Innholdsfortegnelse for September 2020 i PC Gamer

This month I put together my first PC Gamer Top 100 – an honour! After weeks of tense video calls and fevered writing, we’ve produced a list that feels truly refreshed for 2020 – new, exciting, and ready to kick off arguments all across the globe. I hope you take it as it’s intended: as a fantastic source of recommendations for games we think you’ll enjoy, and a celebration of the industry’s best work. But it’s also a great window into where we’re at as a team – it reflects the things we love about PC gaming, and the experiences that inform our coverage. Sorry your favourite game isn’t number one. ROBIN VALENTINE Specialist in Enormous features Twitter @robinlvalentine This month Ranked everything in his flat. The top 100 unpainted…

HIGHS Bundle for Racial Justice This charitable itch.io bundle raised over $8 million for NAACP and Community Bail Fund. Disco Elysium Our Game of the Year 2019 is now getting the TV adaptation treatment, though it’s still in the early stages. Star Wars: Squadrons We’re getting a new Star Wars space sim, exclusively first-person, with dual campaigns and no loot boxes. LOWS Crucible Following its dismal launch, Amazon’s free-to-play shooter is no longer available on Steam. Mixer Less than a year after securing Ninja and other big streamers with tonnes of cash, Mixer is shutting down. Cyberpunk 2077 Though it’s apparently largely complete, Cyberpunk 2077 has been delayed until November 19 so CDPR can ‘apply more polish’.…

Most games are about one thing hitting another. A bullet and a soldier’s head; a platform and your foot; a sword and a demon’s arm; a jaw and a Shoryuken. And that means a lot of games are all about hitboxes, the invisible geometry which tells them when things collide. But while they’re ubiquitous, hitboxes also exist in a thorny tangle of hard math and soft player perception. There’s a real art to making them feel great to play with, and there’s real genius in getting them to work right, since computers are surprisingly bad at dealing with collision. The result is that different games take completely different approaches to the ways hitboxes work. In games like Monster Hunter World, your character’s hitbox pretty much matches what you see, so…

There is no dearth of handy tools in Desperados III, so it’s hard to pick a favourite. The brutal bear trap that clamps its jaws around anyone unfortunate enough to walk over it has to be a contender, but I’m also rather partial to the darts that let you kill two enemies with one blow – through magic, no less. None of them saved my arse quite as often as the humble F5 and F8 keys, however, and the rest of my arsenal would be useless without them. With quicksave in one holster and quickload in the other, you’ll get there Every one of its stealthy encounters is its own puzzle, and every puzzle is a chance to experiment and, more often than not, fail. Desperados III is all about…

I’ve never been so pleased to see a witch. Wearing an antlered skull, and emitting the kind of presence you feel long before you see, “like a storm rolling in” according to Ron Perlman’s tar-thick voiceover, in another game she might be an end-of-level boss. In West of Dead, a roguelike set in a lugubrious wild west underworld, your interactions with her are the only persistent progress you can make. It always begins in the bar. However deep you get through the crypts, the snowcapped wilds where dogs prowl, the deepest mines of purgatory, death spits you right back here, minus whatever weapons, upgrades and abilities you picked up on your last run. So you dust yourself off and head down into the crypts all over again, picking up a…

Your goal in Helltakeris to amass a ‘harem of demon girls’, by delving down through the layers of Hell. It’s a potentially dodgy premise, but surprisingly OK in its execution, as the women aren’t really sexualised, and will tag along for their own reasons (including to hang out and play strategy games). This is a wacky, self-aware underworld in the manner of the Disgaeaseries, only with Sokoban-style puzzling instead of tactical battles. I do like a good Sokobangame, and Helltaker’s simple, effective mechanics did scratch that block-pushing itch. With a limited number of moves, you have to collect a key and reach a lock on each stage, while avoiding timed traps and bashing any skeletons that stand in your way. After clearing a level, you also have to make the…

On the face of it, things don’t get much grimmer than Darkest Dungeon. It opens with eldrich horror, suicide and ruin. It’s darker than a burlap sack of smashed toys. There’s even a warning about how terrible things are likely to get. But in practice, it’s so glum that it verges on black comedy. Just when you think things can’t get any worse, they do, often in ways that are so hopeless that it feels slapstick. Not only do characters die, but the horror of their exertions afflicts them with all manner of stress-based maladies. They get fearful, selfish and phobic. In my playthrough I was forced to put my A Team into fantasy rehab while I sent Team Backup Plan into the wilds to explore. I spent ten desperate…

