Innholdsfortegnelse for November 2025 i PC Gamer

There are a lot of Worlds of Warcraft these days. I don’t just mean the original – which fans now call ‘live’ or ‘retail’ – and the official lineup of old-school ‘classic’ servers set in various points throughout the game’s history. There have always been private servers: fanmade builds hosted unofficially, often locked to an old patch or with major changes. And though they’re typically snug in the underground with a few hundred players or so to their name, one relatively new server has been turning more heads. Around 72,000 simultaneously, in fact, at its current peak player count. That number comes from Akalix, the community manager on Turtle WoW. Named for a design philosophy that favours slow-paced, social gameplay over intense dungeon crawls and showers of disposable loot, the…

NEED TO KNOW RELEASE2025 DEVELOPERSeismic Squirrel PUBLISHERSeismic Squirrel LINK steam.pm/app/1836560 P eople mill about laughing in the sun, but something’s off. The world feels grainy and sluggish like I’m wading through sand. I need to keep the girl close. Aether & Iron is so dripping with noir it’s leaving behind fedora-shaped puddles. It’s full of steely internal dialogue like this where you hear the main character, Gia Randazzo, take in her surroundings. Gia has good reason to have her guard up: her world is a fantastical, fractured, floating New York City in the 1930s with the gangsters and violence synonymous with noir, but these goons have flying cars and lasers to conduct their bad business. Adding to the noir setup, we meet Gia “at a low point in her career…

RELEASETBA DEVELOPERConfiction Labs, Agate PUBLISHERConfiction Labs LINK s.team/a/2282790 A co-op looter-shooter that promises you can play solo as well, Riftstorm casts you as an operative of the Mythic Protocol, an organisation that attempts to regulate the unknown and the secret societies that work within it. This means a lot of shooting as you aim to protect the world from threats it can’t understand and should never actually be aware of, closing the rifts through which they flood our plane.…

Q iwei ‘Soulframe’ Liang, game director at S-Game, has slipped away again, and when I see him next he’ll look impossibly fresh despite the Beijing summer’s sweltering – some might say outright evil – 98% humidity. There’s no hope of beating the heat in a 100-year-old decommissioned blast furnace, a recent Olympic venue now filled with hundreds of PCs running Phantom Blade Zero, which I’ve flown to China to play. But as I slowly sweat my way from solid to a liquid that holds the vague shape of a cotton shirt, Liang flits between interviews with just enough time to sneakily swap to a fresh black T-shirt for each one. I get it: when you’re making a game this hellbent on looking cool every single second, you’ve gotta walk the…

NEED TO KNOW EXPECT TO PAY Free DEVELOPER Daniel Linssen LINK bit.ly/DanTyping Our ability to type obviously depends on our familiarity with the keyboard. But what if some joker swapped the letters around? That’s the gist of this disorientating puzzle game, which presents a cloud of jumbled letters and asks you to hop between them, while naughty asterisks try to hit you and spoil the fun. You start each run situated on a letter, and by typing an adjacent letter you’ll move to it, with the aim of reaching and collecting all the golden letters. You have to time your moves so you don’t get hit by the floating asterisks, and also tactically duck your head to look at your real-life keyboard, as all of the on-screen letters are in…

NEED TO KNOW EXPECT TO PAY £11 DEVELOPER Sukeban Games PUBLISHER Ysbryd Games, PLAYISM There’s something lovely about matching drinks to your media of choice. Ale, cheese, and crusty bread when you play Skyrim. Yamazaki when you play Yakuza. And this is exactly what VA-11 Hall-A (from now on, for the sake of ease, Valhalla) encourages when you first fire it up. It’s a game that’s best played after dark on a sticky summer’s night, ideally with some kind of ice-cold beverage nearby. Finding a complementary drink is trickier, since the ingredients here are an inscrutable selection of spirits with names like Adelhyde, Flanergide, and Karmotrine, who sound like beautiful sisters on a Swiss space station. If you’ve worked in a real bar, you’ll know that there’s nothing relaxing about…

