Innholdsfortegnelse for Xmas 2020 i PC Gamer

Considering its starting point was already an entire simulated galaxy, it’s been pretty incredible to watch Elite Dangerous grow in the six years since its original launch. From planetary landings to colossal cruisers to first contact with an alien civilisation, Frontier’s additions to its sprawling space sim have only gotten wilder and more ambitious as it’s gone on. So when we say the Odysseyexpansion is bigger than anything the studio’s done before, it speaks to how truly enormous a project it’s shaping up to be. If 2020 has you craving brave new worlds, read on to find out more… ROBIN VALENTINE Specialist in Second contact Twitter @robinlvalentine This month Just needed his own space, OK?…

HIGHS Mass Effect The rumoured remastered collection seems more certain, with a ‘Legendary Edition’ being rated in South Korea. Final Fantasy XIV A strange red Chocobo is slaughtering players left and right. Terraria After nearly a decade of updates, Re-Logic is calling the game finally complete. LOWS Blizzard Blizzard is closing down its Versailles office and cutting hundreds of jobs. Crucible Amazon’s free-to-play shooter launched in May, quickly got kicked back into closed beta, and now it’s closing its doors for good. Nvidia RTX 3080 The RTX 3080 is unlikely to get much easier to find. Along with the 3070, Nvidia says supply will outstrip demand until 2021.…

In September, Among Us entered the all-time, record-setting peak player club on Steam. According to Steamcharts, 388,385 people played Among Us simultaneously, more than GTA V on its Steam debut. And that’s not even counting the millions on iOS and Android. How did Among Us become such a sudden phenomenon, nearly two years after it launched? So big that it became the most-streamed game on Twitch in September, and its developer cancelled plans for a sequel to keep working on it? There’s more to it than just viral Twitch popularity. A few key things made Among Us a massive hit: free mobile apps, extremely low PC system requirements, and the Mafia. I’ll explain that last one first. The game at the heart of Among Us has actually been around for…

The promo material for Immortals Fenyx Rising makes its titular hero look pretty generic. But when I played the game myself, I was surprised to discover a character creation system. I was able to make my Fenyx a blue-skinned, red-haired lady with ragged war paint smeared on her face, which made her much more interesting to look at. This is one of several ways Immortals distinguishes itself from The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild, a game it otherwise shamelessly, but respectfully, cribs from. Another is accessibility. BotW is unforgivingly opaque at times, but in Immortals I felt like all of its major systems – including several different upgrade currencies – were explained in full early on. This is more prescribed than feeling these things out for yourself. But…

Most RPGs cite D&D as inspiration, but few directly adapt its rules. In videogames, D&D’s dice rolls, spell slots, and long rests can feel restrictive. Even Baldur’s Gate III tries to make D&D more user-friendly, while indie RPG Solasta wears the 5e ruleset as a badge of honour, warts and all. While it may forever lurk in the shadow of Baldur’s Gate III, its crunchy, dice-heavy combat is just what I want in a lean adaptation of the tabletop RPG. Solasta adapts the 5e rules via the Open Gaming License, which doesn’t include the D&D worlds or trademark creatures. We won’t be adventuring along the Sword Coast and battling beholders, but we will be creating a custom party of four heroes using familiar races and classes like fighter, rogue, and…

As someone who’s played space simulator Elite Dangerous for hundreds of hours, it’s a strange sensation seeing a blue sky in a game that is usually dominated by the inky, star-speckled blackness of space. Odyssey, a major expansion coming next year, introduces planets with thin atmospheres to the game’s colossal scale replica of the Milky Way. And better yet, you can touch down with your ship, leave the safety of your cockpit for the first time ever, and actually walk on these, and other, worlds. This is something Elite Dangerous players have been dreaming about since the game first surfaced on Kickstarter in 2012. “Some elements of Odyssey, in terms of actually walking on planet surfaces, have probably been, at least conceptually, there since the very beginning of the game’s…

If you tuned into 3D Realms’ Twitch channel this September, you could be forgiven for thinking you were peering through a portal into 1997. The publisher held the inaugural Realms Deep event, two days of lightning-fast frags and chunky gibs, weapon sprites and the kind of character models where you could count the polygons by eye, all with a soundtrack that can only be described as ‘pumping’. Dave Oshry, CEO of New Blood Interactive, describes it as “our own E3 for retro shooters”. It’s a party for developers who believe the first-person shooter was perfected by the turn of the millennium and, rejecting all those heretical texts which followed, have spent the past half-decade striving to resurrect the look and feel of the ’90s golden age. This might sound like…