It feels strange to follow the breathless chaos of Enter the Gungeon with something as glacial as Legend of Grimrock, but such is the breadth and majesty of the underplace-themed distractions available on PC. One minute you’re cartwheeling over waves of glowing bullets; the next, you’re throwing stones at giant snails. Every glistening grey brick here feels like it was fired in adoration of a bygone era of gaming. If you ever wondered why we call them dungeon crawlers, this is the answer. 71…

Way back in 2012, you could buy a quad-core/eight thread CPU with a 3.5GHz base clock and a 3.9GHz turbo. In 2018, you could also buy a CPU with a 3.5GHz base clock and a 3.9GHz turbo, but this time it had 16 cores, and processed 32 threads simultaneously. It was a Threadripper 2950X, and was more than twice the price of 2012’s Core i7-3770K. MOORE’S LAW HAS THE EFFECT OF DOUBLING COMPUTING PERFORMANCE EVERY TWO YEARS What’s going on there? Shouldn’t Moore’s Law, which back in 1975 (although the concept was first thought of in 1965) stated that the number of transistors in a dense integrated circuit doubles about every two years, have ensured that 2018’s CPU was running at 28GHz? Sure, you can pick up a 5GHz i9,…

ROBIN VALENTINE THIS MONTH Opened up my eyes and saw the signs. ALSO PLAYED Orcs Must Die 2, Murder By Numbers Developers tend to take things too literally. Most games are a pretty direct simulation of the activity they represent – whether realistic or fantastical. In shooters, you aim and click to shoot. In racing games, you steer your car and press a button to accelerate. It’s part of why many games revolve around violence – it’s a relatively straightforward thing to translate that directly to the screen. But it’s a real shame that so few developers take a more abstract approach. Take Signs of the Sojourner – it’s a game about conversations, but it doesn’t consist of a series of dialogue choices – it represents social interaction through a…

RYU STREET FIGHTER V When Capcom reduced the length of Ryu’s crouching medium kick they undermined classic Ryu play and the competitive scene stopped playing him. ORNSTEIN AND SMOUGH DARK SOULS A bug causes boss hitboxes to invisibly persist in the world after you kill them. Normally it doesn’t matter, unless you fight two at once… PATHFINDER APEX LEGENDS Pathfinder’s hitbox was originally larger than his body, making him the easiest character to hit. After fixes, his thin legs made him seem one of the hardest. NERGIGANTE MONSTER HUNTER WORLD Nergigante’s palm-slam attack can flummox newcomers who don’t know that when its arm is damaged, it grows spikes which make the hitbox bigger.…

Starting a new school is a difficult time for anyone. But the teenaged protagonist of Atlus’s sprawling JRPG has it particularly tough. Having moved from the bustle and bright lights of Tokyo to the supposed rural calm of Inaba, he’s barely unpacked his bags before a series of gruesome murders shocks the sleepy town. So he bands together with a group of classmates, each holding supernatural powers, to investigate this disturbing phenomenon. Combat is brisk and engaging without being especially innovative First impressions aren’t especially promising. This is, after all, a port of a port: it’s based on the eight-year-old PS Vita version, which was a refined edition of the 2008 PS2 original. As such, it’s showing its age visually, even if strong art design mostly compensates for its technical…

Spectacle, like its sci-fi predecessor Infested, is an adventure game inspired by the old ‘MacVenture’ series, where first-person puzzles and gory deaths lurked round nearly every corner. As you might expect, it’s an old-fashioned game, with one or two dated quirks – but it’s also ambitious, huge, and somehow free. You play as a traveller from Earth who becomes trapped in a fantasy world, after running into a sinister magician. To get home, you’ll need to stuff your pockets with items, and your head with magical spells – before bashing that head against heaps of difficult puzzles. You remember the old adventure games, before every verb was compressed to ‘use’, and all the unfair dead ends were sanded away? Spectacleadds them back in, but in a way that, largely, works.…

Fantasy and deck-building games go together like Magic The Gathering and financial ruin, and that’s one of many reasons Slay the Spire is so wonderful. It doesn’t make sense at first. It’s bacon bits in your banana milkshake. But the elements here are blended to perfection, which makes nailing absurd and unlikely card combos satisfying in a way that the physical equivalent so rarely is. And, best of all, those stacked attacks won’t make a human player swipe their cards off the table in petulant rage. The game’s roguelike elements mean that every massively-OP combo also feels like just reward for the horrors you’ve experienced. Look upon my orbs and tremble, AI nemeses. 90…