Audio engineers will tell you a piece of music has ‘that Pro Tools sound’. The track sounds cleaner, glossier, but overly digitised and brimming with artifice, they’ll say, as you nod politely before being handed your change at the bar, putting a hand on their shoulder and giving them an ‘enjoy your night, mate’ before walking off. In a similar way, PC gamers have all become accustomed to ‘that Unreal Engine look’. You know the one. Really blurry textures for a half-second when your save game first loads. A faint plasticky look to every surface. More bloom than a garden centre. There are specific reasons UE games tend to look a certain way, like the material defaults that many developers don’t change, and the multiplicative lighting solver that illuminates spaces…

KEY Budget build PC gaming is for everyone. Pick these parts if you want to build a new, well-rounded PC for a good price. Mid-range build You want to run every new game at 1080p 60fps. This recommended build will see you through. Advanced build You’re looking for the best PC on the market and superior components. But you still want to spend smart. BUDGET BUILD Enjoy 1080p gaming without breaking the bank MOTHERBOARD B660M Pro RS ASRock £115 This is as cheap as we want to go while still offering room for expansion and upgrades down the line. PROCESSOR Core i5 13400F Intel £120 Intels’ budget chip is still fantastic value and a solid all-rounder. GRAPHICS CARD Radeon RX 9060 XT 8 GB AMD £260 AMD delivers what we…

NEED TO KNOW RELEASEJanuary 1999 PUBLISHERNintendo DEVELOPERHAL Laboratory LINK ssbwiki.com/Smash_Remix Smash Remix goes back to 2019 when it replaced Captain Falcon with his slower counterpart Ganondorf, but six years’ worth of updates have brought the roster up to 30 regular fighters and 16 ‘bonus’ fighters that skew stronger and sillier, like Lanky Kong and the piano from Super Mario 64. This is not a fan game, but a patch that runs as easily on a RetroArch core as it does on your dust-stained Nintendo 64. As long as you’ve got a way to transfer your Super Smash Bros 64 cartridge’s ROM onto your PC and then back onto an SD card (to slap into a custom N64 cart like an Everdrive), you can run Remix natively on original N64 hardware.…

We recently saw the full introduction of the requirements outlined in the Online Safety Act in the UK, requiring “robust” age checks for users to access adult content online. People have found ways around at least some of these verification requirements after less than 24 hours. We’ve stumbled across people using Sam Porter Bridges selfies to bypass Discord’s age verification. Naturally, we thought to take this infiltration method for a spin. It worked! We’re enjoying smutty Baldur’s Gate III fanfics on Discord again. Not that we couldn’t anyway, we’re all 18 or older here. Nor are we telling you to circumvent these restrictions. Adult content is for adults. But it is a fun hack, and a good way of keeping your actual face far away from Discord’s age verification system,…

1 month BORDERLANDS 4 RELEASE September 12, 2025 | DEVELOPER Gearbox The mayhem-fuelled looter-shooter returns with promises of billions of weapons, outrageous enemies and intense co-op action. Here’s hoping it’s better than the movie! DYING LIGHT: THE BEAST RELEASE September 19, 2025 | DEVELOPER Techland The game-changing FPS survival horror series returns with a new game that harkens back to the original’s darker tone. Wreck your vengeance as Kyle Crane, half-man, half-beast. ENDLESS LEGEND 2 RELEASE September 22, 2025 | DEVELOPER Amplitude Studios The acclaimed asymmetrical 4X strategy series returns after a lengthy hiatus with more excitingly distinct factions, fresh game mechanics, and a new planet to conquer. 2 months BATTLEFIELD 6 RELEASE October 10, 2025 | DEVELOPER Battlefield Studios Multiplayer and single-player FPS action returns in the new all-out…

