PC Gamer

Before the disaster that was Stadia, Google demoed its game streaming tech via a free version of Assassin's Creed: Odyssey you could play in your browser. My fiancée has fond memories of whiling away slow nights at work playing this massive triple-A game on a crummy library OptiPlex.

Whatever came after with Stadia and game streaming in general, that demo felt like black magic. If a genuinely impressive tech demo can lead to a notorious industry flop, what about a distinctly unimpressive one?

What are the ethics of expending massive amounts of capital, energy, and man hours on not even a worse version of a game from 30 years ago, but a vague impression of it? These are the questions I pondered after having gotten motion sickness playing a game for the second time in my life with Microsoft's Copilot AI research demo of Quake 2.

"This bite-sized demo pulls you into an interactive space inspired by Quake II, where AI crafts immersive visuals and responsive action on the fly," reads Microsoft's Q&A page about the demo. "It’s a groundbreaking glimpse at a brand new way of interacting with games, turning cutting-edge research into a quick and compelling playable demo."

This demo is powered by a "World and Human Action Model" (WHAM), a generative AI model "that can dynamically create gameplay visuals and simulate player behavior in real time." Perusing Microsoft's Nature article on the tech, it appears to operate on similar principles to large language models and image generators, using recorded gameplay and inputs for training instead of static text and imagery.

This demo is not running in the original game's id Tech 2 engine. However Microsoft produces this demo, it's some kind of bespoke engine with an output that resembles Quake 2 because the AI model behind it was trained on Quake 2.

I'm reminded of those demakes of Doom for Texas Instruments calculators, but instead of marshalling limited resources to create an inferior impression of a pre-existing game, the Copilot Gaming Experience is the result of Microsoft's (and the entire tech industry's) herculean push for generative AI.

I don't know what the discrete Copilot Gaming project costs, but Microsoft has invested billions of dollars into compute, research, and lobbying for this technology. On Bluesky, developer Sos Sosowski pointed out that Microsoft's Nature paper lists 22 authors, as opposed to the 13 developers behind Quake 2.

Based on the paper, Sosowski also estimated that Microsoft's new model required more than three megawatts of power to begin producing consistent results⁠. That's assuming use of an RTX 5090, which Microsoft likely did not have access to given the timing of the paper's publication, but it's still helpful to get an idea of the scope of this project's power draw. According to battery manufacturer Pkenergy, a single megawatt requires 3,000-4,000 solar panels to produce.

Despite all of that investment, the demo is not good. The Copilot Gaming experience runs like a slideshow in a tiny window at the center of the browser, its jerkiness and muddled, goopy visuals⁠—familiar to anyone who's seen an AI-generated video⁠—gave me a rough case of motion sickness after bare minutes of play. The only other game to ever have set my belly a rumblin', EvilVEvil, did so closer to the hour mark.

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2025 games: Upcoming releases **
** Best PC games: All-time favorites
Free PC games: Freebie fest
Best FPS games: Finest gunplay
Best RPGs: Grand adventures
Best co-op games: Better together

And while chatbots will tell you to eat rocks and drink piss, the Copilot Gaming Experience has its own fun "hallucinations"—the surreal, unnervingly confident errors produced by generative AI models that massive amounts of money, compute power, and uninhibited access to copyrighted material can't seem to address.

Looking at the floor or ceiling at any time in the Copilot Gaming Experience has about an 80% chance of completely transforming the room in front of you, almost like you teleported somewhere else in the level.

Of course, there is no "level," goal, or victory condition: The Copilot Gaming Experience is just constantly generating a new Quake 2-like bit of environment in front of you whenever you turn the corner, with what came before seemingly disappearing as you go.

One such warp moment sent me to the Shadow Realm, a pitch black void out of nowhere which took some finagling to get out of. There are "enemies," but when I killed one it just deformed into some kind of blob. Then I walked past it, turned around, and the hallway had completely changed, taking the blob with it.

Like so much of generative AI or the blockchain boom before it, I can imagine the "Well, it's just a WIP, first step type of thing" defense of what I was subjected to, but I'm just not convinced. Whatever specific compelling use cases may exist for generative AI tools, that's not what we've been aggressively sold and marketed for the past two years and counting, this insistence on cramming it into everything. Google Gemini is now constantly asking if I want its help writing, like some kind of horrible, latter-day Clippy.

Forced mass-adoption of this stuff by consumers is here, now, demanding our approval, attention, and precious time. A public tech demo exists to impress, and the Copilot Gaming Experience does not. Doom on a calculator, but we had to boil a lake or two to get it and are being told it's the future of games. I reject this future. Not only do I find it philosophically and ethically repugnant, it also made my tummy hurt.

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Tabletop wargame BattleTech is getting its first real alternate universe in its 40 year history, and it's a pretty obvious one: If you have a giant robot, well, why should it not fight a giant monster?

BattleTech: Gothic is an alternate timeline for the world of BattleTech, one where endless and unrestricted warfare among the great houses of the Inner Sphere has led to a scorched human landscape stalked not just by giant mechs, but by Abominations—"horrible creatures of amalgamated flesh and steel."

The world of Gothic will be familiar to BattleTech fans, though changed. It has the same Inner Sphere setting but with the names just a bit altered and the cultures twisted by the horrors of continual warfare—in a way, it seems like this world of BattleTech has been consumed by unrestricted warfare in the way that the default BattleTech setting's noble space-pilots have set up their entire society to avoid.

The first big product release will be some pretty nifty spike-and-organic-bits versions of classic battlemechs in a starter box for Gothic. They're pretty suitable for what you'd imagine them to be: Grimmer, more stylized versions of the smoother military machines that hit the field in a normal BattleTech game. Presumably some models of full-on, not just hybrid-mech-looking, Abominations are coming in a future release.

"BattleTech: Gothic is the first release of the Continuum Series. With these releases, we aim to explore different versions of what the BattleTech universe could have been. The creative minds behind BattleTech and especially Gothic have plenty of ideas and we can’t wait to share them in the future," says developer Catalyst Game Labs.

The world of BattleTech: Gothic is spearheaded by Herbert A. Beas II, an author who has been involved with BattleTech books in one form or another since the late 1990s.

You can learn more about BattleTech Gothic on Catalyst Game Labs' website and download a lore primer on its world via Facebook.

2025 games: This year's upcoming releases **
** Best PC games: Our all-time favorites
Free PC games: Freebie fest
Best FPS games: Finest gunplay
Best RPGs: Grand adventures
Best co-op games: Better together

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Challenged to a supernatural game by the sultan, you have to fulfill the conditions of a mystical game that demands you commit dreadful sins: Carnality, Bloodshed, Conquest, and Extravagance.

You'll have to desperately scheme, manage your limited resources, and explore the depths and heights of society to win a stay of execution—and to survive the consequences of the horrible things you did to win.

