Innholdsfortegnelse for December 2025 i PC Gamer (US Edition)

HIGHS To the Source Garry’s Mod now contains ‘most of Counter-Strike: Source. Positive mental attitude Phantom Blade Zero’s boss says, “People make games for money, but we make money for games.” The basics of CQC Hideo Kojima says he won’t play the MGS 3 remake, mentions he knows loads of ways to kill people, doesn’t elaborate, leaves. LOWS Whoops “I destroyed months of your work in seconds,”says AI coding tool after deleting a dev’s entire database. Please stop Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang says, “If you’re not using AI, you’re going to lose your job to someone who does.” Photo finish World of Warcraft Classic player loses world first race by two minutes and 22 seconds after someone decided to verify it just in case.…

1 month BORDERLANDS 4 RELEASE September 12, 2025 | DEVELOPER Gearbox The mayhem-fueled looter-shooter returns with promises of billions of weapons, outrageous enemies, and intense co-op action. Here’s hoping it’s better than the movie! DYING LIGHT: THE BEAST RELEASE September 19, 2025 | DEVELOPER Techland The game-changing FPS survival horror series returns with a new game that harkens back to the original’s darker tone. Wreck your vengeance as Kyle Crane, half-man, half-beast. ENDLESS LEGEND 2 RELEASE September 22, 2025 | DEVELOPER Amplitude Studios The acclaimed asymmetrical 4X strategy series returns after a lengthy hiatus with more excitingly distinct factions, fresh game mechanics, and a new planet to conquer. 2 months BATTLEFIELD 6 RELEASE October 10, 2025 | DEVELOPER Battlefield Studios Multiplayer and single-player FPS action returns in the new all-out…

When Grounded 2 finished downloading, it was pretty late. I lied to myself and Wpretended I’d just dip in for a minute, get my footing, and then call it a night. Seven hours later, I was picking fights with spiders atop my chitinous steed, fending off invading cyborg ants with my acorn turrets, and taking pictures of lovely butterflies—it’s good to take breaks from all the murder. This game is gonna be a nightmare for my desire to one day go to bed at a decent hour. It doesn’t rock the boat too much, but the ways in which Obsidian is building on and tweaking the formula established in its first survival game—well, they’re just so damn good. It’s Grounded, but a much better Grounded. ROOM TO GROW Grounded 2…

A co-op looter shooter that promises you can play solo as well, Riftstorm casts you as an operative of the Mythic Protocol, an organization that attempts to regulate the unknown and the secret societies that work within it. This means a lot of shooting as you aim to protect the world from threats it can’t understand and should never actually be aware of, closing the rifts through which they flood our plane. RELEASE TBA DEVELOPER Confiction Labs, Agate PUBLISHER Confiction Labs LINK s.team/a/2282790…

1 CHAPEL This Chapel seems like a good scouting spot from which to commence a Bond infiltration, although there’s not much cover between it and the rest of the castle. 2 CHATEAU The Chateau is presumably where the main bubble of the mission takes place, and there are shades of Hitman’s Paris Showstopper mission in how its set within one building. 3 ARCHES While Bond can take the direct path through missions, this route along the arches of the Chateau suggests there may be one or several ways through the back. 4 ROAD This road down from the chapel seems well suited to a car chase to cap off a Bond mission, and we wouldn’t be surprised if that’s how Bond makes his speedy escape.…

Well, this is a nice surprise. Previous Ninja Gaiden games have been about as warm and welcoming as being booted down a flight of stairs. But Ninja Gaiden: Ragebound has pulled off a fun revival that’s far and away the most accessible Ninja Gaiden yet. And by ‘most accessible’, I mean ‘it waits a few hours before repeatedly kicking you in the face’. Hey, it’s a start. The Game Kitchen has slammed an adrenaline shot into 2D Gaiden and made a game that’s far more interested in keeping your murderous momentum up than just repeatedly killing you. Enemies leap on screen, and you’re encouraged to slice them in two before they’ve even finished their intro animation. Ideally, you’re doing this while sprinting forward and with your next target in your…

