Innholdsfortegnelse for January 2026 i PC Gamer (US Edition)

Nintendo has had a lengthy history of legal skulduggery, but after initiating last year’s patent lawsuit against Palworld developer Pocketpair, the house of Mario has descended into outright moustache-twirling IP villainy. September, however, saw Nintendo armed with a particularly troubling weapon for its legal arsenal: US Patent 12,403,397, a patent on summoning and battling characters that the United States Patent and Trademark Office granted with alarmingly little resistance. According to videogame patent lawyer Kirk Sigmon, the USPTO granting Nintendo these latest patents isn’t just a moment of questionable legal theory. It’s an indictment of American patent law. “Broadly, I don’t disagree with the many online complaints about these Nintendo patents,” says Sigmon, whose opinions do not represent those of his firm and clients. “They have been an embarrassing failure of…

Ahorde of howling orks comes charging across the war-torn wasteland, straight towards the men and women of the Astra Militarum, waiting with guns primed, hiding behind walls, readying themselves for death. Then angels fall from the heavens; heavily armored saviors in drop pods that slam to the ground and annihilate any orks unlucky enough to be standing underneath them. The Blood Ravens are here. And they are going to cause carnage. Oh, boy. Dawn of War IV. Yes, it’s back. And I do really mean back. If, like me, you’ve been praying to the God Emperor that one day we’d get a true sequel to the original Dawn of War, then I’ve got good news: the horrible, desiccated, throne-bound corpse was listening. OK, OK, I don’t want to get too…

I awake aboard a rocking ship, which is rolling among the ocean waves. Outside my cabin’s window, unspeakable eldritch horrors await, with tentacles writhing within the deep waters. But in my hand a razor-sharp sabre is lodged, at my feet a rifle rests, and in my mind are the words of power needed to summon terrible, destructive magics. This is the mad new entry in the Project Warlock series of games, Lost Chapters, and the terror and treasure hunting is about to begin. I kick down the door of my cabin, and I am immediately confronted by gun-toting pirates and slithery demonic monstrosities. Why the denizens of the Dungeon Dimensions and the pirates are in cahoots is anyone’s guess, but they surge at me like a console gamer trying to…

A zombie extraction FPS for one or three players coming soon to Early Access, Midnight Walkers features a crafting system you can only access if you successfully escape a level. Die, and you lose everything you had in your pockets. Poison gas that seeps into the floors of Liberty Grand Center doesn’t help matters, and other survivors—split into the categories of tank, support, sniper—are an even bigger threat. RELEASE November 21, 2025 DEVELOPER Oneway Ticket Studio PUBLISHER Oneway Ticket Studio LINK steam.pm/app/2795540…

KING’S BOUNTY 1990 Widely considered Heroes’ forerunner, and now a series in its own right. HEROES OF MIGHT AND MAGIC 1995 The planet Enroth was invented for this spinoff from the RPG series. HEROES OF MIGHT AND MAGIC III 1999 A shiny refinement of a beloved formula. Regarded as a classic. HEROES OF MIGHT AND MAGIC IV 2002 New World Computing destroyed Enroth for its final sequel. HEROES OF MIGHT A ND M AGIC V 2006 Ubisoft bought the rights and handed the reins to Nival, of Silent Storm fame. HEROES OF MIGHT AND MAGIC VII 2015 Limbic Entertainment asked players to vote on the factions included.…

Silent Hill f isn’t some spin-off or experiment for Konami to indoctrinate its players into performing perfect dodges—it’s the next step for the iconic horror series. Watching as the fog settled on Ebisugaoka, I felt the same pit in my stomach that I experienced back when I stumbled across Silent Hill as I searched for Cheryl. Silent Hill f may leave behind that old rural town, but it has more in common with previous games than just its title. The new protagonist, Shimizu Hinako is at a crossroads in her life. Just finished with school, she faces pressure from her parents to settle down and get married like her older sister. But she’s plagued by the fears of heading down a path that broke her mother and sent her sister…

In an age of increasingly fake photographs and videos, if only you could grab a coin and scratch away to find the truth of the matter. Well—you guessed it—that’s the gist of the joyful Scratch and Reveal, which has you defacing photographs to uncover their authentic incarnations. The original photographs were taken at the turn of the 20th century by Bolette Berg and Marie Høeg, and show the Norwegian women dressing up as soldiers, explorers, and other distinctly unladylike professions. One of their brothers gets in on the fun too, by dressing up as a woman in some wonderful photos. Scratch and Reveal adds another layer to the photographs—literally. In this browser game, developer Susana G Chueca has doctored the images so they are more socially acceptable, so they better…