Sultan's Game is a really cool narrative card game, a kind of bleak, terrible world where your poor character must sink to lowest lows in a desperate bid to survive a kind of gruesome One Thousand and One Nights fantasy world of mystics and madmen.

The game's not only very pretty, but it strikes a balance between resource management and surprising narrative events. It's a little pop-up dark fantasy story generator that you're in charge of keeping running.

PC Gamer's Robin Valentine got a look at it earlier this year and said that it'd "turn you into a desperate sociopath… uh, in a fun way."

"[It's] a game not just about doing bad things to excess, but having to work really hard at it. Success requires sustained manipulation, scheming, murder, and… well, a pretty in-depth knowledge of the local brothel. You're essentially being forced to be a monstrous, decadent sociopath against your will and beyond your means," he said.

A few days after launch, the publisher and developer announced that Sultan's Game has sold more than 100,000 copies, and it has Very Positive reviews on Steam as of press time.

Developer Double Cross is working on updates including Steam Workshop support, automation for repetitive events, better card organization, more music and sound effects, and sensitive content filters for some of the darker storylines.

You can find Sultan's Game on Steam for $25, though it's 10% off until April 10.

2025 games: This year's upcoming releases **
** Best PC games: Our all-time favorites
Free PC games: Freebie fest
Best FPS games: Finest gunplay
Best RPGs: Grand adventures
Best co-op games: Better together

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(Image credit: Xbox Game Studios)

2025 games: Upcoming releases **
** Best PC games: All-time favorites
Free PC games: Freebie fest
Best FPS games: Finest gunplay
Best MMOs: Massive worlds
Best RPGs: Grand adventures

On an average day about a dozen new games are released on Steam. And while we think that's a good thing, it can be understandably hard to keep up with. Potentially exciting gems are sure to be lost in the deluge of new things to play unless you sort through every single game that is released on Steam. So that’s exactly what we’ve done. If nothing catches your fancy this week, we've gathered the best PC games you can play right now and a running list of the 2025 games that are launching this year.

Elroy and the Aliens

Steam ‌page‌ ‌
Release:‌ April 3
Developer:‌ Motiviti

Elroy and the Aliens is another harkening back to the simple days of pointing 'n' clicking, with an art style reminiscent of '90s cartoons (the protagonist is a dead ringer for Shaggy). It follows the zany adventures of rocket scientist Elroy and journalist Peggie as they investigate the suspicious disappearance of the former's father. This quest inevitably takes them into far flung space, which is naturally full of amusing aliens and taxing puzzles. This is a big adventure: with over 60 characters and 60 locations, it'll take you roughly 10 hours to complete. If you've got insatiable hunger for '90s nostalgia, this should help block out the present for a spell.

Gnomes

Steam‌ ‌page‌
Release:‌ April 5
Developer:‌ Dystopian

I adore the art style of this turn-based tower defense roguelike, which is all about gnomes decimating droves of goblins. Not just for fun: the gnomes need to protect their crops, ideally holding out long enough to warrant the attention of the goblin king, whose death is a requirement to win. Thankfully the gnomes are a wise bunch, because not only are they adept at exploiting the benefits of relics and the environment, but their plants have abilities of their own too. This looks debilitatingly more-ish; definitely something to investigate if you're ready to finally uninstall Loop Hero.

LiDAR Exploration Program

Steam‌ ‌page‌ ‌
Release:‌ April 3
Developers:‌ KenForest

LiDAR Exploration Program is about a poor soul stuck in a perfectly dark world. No biggie though, because this poor soul has a lidar scanner for some reason, which is a real world tool that uses light to measure the dimensions of spaces. Using the scanner, you'll substantiate the world as you explore, encountering mysterious structures and bizarre objects along the way. There are horror elements here, and the resemblance to Scanner Sombre is very obvious (the dev gives it a shout out), but there are some neat ideas wrapped in an eerie 'n' icy atmosphere.

Emperor of the Fading Suns Enhanced

Steam page
Release:‌ April 5
Developer:‌ Holistic Design, Inc.

First released in 1997 in a fairly buggy state, Emperor of the Fading Suns is a 4X strategy that has grown a small but passionate following ever since, mostly thanks to the remedial work of modders. It's easy to see why its players loved it: it's a strange hybrid of science fiction and fantasy that drastically tweaks a lot of the systems that had, by the mid-'90s, become rote in the 4X genre. This 'enhanced' edition has "new features, modernized gameplay, and immersive visuals designed to expand on the already treasured strategy game". There's a demo too, if the prospect of a '90s 4X feels a bit intimidating.

Vaporwave Pinball

Steam‌ ‌page‌ ‌
Release:‌ April 5
Developer:‌ Jamie D, Mixtape Games UK

It's vaporwave pinball.

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A couple of months ago PC Gamer's Joshua Wolens bemoaned the state of this world with regards to how there is not in fact an elaborate remaster or remake of Oblivion available to him. He was consoled, however, by the fact that some indies were making an entire slew of jam games based on Oblivion's uh, polarizing, persuasion wheel. (It's bad, actually. You can watch a little video of it.)

Well, the game jam's runtime is over and it… actually produced some really good, weird ideas for games. These were all made in a week of total chaos by indie developers—which is to say they're proof of concept, not finished games. But they're free, cute, and fun.

One of the best is Blade & Wheel, a game that twists the wheel into a method of going on a heroic journey to battle monsters. The wheel's elements become things like Attack and Struggle during combat, or Meander, Move, and Rush during exploration.

There's also the rather clever ObliviGun, which retitles the now rather ancient joke about Fallout 3 just being Oblivion With Guns into a little hardcore boomer-esque shooter where your wheel-powered gun just can't ever really be relied on to shoot in the way you expect it to because you've got to rebuild its properties via wheel every time you reload it.

There's a lot more that's cool too. There's one about fighting demons using your wheel-driven office productivity software. There's one about the wheel being a magic circle. There's one pretty straightforward one about befriending weirdo cryptids via wheel. There's one about cooking chili using the wheel. There's one about engine flywheels and I'll bet you can figure out where the wheel is in there.

There's even one made just for me, specifically, about the beautiful and perfectly engineered control systems of vintage spacecraft. It's called Reaction Wheels. Obviously.

You can find all of these and more on itch.io's wheeljam page.

2025 games: This year's upcoming releases **
** Best PC games: Our all-time favorites
Free PC games: Freebie fest
Best FPS games: Finest gunplay
Best RPGs: Grand adventures
Best co-op games: Better together

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Rust is, famously, an unforgiving affair, a survival game where someone murdering you and stealing everything you own is also known as 'Tuesday'. But Facepunch's open-world cruelty simulator does have at least one merciful bone in its emaciated, battle-scarred body. In 2021, Facepunch added a softcore mode, which mitigates some of the vanilla game's brutality with features like safe spawning zones and the ability to recover some of your loot upon death.

