Innholdsfortegnelse for January 2021 i PC Gamer

You can barely swing a Catachan death-feline these days without hitting a Warhammer game – and the sad truth is, a lot of them aren’t great. But that only makes it more special when a developer really getsGames Workshop’s worlds. And is there any developer that gets it more than Fatshark? With the Vermintideseries it found the perfect balance of grimdarkness, over-the-top violence, and most importantly absurdity and humour. I couldn’t be more excited that they’re back to take a crack at 40,000 – and to mix up their co-op formula with even bigger, spikier weapons of war… ROBIN VALENTINE Specialist in Heresy Twitter @robinlvalentine This month Fell in with a bad horde.…

HIGHS World of Warcraft WoW speedrunner DesMephisto took a Death Knight from level 10 to 50 in 3 hours 33 minutes. Apex Legends Respawn hasidentified 419 top-level players using an exploit to beat up on Bronzers, and banned them. Mass Effect A return to Andromeda? Who knows, but Bioware is releasing artwork that gives hope for humanity’s future. Among Us Since the game became a viral hit, Steam has been flooded with knock-offs. Capcom The Japanese giant was hit by a huge ransomware attack in November. Ubisoft Montreal Hoax Some moron called in a hoax hostage situation at Ubisoft Montreal, and the building was cleared by armed police. LOWS…

Microsoft Flight Simulator’s version of Earth is a marvel. Satellite data from Bing Maps (hey, someone’s got to use it) interpreted by Microsoft’s Azure AI platform creates an approximation of our planet, all 200 million square miles of it. The result is a feat of engineering to rival the real-life aircraft you fly over it – an evolutionary leap from Google Earth, exactly the world tourism simulator we all need right now. Except when it’s not. Drop beneath the clouds, and you may notice the generic office buildings that replaced iconic landmarks such as the Washington Monument and Buckingham Palace. Or the Brazilian airfield swallowed by a mile-deep chasm. Or the 2,000-foot monolith piercing the skies of Melbourne, apparently the result of a typo in OpenStreetMap, a source that Bing…

The Ankylosaurus roamed the plains of what is now North America in the late Cretaceous period. It weighed as much as a pair of rhinos, and put their thick skin and horns to shame with an armoured shell and bony club at the end of its tail that could sweep predators’ legs from under them. Seventy million years later, it was discovered by a Victorian palaeontologist named after – of all people – PT Barnum, the circus barker from that Hugh Jackman musical. And a century after that, I’ve just managed to get one tipped onto its back, and am hastily emptying my minigun’s entire belt feed into the glowing weak spot on its exposed belly. (Oddly enough, this tactic is kind of historically accurate, minigun aside – flipping an…

James Davenport: I could fill a bathtub with the palm sweat Doom Eternal milked from me this year. It is easily the most intense shooter of 2020, and not just because it throws dozens of demons at you at once. Arenas are filled with hazards and demon compositions designed to test FPS habits, old and new. The most hated enemy of 2020 might be the Marauder, who inverts your embedded Doom habits with melee duels. The expansion continues the trend: the Spirit possesses and buffs fellow demons, while the giant tentacle pancakes whole arenas while the ants (you and co) below duke it out. Pointing and clicking alone won’t cut the cake. Eternal demands sharp situational awareness at 1,000 mph. All the while you’re treading water, topping up resources with…

Steven Messner: Valhallawas a bit of a surprise to me, honestly. I expected it to be pretty good, but I had no idea that Ubisoft’s next Assassin’s Creedwas going to be such a memorable adventure. What matters here are the little details – the numerous ways Ubisoft listened to feedback from Odysseyto make Valhalla a much more inviting RPG. Level-gating is gone, the open-world doesn’t feel like a checklist of boring activities, and the combat has been refined to include more depth. It’s also the first time an Assassin’s Creedstory really gripped me from beginning to end. Odyssey’s storytelling was often clunky and a little obtuse, but Valhalladoes a fantastic job of exploring Eivor’s relationship with her adoptive brother Sigurd while questioning the traditions of Norse culture with a surprising…

