Innholdsfortegnelse for February 2020 i PC Gamer

It was only when we began our research for this issue that I realised what an eventful decade it’s been. Within ten short years, our relationships with crowdfunding, esports, microtransactions, open development, and more have all fundamentally changed. Are things better now, or worse? Have we learned from our triumphs and mistakes? Does the future look bright or bleak? Perhaps, over the course of our feature, you’ll come to your own conclusions. All I know is, at the start of the decade I was working in a carpet shop, and now I’m the editor of the world’s greatest PC gaming magazine. Like I say, it’s been eventful. ROBIN VALENTINE Specialist in Navel-gazing Twitter @robinlvalentine This month Spent a lot of time googling dates. SUBSCRIBE TO PCGAMER Check out our Xmas…

HIGHS BioShock 2K has finally announced that a new BioShock is in development, but it’s still several years away. Red Dead Redemption 2 RDR 2 already has a huge modding scene on PC – check out our list of the best at bit.ly/2t69ceo. Halo Halo has finally returned to PC, where it nabbed the third and top spots on Steam. LOWS In the Valley of Gods The creators of Firewatch have shelved their intriguing archeological adventure to work on different things at Valve, including Half-Life: Alyx. Steam controller Valve’s Steam Controller is no more, with the last of the stock now sold. Rocket League The loot box system has been replaced with a pricey shop, which players are even less happy with.…

Demon’s Tilt didn’t have bowling, at first. It had a chimera, sure, and an occult priestess whose eyes glowed a blazing pink when she hurled your pinball in a circle around her head. It had a pentagram (actually, several pentagrams), and pulsing rings of bullets that pummelled your ball as you battled your way upward from the bottom of the table. Hard to imagine what else a game promising Occult Pinball Action could need, really, but Demon’s Tilt creator Adam Ferrando had time on his hands. After launching Demon’s Tilt in Steam Early Access last January, he set to work squashing bugs and then figuring out how to expand a pinball game. Why not a bowling minigame? It’s ridiculous enough to feel perfectly in line with Demon’s Tilt’s aesthetic, full…

Yes, there is a boomerang. And yes, it’s in the shape of an X. In that sense Boomerang X satisfies the promise of its name. But having a weapon that comes back to you isn’t the most interesting part of this first-person arena… er, shooter? Thrower? Flinger? The key to Boomerang X isn’t that the weapon comes back to you. It’s that you can go to the weapon. Throw out the boomerang and left-click before it returns and you’ll be hurled towards it, gaining a huge burst of speed and propelling yourself off the ground. Do it twice in the air and you can extend your burst jump to cross vast chasms. Do it continuously – turning as needed to change the direction of your next throw, thus shifting your…

My teammates and I are dropped into complete darkness at the beginning of another mission. We’re apprehensive as we turn our flashlights on – past experiences have taught me that bright lights can disturb the fleshy, distorted creatures that roam these industrial wastes. The four of us have been forced down here by the mysterious Warden to find the main reactor and switch it back online. Our plan is to first access a terminal through which we can locate our objective, and then make our way there, sneaking through the enclosed metallic maze. It seems straightforward enough, but developer 10 Chambers Collective is adept at throwing out curveballs that put your teamwork to the test. “There are a lot of games that do cooperation, but there’s not much of an…

FORTNITE RELEASED July 25, 2017 |DEVELOPER Epic |PUBLISHER In-house UNLIKE PUBG, FORTNITE: BATTLE ROYALE WAS AND STILL IS FREE-TO-PLAY James: Who said it? Who at Epic Games – during whatever meeting about the questionable outlook of its cooperative base building game finally entering early access after nearly seven years in development, announced in 2011 and delayed multiple times since – who said, “Maybe we could turn it into PUBG?”. There’s never been such a rapid, derivative, and successful pivot: Fortnite’s  barebones battle royale mode was made in two months. And it wasn’t even good. But, unlike the then-phenom PUBG, Fortnite: Battle Royale was and still is free-to-play. It didn’t matter that the building system wasn’t made for twitch shooting in a 100-person free-for-all or that the map began as a…