This mode is also the focus for Rust's latest update, and it appears the grizzled survival game is further mellowing in its old age. As of this update, softcore mode is going even softer, and at least one of the changes may have implications for Rust as a whole.

The update, titled 'Soft Refresh', makes an array of changes to softcore mode, but chief among them is the addition of deployable debris. To be clear, this isn't debris deployed by players. Rather it's debris left over by deployable items (like wooden boxes and storage barrels) when they are destroyed.

How does this feature make softcore mode easier? In two ways, actually. First, destroyed deployables can be repaired, rather than having to be crafted again from scratch. Second, these wrecked storage items only drop half their contents. The other half remains safely trapped inside the wreckage/detritus/smouldering pile of leftover slag, and can only be accessed by their owner.

In other words, a raid on your base no longer results in you losing everything. Now you merely lose half of everything. This is also the feature which may have broader ramifications for Rust. As Facepunch notes in its Steam update, "Whilst this feature is only applied to the softcore game mode, it's a bit of an experiment, and we may bring it over to the vanilla game in future."

(Image credit: Facepunch Studios)

On the subject of halves, the update to softcore mode also alters respawning, so players now spawn with 50% of their inventory intact by default. This 50% is also spread across all stacked items, rather than just randomly selecting half of your inventory's contents. "No more sprinting to Outpost, hoping your stuff didn’t get looted, and waiting around to reclaim your bits and pieces," Facepunch writes. "The system is now faster, cleaner, and more forgiving."

Other changes to softcore mode include a 25% reduction in all bullet damage, an increase on upkeep on doors to "discourage massive sprawling bases", and a change to how sleeping bags work, so that players get a one-shot respawn on them even after they've been destroyed.

While the update's focus is mainly on softcore mode, there are a few changes that apply more broadly. The main one, though, is that bees have been nerfed. Bees were introduced in Rust's last update, letting you create beehives and craft bee grenades. But it seems the world's best insect was a little too effective in both making honey and stinging your enemies to death. As of this update, bees now create less honeycomb and are sensitive to temperature changes, while damage taken from bee stings now depends on how much clothing you're wearing.

Finally, the update provides a glimpse of Rust's upcoming new Jungle biome. This environment will facilitate new early-game weapons, and also feature "a whole cast of deadly new wildlife including crocodiles, snakes, and more." Presumably, this added menagerie also includes tigers, given the screenshot of one peering through some foliage that I added above. Facepunch doesn't specify when the jungle biome will launch, but it's apparently in its final development stages, with a public test kicking off later this month.

2025 games: This year's upcoming releases **
** Best PC games: Our all-time favorites
Free PC games: Freebie fest
Best FPS games: Finest gunplay
Best RPGs: Grand adventures
Best co-op games: Better together

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Speaking to Nightdive founder Stephen Kick and VP of business development Larry Kuperman at this year's Game Developers Conference, I was curious about how it felt to be returning to System Shock 2 for the studio's upcoming remaster. After all, I had a loose understanding that Shock 2 is the game that kicked off Nightdive in the first place.

Kick recounted the unlikely story of how he found himself making deals to revive a dead franchise, and also supplied a detail I'd never known before: For the longest time, the rights to System Shock were in the hands of an insurance company that had no idea what to do with them.

"Initially it was just because I couldn't get it to run right," Kick said of his System Shock 2 quest. After some time spent working for Sony Online Entertainment, he and his girlfriend quit to go on a driving tour of Central America. "I brought a netbook⁠—just small, compact⁠—and the only things I could get to run on it were classic PC games."

But he couldn't get his physical copy of System Shock 2 to work, while a digital version was absent from the GOG storefront, then still spelled out as "Good Old Games."

"I started casually trying to figure out what happened to Looking Glass, where did the rights end up," Kick said. "And the search led to a G4 TV article that I found on the Wayback Machine, about how when Looking Glass went out of business, the rights went to an insurance company in the Midwest called Star Insurance.

"I looked them up and sent an email to their general counsel, which is just listed on the website: 'Hey, you guys still have the rights to System Shock.' And they wrote me back almost immediately, but they asked me if I wanted to do System Shock 3. I might have, like, a couple thousand to my name, and I'm in Guatemala, so I wasn't really in the best position to start a triple-A project, but I pitched the idea of re-releasing the original games."

Originally, the rights to the series had been split between Star and EA, with Star getting the IP copyright, and EA the trademark. "That was a strategic thing done by Warren Spector so that nobody could do a System Shock project," Kick explained. "He would tell us that many years later."

Luckily, EA's trademark had just lapsed from lack of use when Kick reached out to Star, so the insurance company had just attained full ownership, but lacked an obvious path forward to take advantage of it.

"I came to them with a business idea that was quick, cheap⁠—by comparison to developing a new triple A game⁠—and that would allow them to own the rights of System Shock," said Kick. "They agreed, and I sent the contract to GOG, because they didn't believe me when I told them I had got it."

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(Image credit: Larian Studios)

2025 games: Upcoming releases **
** Best PC games: All-time favorites
Free PC games: Freebie fest
Best FPS games: Finest gunplay
Best RPGs: Grand adventures
Best co-op games: Better together

"[Former GOG SVP Oleg Klapovskiy] didn't believe that Steve had the rights. Steve had gone in through the support email," Kuperman explained. "That gets forwarded to Oleg, saying, 'Hey, this guy says that he has the rights to System Shock.'

"Oleg writes back, saying, 'He's probably full of shit. It's probably all bullshit.' That gets forwarded back to Steve. Oleg is a man of few words. Most of them are obscene."

"He still doesn't believe me to this day that I just emailed and asked," Kick said. "He thinks that I have family working at Star, or that there was some kind of conspiracy, because [GOG] had been trying to get the rights for years."

Subsequently, Kuperman would join Nightdive and go about securing the remaining rights to the series held by Star Insurance, and the System Shock series has been undergoing a bit of a renaissance under Nightdive.

In addition to the upcoming System Shock 2 remaster arriving on June 26, the studio's ground-up remake of the first game was one of our favorite releases of 2023⁠—we gave it a "best remake" award even going up against the likes of the Resident Evil 4 remake. Nightdive hasn't spoken definitively about what's next after Shock 2, but I'm champing at the bit to hear more.

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Against the Storm is one of the best city-builders of recent years, taking the SimCity cycle of building cities destined to be destroyed by natural disasters and infusing it with a roguelike structure, such that the death of your city is merely a part of the game, rather than the end of it. Yet alongside this, one of the key secrets to its success is the diverse array of anthropomorphic animals—the citizens of your civilization in this grim fantasy realm—you have to manage.