Rich Stanton: The first thing my team of crack spook-hunters look at in a Phasmophobiamission is whether the ghost responds to everyone, or only people who are alone. When it’s the latter, the mood darkens. Communication is at the heart of this experience, and even the most hardened don’t enjoy being alone with a ghost. The array of equipment forces the team to work in tandem, necessitating constant chatting, while the ghost ‘listens’ to what’s being said. Rule one: never admit you’re scared. The most common sentences in the game begin with “I think I saw…” as one player half-catches something and the team rushes over. When the lights are on and you’re setting up, it’s all bonhomie and wisecracks about the wallpaper. Then stuff starts to happen, the chat…

I feel that Spårvagnis a game that knows it’s frustrating. Why else would this game of metropolitan tram traffic control feature such a soothing ambient soundtrack? Without it, I might have thrown a trammy tantrum and thrown in the towel before finishing it, but that minimalist soundtrack – and its beautifully alive top-down city – combined to offset the frustration, just long enough for me to complete its handful of stages. In each cityscape, you have to manage a couple of tram lines long enough for all the waiting passengers to be collected. The trams move automatically, but you can pause them momentarily by clicking on them – and if you don’t, a collision will occur sooner or later. However, leave them paused toolong and they might be bashed from…

The theme this month was meant to be festive. And with that in mind, Hollow Knight is a stretch but it’s a winter-adjacent excuse to play one of the best Metroidvania games ever made. Another is that it’s simply brilliant. There’s a crispness to it all that satisfies like stepping on a semi-frozen puddle – a clear, sharp sense of purpose that’s unusually compelling, even if it can be a harsh experience at times. The setting of Hallownest is uniquely appealing despite having the same wistful sense of decay that British seaside resorts have in October. It’s a place long past its prime, full of echoes of former glory. But it doesn’t have the same oppressive gloom as its thematic gaming counterparts, such as the likes of Lordran. Despite it…

I’m not saying that my current playthrough of The Long Dark is going badly. Just that I might struggle to survive if I don’t manage to kill this rabbit by chucking stones at its adorable head. And I just ran out of stones. It’s one of those games that remind you just how dead you’d be if you had to spend even one night outside in mild temperatures, let alone an endless winter in the wake of a geothermal disaster. It’s a brutal, unusually brilliant survival game, but it’s utterly terrible for your self esteem.…

A lot of sci-fi ideas seem to have their roots in the ’70s. We don’t know whether it’s the availability of mind-bending drugs at the time, or the free love, or the fashions, but something seems to have sparked off a load of ideas that still seem modern today. One of those ideas is the brain/computer interface (BCI), which you kind of expect Elon Musk to talk about in the same way he might discuss hollowing out a volcano, but sit up and take notice when Valve starts talking about it too. Research into them began in the ’70s, and earlier this year the UK Government received a report into them from the Parliamentary Office of Science and Technology, in which it was stated that entertainment companies are developing non-invasive…

Hearthstone’s new Duels mode feels a bit like playing the results of a teleporter accident. Blizzard has spliced something I love with something I very much do not. The result feels like an amped up version of the already fairly deranged main game. The unevenness comes as no surprise given that, as I write this, Duels is in Early Access. Borrowing from Arena, your aim is to build a deck capable or racking up 12 wins against human opponents – but lose three times and you’re out. Where the Dungeon Run element comes in is that you add to the deck after each game, picking bundles of cards from themed ‘buckets’ which will nudge your playstyle in a particular direction. So far, so Hearthstone. The real spice comes from the…

Ever since Microsoft announced its Bethesda acquisition, Fallout: New Vegas has been on my mind. With Obsidian and Bethesda now sharing the Microsoft umbrella, speculation about a sequel or remaster to the western apocalypse are both rampant. I highly doubt we’ll see either of those two things happen. Not soon, in any case. Although an official remaster would be nice, Fallout: New Vegas has recently passed its tenth anniversary, meaning it has a decade of mods accumulated for making your own remastered version. Ten years of mods is quite a pile to sift through though. Some have been abandoned and others are redundant. Some are shiny and new but less developed than other old faithful options. In honour of its big birthday, I’m setting out to find the most faithful…