FEB 12, 2014 TWITCH PLAYS POKEMON A stream of an emulated Game Boy game played via a flow of commands from the chat reaches millions of people. MARCH 25, 2014 FACEBOOK BUYS OCULUS The VR firm is bought out by Mark Zuckerberg, his head no doubt swimming with visions of the virtual social spaces of the future. AUG 16, 2014 GAMERGATE BEGINS With one angry blog post, a bitter ex sets in motion a rolling hate mob that exposes the rancid underbelly of the gaming community. SEP 15, 2014 MICROSOFT BUYS MINECRAFT Creator Markus Persson aka Notch cashes in on his smash hit indie game by selling his studio Mojang to Microsoft. NOV 11, 2014 ASSASSIN’S CREED UNITY Graphical issues and bugs plague this sequel’s release, most memorably in the…

There have been few moments over the last ten years where I’ve been far from a grid full of little soldiers duking it out turn by turn. There was a lull, certainly in attention, after the ’90s, but then XCOM: Enemy Unknown came along and lit a fire under the genre, arguably kicking off the decade of turn-based tactics games – a title I’d never have imagined it earning at the start. I say ‘arguably’ not because there is any doubt that this has been a fantastic decade full of smart, tactical battles, but because the extremely slick Frozen Synapse came out in 2011, a year before XCOM, and was just as impressive. It didn’t quite have the same impact, however. XCOM is a reimagining of a series that was…

Loot boxes become a thing of the past Robin: Though some of their stealthier forms might survive I think your run-of-the-mill loot boxes aren’t long for this world. There’s just too much scrutiny on them these days. If government regulation doesn’t kill them, publisher skittishness will, and they’ll end up banished to the same graveyard online passes got chucked in. The catch? I think they’ll be replaced by something even more insidious. Ray tracing at 4K and up is standard Tyler: At the start of the ’10s, people were complaining about not being able to read text on their SD TVs. In the decade that followed, 1080p became normal, and then 4K TVs became normal. Still, true 4K gaming (as in, no upscaling) is considered high-end today. This is a…

Nestled in the mist-shrouded mountains of rural China, Bailu Village is a settlement frozen in time. People live slow lives here among rice paddies, ornate Buddhist temples, quaint cottages, and fields of colourful wildflowers. There are some clues that Shenmue 3 is set in the 1980s – a woman’s oversized glasses, a bleepy arcade game – but otherwise life here has changed very little in the past hundred years. It’s an ideal setting for a Shenmue game, a series famous (or perhaps infamous) for its languid, aggressively deliberate pacing. This is a game as slow and meandering as the old man strolling through Bailu’s marketplace deciding which kind of steamed bun to have for lunch. And the village’s steadfast resistance to a changing world, to the creep of modernisation, neatly…

This throwback mech sim honours the 30-year MechWarrior legacy very closely: in mechanics, in controls, and even in soundtrack. Bombastic guitar riffs thunder over every combat, lasers sizzle, PPCs crackle, and gauss rifles make that weird ‘pew’ noise, you know the one. Mechs stomp and break and explode spectacularly, levelling buildings around them. In short: MechWarrioris extremely back. The feeling of dropping into those missions is superb Not everything about MW5is rooted in the past. The overall aesthetic fits into the contemporary look of the BattleTech universe. The UI is clean, inspired by the work that went into Harebrained Schemes’ interface for 2018’s BattleTech. Piranha’s modern mech designs are memorable updates to the dated ’80s designs. They stomp menacingly at each other across a pretty diverse set of battlefields that…

There’s good reason to welcome the return of the horsemen of the apocalypse, and not only because of what’s on your social media feed. In the world of videogames they star in a great series that didn’t deserve to pass like wind with the somewhat lame third entry. And lo, Airship Syndicate did rise from the ashes of Vigil Games – who did once develop entries first and second – and thus it spake unto the industry, “Let’s do this”. Strife soon unlocks the Void Bomb for some portal creation Darksiders has always bounced gleefully from one influence to the next. The first game borrowed heavily from Nintendo’s Zeldaseries, while the second – which starred a hilariously ripped version of Death –clearly took its wallrunning cue from the Prince of…