Each of the game's animal races has unique needs and desires, which can diverge wildly and outright contrast with other species' requirements, as Len Hafer noted in her review. "Beavers, for instance, are fancy little lads who love tea parties and a good vintage of wine. They're also quite hard to please. Lizards, on the other hand, delight in munching on beef jerky and engaging in recreational combat. It's rare to be able to please all of the species in your settlement, so you usually have to choose which ones to favor."

Now, developer Eremite Games has offered a glimpse of the game's next DLC, which will further complicate balancing your citizens' needs with the addition of a new species—Bats. According to the developer's Steam blog "bats are stern and fiercely devoted people. They take pride in enduring what breaks others and cannot stand being favored. Bats excel at metallurgy but find no particular comfort in any type of work." That last bit sounds just like me, except for the metallurgy part.

In all seriousness, bats sound like they're designed to be a more challenging species to play with, one where you'll have to pay close attention to their needs, making sure you give them what they require without making them feel special. The addition of bats to Against the Storm also marks a major milestone for the game's development, as Eremite notes. "With this DLC, we’ll complete the species roster we’ve envisioned for the game ever since Bats were first introduced during the community vote a little over two years ago."

Bats aren't the only new feature coming to the DLC: It will also add a new biome, though Eremite doesn't specify what this biome is. As well as this paid update, Eremite is working on a free content update that will coincide with the DLC's launch, though again, the developer doesn't provide any details regarding what the free update will include.

There's also no set date for the launch of either the free update or the DLC, although Eremite does state that it's still "months away". A time-limited open alpha of the DLC will commence in 4-6 weeks' time. You can find out how to participate in that here.

2025 games: This year's upcoming releases **
** Best PC games: Our all-time favorites
Free PC games: Freebie fest
Best FPS games: Finest gunplay
Best RPGs: Grand adventures
Best co-op games: Better together

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Bill Petras, a veteran of Blizzard Entertainment with a career spanning over 30 years in the games industry, has died. The news was shared to LinkedIn by Petras' friend and colleague, former Blizzard cinematics director, Harley D. Huggins II. Petras is survived by his family, who are planning a celebration of life for Petras in the coming days.

Petras' earliest recorded credits in the games industry were with developer GameTech in the early '90s⁠—he's credited on such deep cuts as Ripper, Star Crusader, and BloodNet. Petras' first project with Blizzard Entertainment was the original StarCraft, where he was credited with storyboard, 3D, and cinematic art.

Petras notably served as art director on World of WarCraft for its original release in 2004. WoW iterated on Warcraft 3's visual identity to create an extremely influential art style not only in videogames, but fantasy writ large: WoW's DNA found its way into comics and tabletop, with both Dungeons & Dragons' fourth edition and Pathfinder taking visual cues from the transformative MMO.

Petras left Blizzard in 2005 to co-found Red 5 Studios, but returned in 2010 and oversaw the art of yet another massively influential Blizzard game, Overwatch. In 2017, Petras gave a GDC talk about Overwatch's art where he revealed that Torbjorn, of all characters, was one of the first, most crucial character designs the team set in place after scrapping the Titan MMO concept and pivoting to Overwatch.

"Billy and I started at Blizzard the same week and were close friends for 28 years," Huggins wrote on LinkedIn. "I will miss our regular, long, rambling conversations about life, game dev, games, art, comic books, toys, monster movies and Conan. He will be deeply missed by me and all who knew him." Huggins signed off with one quote from Thomas Campbell's poem Hallowed Ground, and one from the legendary Hyperborean warrior himself: "I am Conan, and I am not afraid of death."

2025 games: This year's upcoming releases **
** Best PC games: Our all-time favorites
Free PC games: Freebie fest
Best FPS games: Finest gunplay
Best RPGs: Grand adventures
Best co-op games: Better together

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Balatro-focused YouTube channel Balatro University has shared a video describing their personal experience with YouTube age restricting videos about the game, with the given reason being its alleged depiction of gambling. Balatro creator LocalThunk has even commented on the situation, frustrated by the continued mischaracterization of his game.

On March 19th, YouTube instituted a TOS change for creators, with "depictions or promotions of online casino sites or apps" now liable to be age-restricted. That's a fairly common-sense change, but Balatro U (go fightin' Jokers!) and other Balatro-focused channels have found themselves caught in the crossfire.

Crucially, age restriction is a bit of a death sentence for a video, severely limiting its potential to be recommended to viewers via YouTube's algorithm. A recurring problem on the platform is creators having perfectly innocuous videos age-restricted, seemingly for no reason and with little recourse for appeal. Popular speedrunning historian Summoning Salt ran into just such a situation with a video about Mega Man.

The particularly maddening thing here is that Balatro is not an "online casino site or app," and characterizing it as one is an act of almost willful ignorance. It's no more or less a game of chance than other deck builders, and I'd wager the issue is Balatro's use of the standard 52-card deck and playful evocation of casino kitsch getting caught up in some algorithmic content moderation dragnet.

It's the same struggle that Balatro had with European ratings board PEGI, which had insisted on slapping Balatro with an 18+ classification before finally relenting in February. But the heavily automated black box of YouTube makes a similarly happy ending in this situation much less likely.

Balatro University criticized the uneven application of the new rules on Balatro content, with only a sixth of their videos getting age-restricted. They also explained the Kafkaesque runaround of trying to appeal an age restriction, and how it seems impossible to talk to an actual person and get a clear, personalized answer at any point in the process.

Balatro creator LocalThunk has even weighed in on Bluesky, understandably annoyed that this just keeps happening. "Good thing we are protecting children from knowing what a four of a kind is and letting them watch CS case opening videos instead," he wrote, referencing the gambling-adjacent mini economy around Counter-Strike weapon skins.

As one of those geriatric millennials exposed to the rough and tumble, aughts internet at too early an age, I'm probably the wrong guy to comment on this, but a new wave of draconian, ham-fisted "won't somebody think of the children" content moderation increasingly looks like a real threat to an open, usable internet. See also the proliferation of ID verification laws in right wing-controlled states in the US.

2025 games: This year's upcoming releases **
** Best PC games: Our all-time favorites
Free PC games: Freebie fest
Best FPS games: Finest gunplay
Best RPGs: Grand adventures
Best co-op games: Better together

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Board game publishers may be lamenting the end of the tabletop boom—the golden age of board gaming that has filled my weeknights with games like The Quacks of Quedlinburg and Darktide—but I don't expect the industry to topple overnight. Middle-class Catan bros will choke down a lot of price hikes to get their cardboard fix, and Kickstarters for expensive boxes of fancy plastic are probably here to stay for a while yet.

Like, for example, the upcoming board game Tomb Raider: The Crypt of Chronos, launching on Kickstarter next month. In this game for one or more players, renowned animal-murderer Lara Croft searches the island of Kairos for "an artifact said to hold the reins of time" that will definitely not unleash a supernatural disaster when uncovered.