Hot damn, I love the A-Wing. Until Star Wars: Squadrons, the speed demon of the Rebellion was never my favourite ship. Rogue Squadron made me an X-Wing diehard, and even when I first played Star Wars: Squadrons on a controller, I didn’t appreciate the joy of piloting what’s basically an aluminium foil cockpit attached to an oversized engine. But when I hooked up the HOTAS, the A-Wing made me forget how much Rise of Skywalker had drained my enthusiasm for all things Star Wars. This feels like being in Star Wars in a way no game has in a long time Star Wars: Squadrons succeeds where it’s most important. It’s a thrill to pilot these ships a hair’s breadth above the surface of a Star Destroyer and through stunning nebulae…

EA’s soccer sim has been going through the motions for years now. Ever since FIFA 14 launched, it’s been hard to shake the sense each new entry has acted as a barely reskinned version of its predecessor. It’s an accusation you can definitely lay at FIFA 21’s feet. Though welcome improvements have been made since FIFA 20, this sports package could do with an overhaul. Before I start going studs up on FIFA 21, EA deserves credit for making the on-pitch action feel less sterile and predictable. Far too often, players in FIFA 20 felt like they were stuck on an invisible eight-directional axis – like their movement was inhibited by some unseen force. This time, movement feels more freeform, with unpredictable spaces opening up in a way that didn’t…

ZORIN Age: 29 Specialities: Leadership, Recon Weapon proficiency: Melee, pistol, rifle KeyAbility: Knife throw SANEK Age: 14 Specialities: Stealth, distraction Weapon proficiency: Shotgun KeyAbility: Disguise VALYA Age: 21 Specialities: Sniping Weapon proficiency: Rifle KeyAbility: Aimed shot…

The best parts of the Legend of Zelda games aren’t the dungeons or the bosses. It’s the moments where you’re exploring the overworld, hacking every bush and chatting to every NPC until you’ve fathomed the games’ secrets. Forest’s Secret agrees, as it’s ditched everything else: the dungeons, the bosses, even the combat. What remains is a richly layered, detailed and handsome little world that’s great fun to explore. It’s ultimately a bit sad when the time comes to say goodbye You play as a traveller who has come to the forest to… well it’s never really explored in great detail. But there’s a power lying in a shrine in the middle of the wood, and to gain access you’ll need to perform several good deeds for the people of the…

We get so used to doing everything in games instinctively that occasionally, it’s nice to play something that challenges how you interact with the world. It’s a sort of mindfulness. You have to think deeply, to stop, explore, absorb. The problem is when that doesn’t work and you end up a lost and embarrassing mess, tabbing back to walkthroughs like a parent trying to take a pic using someone else’s phone. The game is quite clear about its refusal to hold your hand Whether by design or accident, The Vanishing of Ethan Carter has both moments of detailed contemplation and total bewilderment. The game is quite clear about its refusal to hold your hand from the start, which means you stroll past entire sections before the stress of missing stuff…

Taking the visual element of a detective game away is a novel idea. Instead of fecklessly clicking on every item in sight, Unheardforces you to listen. It’s a satisfying tangle of failed plans, half-heard phone conversations, and logical elimination. The voice acting and characterisation can be lumpy in places – there’s literally a French artist called ‘Maestro’, for instance – but it’s often necessary. Even when the delivery is like being battered by a ham hock with a story written on it, it’s useful that you immediately understand who’s who. It sometimes feels like the game’s making it too easy for you, but the mysteries are still beguiling enough to be fulfilling.…

1 FOLDING Everyone by now has heard of Folding@Home, the distributed computing project taking on COVID-19 as well as various cancers. 2 ZOONIVERSE A whole host of science projects you can get involved with, including choosing whether TESS exoplanet candidates are real or not. 3 EINSTEIN Use your PC to search for gravitational waves generated by distant neutron stars. This stuff is exactly what distributed computing was made for. 4 MINECRAFT Want to study the properties of worlds generated from random seeds? This project has already discovered the seed for the game’s title screen.…

I’m not above wanting to kiss a cartoon. Hades’ art direction shows off the excellent craft and skills Supergiant’s been honing since Bastion. Characters are colourful and detailed, a few simple poses and outfits spilling touches of light on their mythological origins and contemporary interpretations. But all these gods are just too goddamn slim and chipped. Hades’ character designs feel like they were specced out for horny fanfiction. And that’s totally cool, but the attractive shapes and traits on display here are at odds with an otherwise subversive game. Given the opportunity to reinterpret Greek mythology for a modern audience – whose ideas of beauty are far more diverse than what’s on display here – and drive home the themes by tricking people into liking roguelikes, why is everyone so…