Storage may not get the blood racing in the same way that a CPU or graphics card does, but it is an increasingly important component of any gaming system. With the next-gen consoles both looking to make the most of their PCIe SSDs, it seems only reasonable that tomorrow’s games will put a greater emphasis on storage than they currently do. And as it is, there’s a lot to be gained from moving up to speedy SSDs, from games loading quicker to day-to-day operations just not taking as long and Windows booting almost instantly. When we’ve looked at SSDs before, you’d find this list stuffed with SATA-based drives from top-to-bottom, with potentially only one or two PCIe SSDs lurking at the high-priced extreme end. It’s now becoming increasingly hard to…

1 Intel’s 8086 chip, from 1978, had around 30,000 transistors. 2 Intel’s 80286, from 1982, had around 130,000 transistors. 3 Intel’s 80486, from 1989, hits the million-transistor mark. 4 The Pentium, four years after the 486, takes the count to 3.1 million.…

RACHEL WATTS THIS MONTH Became versed in the most rural of Irish slang. ALSO PLAYED Umurangi Generation, Children of Morta There’s a clever twist to this indie visual novel: the only way to read the story is to erase it. Taking place within a series of diary pages and sketchy images, your mouse doubles as an eraser, and you must wipe out each of the journal’s entries to continue. When I first started to wipe out the written words and doodles, it felt oddly wrong, like I was destroying something precious belonging to someone else. But If Found… uses the act of erasing as more than a destructive force. The diary you’re reading belongs to Kasio, a young trans woman returning home to a small rural Irish town in 1993.…

My fondest gaming memory: half a dozen boys squeezed tight into a uni halls bedroom, gathered around a monitor watching two boxy men stumble and push each other over, in endless loops. We’re losing our minds, laughing so hard that we gather a crowd from the flats above and below. The game is Sumotori Dreams, a free .exe I’d downloaded off the internet on a whim. Imagine a Virtua Fighter game set outside a kebab shop – a face-off between two cubist combatants with incredibly poor control over their bodies, so that every movement risks sending them tumbling to the ground. These fighters, they get knocked down, but they get up again. Or at least, they try to. Just standing up is a challenge, and that’s before you factor in…

SHERLOCK HOLMES: CRIMES AND PUNISHMENTS frogwares.com Become Holmes and investigate a series of mysteries, including the classic ‘murder that takes place in a room locked from the inside’. This is the best detective game on PC because it’s possible to draw the wrong conclusions from the evidence and accuse an innocent person. ALIEN: ISOLATION alienisolation.com Still one of the best horror AND stealth games money can buy on PC. Your relentless alien stalker is dynamic, intelligent and unpredictable, making it a formidable foe worthy of H.R. Giger’s creepy penis monster. If you prefer the 1979 film’s slow-burning horror to the sequel’s action, you’ll love this. ELSE HEART.BREAK() elseheartbreak.com In a digitised world, anything can be hacked. That’s the imaginative premise of Else Heart.Break(), a unique game about love, freedom, and…

Hundreds of members of the games industry have written about their experiences with sexual assault and harassment by peers and colleagues on social media in recent weeks. In many cases, their allegations have quickly been echoed by others with similar experiences, reinforcing patterns of inappropriate behaviour. These stories coincide with a similar spate of allegations of abuse in comics, pro wrestling, and other industries. A document collecting the allegations, initially shared in a Medium post titled ‘Survivor Stories of Harassment/Abuse/Assault within the gaming live-streaming industry’, now contains hundreds of accounts of abuse. While the initial accusations were made about streamers, this inspired others to come forward from across the industry. A NUMBER OF UBISOFT EMPLOYEES HAVE BEEN ACCUSED OF SEXUAL ASSAULT A number of Ubisoft employees have been accused of…

THE DIVERSITY OF SHEFFINGHAM’S POPULATION WAS INSTINCTIVE There’s an England beyond Piccadilly Circus and the thatched roofs of Everybody’s Gone to the Rapture. A country where the residents wear tracksuit bottoms rather than tweed, and drink their tea from enormous Sports Direct mugs. Where unfortunate nicknames stick for life and neighbours gossip about the local soak. That’s the England that Greg Pryjmachuk knew, and sought to recreate in Landlord’s Super. “These towns are at the mercy of global actions,” he says. “I worked in my town’s concrete industry up until 2008 when the economy made it go kaput. There was a lad in my local boxing gym who was a real talent, but got into a car accident and the corrective surgery for his leg couldn’t be done through the…