It sounds kind of like Citizen Sleeper in that Lara has a pool of dice that can be assigned to different actions each turn, like exploration and crafting. How does crafting work in a board game? I assume it's as abstract as it is in most videogames. Maybe you have to kill and skin the bear to make Lara's sweet bomber jacket.

The bear is apparently a boss enemy that is able to regenerate, while the standard enemies are gun-toting mercenaries sent by Natla Tech who are after the artifact for nefarious ends. Also, there's Roman legionnaires and Lara's ancient enemy, some dogs.

All are represented in lovingly detailed plastic, though they're standing on too many tactical rocks for my liking. Almost every base seems to include a fallen pillar and/or a small mine's worth of ore so the character can dramatically pose with one leg raised.

Apparently Tomb Raider: The Crypt of Chronos will have two modes of play, with Adventure Book Mode as a series of 20–60-minute story missions while Campaign Mode is a kind of open-world free roam through random locations, a full campaign of which will take roughly three hours to complete.

This isn't the first Tomb Raider board game, with Tomb Raider Legends pitting four classic-look Laras against each other several years ago. That was published by Square Enix, however, while Tomb Raider: The Crypt of Chronos is the work of licensee Iconiq Studios, previously responsible for tabletop games based on They Live and Saw, as well as a line of figurines based on characters from Silent Hill 2, Street Fighter 5, and so on. It'll go live on Kickstarter on May 27.

Dress to Impress codes: Get fast fashion
Blue Lock Rivals codes: Gear for the pitch
Blox Fruits codes: Double XP and free stats
Anime Reborn codes: Free gems and traits
Fisch codes: Bring the best bait
Arise Crossover codes: Beat 'em up gear

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Unity has not been having the greatest time in recent years, much of which is down to its former CEO John Riccitiello. Calling developers "fucking idiots" didn't seem a wise move when your business depends on, erm, developers, but that was nothing next to Unity's plans for a mooted runtime fee that would see game makers charged for their games being booted up.

The reaction against the runtime fee was horror swiftly followed by unanimous anger, forcing Unity into a total climbdown and Riccitiello to fall on his sword. It's fallen to new CEO Matt Bromberg to rehabilitate the company's image and win back some developer goodwill, and he's recently been on the interview circuit saying very sane things like "you can’t have a business where we’re [fighting our] customers. That’s insane."

In an interview with The Verge Bromberg is asked about the metaverse, and I kinda like the cut of this guy's gib.

"I was never a massive believer in the metaverse during that period of time," says Bromberg. "I’ll tell you why: Because, as a game maker, I experienced all those new platforms and just thought they were garbage. And I thought, 'This looks like the games we tried to make 15 years ago. There is no way that’s a sustainable consumer experience.' All sorts of metaverse companies—I was completely confused by them."

Bromberg goes on to distinguish between the metaverse as Mark Zuckerberg would describe it, and huge live service platforms like Roblox and Fortnite that are often described as metaverses (erroneously in my opinion). These experiences with millions and often tens of millions of players "in some ways [are] the fundamental feature of the videogame business right now—80 percent of the people are deeply invested in this experience that they’ve been playing for years."

He's not wrong about that: a recent GDC talk estimated that 92% of PC gamers are spending their time on games that are more than two years old. Bromberg reckons one of the big challenges now is convincing players to try something new, "but I wouldn’t confuse the failure of the metaverse with some lack of sustainability in major live service gaming."

(Image credit: SOPA Images / Getty)

As for all the gear that comes with the metaverse, the headsets we'll apparently be wearing all day and hand controllers etcetera, Bromberg doesn't mince his words about some of what we've seen: but reckons it's only a matter of time before AR glasses of some sort hit the right form factor.

"Put aside the idiocy of some of the metaverse stuff," says Bromberg. "The future, to some degree, is going to be tied to massive consumer adoption of peripherals, or maybe that’s an old-fashioned word for it, but new devices. I’m an enormous believer in AR [...] I have no doubt that a couple of years from now everybody’s going to be wearing AR glasses. The combination of AI and voice, which enables really easy interactions with the form factor, the battery life that is now possible, and the ability to overlay information and services in front of your eyes, to me, is obviously going to explode.

"And we’re going to look back and think about the time when we kept reaching into our pockets to pull out this thing for everything, it’s going to seem quaint. But it takes a long time to get true mass consumer adoption of these devices because it all has to be perfect. But once it hits, it explodes."

Hmmm. I don't disagree with the hardware side of what Bromberg's saying: I wear glasses, and putting them on in the morning barely registers. But it seems to me there's also a philosophical side there where you're choosing to have the whole world mediated, all the time, through technology. And much as I love tech, I'm not sure how appealing that is.

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First reported by Gaming on Linux, backend updates to the yet-to-be officially announced Neverwinter Nights 2 Enhanced Edition recorded by SteamDB show that the remaster of Obsidian's 2006 classic is already Steam Deck verified.

The tags on SteamDB were updated a few days ago on April 3, and SteamDB is also how we became aware of the unannounced project in the first place. Infinity Engine and OG NwN Enhanced Edition studio Beamdog has come out and said it's not on this one.

Instead, the EULA tied to the Steam listing mentions Aspyr, which has previously made a name for itself bringing a ton of Star Wars PC classics to modern platforms, including Obsidian's first game, Knights of the Old Republic 2.

This is all great news for me, as I'm not only a big Obsidian sicko, but specifically a Neverwinter Nights sicko. NwN 2's original campaign and expansions Storm of Zehir and Mysteries of Westgate are very dear to my heart.

But its Mask of the Betrayer expansion is on a whole other level. MotB is a strange, unsettling, personal story set in an under-explored corner of the Forgotten Realms, and its thought-provoking writing calls to mind genre classic and RPG forum guy fixation, Planescape Torment.

NwN 2 also, paradoxically, is more in need of a remaster than older RPGs which have already gotten them like the first Neverwinter Nights. NwN 2's technical and graphical ambitions left it a more chunky, finicky game than its predecessor.

The Complete edition currently available on GOG (not Steam) can be frustrating to wrangle. The biggest issue, I've found, is that the UI gets unworkably tiny past 1080p, while it also crashes when swapping resolutions ingame⁠—you gotta do it in an .ini file instead.

Apart from that, some of my dream stretch goals include cleaning up the game's scripting and companion AI, some of which was really borked in the earlier campaigns with the release of later expansions. Cleaned up controls would also be great, and the Steam Deck verification gives me a lot of hope on that front⁠.

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(Image credit: Larian Studios)

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This game has never had proper gamepad support, and though theoretically possible to get it running on Steam Deck already, the current workaround, bastardized mouse and keyboard-via-gamepad scheme you'd have to use really isn't worth it.