NEED TO KNOW RELEASETBA DEVELOPERChristoph Schultz PUBLISHERChristoph Schultz LINK s.team/a/2288530 T his looks a bit like Day of the Tentacle, and that’s a good thing. The demo drops you into its world after the game has got going, and has a recap of the events you haven’t played yet to bring you up to speed with its world. It’s a neat way to approach a demo. The idea is that back in 1997 three friends found a weird console game cart which subsequently broke, and when they tried to fix it a portal appeared. Of course they stepped through, and ended up in three different places, one of which looks suspiciously similar to the game that was on the cart. It’s a wonderfully colourful world, alive with little details such…

J ames Bond returns to videogames, and about bloody time. It’s been 13 years since Ian Fleming’s Scottish superspy last infiltrated gaming’s bubbling volcano base. And if we’re talking about good Bond games, there’s a chance you weren’t born when the last one came out. GoldenEye 007 is nearly 30 years old and has aged like Roger Moore in A View to a Kill, while every virtual Bond escapade since has ranged from aggressively mediocre to outright duff. But with 007 First Light, there’s hope things will be different. This time, Bond has a handler with proven espionage credentials – IO Interactive. In its brilliant World of Assassination trilogy, the Hitman developer has already built what seems like the perfect template for a modern Bond experience; games about exploring glitzy…

NEED TO KNOW WHAT IS IT? The definitive modern remaster of two Doom Engine games largely forgotten by history EXPECT TO PAY £13.50 DEVELOPER Raven Software, Nightdive Studios PUBLISHER Bethesda Softworksl REVIEWED ON AMD Ryzen 7 9800X3D, 64GB RAM, Nvidia GeForce RTX 5080 MULTIPLAYER Yes LINK s.team/a/3286930 Doom gets all the plaudits. Of course it does. Then Quake comes along and changes things again, like incorporating mouselook. In between these two early FPS titans, however, came a slew of games that took id’s work, often literally, and ran with it. Heretic (originally released in 1994) was one of those, and now that game and its sequel have a Nightdive remaster with additional new levels. It’s a fascinating slice of history, if not quite up there with the greats of the…

NEED TO KNOW EXPECT TO PAY Free DEVELOPER Motamot LINK bit.ly/Hellkind Annoyingly for a magazine, Hellkind is not a game that looks great in static screenshots, so you’ll have to rely on my feeble words to get its atmosphere across. Waking up in a church near a ritual altar, you have to figure out what the heck is going on and try to escape. It’s a top-down Resident Evil, but with a focus on puzzles and atmosphere. That atmosphere is aided enormously by the gloomy 1bit aesthetic, which lays a blanket of dither and shadow over the church. You’re never quite sure what’s around you until you creep into a shadowy corner, and the character’s FOV reveals a room, possibly slathered in blood. Doors are disguised in the darkness and…

NEED TO KNOW EXPECT TO PAY £12 DEVELOPER Untitled Studio PUBLISHER Untitled Studio Last in our collection of drink-adjacent games in Tavern Master, which means we’ve got all the essential liquids covered: blood, cocktails, and beer. Surprisingly for a medieval setting, the range on offer here is quite broad. Although if I travel back in time and ask for lemonade, I deserve to get burnt as a witch. Tavern Master is so chilled out that it almost feels more like an idle game than a bawdy, fully-realised representation of a medieval inn, but it’s compelling nonetheless. There’s something irresistible about seeing piles of empty tankards on wooden tables as your gold counter ticks up. It requires very little in terms of micromanagement: the most reactive you get is adding more…