Ipicked this because I had it on good authority that this is the most autumnal Nancy Drew game, but it does accidentally mean that we have two titles this month set in leafy northeastern American schools. But, functionally speaking, I’m not sure it’s conceivable for them to be more different. For a start, the main threat here is receiving a rude letter, rather than having your head flushed down the bog by a jock with a hormone disorder. Not visually: this is a point-and-click game from 2009 made by a team that’s churned out 34 Nancy Drew games in 26 years. The NPCs look like digested Lego Friends, and everything has a Vaseline-smeared nebulosity that makes it feel like you’re playing a wet VHS of TV from the ’90s. I…

DIRECT DRIVE WHEELS Now available in affordable sub-£500 bundles, a notion that was pure fantasy in 2020. ARTISANAL PERIPHERALS Buying these is less about what they can do, and more about how limited and exclusive they are. STREAMER-GRADE SETUPS RGB lightstrips and vibrant neon signs aren’t just for making let’s play videos any more. STANDING DESKS We all read the articles. We all bought them. And now we’re all stuck with them.…

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…

Classic RPGs make up some of the most formative examples of late ’90s to early 2000s PC gaming in my memory, but I also remember when they weirdly disappeared. If you loved games like the original Baldur’s Gate, Icewind Dale, or Planescape, and also wondered why we stopped seeing these kinds of titles for a bit there, it turns out you can blame physical retailers for the decline in Dungeons & Dragons-style PC RPGs. The Infinity Engine was used to power isometric roleplaying games such as the ones above. It allowed game devs to take many of the sentiments and mechanics used in D&D and translate them to videogame experiences. It helped a lot of people to have these kinds of adventures for the first time, especially when good Dungeon…

FEBRUARY 2022 Nintendo ROM hacker Gary Bowser is sentenced to spend three years in prison and pay a $14.5 million fine. MAY 2023 Nintendo prevents the Steam release of open source Wii emulator Dolphin by threatening to pursue a DMCA lawsuit. MARCH 2024 Blamed by Nintendo for Tears of the Kingdom piracy, Switch emulator Yuzu agrees to pay $2.4 million in settlement. APRIL 2024 Garry’s Mod developers are forced to purge more than 20 years of Nintendo-related creations from its workshop.…

First things first: it’s not Nightdive. The remaster specialists behind the System Shock 2 and Heretic + Hexen re-releases wanted to do Deus Ex, and said so back in 2024, but Aspyr (of the Tomb Raider remakes) has been given the gig instead. This isn’t the only thing that’s annoyed a portion of the fanbase. Early screenshots look… not great. The original Deus Ex, from 2000, was built on the first Unreal engine, and required just 16MB of VRAM to run. As such, it always looked a little boxy, it being the year of the PlayStation 2’s release, along with the first Hitman and Thief II. There is, therefore, a lot of graphical ground to make up with a remaster. Whether it takes the Oblivion route, and runs the original…

As I lie face down on the cold, hard concrete of the skate park, I take a deep breath and confirm that, yes, I’ve definitely won the Best Dressed Corpse Award. My huge 720-degree Christ Air looked incredible as I, the flying Jesus of skateboarding, pirouetted through the skies of San Vansterdam, Skate’s fictional city. But I got greedy like the dwarves of Moria and, stretching for just a little bit more rotation, failed to get my skateboard fully back under my feet in time. The rest, as the grinders say, is skating history. So far, this has largely summed up my time with the return of the Skate series, which, after a long hiatus, has relaunched into this free-to-play Early Access game. There’s been plenty of pleasure, with the…

That belongs in a museum,” was a great line when Indy said it, but he never mentioned that museum being in the artifact’s country of origin. Relooted takes a practical approach to antiquities languishing in places they perhaps shouldn’t be: taking them back. After all, is it really stealing? Well, some people think it is. Set in a future version of Johannesburg, and created by a South African developer, your liberation crew with its eye on the spoils of colonialism held in Western museums is led by an art historian and made up of scientists, hackers and even MMA fighters (the game is non-violent) rather than safe-crackers, burglars, and knife-wielding maniacs. Main character Nomali is an acrobat, able to jump and free-run across obstacles, a speed-boost button allowing her to…