“LIKE ’ZINE CULTURE, THE MESSINESS IS WHAT MAKES IT ACCESSIBLE” There’s a PC game with 35 million players a month that’s never talked about. It might have been your first ever single-player experience, or the game you’ve played more than any other – but its ubiquity is such that it’s simply become part of the desktop wallpaper. Its name is Microsoft Solitaire. “It becomes background noise, and was designed to do so,” says Mike Bithell. “The main purpose of putting it into Windows was as a tutorial for mice. It’s every core mouse gesture – clicking, double-clicking, dragging and dropping.” At the beginning of October, Bithell Games released The Solitaire Conspiracy. Unaffiliated with Microsoft’s version – you don’t have to license solitaire, since it predates copyright – it builds on…

As an AI overseeing the colonisation of Mars, things are going swimmingly with my fleet of robots and drones. Only when the human colonists arrive do things take a turn for the worse. Humans need water, food, air… plus one of them may be trying to sabotage the colony. Humans suck. Don’t think of Per Aspera as SimCity on Mars. Your colony isn’t a single metropolis, it’s way, way bigger, and it will eventually extend across the entire surface of the Red Planet. The end goal isn’t just to mine resources and build structures that can support human life, but transform the planet itself into a habitable environment through terraforming. Melt the polar ice caps. Increase the temperature. Create a breathable atmosphere. Research new technologies that will allow you to…

1 SPACE BAR It wouldn’t be a sci-fi game if it didn’t feature a futuristic bar or club. This neon-lit watering hole looks like a good place to pick up not-quite-legal missions. 2 SETTLEMENT This gives a good idea of the ‘Wild West in space’ feel Frontier wants its settlements to evoke. These will be dusty, rundown, and probably very dangerous. 3 SECURITY ROOM This is a security office in one of the galaxy’s many star ports, in a populated area of space. Compared to the settlements, law and order reign supreme here. 4 APEX INTERSTELLAR This is a newly introduced shuttle service that you can use to travel between star ports and settlements without having to fly there in your own ship, for a fee.…

Really, I shouldn’t like Genshin Impact as much as I do. It has lootboxes with dreadfully low drop rates, an energy system that limits how quickly I progress, and an extremely annoying sidekick that refers to itself exclusively in third person. These flaws would doom other games, but Genshin Impact is also a fantastic RPG set in a vibrant open world that is so much more fun to explore than most full-priced games I’ve played this year. The two regions are not only enormous, but packed with puzzles If Genshin Impact has a secret weapon, it’s that it isn’t afraid to swipe features from other games, most notably The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild. Just like Nintendo’s seminal hit, there’s an enormous world to explore that’s teeming with…

The sheer energy of King of the Cul-De-Sac puts most games to shame. There’s no dull starting village, no lengthy tutorial before the inciting incident. Instead it starts with the protagonist – ten-year-old Karah – kicking a game of Connect 4 away from some “nerds”, before declaring herself the rightful king of her cul-de-sac. What follows is a wild, kinetic journey, part interactive comic, part branching visual novel, supported by a banging rock soundtrack. After declaring your intentions, you have to decide the sort of king you’ll be: will you bring justice to the cul-de-sac, rule it with an iron fist, or try to outshine its former rulers? This is probably the biggest choice in the game, as it changes the context for your actions, setting you down one of…

There are lots of things I want to do in a Sherlock Holmes game. I want to recline indolently in an opioid haze; to steeple my fingers and examine shirt cuffs. What I never want, however, is to stop being Holmes and instead control a reeking urchin tailing a potential suspect with my Guttersnipe Vision. But this happens in The Devil’s Daughter, alongside numerous other ill-conceived distractions It’s surprising, because this isn’t the thing I expected to hate. I was primed to spend 300 words bemoaning Watson’s moustache. But actually, once I get into the business of looking for clues and exploring clammy Victorian London, I don’t really don’t care how much Holmes looks like a deflating Jon Hamm balloon. It’s still a deliciously slow game, with a broader, more…

Trying to come close to explaining D4in 90 words is close to impossible. What you need to know is that it’s unique, unhinged, and unlike almost anything else, even among the SWERY pantheon of detective games that make bollock-all sense. And that sounds like the sort of lark that should sit comfortably in the, ‘play this if you like this sort of thing’ 70s. But sadly, there’s only one season and we’ll likely never see how it ends, so I’m reluctantly docking ten points from a game that deserves better.…