Full (or as full as possible) mod compatibility would make this remaster essential. NwN 2 never had as big a scene as the legendary NwN 1, as the new Electron engine's tools were overly complicated in comparison to the sweet spot Aurora engine toolset for the first game, but NwN 2 still has a repository of interesting custom campaigns I'd like to dig into some day.

I'm champing at the bit to do one of my customary, every few years or so full replays of NwN 2 and its expansions, so I'm eager to hear more about this remaster project when Aspyr's ready.

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A Microsoft employee interrupted an address being given by AI CEO Mustafa Suleyman as part of the company's 50th anniversary event, demanding the company "stop using AI for genocide."

The disruption was first reported by The Verge, which also shared video of the incident. It can also be heard in The Verge's full coverage of Microsoft's Copilot presentation, although Ibtihal Aboussad, reportedly the employee who interrupted Suleyman, is out of view.

"You are a war profiteer," Aboussad says as she's escorted out of the room. "Shame on you. You are a war profiteer. Stop using AI for genocide, Mustafa. Stop using AI for genocide in our region. You have blood on your hands. All of Microsoft has blood on its hands."

A February 2025 report by AP said the Israeli military's use of Microsoft and OpenAI technology "skyrocketed" following the Hamas attacks of October 2024, to nearly 200 times higher than what it was the week before the attack. It also notes that Israel's Ministry of Defense is Microsoft's second-largest military customer, behind only the US military.

The Verge shared a copy of an email Aboussad sent to Microsoft employees via numerous internal mailing lists saying that it was that relationship that prompted her to take action.

"My name is Ibtihal, and for the past 3.5 years, I’ve been a software engineer on Microsoft's AI Platform org," Aboussad wrote. "I spoke up today because after learning that my org was powering the genocide of my people in Palestine, I saw no other moral choice. This is especially true when I've witnessed how Microsoft has tried to quell and suppress any dissent from my coworkers who tried to raise this issue.

"For the past year and a half, our Arab, Palestinian, and Muslim community at Microsoft has been silenced, intimidated, harassed, and doxxed, with impunity from Microsoft. Attempts at speaking up at best fell on deaf ears, and at worst, led to the firing of two employees for simply holding a vigil. There was simply no other way to make our voices heard."

Later in her email, Aboussad said she was initially excited to move to Microsoft's AI platform for the potential good it offered in areas like "accessibility products, translation services, and tools to 'empower every human and organization to achieve more'."

"I was not informed that Microsoft would sell my work to the Israeli military and government, with the purpose of spying on and murdering journalists, doctors, aid workers, and entire civilian families," Aboussad wrote. "If I knew my work on transcription scenarios would help spy on and transcribe phone calls to better target Palestinians, I would not have joined this organization and contributed to genocide. I did not sign up to write code that violates human rights."

Microsoft's military entanglements have been met with pushback in the past: In 2019, for instance, a group of Microsoft employees protested the company's $479 million contract to develop HoloLens technology for the US Army; shareholders expressed similar concerns in 2022. But concerns about Israel's ongoing attacks in Gaza are not hypothetical: More than 50,000 Palestinians are estimated to have been killed since October 2023, although that's merely an estimate—researchers say the actual number could be much higher.

Aboussad's email urged employees to speak out by signing a "No Azure for Apartheid" petition, urging company leadership to end contracts with the Israeli military, and ensuring others at the company are aware of how their work could be used.

"Our company has precedents in supporting human rights, including divestment from apartheid South Africa and dropping contracts with AnyVision (Israeli facial recognition startup), after Microsoft employee and community protests," Aboussad wrote. "My hope is that our collective voices will motivate our AI leaders to do the same, and correct Microsoft’s actions regarding these human rights violations, to avoid a stained legacy. Microsoft Cloud and AI should stop being the bombs and bullets of the 21st century."

Not long after Abbousad's protest, a second employee staged a similar disruption during a separate talk being held by current and former Microsoft CEOs Satya Nadella, Steve Ballmer, and Bill Gates.

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"Shame on you all. You’re all hypocrites," Vaniya Agrawal said. "50,000 Palestinians in Gaza have been murdered with Microsoft technology. How dare you. Shame on all of you for celebrating their blood. Cut ties with Israel."

Some in the audience booed, while Nadella, Ballmer, and Gates sat in awkward silence while Agrawal was escorted out of the room. Agrawal also sent an email to company executives, viewed by CNBC, in which she said she's "grown more aware of Microsoft's growing role in the military-industrial complex," and that Microsoft is "complicit" as a "digital weapons manufacturer that powers surveillance, apartheid, and genocide."

"Even if we don't work directly in AI or Azure, our labor is tacit support, and our corporate climb only fuels the system," Agrawal wrote. Like Abbousad, she also called on employees to sign the No Apartheid for Azure petition.

It seems likely that this protest will cost Aboussad and Agrawal their jobs: In 2024, Microsoft fired two employees who organized a vigil at the company's headquarters for Palestinians killed in Gaza.

I've reached out to Microsoft for comment and will update if I receive a reply.

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It's only been a couple of months since Abiotic Factor's Dark Energy update cascaded out of its Black Mesa-ish science lab. But developer Deep Field Games is already heavily into production on the game's next block of content. This week, it provided the first look at the new update, titled 'Cold Fusion', and it's shaping up to be another substantial addition to the Half-Life inspired survival game.

Cold Fusion primarily introduces a new area to the GATE research centre, the residence sector, which is suffering from an unnatural cold snap. "Something is causing residence sector to fall well below optimal living temperatures," writes Deep Field in its Steam update. "The important thing is you must science your way through it to see this journey to an end." The update doesn't specify what challenges you'll face in the sector specifically, but mentions that you'll experience "cold snaps, rolling blackouts and a mysterious black fog" throughout the facility, so I imagine these will factor into exploring the residence sector as well.

(Image credit: Deep Field Games)

From the handful of screenshots Deep Field has shown, the residence sector looks heavily inspired by my favourite part of Half-Life, Office Complex. Half-Life's fourth chapter showed players Black Mesa at its most mundane, which was precisely what set it apart from the phobos labs and slipgate dimensions of shooters like Doom and Quake. I hope Abiotic Factor's residence sector can replicate that everyday, humdrum vibe, and the tiled corridors and tree-lined courtyard shown in Deep Field's work-in-progress screenshots are a promising start.

Alongside this new area, the Cold Fusion update also brings a new upgrade system. Crafting an enhancement bench will allow your survivalist scientists to upgrade weapons, armour, and "a few other item types". The possibilities will be, not endless, but substantial, with Deep Field games declaring "for weapons alone, we have about 15 to 20 permutations in the works." The update will also introduce a new tier of weapons to wield, and allow players to reset their character specs during a game.