As you push back Athe fog of war on the continent of Jadame, you’ll often stumble over ruins. Moss-covered standing stones, and mana-infused obelisks, cracked open by thick vines and the passage of time. Towering trees of burnt orange and violet jostling for room with kneeling statues, their stone palms turned upward in supplication to a god no one remembers. It’s a fitting backdrop to Heroes of Might and Magic, a turn-based strategy classic which defined the genre before dropping out of it completely. Original developer New World Computing died in 2003, after which point the series bounced between different studios, never finding a permanent home. Amid diminishing returns, publisher Ubisoft simply stopped making it. For a full decade now, the series has been in the wind. To an entire…

GET DIGITAL ACCESS TO 130+ ISSUES WHEN YOU SUBSCRIBE!* SUBSCRIBE TODAY THE GLOBAL AUTHORITY ON PC GAMES Over 25 million gamers visit us online every month. Join them. www.pcgamer.com *Offer valid on US orders only, visit us at magazinesdirect.com or call 1-305-910-0069 for pricing outside the US and other subscription options. Your first issue will arrive 4-6 weeks after your payment is processed, please allow additional time for subscriptions shipped outside of the US. Newsstand cover price is $13.99. Offer valid on print subscriptions only. Digital access starts and ends with your print subscription. Mail this form to: Future Publishing LTD, PO BOX 4009, Chesterfield, MO 63006-9972 B5EMAG…

It says something about the state of the FPS that the hype for Battlefield 6 is mostly down to the old, not the new. Here we are, howling at the moon for decades-old modes, ‘grounded’ character models, classic class setups, and a map from 2011. Series vets are gobbling up this sequel as if we haven’t eaten for weeks, while patting Dice on the back for managing to execute a normal Battlefield game. Dice’s last effort tanked expectations, but that’s not why Battlefield 6 has impressed me. It’s the wider multiplayer culture of 2025—wrung out by years of battle royale banality and meta-pilled ranked modes—that created the conditions for an ordinary Battlefield to be the most exciting FPS of the year. Place your palm on the pavement, and you can…

Beyond Booleans has released some excellent adventure games over the last few years. I reviewed Teeth of Glass last year, and now a prequel has arrived in Snarl, which tells a new tale of cosmic horror featuring the monstrous ‘gray man’ and his mouth full of jagged glass teeth. He’s not a guy you want to mess with, as he can tear you apart with a flick of his hand. Snarl takes place in the 1970s, which was already horrific enough without a demon’s involvement. The game begins with two detectives in a diner, who spring to life when a father and son stumble through the doors. The dad has been injured, and there’s a creepy figure standing outside the diner. When one of the detectives goes to investigate, the…

The menu music for Bully, composed by Shawn Lee, is an obvious homage to the work of Goblin, the progressive rock band most famous for their work with Italian director Dario Argento. At first, I thought this an odd choice. But, on reflection, referencing a horror about a new student joining a monstrously evil place of learning could not be more apt. At the risk of sounding traumatized by the British education system, nothing provides a more stark reminder of feral barbarity of school quite like this. Initially, it seems quite benign: a world of nuggies, wedgies, and cartoonishly fondled buttocks. But, before long, you’re chucking bricks at strangers and forcing weaklings to soil themselves. It’s essentially Oz with varsity jackets. It plays like GTA, filtered through the simplified lens…

Let me tell you, stranger, about the game I install on just about every gaming PC I use, whether it’s so powerful it dims the lights when I switch it on or whether it’s getting by on integrated graphics. It’s the 2004 remake of Sid Meier’s Pirates!. You see, when I was a child, my family owed money to an evil Spanish nobleman, the Marquis de la Montalbán. He betrayed my father the day before that debt was due, dragging him away into servitude. I escaped, and swore a terrible revenge. Later, I traveled to the Caribbean under the flag of the English, mortal enemies of the Spanish, led a mutiny against an abusive captain, and took his ship. From there, I sailed from Florida to Trinidad, a letter of…

Should you wish to free yourself from a tinny headset mic, a good standalone microphone should be high on your shopping list. And I’ve got good news for you—gone are the days when a good recording setup meant XLR cables and complicated interfaces, as a simple USB connection is now all you need for excellent vocal capture at home. So for those looking to raise your audio game, it’s never been easier to capture excellent sound from the comfort of your home. But with so many microphone options on the market, which do you pick? 1 Capsule Elite NZXT $90 Rich and fruity This NZXT mic is sure to split opinions on first viewing. Some will find its design charming, while others (myself included) will think it looks a little too…

NORBAUER SENECA Prices range from ‘cheap second hand car’ ($3,000) to ‘expensive second hand car’ ($8,000) for this, er, keyboard. WOODFORT GENESIS A £1,600 handcrafted wooden PC case for extra… cooling? No. Ventilation? Nope. Cool points? That’s the bingo. ARTISAN FX NINJA ZERO Compared to its contemporaries, £62 for a mouse mat seems like a bargain. Until you look at how much other mouse mats cost. FINALMOUSE STARLIGHT Releasing their mice in limited drops like rare sneakers is a clever marketing move. Use it to click on stuff.…