Finally, an Undertale-style RPG where you can really make the most of the combat system – without feeling awful about every enemy you kill. Grimm’s Hollow begins with a girl named Lavender waking up in the afterlife. Hey, so it turns out there’s a purgatory, and it’s full of violent ghosts, but also reapers to dispatch them to the Great Beyond. Upon death, Lavender is designated as a reaper, while her similarly deceased little brother becomes a ghost. The game’s combat system is feature-rich, if a little awkward I mentioned Undertale, and that’s because Grimm lives in its enormous shadow, with its spooky, kooky underworld, its cute and funny cast of characters, and the surprising emotion it can evoke through its earnest dialogue. It isn’t mawkish or overly sentimental; in…

I was braced to spend 500 words gently ribbing Quantum Break. It feels like low-hanging temporal fruit, thanks to the time-bending combat and smattering of semi-famous faces. Crowbarring in a whole TV show just feels desperate, like giving away a chicken baguette as a magazine cover mount. But even though you can feel the weight of Microsoft’s crushing expectations when you play, there’s still something engaging about this confidently-told confection. Aidan Gillen is at his punchable best as Paul Serene The hucksterism of adding a TV show is clearer with the benefit of hindsight. I’m quite happy to play a game about cabbagey everyman with magical powers; but I’m too time-poor to consider watching a show about the same thing. It’s a cool, ambitious idea that’s lavishly executed. But the…

Hollywood action sequences would have us believe it’s possible to sidestep bullets, brain baddies with thrown projectiles, and sashay out of buildings while things explode behind us. And Superhot brings that delusion to life with swaggering panache, but also: it doesn’t. Because if I’ve learnt anything playing Superhot, it’s that action heroes don’t dither. John Wick doesn’t get decision fatigue when he’s choosing which mafioso to punch. Jason Bourne never had to phone a friend when carrying out an assassination (good job, since they’re probably all dead). But in spite of my wobbling lack of decisiveness, I still feel unreasonably cool playing Superhot.…

When I first played Mutazione, I couldn’t quite gel with the rhythm and vibe it was going for. I’ve played plenty of chill games before, but I’ve never experienced anything as leisurely as this indie adventure. It calls itself “a mutant soap opera where small-town gossip meets the supernatural”, so I was ready for drama and tea to be spilled. What I wasn’t prepared for was to end up consoling a grieving cat lady in a melancholic garden I had grown especially for her. Gardening has been used as a gameplay and storytelling mechanic in many games. You raise plants and crops for money in titles such as Stardew Valley and The Botanist, and in the upcoming Oobletsyou even grow new friends. But in Mutazione, it is a purely selfless…

I love Planky. Not only has she saved my life after my previous ship sunk; she’s flotsammed (or maybe jetsammed) me to a friendly port. Because even when things go wrong in Lovecraftian Age-of-Sailmeets-FTL game Abandon Ship, there’s always a chance the sea will carry you to more lucrative shores. Unfortunately, there was no room on Planky for the rest of my crew, whose reluctant souls were condemned to the briny deep. And with my ship went most of my gold, which makes hiring a new crew challenging. It turns out, however, that arsonists, murderers and ne’er do wells come at bargain prices, and my first hire is a disgraced surgeon who’s afraid of the dark – a steal at 15 gold, even if his criminal status prevents him from…

Baldur’s Gate isn’t the only D&D setting being revisited soon. The previously console-exclusive action-RPG series Dark Alliance is also returning, and this time the party – which now includes D&D celebrity Drizzt Do’Urden – is hanging out in the chilly, barbarian-infested land of Icewind Dale, trying to keep the frost giant population down. The original Baldur’s Gate: Dark Alliance launched on consoles soon after Baldur’s Gate 2 concluded with the Throne of Bhaal expansion, but aside from sharing the same setting it was an entirely different kind of fantasy romp. It was a 3D hack-and-slash affair with three classes, couch co-op, and a linear, rollicking campaign that left countless dead monsters in its wake. Next year’s Dark Alliance drops ‘Baldur’s Gate’ from the title and takes the action north. Icewind…

If we were making a game with new mechanics in the fantasy realm, I would be much more worried,” says Gudmundur Kristjánsson, former project lead at Eve Online developer CCP. “There the competition is so big, there are so many strong titles that are already out there.” Gudmundur left CCP in 2015 to found new studio 1939 Games alongside his brother, former CCP CEO Ivar. Their first game is Kards, a WWII-themed collectible card game which entered Early Access in April 2019, and is set for a full release in early 2020. “It’s pretty traditional in many ways,” Gudmundur tells me. “But then we added quite a lot of innovations that tailor to our inspiration of the Second World War, and strategy and board games.” The biggest of those inspirations…