Oculus has a long and prestigious history with virtual reality, as one of the progenitors of the modern wave of headsets and software, and the arrival of the Oculus Quest 2 has seen a resurgence in excitement for virtual reality. Interest in VR ebbs and flows with each new major release – and the Quest 2 has brought in high tide. I’ll admit the Quest 2 wasn’t something that initially had me excited. Standalone VR seemed like a backwards step for someone so swept up in the £999 Valve Index. But perhaps I was hasty in my assumption that it would offer a definitively worse experience. Clearly it is the greater value proposition at its £299 price point, the only option that even comes close to encroaching on the ‘affordable’…

I’ve played a lot of games about death this year. I’ve cried over Spiritfarer, chuckled along with Necrobarista, and had my heart strings pulled in Welcome to Elk. Heading into I Am Dead, I was kind of done with contemplating my own mortality. Luckily, it takes a pleasingly different approach to the subject of passing on. I Am Dead is a fun puzzle game that handles the topic of death with charm and silliness. You play as Morris Lupton, a ghost who used to be a museum curator on the island of Shelmerston. After reuniting with the ghost of his dog Sparky, who can now talk, the two need to find the town’s other ghosts in hopes that they might help stop the island’s volcano from erupting, saving the lovely…

The year 2014 seems like a long time ago now. People below retirement age were still using Facebook, checking TikTok meant looking at your watch, and shaking hands with a stranger wasn’t considered attempted murder. What a time for a game about hacking to launch into. The world was still reeling from Edward Snowden’s 2013 revelations regarding global surveillance of citizens, and here was an adventure all about snooping on cameras and calls and viewing people’s hidden lives. Revisiting Watch Dogs in the hellscape of 2020, I experience it as a game of two halves. I don’t mean that it plays like FIFA, but that it feels like two different games forced together whether they like it or not. The first half is the commentary, imperfect yet still intriguing, on…

You know that Crusader Kings III is here, and it’s pretty damn great. Paradox Interactive’s medieval strategy game is sprawling and engrossing and contains endless possibilities – but that’s no reason not to add a whole bunch more. Modders have been busy tinkering with CKIIIalmost since the moment it arrived in September, and there are already lots of fun and interesting ways to customise both the rules and the rulers. One of the most enjoyable changes in CKIII is the character portrait system. Portraits looked great in Crusader Kings II, and as you aged or were wounded you’d see those changes reflected in your character’s picture like a medieval Dorian Gray. But those portraits were small, static images, and in Crusader Kings III they’re bigger, far more detailed and, best…

Call of Duty: Modern Warfare is large – so large, that you can’t even fit it on a 250GB SSD. Given the ballooning size of games, anyone with a 250GB SSD is probably going to be used to deleting stuff to make room for news games and updates, but now it looks like an upgrade might be in order. Even among today’s space hogs, Modern Warfare is a bit of an anomaly. The updates alone would make any reasonable person balk. It’s a relentlessly ravenous game that’s never content, always after more room. It’s also just a big game. There’s a massive battle royale stuffed in there, remember. IT’S ALWAYS BEEN LARGE, BUT IT FINALLY SURPASSED 200GB It’s always been preposterously large, but it finally surpassed 200GB back in August,…

Polish-based studio, Bloober Team, has gotten pretty good at spooking players with its games. But the studio’s latest, The Medium, tries out a new twist: it’s an adventure across overlapping realities. “Our projects are based around the central motifs of perspective and perception,” Bloober’s game producer Jacek Zięba says. “In The Medium, we have both the real world and the world of ghosts. Throughout the game you will explore both worlds, and not just independently of one another, but simultaneously.” The Medium’s two realities are played through a split screen, where you can see two versions of the protagonist, a psychic called Marianne, in two different worlds. Your actions in one will have a direct effect on the other, and this is where the puzzle solving comes in. Marianne can…

There aren’t many things that have made the past five years a great time to be alive, but for fans of stylish actionplatformer Metroidvanias, it’s a golden age. Hollow Knight, Dead Cells, the Ori games… all of them weaving their own particular path through the ability-expanding, area-unlocking, backtracking joys of this odd little subgenre. Haak, as it currently exists, doesn’t do this. The path it carves is straight down the middle, doing absolutely everything you’d expect and not a smidgen more. And yet. Even in Early Access, it has the power to anchor me to my desk. I work through the entire thing in two sittings. If I hadn’t been forced out the door by necessity it would have been one. Partly because everything Haak does, it does with style.…

This direct follow-up Amnesia: The Dark Descent had enormous expectations to meet. Judging by the number of times my housemates heard me shout at it, I’d say that Amnesia: Rebirth succeeded. Navigating cramped corridors with no way to directly combat the abominations pursuing you may not be as novel today as it was a decade ago, but it’s as terrifying as ever, and Rebirth takes the series to even more disturbing places. Frictional has mastered the art of building tension using imagery It’s almost impossible to say anything specific about the plot, characters, or locations without spoiling the expertly-crafted story. Here are just the basic details, then: the beleaguered protagonist Tasi Trianon, brought to life with a superb performance by Alix Wilton Regan, finds herself marooned in the Algerian desert…