HIGHS Breaking the chains Battlefield 6 dev says its destruction tech is so great because, “We’re not on the PS4 or Xbox One any more.” Dwarf your-tress Dwarf Fortress say it’s “giving storytelling tools back to the people”. High wisdom Larian boss Swen Vincke reminded execs that “making games faster and cheaper while charging more has never worked gaming, before”. LOWS Disunified Fallout Shelter, Pentiment, and other Unity games had to be briefly delisted on Steam thanks to a Unity security vulnerability. Uncivil Ubisoft reportedly canceled an Assassin’s Creed game set around the American Civil War. Not gnarly EA is charging Skate players $35 for a cardboard Dead Space skin.…

1 month ANNO 117: PAX ROMANA RELEASE November 13, 2025 | DEVELOPER Ubisoft Mainz The latest entry in the long-running Anno series promises to let gamers shape the Roman Empire in their image, be that via strong economic growth or bloody warfare. CALL OF DUTY: BLACK OPS 7 RELEASE November 14, 2025 | DEVELOPER Treyarch, Raven Software Robots, zombies, and guns, lots of guns. The latest co-op and multiplayer shooter promises to be the most mind-bending Black Ops ever. YAKUZA 0 DIRECTOR’S CUT RELEASE December 8, 2025 | DEVELOPER Ryu Ga Gotoku Studio Fight through the entertainment districts of 1980s Tokyo and Osaka as yakuza Kazuma Kiryu and cabaret club manager Goro Majima. It’s time to crack skulls. 2 months CODE VEIN II RELEASE January 29, 2026 | DEVELOPER Bandai…

Jurassic Park is about chaos. Man comes to think he can control nature, even play God, and he is undone by his hubris. Dinosaurs run amok and destroy all he has built. Life finds a way. Jurassic World Evolution 3 is not about that. Ten minutes into my roughly hour-and-a-half playing Jurassic World Evolution 3 at a recent preview event, I find myself agonizing over which of the 17 different possible designs of path I should lay down in front of my maintenance building. Each one has a fully customizable color scheme. More than ever, this is a series about control. CAGED BEAUTY In that sense, this sequel feels aimed squarely at existing fans. The core loop is familiar to the point of, frankly, staleness—build enclosures, put dinosaurs in them,…

We’ve known Warhammer 40K’s version of XCOM starring the gribbly transhuman weirdos of the Adeptus Mechanicus is getting a sequel for a while, but now there’s a demo on Steam, and it’s good to see that Bulwark Studios has embraced the Mechanicus’ guiding philosophy by performing some upgrades. The most notable is the repositioning of the turn queue from the top of the screen to the right, which somehow feels like a better place for it despite Baldur’s Gate III’s equivalent being at the top. The demo functions as the game’s tutorial, so you’re not faced with a huge amount of resistance, just a few Necrons. These skeletal aliens housed in bodies of living metal seem to have become the natural enemies of the Mechanicus, as not only do they…

Windstorm raised a lot of money on Kickstarter, and the fruits of this are beginning to show in its sumptuous open world. The setting is 13th century Mongolia, and you are a courier on a horse. While it may look a lot like Red Dead Redemption 2 as you trot between message drops, there’s also a bit of Death Stranding here as you plot routes across the steppe, fight off wolves, and deliver packages. A unique aspect of the game comes in breeding and training your own horses, combining bloodlines to produce mounts better suited to the conditions you’re facing. Equine behavior has, apparently, been refined and approved by experts, so there should be a bit more to it than nuzzling everyone for sugarlumps. Otherwise, you’ll be gathering resources, hunting…

1 TALE OF TAILS Knights, lances and dragons all contribute to the heightened, fantasy feel of the Heroes series. Unfrozen is determined to introduce some extra nuance. 2 SHIELD WALL Siege battles play a part in the Heroes formula, but were somewhat undeveloped in earlier entries. Now, you’ll be able to install additional defenses. 3 PUB GENIUS If you capture a city tied to a specific faction, you’ll get access to powerful benefits. You’ll also be able to recruit extra heroes from the tavern. 4 GETTING PILES Wood, found lying around the place, is one basic resource you’ll rely on to construct buildings, hire troops, and study spells.…