FEB 9, 2012 DOUBLE FINE ADVENTURE The indie developer launches its first Kickstarter, for the project that will later become Broken Age, and raises almost $3.5 million. MARCH 6, 2012 MASS EFFECT 3 The last in the trilogy triggers controversy, primarily around its widely derided ending. Later in the year, Bioware patches in a new, more complete finale. MAY 30, 2012 CYBERPUNK 2077 ANNOUNCED An extremely early trailer announces Cyberpunk 2077, initially about future police hunting down cyber-psychos. AUG 1, 2012 OCULUS RIFT Oculus VR releases its first virtual reality headset, in the process kicking off a modern wave of consumer virtual reality technology… and motion sickness. OCT 18, 2012 STAR CITIZEN The space epic launches its Kickstarter, raising over $2 million. Its crowdfunding campaign continues to this day, and…

The first game I ever bought from Steam Early Access was a survival sandbox called Under the Ocean. I played it, enjoyed it and tried out new alphas as they were released over the next few months. As time passed, the game’s scope grew, devblogs and roadmaps were published, and new features like multiplayer were discussed with the fans. In 2014, things began to change. Communication from the developers slowed to a trickle. On February 3, 2015, developer Paul Hart revealed that Under The Ocean’s programmer had quit. Hart said he still wanted to finish the game, though he didn’t know when or how it would happen because he would be “restarting the project from scratch”. PLAYERS HAND OVER MONEY THINKING THEY’RE BUYING A GAME, BUT THEY’RE NOT Refunds weren’t…

JAN 8, 2016 MARC LAIDLAW LEAVES VALVE Once head writer on the Half-Life series, Marc leaves the studio. Later, he posts a synopsis of where the Half-Life story was to go next. FEB 9, 2016 RIOT BUYS RADIANT ENTERTAINMENT The developer of robot brawler Rising Thunder are snapped up to work on the upcoming LoL fighting game. FEB 26, 2016 STARDEW VALLEY Developed by just one man, this charming indie farming sim takes the world by storm – within a year it’s sold 3.5 million copies. MARCH 7, 2016 FABLE LEGENDS CANCELLED The Fable series appears to die away for good as Microsoft cancels this – though if rumours are to be believed there’s a new game in the works. MAY 24, 2016 OVERWATCH Blizzard launches its ‘hero shooter’. A…

FEB 27, 2018 INTO THE BREACH The developers of FTL release one of the most tightly designed strategy games ever made. It’s so good it wins our Game of the Year award. MAY 14, 2018 BOSS KEY CLOSES Gears of War creator Cliff Bleszinski shutters his studio after the failure of Lawbreakers and an abortive attempt at a battle royale game. NOV 2, 2018 BLIZZCON 2018 A tepid showing is closed out with the announcement of Diablo Immortal. The reveal goes down like a lead balloon, creating a rift between the studio and its fans. NOV 28, 2018 ARTIFACT Valve has a rare taste of true failure as its card game spin-off’s unusual business model fails to strike a chord with already well-served online-CCG players. DEC 6, 2018 EPIC GAME…

JAN 10, 2019 BUNGIE SPLITS WITH ACTIVISION The studio buys itself back from Activision, leaving the publisher and taking the rights to its MMO shooter Destiny with it,. FEB 24, 2019 DEVOTION PULLED Devotion is voluntarily taken down from Steam in the midst of a controversy around an insulting depiction of the leader of China. JUNE 9, 2019 MICROSOFT BUYS DOUBLE FINE The buying spree continues as it snaps up beloved indie studio Double Fine to join its new stable of first-party devs. OCT 6, 2019 BLITZCHUNG SUSPENDED Hearthstone pro Blitzchung speaks out in support of the Hong Kong protests – Blizzard suspends him and withholds his prize money. OCT 13, 2019 THE END Fortnite dominates mainstream -news cycles around the world simply by not being available to play for…

