be hauling ore into my workshop while another lugs a sack of goods over to a merchant waiting by their cart. PLAYED IT Being able to keep track of a dozen different moving parts…

NEED TO KNOW RELEASE 2025 DEVELOPER Paradox Tinto PUBLISHER Paradox Interactive LINK tinyurl.com/39racrk3 Paradox has finally unveiled the worst-kept secret in strategy gaming: Europa Universalis 5 is coming. This reveal also means I can talk about my failed attempt to unite the British Isles under Scotland, my conquest of Byzantium as the Ottomans, and how even after many hours of unraveling this behemoth it still makes me feel like a stupid child. While Crusader Kings is the series that really introduced Paradox’s complex brand of grand strategy to the wider world, the long-running Europa Universalis series has always been the company’s flagship. But the 12-year-old Europa Universalis 4 is already so dense and wide-ranging—especially when you take into account the vast number of DLCs—that it’s pretty reasonable to wonder what…

NEED TO KNOW RELEASE TBA DEVELOPER Prospector PUBLISHER Prospector LINK s.team/a/3719880 Ah, mining. It’s a strange thing, perhaps, that digging things out of the soil by sheer hard work has become so popular among those of us who would rather be facing a monitor than monitoring a cliff face, but here we are once again, tunneling into the earth. PLAYED IT Except it’s not Earth, but L 98-59 b, a future colony world that has more going on than it might at first appear. It’s the work of a solo dev known as Prospector, and you certainly do spend a lot of time in the game looking down a hole with a shovel in your hands. Your new pre-fabricated outpost has been placed on top of a relic of an…

y favorite part of the new Painkiller was also the last thing I tested—the submachine-gun. In a series famous for its enemy-impaling Stakegun and eponymous fanbladed melee weapon, I dismissed the SMG outright, certain it would be the reboot’s least interesting firearm. Boy, was I wrong. This unassuming death-spitter, the bane of self-respecting Call of Duty players worldwide, might be nu-Painkiller’s secret MVP. Partly, this is because the SMG excels at clearing the larger, co-op attuned hordes of the sequel. Mainly though, it’s due to the fact the SMG comes with a wicked alt-fire option that shoots an enemy-bursting electronic beam. Moreover, this can be upgraded so that explosions radiate outward to nearby foes, splat-splat-splatting them in a cascading wave of gibs. It was this moment, watching a tsunami of…

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Jan’s the only survivor of an intergalactic mining operation that’s gone horribly wrong, and he’s the last person anyone would hope was the last person standing in an ‘all alone on an alien planet so hostile just standing around outside could kill someone’ scenario. He’s also going to be burned into a cosmic crisp in a matter of days unless I get on top of this mess right now. So my first few in-game days in The Alters are spent running around in a blind panic, trying to patch Jan’s base-in-a-giant-wheel up as quickly as possible so I can get the hell away from wherever here is before the sun rises and soaks the land in its deadly rays. With the stakes being so high from the moment the game…

In a time when the FPS campaign is so vanishingly rare that the only helping of big-budget shooting we can rely on each year is from Call of Duty, it’d be easy for id Software to kick up its feet and decide “more Doom” is good enough. It’d be good enough for me. But that’d be dereliction of id’s duty to the genre it created. To id, a new Doom is an opportunity to demolish a perfectly good sand castle and start fresh. Doom: The Dark Ages is the trilogy’s sharpest zag yet—recasting the Slayer from a meaty fighter jet, dashing past the hordes of Hell, to a stalwart tank, smashing shield-first into the action. The transition is successful, but not without major sacrifice. This is Doom at its most…

The mirror image of Unpacking, Pack is a little game about cramming your possessions into a suitcase, focusing purely on the puzzle aspect of making sure everything fits, and there is no overflow. It’s a bit like Resident Evil 4’s inventory Tetris, only without the grid that would make the process a whole lot easier. Actually, a better point of reference might be Ultima VII, with its inventory system comprised of physical bags, stuffed with little items you had to constantly move to find other little items. Pack improves upon the physical inventory concept by not allowing items to overlap. As you drag them into the suitcase one by one, they have to occupy their own little space in it and not get too close to the edge or to…

I was recently stuck in traffic and I noticed the cars with campers and wondered if, one day, I’d also like to own my own. Then I remembered how hard it is to reverse park a trailer in Euro Truck Simulator 2 and I decided to never consider it again. This is the great paradox of Euro Truck Simulator 2. Part of it is amazingly zen, as you calmly maintain the speed limit and ponder life’s great mysteries without ever driving dangerously. The other part is parking. This is stressful and difficult and probably not worth the faff, which probably explains why only 2% of players have the associated Steam achievement. Aside from that, the only things likely to jackknife your serene worship of the asphalt are road traffic accidents…

REDNECK RAMPAGE 1997 The original game starring Leonard and Bubba fighting rival hicks and aliens. It got a Suckin Grits on Route 66 expansion pack. REDNECK RAMPAGE RIDES AGAIN 1998 Starring new characters Daisy Mae and Frank Doyle, this sequel delivered more mad hick and alien-killing carnage. REDNECK DEER HUNTIN’ 1998 A spin-off wild animal hunting game that uses the same engine as Redneck Rampage and Redneck Rampage Rides Again. OFF-ROAD REDNECK RACING 2001 Developed by a different studio, this spin-off sees gamers race around off-road courses in pick-up trucks and buggies.…

With Windows 10’s imminent discontinuation on October 14, many of us have suffered a very peculiar indignity lately: being told by Windows that our puny, pathetic top-spec gaming PCs don’t meet the requirements for Windows 11. Sure, it can run Assassin’s Creed Shadows or Avowed in 4K with the softest of soft shadows enabled, and still hit 120fps. On a good day, it can even load an article from a local news website without Chrome crashing to desktop. But run Windows’ latest operating system? Forget it. In reality, for most users with high-spec hardware who are coming up against a compatibility wall for Windows 11, the problem is likely as simple as turning on TPM 2.0 and Secure Boot, rather than a fundamental lack of componentry. But while we contend…

You’ve read the words above and you’re already dismissing the idea as utter, utter piffle. That’s understandable, because clearly the appeal of remastered games is that they let you experience the stories, places, characters and systems of classic games in a visually appealing and mechanically refined environment. How the heck would that work for a processor chip? No one wants to go back to lesser performance levels for the sake of nostalgia. Sentiment for the past is a powerful consumer motivator that extends well beyond our whirring hardware and heaving Steam libraries. Ironically, the retro trend’s been around for so long, you could start to get nostalgic for its first notable breakthroughs into pop culture. Stranger Things season 1, eh? The Hotline Miami soundtrack. The return of the Clark Bar.…