Finally, Deep Field is planning some big changes to how enemies will attack your base. "We’ve heard a lot of feedback about base assaults and how they just… Kinda stink," the developer writes. "Portal Storms are working largely as intended, but there are several cases, mostly non- Pest related assaults, where they will simply spawn inside your base or in the same spot over and over."

(Image credit: Deep Field Games)

To address this, the team says it has "done some major overhauls to how bases are detective", with the game's AI now looking for "gatherings" of furniture and "things that seem to constitute your outer walls." The upshot of this should be better, more interesting base assaults. "While this will never be absolutely perfect , we expect assaults to feel a lot more unique and varied, and starting, generally, well outside of your base."

Deep Field doesn't provide any info on when the Cold Fusion update will release. But given the frequency of updates to the game, I reckon it'll arrive sometime in the summer. Moreover, while the studio doesn't specify this, use of phrases like "the road to 1.0" and "see this journey to an end" does make it seem like Cold Fusion will be one of the latter major updates before Deep Field begins preparations for a full launch. No doubt we'll hear more about both Cold Fusion's progress and the plans for 1.0 soon.

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Cozy farm sim games have a problem: We still don't have a good name for them. Sometimes I call them farm sims, but the ones that don't actually have farms are life sims—not to be confused with Sims-like life sims—sometimes I mash them up into farmlife sims, and sometimes they're just games like Stardew Valley when I give up entirely.

None of those things roll off the tongue. More importantly, none of them really capture the whole of the genre. Cozy farming games aren't always set on an actual farm (sometimes it's a graveyard or a workshop) and although they are about life, calling them life "sims" has always felt a little incorrect too. Out of desperation I just call them "games like Stardew" a lot, but sometimes they're really more like Animal Crossing, actually.

Roots of Pacha (Image credit: Soda Den)

Too many other emergent game genres have gone the way of the ugly "game-like" suffix: roguelikes, soulslikes, and even the survivorlikes—though we're workshopping that genre name too.

Stardew-like is worse than all of those combined. Not only will the occasional pedant point out that it should really be Harvest Moon-like—though I'm of the opinion that the honor belongs with the game that eclipsed its own inspiration, not the series whose naming rights snafu makes the legacy of the series a headache to track. It also just sucks to say.

Long after I'd given up thinking this was a solvable problem, the answer came to me—as I was complaining about fishing, of all things. Much as I despise it as a minigame, fishing is one of the core activities of a Stardew-style farming sim. You might call it one of the main pillars of the genre. One of the four big Fs, even.

Stardew Valley

Wait, we have a genre like this already: 4X games. Like Stardew and its ilk, they're a specific subset of a broader genre (strategy games), grouped together by a common set of game systems they share—explore, expand, exploit, exterminate—not one common ancestor like roguelikes or an easy acronym like FPS.

Stardew games have that too. They're a subset of simulation games, neither life sim nor crafting sim nor job sim, but identifiable by a handful of specific elements they pretty universally include. They can be 4F games: farm, forage, fish, friendship.

Or maybe it should be: food, forage, fish, friendship to account for the games that don't actually involve farming. Or perhaps it's a sort of three-out-of-four checklist to identify if a game is "one of those." Look, one way or another I think the 4F thing has legs, alright?

Hello Kitty Island Adventure (Image credit: Sunblink Entertainment)

It has the capacity to capture the Stardew Valley-alikes and the Animal Crossing-inspired games without accidentally lumping in Farming Simulator 25 and The Sims.

But does it actually work? Let's check it against some of my favorite farmlife-y things from the past couple of years and some that are yet to come:

That actually came out even more uniform than I expected. Okay, here are some edge cases then.

What about Rusty's Retirement, the adorable idle game that was one of my favorite cozy games last year? It has farming, but not foraging, fishing, or friendship. It really isn't a Stardew or Animal Crossing-like game, but it does have those vibes. With only one of the 4Fs accounted for is it a 4F-like?

Rusty's Retirement (Image credit: Mister Morris Games)

How about Fallout 76? It's not a Stardew-like game at all in my book, but after adding fishing in an update this summer as it's planned to, it will have all four Fs: farming, foraging for supplies, fishing, and the companion character friendship and romances. That feels like one of those "is a taco a sandwich?" situations.

Maybe the concept of time simulation is important to capture since it's an element that's important, if slightly different, in both Animal Crossing and Stardew Valley style games. Who knows a good 'F' word for "time"?

Game genre name will always be a source of banter and disagreement, but I'm confident that 4Fs are better than the stardewcrossinglike mouthful I've had to write for the past nine years.

Stardew Valley mods: **** Custom farming
Stardew Valley cheats: Farm faster
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It's no secret that Assassin's Creed has been stuck in a bit of a rut for a while. While the series' use of wildly different historical time periods helps add a lot of variety, it's struggled to marry its many disparate systems in a cohesive way. Assassin's Creed Valhalla makes this more obvious than ever with a wealth of issues, chief of which are a bloated open world and meandering story. That's exactly what makes Assassin's Creed Shadows such a pleasant surprise—it feels like a complete course correction.

While there are still some frustrating issues that continue to plague the series, it feels like Shadows might have stumbled onto a winning formula that could carry the series forward—a true fusion of the newer RPG games and the classic Assassin's Creed formula.

(Image credit: Ubisoft)

The 2017 release of Assassin's Creed Origins changed the series' entire trajectory, and that new RPG formula has been iterated on ever since. But Valhalla, arguably, took that formula too far, and became too gratuitous in trying to be an expansive open-world RPG, shunting sneaky, assassin shenanigans off to the side.

Valhalla's real downfall is that it's simply trying to do too much, it's butter spread too thin over a piece of toast. It's a decades-spanning Viking epic; a free-form open world full of icons, activities and things to collect; an action RPG with the vestiges of a stealth system; and then there's the sections where you're not even playing Eivor.

It's easy to feel overwhelmed—the dozens of icons and color-coded spheres on your map, the intricate web of hundreds of abilities, and the meandering plot lines that feel like five seasons of a TV show crammed into a game.

(Image credit: Ubisoft)

More often than not these activities and stories don't feel like they're contributing to the core narrative. They feel separate, and unfortunately because of that, like a waste of time. By trying to maximize all of the RPG elements of Origins and Odyssey, Valhalla ended up feeling unfocused and scattered, and that's a real shame considering there's some strong story moments near the end—it's just the 100 hours to get there don't feel worth it.

Coming into Shadows, that created a major question: would Assassin's Creed continue down the RPG path or go back to basics? The answer's a bit complicated, and while Shadows doesn't fix all of the problems that have been there in the past few games, it provides a blueprint for how the series can, and should, evolve.