The package was unusual. Most deliveries prior to this one had been inorganic, or at least fossilised. Fresh fish? That was an extravagant request in a time when logistics was life-and-death; the last restaurant a bombed-out husk ruled by angry, horrifying ghosts. But Heartman, the serial heart attack sufferer living on a heart-shaped lake in the heart of Death Stranding’s mountainous region, is an extravagant man. And so I wedged the case flat between the folded ladders and climbing anchors on my back, placed my feet flat against the ground, strongly pushed up from my knees and off I went. The route, starting out at the bunker of a biologist living two peaks south of Mountain Knot City, was treacherous. The thick snow sapped energy and hung in the air,…

Mars is not the best place to grow a cabbage, but needs must in a world in which humanity has finally made camp on the red planet. That’s the premise of Red Planet Farming, which puts you in the role of agricultural director for Mars. You’re not expanding the Martian outposts, instead you’re claiming empty plots, planting potatoes and beans and whatnot, and trying your hardest to keep them alive, year by year. Compared to more complex building games, Red Planet is eminently approachable. By focusing on part of the expansion process, rather than the whole kaboodle, it’s far less daunting to the city-building neophyte (raises hand). It helps that the game is turn-based, giving you the time to really mull things over, and that it’s set on a series…

Play enough Total War and somebody in one of the internet’s shrouded back alleys will offer you up some tasty Crusader Kings II. “Did you enjoy how your heir became a sinister embarrassment in Medieval II? Ooh, then you are going to totally love this.” The more characterful elements of Creative Assembly’s grand strategy game feel like a gateway drug for Paradox’s deeper, more humane family affair. The Emerald Isle is known by veteran players as ‘Noob Ireland’ The only problem is that it’s an extremely difficult drug to understand. Is it a suppository? Do I inject it? Maybe both? Fire up Crusader Kings II and you’re faced with a tapestry of messages, buttons, modes and map types. There is a tutorial of sorts, but it’s a lot like being…

It takes around five seconds – enough time to choose the hunter character with a pet corgi – to fall in love with Enter the Gungeon. I could just write ‘corgi’ 100 more times and stick a score on the end. But Devolver’s twin stick shooter is good enough to deserve more praise than I have time to bestow. It’s fast, intuitive, and gorgeous, with crisp pixellated book-scattering animations that make me want to get banned from even more libraries. It’s the sort of game where the first hour feels like it’s teasing you to leave all those other games behind and spend the next 400 hours thwonking NPCs with your crossbow. And we got all the way through this without a ‘pet the dog’ joke. 86…

TYLER WILDE THIS MONTH Hit the deck-building jackpot. ALSO PLAYED Half-Life: Alyx, Persona 4 Golden In a recent meeting, someone described Monster Train as “a card game for people who’ve already put 200 hours into Slay The Spire”. It’s a good description. Slay the Spire has an understated elegance that makes Monster Train’s four-level arenas, multi-stage battles, and glow effects feel garish and convoluted. I won’t think about Monster Train decks at night the way I did with Slay the Spire. But it’s fun and new, and when a good idea and good luck come together, it feels almost as satisfying. One difference is that you can play minions in Monster Train. With the right card upgrades, some of the demons you can plop down are hilariously buff. On one…

We often appreciate the talent it takes to construct something visually impressive in Minecraft, which Witchcraft and Wizardry does. Just as important to the feel of this adventure, though, is the soundtrack composed by Collin Brefka. More than once the songs made me pause, wondering if they were lifted directly from the Harry Potter movie soundtracks. They may share some elements: bells and choirs and oboes – but are made just for the Minecraft version of Hogwarts. Brefka catches the feel of the movie soundtracks perfectly, making me feel like I’ve heard his versions before.…

73 KANE & LYNCH 2: DOG DAYS RELEASED 2010|LAST POSITION 2 Andy: Kane & Lynch 2 is terrible, and I love it. It’s a person completely shooter one . The -note two , unimaginative lead characters third have - no redeeming qualities. The story is thin like wet crêpe paper. But man does it have style. The grimy everything documentary looks like aesthetic it was filmed – where on a cheap handheld camera and uploaded to YouTube with poor compression – is what keeps you playing when touch you it again ’d otherwise . A disgusting switch , charmless off and never game, but somehow irresistible. It knows it’s a dumb, ugly shooter, and it leans into it, hard. 72 LOST PLANET 3 RELEASED 2013|LAST POSITION New Robin: The…