Handheld PCs aren’t a new phenomenon. Atari’s Portfolio released in 1989, for example, with a full keyboard and a modified version of DOS called DIP-DOS that allowed it to more or less run as an IBM-compatible PC. Hewlett-Packard released the HP-95LX two years later which ran on DOS itself. But it doesn’t feel like devices like those have been at the heart of PC culture, or even in particularly high usage, throughout the platform’s long history. HAVE YOU PLAYED STARDEW VALLEY ON A HANDHELD GAMING PC? Not until 2022, when Valve released the Steam Deck. As soon as the company behind Half-Life gave us a glimpse of what looked like a futuristic Game Gear and flexed its gigantic brand power biceps, we seemed to decide that handheld gaming PCs were…

JODY MACGREGOR THIS MONTH Learned the gig economy wants you to conform. ALSO PLAYED Skin Deep, XCOM 2 Truer than You is a visual novel about the gig economy. You’re hired by a startup run by a techbro who wears ‘fun’ T-shirts in the office to complete vague tasks delivered via app. Sort of like Fiverr, but the jobs range from helping someone who might be an artist or might be a terrorist record a threatening video to being someone’s plus-one at an event they don’t want to attend alone like Jenny Got-No-Friends. At the end of each gig you’re given a score out of five, and it says something about how accurately it captured the Uber driver experience that when I got a four I responded with indignation…

DOMINIC TARASON THIS MONTH Sent his fingers to a health spa to recuperate. ALSO PLAYED Dice Gambit, Project Silverfish More than any other group in the industry, I firmly believe that rhythm game developers are in it purely for the love of the medium, and few games support that claim better than Vivid/stasis. Recently graduated from Early Access after years of updates and tuning, it is a rhythm game with hundreds of songs to play, an emotionally resonant mystery visual novel, a mind-bending collection of cipher-cracking ARG puzzles, a Yume Nikki-style exploration adventure and even finds time to sneak in virtual pet and fishing minigames. The rhythmic mechanical heart of Vivid/stasis is a four-button music game in the style of DJMax or similar. Notes fall down, you hit them…

NEED TO KNOW RELEASETBA DEVELOPEROwlskip PUBLISHEROwlskip LINK s.team/a/3756940 Every morning, someone slides a dossier under your door, and you get to work identifying the people within it. This might not sound all that exciting, but the demo available on Steam puts that idea to bed: it’s compelling stuff, filled with the joy of realising that a clue exists, then following it. The game begins with a dead priest. He’s got a big knife in him, and the word ‘ratline’ daubed on the wall above him. Connoisseurs of 20th century history will immediately recognise that word: the name for escape routes used by Nazis to flee Europe at the end of the Second World War. You’re Perlman, an investigator who specialises in identifying people. Your first case is to find the…

RELEASE2025 DEVELOPERParadark Studio PUBLISHERNull Games LINK s.team/a/1701840 A post-apocalyptic Staten Island is the setting for this first-person adventure, which casts you as a bounty hunter in the service of the Helion Corporation. If that sounds like Blade Runner, then the visuals back up the association, with the kinds of flying cars, hand cannons, neon signs and orange sunsets dreamed up for the 2049 movie. There are hints of Mad Max and Fallout on display too, especially as the protagonist rocks up to a desert dwelling in the game’s trailer, putting on a hat and pulling a revolver as he approaches the door. There’s a lot of the Old West in ExeKiller, a thick seam of retrofuturism that extends to a handheld motion tracker that looks like an old transistor radio.…

It’s been ten years since Raw Fury signed its first game and started its journey to becoming a publisher known for its wide range of indie hits. After being founded by ex Paradox mobile vice-president Jonas Antonsson and EA Dice’s Gordon Van-Dyke, with its first release, Kingdom, dropping in 2015, the company has continued to grow and be responsible for the likes of Blue Prince, Cassette Beasts and Moonstone Island. Instead of specialising in a particular genre, Raw Fury has mastered the art of finding great games and supporting them no matter what type they are. But what is it that helps make the publisher and its games so successful? PC Gamer spoke to Raw Fury’s CEO Pim Holfve to find out. “We have a great value foundation,” Holfve tells…