A global pandemic forces us all to stay inside and listen to burbling politicians. A galactic pandemic forces us to join the armies of Nurgle and listen to burbling daemons. Fascism and authoritarian thought rises inexorably across the globe. Fascism rose 25,000 years ago, but at least it has cool spaceships. You can rebel against the status quo by retweeting an article you didn’t read. You can rebel against the status quo by summoning dark forces you cannot comprehend. Become numbed to fear through overexposure to a 24 hours news cycle. Become numbed to fear because you’ve been turned into a genetically-enhanced super soldier. You have to wear a mask over your face just to go to the shops. You have to wear a rebreather over your face just to…

THE MELBOURNE ANOMALY The one that started it all – a 212-storey omen that, when the Combine come for Earth, Australia will be first. THE BENEVENTO TWIN But it’s not alone. Rising out of the Italian countryside, this tower is too eldritch for its peaceful surroundings. THE JAPANESE DEATH SPIKES Located in the Saga prefecture, these spines appear to be… oh God… organic in nature? Horrifying. THE LAGOA NOVA PIT You can take off from the airstrip at the bottom of this chasm, but be warned: physics get a little weird down there.…

Pirate. Game. Not that kind. If you’re anything like me, those two words are enough to generate excitement (the concept) and despair (recent examples) in equal measure. By concentrating on sailing, and ensuring that it doesn’t take itself too seriously, King of Seas seems to be setting course for success. Considering the fact that your character is something of a reluctant pirate – you play as the son or daughter of the king of the seas, framed for his murder – you don’t wait long to start causing chaos, graduating from delivery person to merchant murderer with amusing speed. My first truly piratey objective is to sink three merchant ships. The preview build is limited to 45 minutes of play, and each time I run through, I never seem to…

After more than five years surrounded by Vermintide’s skittering, shrieking Skaven, Fatshark has jumped into the grimdark future of Warhammer 40,000. Darktidepits another four brave souls against unrelenting waves of monstrous enemies in a city being corrupted by the power of Chaos. It’s a meat grinder, but you get to be the teeth, chewing through hordes, leaving nothing but dismembered body parts in your bloody wake. And this time, there are chainswords. “AS WE’VE SEEN IN VERMINTIDE, PLAYERS REALLY ENJOY TWEAKING THEIR LOADOUTS” There was a teaser trailer in July, but since then Fatshark hasn’t given much away about its next co-op outing. Chatting to the team, it’s clear they’re being careful about what exactly they reveal at what is still a fairly early stage. They want to keep some…

POXWALKERS Poxwalkers are the cannon fodder of Nurgle’s cursed armies – shambling, plague-ridden husks that serve as the living weapons of the traitor guard. They attack with teeth and claws and whatever simple weapons they can find, and they keep mutating even following death. Like regular zombies, poxwalkers gather in hordes and can quickly swarm you. TRAITOR GUARD The traitor guard are former members of the Astra Militarum who have pledged themselves to Chaos. This regiment is the Moebian Sixth, deployed to help out the Moebian government, but are now attempting to seize power. These treacherous guardsmen fight with anything from simple melee weapons and chain axes to lasguns and combat shotguns.…

James Davenport: It’s easy to say Microsoft Flight Simulator’s greatest trick is that it’s just Bing maps in an aeroplane costume, but it’s the flight simulation wrapper that grounds a free web application in reality like no other game. Flying over your hometown hits differently from typing its name into a search bar. I can’t speak to the depth of the flying simulation. It’s not why I keep revisiting Microsoft Flight Simulator. Like so many of us, I’m stuck at home waiting out a pandemic. But in MFS I’ve charted a course from a remote Siberian airport to the Tunguska meteor crater; I’ve skimmed the top of the Tetons; I flew to the northern tip of Iceland, turned on active pause, and stared out at the edge of everything. MFS’…