Wilderness and robots make for an evocative combination, one that works particularly well in the compact playing field of The Last Resistance: a game of hiding from deadly robots, and then taking them down. Playing out like a very, very small-scale Far Cry, you’re dropped into a refreshingly Nordic open space that offers maybe ten minutes of exploration as you increase your arsenal enough to eliminate a robot threat. There’s a handsome bleakness to the environment that makes it more attractive than many apocalypses, its muted hues contrasting nicely with the stark black and glowing red of the scattered enemies. Speaking of which, it’s your job to eliminate them. You start the game with no weapons, but pretty soon you’ll find an axe and then a shotgun, tools that make…

I picked Remember Me for a couple of reasons. Firstly, it loosely fits with the theme of ‘time’, which seems appropriate as we urge our collective self towards the end of the century. Secondly, I thought it’d be terrible. But, annoyingly, I quite like it. Everything is absurdly striking. Neo-Paris is gorgeous: a cascading mix of old and new. I like the integration of tooltip descriptions as adverts and shopfronts, even if I do spend some time mistakenly trying to interact with them. And the characters all look like they’ve spin-kicked their way off the catwalk: Nilin’s wanted poster could be an advert for hyaluronic acid and even the mutants resemble those angular models you see at some of those haute couture fashion shows. Everything apart from the design in…

You can’t talk about time in games without talking about Prince of Persia. But instead of the charming 2003 reboot, let’s take a look at the angsty sequel instead. Warrior Within still has the elegant combat and thoughtful puzzles, but it’s even harder to take the prince seriously now than it was 15 years ago. The prevalence of nudey bits makes this feel like gaming’s version of that scene in Spider-Man 3 when Parker goes edgy.…

Anyone who’s played a single-player videogame recently – and the chances are you have – will appreciate the very special kind of artificial stupidity necessary to make you feel like you’re getting a decent challenge, but that it was your finely honed skills that finally allowed you to triumph rather than pre-programmed flaws in AI strategy. Putting up a stiff challenge without cheating – no reading the player’s inputs, reacting to the first frame of an attack or psychically knowing where his units are – is a difficult thing to code. But what if you wanted your AI to crush all its enemies and see them driven before it? Perhaps becoming good enough at a game to be in the top 98 per cent of players? All without cheating? That…

Last issue, I took an illuminating but disappointing foray into Hearthstone’s auto-battler-inspired Battlegrounds mode. This month I thought I’d see if I could use my newly acquired knowledge to finally get to grip with the genre’s beefier frontrunners. I’m a lapsed League Of Legends obsessive, so I figured its spin-off Teamfight Tactics would be the auto-battler for me, but if anything my prior experience is a hindrance. Weirdly, Riot has decided to remix its roster for TFT, using alt versions of characters with new allegiances. So, merrily building myself an icy ‘Glacial’ team, I spot Ashe. If there’s one thing I still know about LoL it’s that Ashe is the Frost Archer – her defining trait is her freezing arrows. A perfect fit with the rest of my crew! Except,…

I’m supposed to be stealing keys from several merchants in Leyawiin, but things haven’t exactly gone to plan. I accidentally wore my Grey Fox mask, a piece of armour that immediately marks me as a wanted criminal to every guard I pass. Even after finally sorting out my armour situation and making my way into Southern Books, the shopkeeper Bugak gro-Bol isn’t in bed when I enter and won’t stop following me around and trying to kick me out of his shop, because it’s midnight and I look like exactly the kind of shady character who might be breaking in to steal from him. These are the same hapless adventures that I remember going on in Oblivion, but this time my Khajiit character isn’t out thieving at the behest of…

After leaving us hanging for years and driving the internet into an endless conspiratorial frenzy, Valve’s finally returning to the world of Gordon Freeman, though we won’t be playing the bespectacled physicist this time. Instead, Half-Life: Alyx is a virtual reality spin-off set between Half-Life and Half-Life 2, with the much chattier Alyx Vance stepping into the spotlight as she fights the Combine. Though a VR exclusive, Valve says it’s still a full Half-Life game, and it’s not the only one the team wants to make. INSTEAD OF A GRAVITY GUN, HOWEVER, THERE ARE GRAVITY GLOVES “Half-Life: Alyx is the largest game team we’ve had yet,” Valve designer Greg Coomer tells us. “About a third of the people on the project have worked on previous Half-Life games, some all the…