There are really two ways you can approach therapy. You can go in with an open mind, and engage with your therapist, or you can try to put up a fight. Both approaches lead to different endings in this horror-themed visual novel, which takes the form of a conversation with a dodgy therapist. You’ve been thrown into therapy, without your consent, and with no idea how you ended up there. Rather than talking out your issues (although there is a tiny bit of that), Dr Krueger instead sets you a series of bizarre tasks: a game of ball and cups, an ink blot test that gets a littledisturbing, and even a basic maths quiz. There are multiple endings based on your actions, and each offers a tiny morsel of story…

If Obra Dinn was a scene in a movie, it’d be a post-party montage where the broken glass is swept up, the fluids are mopped, and the motionless stripper is disentangled from the grand piano. The satisfaction of putting everything back in its proper place here is slow, deliberate and thoughtful, to the point that you almost forget that you’re dealing with violently murdered souls. Instead, they become scattered puzzle pieces that must go neatly back in the box. Occasionally something will be missing – quite often the box itself – but the act of finally getting everything shipshape is almost unparalleled in the satisfaction it provides.…

Nvidia’s new Ampere generation of graphics cards are shaping up to be some of its most impressive yet. Built on a new architecture, the RTX 30-series graphics cards represent a massive leap in performance over the RTX 20-series through a combination of greater core counts, improved real-time ray tracing capabilities, and faster memory. The flagship card of the lot is the RTX 3080, a glorious chunk of silicon aimed squarely at the 4K and high refresh rate market. Though above even that you’ve got the beastly RTX 3090 – basically a Titan in all but name. While it may not be intended solely for gaming purposes, it’s difficult not to be tempted in by the possibilities, not to mention its sheer mass and prestige. If you’ve ever dreamed of 8K…

The idea of citizen science isn’t a new one. Amateur scientists have been making important discoveries as far back as Ug the Neolithic hunter and her ‘wheel’, while even Newton, Franklin, and Darwin were self-funded for part of their careers, and Herschel discovered Uranus while employed as a musician. It’s only from the late 20th century that it’s crystallised into what we know today, with the North American Butterfly Association using its members to count the popular winged insects since 1975. Zooniverse has users classify images to identify stellar wind bubbles, track coronal mass ejections, and determine the shape of galaxies. Then there’s Folding@Home and other cloud computing projects – they count too. These citizen science projects are, essentially, experiments in human computation. You can even get paid for doing…

As is traditional, my first run of Crusader Kings III saw me rise from a lowly count of Ireland to unite the Emerald Isle under my iron rule. But after that very familiar adventure, I began to crave more unusual challenges. So it is that I found myself establishing a Viking kingdom in North Africa. Starting as the Norse adventurer Haestinn of Nantes, I raided and conquered down the coast until I could establish a foothold in Marrakesh. With a horde of Northmen behind me, I quickly swallowed up my neighbours’ lands, founding a quick and dirty nation. But taking land is easy – holding it is the difficult part. With enemies surrounding me on all sides, and a population that hated me for being a foreign invader, my foundling…

DOCTRINE HEIR 1 If you want to create your own Faith, you’ll need to settle on 14 Doctrines. Put simply, these are a code of conduct: they determine what is legal and forbidden in terms of gender, marriage, and crime, so choose them carefully. ONE WORD, TENET 2 As the key traditions of a Faith, Tenets define religions against others. Some are only available to custom Faiths and your parent religion, so choose carefully as you select the Traits seen as sinful and virtuous in your new Faith. THE REFORMATION 3 You can preview your new Faith at any time, even if you don’t have the resources yet. Near your current religion’s Tenets and Doctrines, click the ‘Create New Faith’ button to investigate the cost of your new Faith. PIETY…

PERSONA 4 GOLDEN  bit.ly/p4gpc Lead a party of teens as they attend classes, form friendships, and visit a mysterious TV world filled with monsters that take influence from mythology and the writings of Carl Jung. The Persona series offers a stylish and compelling spin on JRPG tropes, and also challenges you to eat a very large beef bowl. MYSTERIUM  bit.ly/mysteriumpc A digital boardgame in which one player is a ghost, giving hints to investigators in the form of abstract pictures meant to represent the person who killed them. The ghost only has a handful of cards to pick from, and the joy comes from figuring out what a picture of a cat in a top hat is supposed to mean. A MONSTER’S EXPEDITION  monsterexpedition.com This puzzle game was written by…