Evan Lahti: Olde Spelunky, our 2013 GOTY, was a clever proc-gen platformer that along with other roguelikes helped usher in the era of ‘Difficulty is Good’. But seven years later, the indie hit’s legacy might be the daring, creative player feats it inspired: the eggplant run (escorting a useless eggplant all the way through to the end of the game), the no-gold run, a speed run of Hell itself. What’s special about Spelunky 2, then, is how much the game’s lead designer Derek Yu drew on the legendary achievements of the Spelunky community as inspiration for this sequel. The eggplant, for example, is no longer just an item: it’s a path to reach a sprawling, secret level that contains the sacred lore of the eggplant god. NPCs are no longer…

Fraser Brown: Crusader Kings III is this year’s best strategy game, but it’s also one of the greatest RPGs and sandboxy sims around as well. On the surface, it’s not much of a departure from its predecessor, but this is a game with astounding ambition that couldn’t have happened without eight years of Crusader Kings II. It refines and reconfigures so much that, while at a glance it’s familiar, it’s far from a repeat. It’s been made knowing that the audience for this sort of thing is surprisingly large and broad, something Paradox probably wasn’t that sure of last time, and that means it’s also the studio’s most accessible grand strategy behemoth. It remains endlessly complex, but the abundance of nested tooltips and all the different ways it guides you,…

My favourite Assassin’s Creed is now Assassin’s Creed Valhalla, which is saying something considering it’s a series that spans 23 games. It builds on the already excellent RPG foundations laid by Origins and Odyssey, but with meaningful improvements that iron out many of the frustrations I had with both games. Case in point: not once during the 60-hour story was I told to stop and level up a bunch before I could take on the next quest. That also means Ubisoft isn’t selling optional experience boosts, either. Thank God. As the settlement expands, it draws new characters What really stands out to me, though, is how much better Valhallais at telling an engaging story that twists and turns according to my decisions. Valhalladoes a great job of introducing characters, concepts,…

A couple of hours into Watch Dogs Legion I look at my small team of DedSec agents and think to myself: these people actually suck. The concept seems sound – rather than playing a traditional protagonist, you recruit a team of heroes from randomly generated, ordinary citizens of London. The problem with ordinary people, though, is that they’re ordinary. I have a filmmaker on my team. An ambulance driver. A legal assistant. A lady whose only skill is that she owns a car. It’s not exactly a dream team, and initially I’m so uninterested in my collection of ‘heroes’ that when one of them (the car owning lady) is kidnapped by an enemy I don’t even bother rescuing her. Go ahead and keep her, I shrug. I can steal a…

This asks you to imagine the world on the otherside of that pane of glass. What’s going on in the lives of your neighbours? By clicking on four apartment windows, in any order you desire, you’ll witness glimpses of their lives, as they struggle with relationships and work-life balance. There’s the middle-aged couple who snap at each other over a seemingly inconsequential matter, a man and a woman coping with breakups, and the lead of an indie studio wrestling with coding errors and a fast approaching deadline. You’ll drop in on each twice before witnessing the resolution, which takes the form of direct interviews with the cast and seemingly a few of the (real) developers of Beyond Your Window. It’s an unusual ending, and I enjoyed how it leant against…

There are loads of things that stick in the memory after your first time playing David Cage’s Fahrenheit. QTE boinking. The heartfelt probably-necrophilia. Floating kung-fu fights against psyche-insects. And that means it’s easy to forget how good the setting and opening are. There’s a palpable sense of panic to the opening crime scene that I don’t think I’ve seen recreated as effectively in any other game. And while the story stays small, before the SWAT teams and spirit mediums arrive, it’s surprisingly effective – more so thanks to some restrained characterisation and seasoned voice acting. It’s also maybe the most January game that’s ever been made.…

One of the easiest ways of giving your system a performance boost is to upgrade your storage. This is particularly true if you’re still rocking a spinning hard drive or two, although SATA SSDs will also see a notable speed boost when you upgrade to the latest drives. Right now, the best storage around uses the PCIe 4.0 interface to produce blistering read and write speeds. At the moment only AMD’s Zen 2 and Zen 3 platforms natively support PCIe 4.0 drives, although Intel’s next generation of CPUs (codenamed Rocket Lake) will also jump aboard this particular super speedy wagon. So even if you don’t have a supporting platform right now, you will do when you next upgrade, which is why we think that moving over to a PCIe 4.0…