Zombies and sniper rifles – it’s a winning combination. With the shambling undead, you get an enemy that can only be eliminated by removing the head or destroying the brain, and who are iconic for shambling very slowly towards you out of the middle distance. In other words, nature’s most perfect headshot target. This pairing has proved especially profitable for Rebellion Developments, the British studio with its fingers in all manner of pies, from comics to films of those comics, but probably best known for producing the Sniper Elite games. The first Zombie Army started life (or at least undeath) as a spin-off from that series, and found success pretty much immediately. “It made its money back overnight,” says Ryan Baker, lead designer of Zombie Army 4: Dead War –…

MARCH 6, 2013 SIM CITY What promised to be a triumphant reboot for the series turns into a rolling disaster as its dysfunctional always-online features stir up ire with fans. MARCH 20, 2013 EARLY ACCESS Steam launches its Early Access program, letting devs sell still in-development games. The landscape of PC gaming is forever changed. MARCH 26, 2013 BIOSHOCK INFINITE The long-awaited sequel launches to critical acclaim, praised for its story-telling – though a later backlash questions its politics. JULY 9, 2013 DOTA 2 While Valve’s sort-of sequel isn’t the first major MOBA, it makes a serious splash on launch - and has a huge impact on the world of esports. AUG 8, 2013 SPELUNKY The highly influential 2009 freeware game gets a definitive PC remake, enhancing its looks but…

FEB 3, 2015 JOYSTIQ CLOSES AOL officially shutters its long-running and influential games news website as part of a larger downsizing strategy. Many great journos lose their job. MARCH 4, 2015 MAXIS CLOSES EA shuts down Maxis headquarters, effectively killing the SimCity and Spore studio as we know it and absorbing its staff into the wider EA ecosystem. APRIL 24, 2015 SKYRIM PAID MODS Bethesda launches an initiative that offers user-made mods for sale. The backlash is quick and in days the project is abandoned. MAY 19, 2015 THE WITCHER 3 CD Projekt stuns the industry by launching an open-world RPG of unbelievable detail and depth, firmly establishing it as the powerhouse it is today. JUNE 16, 2015 E3 2015 We host our first ever PC Gaming Show, welcoming to…

MARCH 21, 2017 MASS EFFECT ANDROMEDA Bioware’s shot at both redeeming and soft-rebooting Mass Effect goes horribly awry as they unveil a messy adventure full of bugs. JUNE 12, 2017 NOTCH GOES WRONG Markus Persson, now a billionaire, tweets an unprintable insult at developer Zoe Quinn and formally kicks off his slide into online alt-rightery. SEPT 14, 2017 DIVINITY ORIGINAL SIN II Larian’s impressive follow-up cements the studio’s newly prestigious status. It’s so good, it takes the number one spot of our Top 100 list. SEPT 26, 2017 FORTNITE BATTLE ROYALE Co-op survival game Fortnite releases an experimental new mode based on PUBG’s ‘battle royale’ gameplay. The rest, as they say, is history. NOV 9, 2017 EA BUYS RESPAWN After two Titanfall games, EA snaps up the studio. Less than…

A terrible disease has overtaken mankind. The Pandoravirus, an alien threat that’s mutating and twisting our world into one controlled by swarms of hybrid creatures emerging from the seas. Society has collapsed and new social movements have risen. A few rogue military operatives seek to revive an old initiative dedicated to securing the future. It will not be easy, as Phoenix Point chooses strategic complexity over tactical simplicity. In this Phoenix Point is very much a successor to the original X-COM – unsurprisingly, as it’s designed by series creator Julian Gollop. In terms of core design, turn-based tactics games don’t get much better than Phoenix Point. To my chagrin, they also don’t get much better than in terms of copious bugs and poor AI. As you stretch out you encounter…

1 YOKOSUKA A city located about 40 miles south of Tokyo and the hometown of Ryo. The first game is set here, mostly on Dobuita Street: a real-life shopping district that you can still find today. 2 HONG KONG In the second game Ryo follows Lan Di to Hong Kong, a city where he feels out of his depth. Later he travels to Kowloon Walled City, a cramped, lawless city within a city. 3 GUILIN Hot on Lan Di’s trail, Ryo ends up in Guilin, a mountainous region of China. Here he finds the cave where the stone for the Phoenix Mirror was quarried and meets a new ally.…