ONE OF THE MOST QUOTABLE CHARACTERS IN GAMING AND A PURVEYOR OF FINE WEAPONRY RELEASED Mar 24, 2023 DEVELOPER Capcom 1 Resident Evil 4 Remake Welcome, stranger “What’re ya buyin’?” You can’t not hear that phrase without hearing that voice and picturing the coat that goes with it. Resident Evil 4’s Merchant is one of the most quotable characters in gaming and is a purveyor of fine weaponry. He also proves that you don’t need a chic boutique or prime location to still do good business, you just need to fulfil a need and have a big coat with a lot of pockets. Despite only getting a few lines and being a bit of a throwaway in the original Resident Evil 4, he gained such a cult following that he’s…

Hades II almost had me questioning Supergiant’s decision to make its first sequel. I loved Hades, which brought all of the studio’s past experience to bear on a killer action game for the roguelike curious, but I wasn’t convinced a sequel would be a better follow-up than whatever new idea for a game Supergiant could come up with next. It took some time, but Hades II convinced me it was worth it. It’s a sequel worthy of the title that expands, but doesn’t diminish what made the first game great. I did like aspects of Hades II when it launched into Early Access. Protagonist Melinoë’s magical array of attacks were more immediately satisfying than Zagreus’ at the start, and the new cast of characters, such as Hecate and Nemesis, gave…

If the snake from Snake fell into the event horizon of a black hole, it would be something like Deep Snake. You’re still grabbing fruit and growing into a bigger snake with a pesky tail, but now you’re doing that while exploring a dizzying hole. It begins simply enough, with just a bit of depth to the game space. You steer the snake by pressing Left or Right, and as you do so, it tunnels deeper, towards the center. Sometimes the fruit is at the rim of the void, sometimes it spawns right at the bottom of it. And every time you chomp ten apples, the bottom falls off and the hole gets bigger. Two words to describe the effect would be ‘bloody hell’. It really feels like 3D wizardry, with the…

As I write this, flanked by three real house plants and one Lego one, camouflaged like a Navy SEAL in a budget ’80s action movie, I wonder if my obsession with foliage has gone too far. But, after 20 minutes with Strange Horticulture, I realize I’m nothing but a novice. I am an ungerminated pod in a world of fronds, worts, woad and nodes. And the worst thing is that I’ve been left in charge of a shop. A shop full of plants. I can just about tell a dieffenbachia from a calathea in real life, but Strange Horticulture requires a huge level of knowledge. And while that should be stressful, it actually isn’t. Time works differently here. My patient customers will wait silently as I leaf (please excuse me)…

I creep forward through the fog, mud underfoot, as I tentatively search the plantations around my rural village for my friend, Shu Iwai. I really could do with finding him as, well, things have got a little sticky in Ebisugaoka as of late. One moment, I was just minding my own business as schoolgirl Hinako Shimizu, talking with my friends and having fun. But then the next moment, the entire village has been covered in fog, my friends have disappeared, I’ve been chased by a shadow doom monster through Ebusugaoka’s streets, and I’ve had to brutally club to death a series of knife-wielding demonic flesh puppet monsters with a lead pipe. Worse still, I’ve not had a chance to pick up this month’s issue of PC Gamer magazine. So, here…

It all feels like an odd dream now. Stepping out onto our doorsteps to bang on our pans every Tuesday evening. Nationwide shortages of baking ingredients. Terrible, self-administered haircuts and vast lines outside grocery stores, shoppers spaced two meters apart, and wearing face coverings that you’d previously only seen in news reports about SARS in Asia. However surreal the events of 2020 might seem now, five years later, the COVID-19 pandemic’s effects were very real. As nations imposed their own lockdown rules of varying stringency, supply chains broke down and waiting lists lengthened exponentially. Zoom in on the PC hardware market, and PCB shortage completely disrupted the market. Lockdown restrictions in China, Taiwan, and Korea, where the vast majority of circuit boards are manufactured, left the entire sector without its…

If there’s one phrase that’s guaranteed to make you come across like a third-year history student who’s got life figured out and now simply watches civilization from the sidelines with a wry smile, it’s this: ‘late stage capitalism’. It’s a term that implies society’s imminent downfall at the hands of corporate greed. Whatever indicator of late stage capitalism the observer has noticed is also an indicator that these are the end times, before our economic and philosophical status quo is demolished and replaced by… well, whatever comes next. Nobody’s sure about that minor detail. Generally speaking, then, it’s quite a blunt rhetorical device. Nobody can see the future, so there’s some considerable confidence inherent in calling anything related to the present day ‘late stage’. Still, when you see an $8,000…