If you told me that one of my favourite games in 2020 would be a free-to-play RPG with ‘gacha’ microtransactions, I’d never have believed you. Yet here I am, approaching what is close to my 60th hour in Genshin Impact. It’s a brilliant game – so long as you aren’t overly offended by some sketchy in-game purchases. It’s easy to forgive that stuff, though, because Genshin Impact is genuinely a joy to play. It ditches the modern trend of big open worlds littered with icons and instead takes a more intuitive approach, forcing you to use your faculties to find hidden treasures, collectibles and loot that’ll power up your party of four characters. I’m constantly skeptical of the environment around me – suspiciously unlit torches might be a little puzzle…

This is the kind of game you don’t describe so much as circle around, making occasional stabs with the ol’ metaphor-knife in the hope of hitting something solid. I could tell you that it’s a retro-shooter-adjacent roguelike, where you sprint around randomly-generated hallways blasting baddies and desperately seeking the exit… but that wouldn’t capture the way it feels to play. And it certainly doesn’t explain why, when alt-tabbing out between runs to take notes, I so often find my fingers are rattling against the keyboard. It’s easy to reach for the substances, comparatively speaking. Not least because of the way Post Void looks: all woozy edges and bright colours and men in suits who have something wrong with their faces. But, the best parallel I can draw from personal experience…

VORTEX Nexus Mod Manager has been replaced with Vortex. It does a lot to hold your hand and warn you of conflicts between mods that you may have overlooked. MOD ORGANIZER 2 MO2 is a no-frills approach and doesn’t have as difficult a learning curve that it’s sometimes alleged to. It also gives more precise control over mod load order. FALLOUT MOD MANAGER FOMM is getting long in the tooth. You’ll see its name mentioned in install instructions for older mods but you’re better off choosing between MO2 or Vortex in 2021.…

A woman named Stephanie has alleged that a new League of Legends character with a similar appearance and name, Seraphine, is based on her. At the crux of this allegation is her brief relationship with a Riot employee in 2019, who she believes borrowed details from her likeness and life for the popstar from fictional girl group K/DA. Riot denies the allegation, “Seraphine was independently created by Riot Games and was not based on any individual. Additionally, the former employee [Stephanie] is referring to left Riot more than a year ago and was in a department and role that has no input whatsoever into the creative design process.” “IT’S BEEN KIND OF HORRID TO HAVE A LEAGUE CHAMPION WHO LOOKS LIKE YOU” We omit Stephanie’s full name at her and…

“THE PLAYER’S NARRATIVE IS MORE IMPORTANT THAN THE GAME’S NARRATIVE” It’s hard to imagine a more prestigious PC gaming university than Maxis in 2008. When an industry fresher named Alex Hutchinson joined the Spore team, he was introduced to Civilization IV designer Soren Johnson, SpyParty creator Chris Hecker, and producer extraordinaire Lucy Bradshaw – who Fortune would later name one of the ten most powerful women in gaming. Presiding over it all was SimCity genius and walking TED talk Will Wright. “It was a very big learning curve, working with some of the smartest people I’ve even seen,” Hutchinson recalls. “There were all these luminaries from the business, which for a 20-something Australian was pretty exciting.” As it turned out, though, Maxis was a better environment for learning than it…

When you start up a free-roaming space shooter, the last thing you expect is to be flying down a tight and twisting tunnel, in search of something called the ‘core’. There are anemone-like creatures all over the walls, and they fall easily to your ship’s lasers. You don’t even know who you are at this point, referred to as just ‘the wingman’ on comms, but once you’ve defended the core, and the miners trying to exploit it, from a giant drill that lets in angry drones, you’ll be slightly closer to finding out. This is the closed beta of Everspace 2, the final stage before its Early Access release in January. The game is running from the gravity well of Cyberpunk 2077, rescheduling from a December release that saw CD…