NEED TO KNOW WHAT IS IT? The first new 2D Ninja Gaiden in basically forever EXPECT TO PAY £25 DEVELOPER The Game Kitchen PUBLISHER Dotemu, Joystick REVIEWED ON Asus ROG Ally STEAM DECK Unverified, but come on, it’ll be fine LINK dotemu.com/games/ninja-gaidenragebound Well, this is a nice surprise. Previous Ninja Gaiden games have been about as warm and welcoming as being booted down a flight of stairs. But Ninja Gaiden: Ragebound has pulled off a fun revival that’s far and away the most accessible Ninja Gaiden yet. And by ‘most accessible’ I mean ‘it waits a few hours before repeatedly kicking you in the face’. Hey, it’s a start. The Game Kitchen has slammed an adrenaline shot into 2D Gaiden and made a game that’s far more interested in…

NEED TO KNOW WHAT IS IT? A first-person puzzler that plays with gravity, size and teleportation EXPECT TO PAY Free DEVELOPER ISART Digital Students PUBLISHER ISART Digital Students REVIEWED ON Intel Core i7-10750H, 16GB RAM, Nvidia GeForce RTX 2060 MULTIPLAYER No LINK bit.ly/TellyPort Televisions – as we know from Charlie and the Chocolate Factory – would make you tiny if you were to step inside one, and that’s pretty much the premise of delightful puzzle game Tellyport, in which tellies shrink (or grow) the protagonist, but also teleport them clear across the room. These two mechanics converge to create some tricky first-person puzzles, as you explore a cosy lab to find your eccentric inventor grandma. It’s Ikea in the ’70s, but with box puzzles and fewer meatballs Of course,…

NEED TO KNOW WHAT IS IT? If Nosferatu was made by Paul WS Anderson instead of Robert Eggers EXPECT TO PAY £35 DEVELOPER DONTNOD Entertainment PUBLISHER Focus Entertainment REVIEWED ON Intel Core i7-7700, 16 GB RAM, Nvidia GeForce GTX 1070 MULTIPLAYER No LINK store.steampowered.com/app/427290/Vampyr T he more I ponder what it means to be a vampire, the more questions remain unanswered. Is it okay to watch YouTube videos of the sun? Are their teeth hollow, like straws that suck up the blood? Do they get seasonal affective depression? The last one would explain a lot about why they’re so glum. There’s a waxy clumsiness to everything that’s visually unappealing Dontnod’s Vampyr does a mostly good job of the emo vampire trope. As freshly undeaded doctor Jonathan Reid, you accidentally…

Our advice to PC builders for the past year or so has been to largely ignore PCIe 5.0 SSDs. The best analogy I can come up with is they’re like a car designed for drag racing: extremely quick but only in a straight line. Try to go around a corner and you’ll quickly careen into the barrier. They’re fast, but also hot and expensive. Or at least the first lot were. Modern PCIe 5.0 drives have improved. They’re no longer as hot or expensive. A few are genuinely affordable and there are a few more I’d even consider ‘worth it’. We’re still not quite at the tipping point for PCIe 5.0 replacing 4.0, but with new controllers rolling out, we’re getting close. 1 P510 1TB CRUCIAL £94 Actually affordable Phison…

ROBERT JONES THIS MONTH Hit upgraded headcrabs with an upgraded crowbar. ALSO PLAYED Heretic + Hexen, Baldur’s Gate II OK, OK, so yes, I’d somehow let Black Mesa pass me by in the past five years since its original full release. I knew it was good, sure, but I’d played Half-Life so many times since 1998 that the idea of playing through the game once more didn’t appeal. Plus, like all of us PC gamers, I had a backlog of new games to play that was haunting me. So, I didn’t play it. That all changed, though, when I saw Black Mesa: Definitive Edition reduced by a frankly ludicrous amount in this year’s Steam Summer Sale (it was $1.49/£1.49), with me pulling the trigger and picking it up. Even…