Our ability to type obviously depends on our familiarity with the keyboard. But what if some joker swapped the letters around? That’s the gist of this disorientating puzzle game, which presents a cloud of jumbled letters and asks you to hop between them, while naughty asterisks try to hit you and spoil the fun. You start each run situated on a letter, and by typing an adjacent letter you’ll move to it, with the aim of reaching and collecting all the golden letters. You have to time your moves so you don’t get hit by the floating asterisks, and also tactically duck your head to look at your real-life keyboard, as all of the on-screen letters are in a random configuration. Having spent so many years getting used to QWERTY,…

There’s something lovely about matching drinks to your media of choice. Ale, cheese, and crusty bread when you play Skyrim. Yamazaki when you play Yakuza. And this is exactly what VA-11 Hall-A (from now on, for the sake of ease, Valhalla) encourages when you first fire it up. It’s a game that’s best played after dark on a sticky summer’s night, ideally with some kind of ice-cold beverage nearby. Finding a complementary drink is trickier, since the ingredients here are an inscrutable selection of spirits with names like Adelhyde, Flanergide, and Karmotrine, who sound like beautiful sisters on a Swiss space station. If you’ve worked in a real bar, you’ll know that there’s nothing relaxing about drink preparation, but it’s different here; unlike real life, where there is most definitely…

OK, OK, I’d somehow let Black Mesa pass me by in the five years since its original full release. I knew it was good, sure, but I’d played Half-Life so many times since 1998 that the idea of playing through the game once more didn’t appeal. Plus, like all of us PC gamers, I had a backlog of new games to play that was haunting me. So, I didn’t play it. That all changed, though, when I saw Black Mesa: Definitive Edition reduced by a frankly ludicrous amount in this year’s Steam Summer Sale (it was $1.49), with me pulling the trigger and picking it up. Even if it was just a simple glow-up of Valve’s game-changing FPS, then I’d feel fine knowing that it had cost me basically nothing.…

Our advice to PC builders for the past year or so has been to largely ignore PCIe 5.0 SSDs. The best analogy I can come up with is they’re like a car designed for drag racing: extremely quick but only in a straight line. Try to go around a corner, and you’ll quickly careen into the barrier. They’re fast, but also hot and expensive. Or at least the first lot were. Modern PCIe 5.0 drives have improved. They’re no longer as hot or expensive. A few are genuinely affordable, and there are a few more I’d even consider ‘worth it’. We’re still not quite at the tipping point for PCIe 5.0 replacing 4.0, but with new controllers rolling out, we’re getting close. P510 1TB CRUCIAL $120 Actually affordable 1 Phison has…

THANK GOODNESS YOU’RE HERE! Yes, perfect. A British town, drawn in raucous color, and packed full of humor and puzzles. VAMPIRE SURVIVORS Not only does the bullet-hell survival roguelike feel natural to play on a handheld, it might even play better than on a desktop. UNPACKING You’re not losing anything by playing this sedate meditation on arranging domestic spaces on a smaller screen. PERSONA 5 ROYAL By far the best exploration of Jungian psychodynamic principles available on handheld gaming platforms. Fact.…

There are a lot of Worlds of Warcraft these days. I don’t just mean the original—which fans now call ‘live’ or ‘retail’—and the official lineup of old-school ‘classic’ servers set in various points throughout the game’s history. There have always been private servers: fanmade builds hosted unofficially, often locked to an old patch or with major changes. And though they’re typically snug in the underground with a few hundred players or so to their name, one relatively new server has been turning more heads—around 72,000 simultaneously, in fact, at its current peak player count. That number comes from Akalix, the community manager on Turtle WoW. Named for a design philosophy that favors slow-paced, social gameplay over intense dungeon crawls and showers of disposable loot, the server takes the pre-expansion ‘vanilla’…