1 HABZONES The hive’s billions live in the habzones, where you might even find some survivors holding out against the tide of Nurgle’s abominations. 2 WALKWAYS If you want an idea of the scale of the hive, why not visit one of our gothic, picturesque bridges and walkways. Don’t look down. 3 MARKET Come to the underground water market to admire the uplifting graffiti and cheery atmosphere. It’s probably even nicer now that Nurgle’s moved in. 4 SERVICE TUNNELS Why not explore the guts of the hive? Though the weather isn’t great – we’ll warn you, an umbrella doesn’t protect you from acid rain. 5 PRISON Don’t forget to be on your best behaviour. The Imperium isn’t delicate when it comes to upholding the law. Hence all the blood stains.…

Steven Messner: Final Fantasy XIV is the most consistently excellent MMO I’ve ever played. I started back in 2013, with the relaunch, and have consistently played for seven years. What keeps me coming back isn’t just the memorable boss fights and beautiful locations, though. It’s that Final Fantasy XIV tells an emotionally gripping story that just keeps raising the stakes. Case in point: its latest expansion, Shadowbringers, takes players on an interdimensional journey to a parallel universe while somehow also keeping a tight focus on the characters that I’ve come to love over these past seven years. FINAL FANTASY XIV TELLS AN EMOTIONALLY GRIPPING STORY What makes this the best ongoing game in 2020 is down to how scientific Square Enix is with updates. While other MMOs have big ups…

Rachel Watts: As someone who has zero patience for dying in games, Hadeshas made me a roguelike convert. It’s a dungeon crawler that gives the gods of ancient Greece action and attitude, all encased in Supergiant’s signature artstyle. But the most impressive feat that Hadeshas, that defeats one of the genre’s biggest hangups, is it makes failure fun. Combat feels punchy and intense, and there are plenty of godly boons to be bestowed that make every run a new endeavour. Testing out each newly discovered weapon or ability never feels like a waste of time, each one feels like it’s been carefully thought out by Supergiant. Progression and persistence just melt away as each run gets easier and dying never feels frustrating when I get to catch up with the…

Wes Fenlon: It’s impossible to play Monster Train without Ozzy Osbourne singing Crazy Train in your head. And honestly, that’s exactly how it should be, because it isa crazy train. My favourite thing about this deckbuilder is its wild makeup of factions, which I can mash together into unlikely allies. The Awoken, for example, are burly plant boys that I use as front line defenders to soak up damage for units I place behind them. But depending on the faction I pair them with, that strategy totally changes. A KIND OF CHAOS THAT NEVER STOPS ESCALATING With the Stygian Guard I sometimes like to go all-in on spell weakness, using puny magicians to stack a multiplicative debuff on enemies and then one-shotting them. But the Stygians also have a whole…

James Davenport: Death Stranding is a hypnotic exercise in dramatic serenity. For 90 percent of my 100-plus hours wandering the gorgeous, rocky terrain, I was completely alone. It was just me and Norman Reedus’ gentle breath. It’s nothing special for an open-world game to punt you out into a huge space on your lonesome, but Death Stranding understands how isolation feels, that jerky oscillation between peace and terror. You’re alone in your job, delivering gear (and oxytocin) to subterranean settlements, and you’re alone out there in good ol’ indifferent, unforgiving nature. Death Stranding is about carrying on anyway and trying not to panic when things get worse. Because they will. I’ve tumbled down cliffs and slid down a river or 12, but scrambling to adjust and salvage my shipment is…

When your enemy is called The Godslayer, you might hope to have more to hand than a bow and arrow and an eagle. In fact, this is a game notable in part for what it doesn’t have. It’s an open-world game with no minimap, no fast travel, no player deaths, no enemies (apart from bosses), no NPCs and no vehicles. Yet what it doeshave has been so expertly crafted, that the end result is something truly remarkable. This isn’t easily comparable to anything else, something that becomes apparent within seconds of taking your first dash across a field. Your sprint is powered by your spirit meter, which is depleted rapidly but can be constantly topped up by shooting the many floating talismans scattered throughout the entire game. Travelling on foot…