There’s something eerie about a public space that is devoid of people, a fact that first-person horror No Players Online utilises to its advantage. It’s set in an online FPS, but one where you’re the only player. Meaning it’s just you and your gun, running around an empty map. Naturally it’s not quite that simple and the game eventually throws surprises at you, like… well, they wouldn’t be very surprising if I gave them all away. But the game’s few set-pieces are effective, well-paced, expertly introduced and more original than the prankish jump scares found in many horror games. Without revealing too much, the abandoned server you’re playing on isn’t quite as empty as the game initially suggests. A presence that makes itself known as you play a (seemingly futile)…

The pitch for Minitis that your curious little duck-thing protagonist picks up a cursed sword that kills them every 60 seconds. The reality is that you’ll die far more often than that – sometimes by accident, but more often because you press the insta-death button when you realise you’ll never solve the next puzzle in time. This means the genuinely original idea ends up featuring more waterfowl slaughter than an especially brutal episode of Springwatch. It’s stylish, smart, and satisfying, even when the ticking death clock become more of an inconvenience than a challenge. And there’s a sense of relief when you get past a puzzle with seconds to spare.…

I’ve duplicated the same apple no less than 400 times. There’s intent here. I can’t carry the apple onto the switch at the top of the ramp I’m standing on. So the goal, from what I can tell, is to duplicate the apple – it’s an apple the size of a baby elephant, mind you – until the fan blowing the apples off the ramp and into the next room can’t anymore. Because there are too many apples in the way. Once the next room is crammed with fruit, I move my left hand from the keyboard to steady the mouse for some violent, rapid-fire clicking. See, if I click on the apple fast enough, it will duplicate itself up the ramp towards me, growing slightly smaller all the while,…

RANKUP 1 Technically all you need to do to access Capcom’s frosty expansion content is reach Hunter Rank 16, which you’ll do by completing the main story. This will take a hefty 50 hours, but you’ll still want to do more preparation on top. PHONE A FRIEND 2 If World is your first taste of the franchise, getting to Master Rank may be a challenge. Use the Hunter Helper system and find experienced hunters to help you through tough scraps, which nets them a reward for their troubles. FELINE FINE 3 If you prefer to bash beasts about solo, ensure your Palico is as powerful as possible. Earn perks by completing missions for Grimalkynes, such as the ability to help your fluffy buddy turn small monsters into temporary mounts. PRACTICE…

COLOUR MAP MOD The popular Colour Map Mod for Oblivion makes the base game map more lively. Another modder created a map for Anequina in the same style, so I didn’t have to live with a washed-out Elsweyr. ELSWEYR PELLETINE A modder has created a more recent companion to Anequina called Pelletine, named after the southern half of Elsweyr. It adds additional cities and explorable areas not included in Anequina. KHAJIIT PREDATORS This mod allows you to create a larger Khajiit warrior character with higher strength. Although the mod calls them ‘predators’, they look like the very tall, stocky Pahmer Khajiit seen in The Elder Scrolls Online.…

Playing Final Fantasy XI after all these years is a lot like returning to your hometown only to find it desolate and different. All the old buildings are still there, but the faces aren’t the same. And that feeling I had – that indescribable sense of belonging – is gone too. It’s a bit alienating and tragic, to be honest, but really what else should I expect from an MMO that’s almost 20 years old and clearly nearing the end of its days? Though I was never as obsessed with Final Fantasy XI as I was other MMOs like World of Warcraft, I can still vividly remember the summer months I spent playing it. My love for Final Fantasy XI is the definition of a summer romance. All I wanted…

ON THE GRIND DESTINY 2  bungie.net/7/en/Destiny/Shadowkeep Real talk: if we were being honest all eight entries should be Destiny 2. What sickness brings me back night after night? It’s an combination of the slick weapon feel and the fizzy space magic. Which still doesn’t explain why I sunk 2,500 hours before the swap from Battle.net to Steam. Note: this is a cry for help. CARD SHARP HEARTHSTONE  playhearthstone.com My other main timesink is Blizzard’s enraging CCG. As you read this the latest expansion, Descent of Dragons, will be a month old. It looks packed with hilariously overpowered cards, but whether that new hotness will be enough to draw me back from Battlegrounds, the addictive Auto Chess knockoff, is less certain. MIND KILLER CONTROL  controlgame.com Is it obligatory to include Control?…