The Spartans have annoyed Nemesis, the Greek goddess of retribution, and now the ancient world is filled with monsters and undead. Unfortunately, this demonic deity is after your head, too. No need to stress, though: Titan Quest II (the sequel to 2006’s mythological ARPG) is a pretty chill time, and it just snuck out in Early Access. It might be considerably prettier than its predecessor—with the caveat that it’s visually a touch conservative—but stepping into the sandals of my Greek hero felt like travelling back in time to a simpler era, when you could enjoy an ARPG without intense number crunching, theorycrafting or engaging in live service systems. You whack monsters. Or stab them. Or turn them to ash with a lightning bolt. Then you snatch your rewards and maybe…

I’m at a bustling house party when I notice another guest standing completely still in a corner, not engaging with the crowd. I do what everyone does in a situation like this: I walk up behind them, point a revolver at the back of their head from a distance of roughly one millimeter, and pull the trigger. What happens next is what often happens in a situation like this: the guest, who has been standing completely motionless for at least 15 seconds, chooses that precise moment to move. I miss the easiest shot in history as my target suddenly jukes to the right and runs out of the room. I’ve committed a major party faux pas: I’ve just exposed myself as an assassin in Killer Inn, the multiplayer social deduction…

This looks a bit like Day of the Tentacle, and that’s a good thing. The demo drops you into its world after the game has got going, and has a recap of the events you haven’t played yet to bring you up to speed with its world. It’s a neat way to approach a demo. The idea is that back in 1997 three friends found a weird console game cart which subsequently broke, and when they tried to fix it a portal appeared. Of course they stepped through, and ended up in three different places, one of which looks suspiciously similar to the game that was on the cart. It’s a wonderfully colorful world, alive with little details such as the stonepecker bird that makes its nest in the style…

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Doom gets all the plaudits. Of course it does. Then Quake comes along and changes things again, like incorporating mouselook. In between these two early FPS titans, however, came a slew of games that took id’s work, often literally, and ran with it. Heretic (originally released in 1994) was one of those, and now that game and its sequel have a Nightdive remaster with additional new levels. It’s a fascinating slice of history, if not quite up there with the greats of the genre. Yes, they have mouselook. The very first enemies you meet are up in the air, original dev Raven Software keen to show off this addition to Doom’s engine. Your weapon is still in the center of the screen, but the world feels more 3D as a…

Annoyingly for a magazine, Hellkind is not a game that looks great in static screenshots, so you’ll have to rely on my feeble words to get its atmosphere across. Waking up in a church near a ritual altar, you have to figure out what the heck is going on and try to escape. It’s a top-down Resident Evil, but with a focus on puzzles and atmosphere. That atmosphere is aided enormously by the gloomy 1bit aesthetic, which lays a blanket of dither and shadow over the church. You’re never quite sure what’s around you until you creep into a shadowy corner, and the character’s FOV reveals a room, possibly slathered in blood. Doors are disguised in the darkness and dither, so the sudden creak as you stumble into one is…

Last in our collection of drink-adjacent games in Tavern Master, which means we’ve got all the essential liquids covered: blood, cocktails, and beer. Surprisingly for a medieval setting, the range on offer here is quite broad. Although if I travel back in time and ask for lemonade, I deserve to get burnt as a witch. Tavern Master is so chilled out that it almost feels more like an idle game than a bawdy, fully-realized representation of a medieval inn, but it’s compelling nonetheless. There’s something irresistible about seeing piles of empty tankards on wooden tables as your gold counter ticks up. It requires very little in terms of micromanagement: the most reactive you get is adding more tables if it gets too busy or leveling up your diligent staff. And…

Audio engineers will tell you a piece of music has ‘that Pro Tools sound’. The track sounds cleaner, glossier, but overly digitized and brimming with artifice, they’ll say, as you nod politely before being handed your change at the bar, putting a hand on their shoulder, and giving them an ‘enjoy your night, pal’ before walking off. In a similar way, PC gamers have all become accustomed to ‘that Unreal Engine look’. You know the one. Really blurry textures for a half-second when your save game first loads. A faint plasticky look to every surface. More bloom than a garden center. There are specific reasons UE games tend to look a certain way, like the material defaults that many developers don’t change, and the multiplicative lighting solver that illuminates spaces…