Stuff. It’s great, isn’t it? Except when it’s not: when you attach personal baggage to it, and you have so much that you can barely move in your own house. Emptyis a game about stuff, more specifically getting rid of it, as you Marie Kondo your way around a sequence of rooms, ridding the colourful 3D spaces of all their clutter. Once it’s gone, and each room is basically just the walls, floor and ceiling, you move on. There are other domestic spaces, and later on more abstract scenes, that demand your attention. It felt a bit unsatisfying to find that, oh, I had completed the game But Emptyis a puzzle game. Rather than dragging the unwanted items into a skip, you have to vanish them instead, by lining each…

There’s a sense of trepidation firing up Arkham Origins for the first time. It has a reputation. This is the estranged, drunk uncle of the series – one who starts celebrating Christmas in September and might not actually be a blood relative. His timing is terrible. He’s slightly unreliable. But he’s not the urine-soaked catastrophe you expect and, in fact, some people like him more than the other uncle with the flashy car. The title refers to the origin of the broader Arkham mythology That’s a potentially-too-personal way of saying Originsisn’t as bad as you probably think, even if it never lives up to the promise of an enriching prequel. In practice, the showcase of Bats as a rawer, more savage version of his later Rocksteady incarnations feels hollow. The…

Playing Frostpunksometimes is like reading a historical account of some fatuous, ineffectual king who failed upward into a position of power. “Idealistic but impractical, he invested heavily in schools. But the children stopped being able to write when their fingers fell off due to frostbite.” Compared to the constant, escalating crises of Frostpunk, every other city management game feels like Farmville. And as well as being a brilliant exercise in humility, it’s also a useful way of learning to say no to people. Or ‘yes’, if the question is ‘should we keep working even if it kills us’. It sounds grim, but Frostpunkis so good that you’ll suffer this and more just for a scintilla of success.…

Hello Games’ epic always looks so amazingly magical from afar. I see my friends’ screenshots of glorious alien vistas, and I want to find some of my own. I see the latest updates, introducing all sorts of new wonders to discover, and I long to see it all for myself. But every time I try, the game seems ever more unwelcome to me. I’m not sure I’ve ever gotten out of what amounts to the extended tutorial. It seems to get longer and more convoluted with each update – and, somehow, the exciting new features always ruin my fun, rather than enhancing it. The last time I tried was shortly after the full multiplayer update was introduced, and while I was grinding through the opening stages, trying to scrape together…

NEED TO KNOW DIFFICULTY Easy TIME 30Hours VITAL LINKS  Anemoculus map: bit.ly/3mtTWhT Tier list: bit.ly/2TtfVcv Best builds: bit.ly/2TwvDUc STAY FOCUSED 1 While you’ll be tempted to discover every inch of miHoYo’s Breath of the Wild-style world, mix your exploration with questing. That’ll ensure you don’t miss out on crucial tools like the wind glider to help you find more secrets and resources. TAKE IT SLOW 2 There is an option to activate Teleport Waypoints to fast travel between, but I recommend against it. Only do so if you’re absolutely certain you’ve covered the area you’re skipping: useful materials, hidden chests and collectibles are everywhere. CHATTERBOX 3 Talk to as many NPCs as possible. Rather than spouting useless dialogue, many peripheral characters are worth speaking to. Some may secretly have quests…

In 2001 RuneScape launched as a browser game and never stopped moving forward, depositing old versions along the way for players who wanted to stay in the past: RuneScape Classic, which no longer exists, and then Old School RuneScapein 2013. For everyone else, the modern version is just called RuneScape, and was recently added to Steam. I’ve always had the sense that RuneScapeis a bit esoteric (I’m sure I tried it back when it launched, when I was into MUDs and other relics of online gaming), but I didn’t realise just how weird the free-to-play MMO is until I gave it a try. Nearly two decades after it first released, visiting RuneScapeis like entering a PC gaming pocket dimension that split off from our own years ago, perhaps accessed by…