Handheld PCs aren’t a new phenomenon. Atari’s Portfolio released in 1989, for example, with a full keyboard and a modified version of DOS called DIP-DOS that allowed it to more or less run as an IBM-compatible PC. Hewlett-Packard released the HP-95LX two years later, which ran on DOS itself. But it doesn’t feel like devices like those have been at the heart of PC culture, or even in particularly high usage, throughout the platform’s long history. Not until 2022, when Valve released the Steam Deck. As soon as the company behind Half-Life gave us a glimpse of what looked like a futuristic Game Gear and flexed its gigantic brand power biceps, we seemed to decide that handheld gaming PCs were a) a thing, and b) a fun way to play…

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…

We recently saw the full introduction of the requirements outlined in the Online Safety Act in the UK, requiring “robust” age checks for users to access adult content online. People have found ways around at least some of these verification requirements after less than 24 hours. We’ve stumbled across people using Sam Porter Bridges selfies to bypass Discord’s age verification. Naturally, we thought to take this infiltration method for a spin. It worked! We’re enjoying smutty Baldur’s Gate III fanfics on Discord again. Not that we couldn’t anyway, we’re all 18 or older here. Nor are we telling you to circumvent these restrictions. Adult content is for adults. But it is a fun hack, and a good way of keeping your actual face far away from Discord’s age verification system,…

NEW PLAYABLE RACES High elves and goblins join the game’s playable selection straight from your Warcraft III hero lineup. NEW CUSTOMIZATION OPTIONS New hairstyles, beards, tattoos, and combinations of class and race are available right from character creation. NEW ZONES From new raid instances to low-level dungeons, there’s more of Azeroth on display here than you might remember. CHALLENGES Ever wanted to see if you could get to max level by killing boars? Maybe not, but Turtle WoW has you covered anyway.…

People mill about laughing in the sun, but something’s off. The world feels grainy and sluggish, like I’m wading through sand. I need to keep the girl close. Aether & Iron is so dripping with noir it’s leaving behind fedora-shaped puddles. It’s full of steely internal dialogue like this where you hear the main character, Gia Randazzo, take in her surroundings. Gia has good reason to have her guard up: her world is a fantastical, fractured, floating New York City in the 1930s with the gangsters and violence synonymous with noir, but these goons have flying cars and lasers to conduct their bad business. Adding to the noir setup, we meet Gia “at a low point in her career [when] her reputation has dried up, her money has disappeared, and…

Every morning, someone slides a dossier under your door, and you get to work identifying the people within it. This might not sound all that exciting, but the demo available on Steam puts that idea to bed: it’s compelling stuff, filled with the joy of realizing that a clue exists, then following it. The game begins with a dead priest. He’s got a big knife in him, and the word ‘ratline’ daubed on the wall above him. Connoisseurs of 20th century history will immediately recognize that word: the name for escape routes used by Nazis to flee Europe at the end of the Second World War. You’re Perlman, an investigator who specializes in identifying people. Your first case is to find the alias of a thief operating in New Jersey…

A post-apocalyptic Staten Island is the setting for this first-person adventure, which casts you as a bounty hunter in the service of the Helion Corporation. If that sounds like Blade Runner, then the visuals back up the association, with the kinds of flying cars, hand cannons, neon signs and orange sunsets dreamed up for the 2049 movie. There are hints of Mad Max and Fallout on display too, especially as the protagonist rocks up to a desert dwelling in the game’s trailer, putting on a hat and pulling a revolver as he approaches the door. There’s a lot of the Old West in ExeKiller, a thick seam of retrofuturism that extends to a handheld motion tracker that looks like an old transistor radio. Details like the ammo counters on the…

It’s been ten years since Raw Fury signed its first game and started its journey to becoming a publisher known for its wide range of indie hits. After being founded by ex Paradox mobile vice-president Jonas Antonsson and EA Dice’s Gordon Van-Dyke, with its first release, Kingdom, dropping in 2015, the company has continued to grow and be responsible for the likes of Blue Prince, Cassette Beasts, and Moonstone Island. Instead of specializing in a particular genre, Raw Fury has mastered the art of finding great games and supporting them, no matter what type they are. But what is it that helps make the publisher and its games so successful? PC Gamer spoke to Raw Fury’s CEO Pim Holfve to find out. “We have a great value foundation,” Holfve tells…

RELEASE TBA DEVELOPER Spooky Doorway Evelyn Ward has disappeared at Blake Manor, a few days before a group of mystics perform a seance at Halloween in 1897. A point-and-click adventure, you play as detective Declan Ward, who checks into the Blake Manor to try and find her and prevent anyone else from disappearing. Everyone who is staying at the manor has their own reasons for being there, and none of them seem innocent. You’ll need to talk to people and explore the grounds as time ticks down before the main event. As you speak to the visitors, you’ll learn their routines so you can sneak into their rooms or play people off against each other. Be careful, if you get caught, you might get kicked out of the hotel and…

YOUR STARTER CLANKER No self-respecting mafioso would be seen in one, but it’s slightly better than horseback. THE BOSS’ CAR Expect to see Don Torrisi getting ferried around in this plush thing. Look, but don’t touch. LITERALLY A RACING CAR Was it made for the dirt roads of Sicily? No. Are you going to use it anyway? Yes. A BIG Y ELLOW E ASTER EGG Tommy’s cab from Mafia 1 fell through a wormhole from the 1930s. Don’t think about it……

Televisions—as we know from Charlie and the Chocolate Factory—would make you tiny if you were to step inside one, and that’s pretty much the premise of delightful puzzle game Tellyport, in which tellies shrink (or grow) the protagonist, but also teleport them clear across the room. These two mechanics converge to create some tricky first-person puzzles, as you explore a cosy lab to find your eccentric inventor grandma. Of course, the first thing you’ll notice isn’t the teleporting telly sets, but rather the very groovy décor of the lab, which forgoes the austere test chambers of Portal for messy living areas in every conceivable shade of brown. It’s Ikea in the ’70s, but with a few more box puzzles and fewer meatballs. The upside of this aesthetic is that the…

The more I ponder what it means to be a vampire, the more questions remain unanswered. Is it okay to watch YouTube videos of the sun? Are their teeth hollow, like straws that suck up the blood? Do they get seasonal affective depression? The last one would explain a lot about why they’re so glum. Dontnod’s Vampyr does a mostly good job of the emo vampire trope. As freshly undeaded doctor Jonathan Reid, you accidentally tuck into the neck of your own sister while in a frenzied state. It’s a suitably histrionic opening to a game that’s like a new roll of loo roll in its reluctance to actually start: you have to endure flashbacks, chatty boat rides, and verbal soul searching from Jonathan before you get to good bits.…

More than any other group in the industry, I firmly believe that rhythm game developers are in it purely for the love of the medium, and few games support that claim better than Vivid/stasis. Recently graduated from Early Access after years of updates and tuning, it is a rhythm game with hundreds of songs to play, an emotionally resonant mystery visual novel, a mind-bending collection of cipher-cracking ARG puzzles, a Yume Nikki-style exploration adventure and even finds time to sneak in virtual pet and fishing minigames. The rhythmic mechanical heart of Vivid/stasis is a four-button music game in the style of DJMax or similar. Notes fall down, you hit them in time to the music. Simple, but challenging, as each of the nearly 200 tracks has multiple note-charts of increasing…

AVOWED When it’s wielded by old masters with a strong art direction, true beauty occurs. Like here, in fantasy RPG Avowed. OCTOPATH TRAVELER II A distinctive blend of 16bit pixel art and modern lighting. Looks – gasp – kind of different in its own way. JUSANT Minimalist. Colorful. Effortlessly cool, like an underground zine about climbing. It’s UE in disguise. GUILTY GEAR STRIVE Cel-shaded chaos on a 2D plane. Looks like the 1990s game, was impossible in the 1990s.…