Shadows feels like it directly addresses that unconnected feeling of Valhalla—there's a deliberateness behind Shadows that gives it an edge. Exploration activities like shrines give you knowledge points to unlock more skills. Side quests can lead to new allies joining your forces, hints to uncover assassination targets, resources to expand your base. Shadows focuses on a core set of ideas and mechanics, and makes sure to expand everything out of those handful of concepts. This even applies to the combat itself.

(Image credit: Ubisoft)

In Valhalla, there were dozens of abilities you could unlock, and upgrades to strengthen those abilities—but you had to find hidden books to do so. But in Shadows those ideas are streamlined. Most abilities specifically apply to particular weapons, meaning you can sink ability points into the murderous tools you enjoy using the most. But the use of knowledge points means you can have a more satisfying progression by simply exploring the world and engaging in its activities as you come across them. You don't need to seek out specific objects to unlock abilities, and smaller skill trees mean you won't get locked out of some upgrade because you've only been investing in one side of the network of skills.

Even the way the story plays out feels more thoughtful—a clear expansion of ideas that were introduced in Assassin's Creed Mirage.

Even the way the story plays out feels more thoughtful—a clear expansion of ideas that were introduced in Assassin's Creed Mirage. Instead of the normal quest log you have a network of character icons, laying out a clear map of who's involved in this story and what their role is.

Quests are then attached to these portraits, letting you select quests by who's involved—whether that's an ally you want to help, or a member of the shadowy organization you're hunting down. These assassinations take you to the various regions of Shadow's feudal Japan, creating a sense of the main story progressing while you uncover more of the world. You can tangibly feel the narrative progression accompanying the exploration.

(Image credit: Ubisoft)

Even the likes of Origins and Odyssey struggled to keep that sense of momentum up—those games had all these interesting systems and assassination targets, but they didn't feel intrinsically linked to that main experience. They were simply side objectives, plain and simple.

While it's a clear step in the right direction, there's still a handful of troublesome elements that Shadows can't seem to drop. An explosive opening hour moves into a surprisingly slow Act 1—with one of the game’s dual protagonists, Yasuke, not even appearing again for nearly six hours. It’s a bizarre choice that halts the momentum set up by the opening, and a lot of those compelling exploration elements, and the variety offered by two characters, don’t become apparent until you’ve played quite a bit of the game. It feels like a hump you have to get over, in order to get to the good stuff.

While Valhalla's scattershot approach was detrimental, games of this scale still need a lot of variety to justify their immense size, they just need to be cohesive. Shadows has that cohesion, but it can also feel repetitive. The map is, once again, vast, and Ubisoft just hasn't created enough distinct diversions to fill it. Rhythm minigames and optional treasures break up the flow at first, but after you’ve done those a dozen times across 60 hours, it doesn’t feel fresh anymore.

(Image credit: Ubisoft)

Instead of doing the exact same thing in a dozen locations, there could be variation layered into each one—whether that’s in the form of more narrative context, or slightly different gameplay mechanics.

The same can be said for Shadow’s approach to assassination. There’s a ton of targets to take down, but the formula, over and over, is infiltrate a castle and take the target down, either with strength as Yasuke or stealth as Naoe. The two playable characters should add variety to these hunts, but it pales in comparison to the black box design of assassination missions in previous games. The foundations of a new formula is there in Shadows, but it could be drastically improved upon with more hand-designed assassination missions that have unique settings, mechanics, or objectives.

(Image credit: Ubisoft)

Shadows drastically improves the problems of Valhalla by making its world and activities feel more united and relevant to each other, but rather than finding perfection, it feels like this is the starting point of something that needs to be refined moving forward.

Assassin's Creed Shadows doesn't redefine the franchise like some may have wanted, but it does feel like Ubisoft is trying to find a middle ground that can appeal to both camps of players. Valhalla veered too far into RPG territory, and Assassin’s Creed Mirage went back to basics to middling results. This time, Ubisoft has tried to keep the issues inherent in both games in mind, and while it still has issues, it finally feels like Assassin’s Creed knows what it wants to be again.

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In late 2022, Activision pulled PC gaming into the $70-for-triple-A-games era that the consoles were already living in, becoming the first major publisher on Steam to abandon the old $60 standard for its launch of Modern Warfare 2. Two and a half years later, I'm only now starting to accept the reality of being expected to exchange 70 United States dollars for the privilege of pretending I'm a guy who hits lizards with swords.

It's good that I haven't gotten too comfortable, because a champion for an $80 standard has already come forward.

Earlier this week, in the wake of its Switch 2 showcase, Nintendo revealed that launch game Mario Kart World will cost $80 as a digital purchase. The $450 price of the console itself is stoking its own discourse, with its MSRP in the US expected to rise even higher now that Nintendo has delayed American preorders following the Trump administration's sweeping tariff announcements.

The justification for Mario Kart's price hike is the same that publishers offered for the rise to $70: increasing development costs and inflation. Both of those factors are real and undeniable. It now costs close to a billion dollars to develop a Call of Duty game, and the value of the dollar has fallen by a third in the last decade.

So no, it isn't surprising that games are continuing to get more expensive. But when wages in the US have remained stagnant compared to the steadily rising cost of living, any additional increase—justifiable or not—becomes harder to stomach. Even if it's delightful that Nintendo is letting cows drive now.

Videogames have sometimes been called "recession proof" on the basis that people play them even when money is tight, when at-home entertainment is preferable to expensive nights out anyway. But the industry did contract following the early pandemic boom, with big companies laying off thousands as the bets they made during that brief period failed to pay off.

And meanwhile, the word on the street is that most PC gamers are pretty busy playing the games we already have, thank you very much: According to games industry intelligence firm Newzoo, PC gamers spend 92% of their time on older games.

If you buy a Switch 2, you've effectively committed yourself to buying some new Switch 2 games. But the same can't be said about a gaming PC or Steam Deck, which offer access to loads of free-to-play games, cheap classics, and out-of-the-blue hits like Schedule 1, the $20 indie game that's currently Steam's best seller by revenue.

Even on the higher end, there are options like Baldur's Gate 3, which has a base price of $60 and is still one of the most-played games on Steam after almost two years.

Activision and the other big publishers may be wise to let Nintendo blaze the $80-per-game trail on its own for now. Rockstar could probably get away with any price it wants to set for GTA 6 (whenever it comes to PC, at least), but it's a special case, and things are not looking up for the disposable incomes of Americans. Turn that 7 into an 8 at your own peril, triple-As.

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What does it take to turn someone into a supervillain? According to a few Marvel movies, not much: Tony Stark skipping a meeting or taking over your construction contracts will instantly push you into a career of ruthless supervillainy.

In pixel art action game Vindefiant, it didn't take much to turn someone evil, either:

"In Vindefiant, you play as Alyx, a disgruntled ex-employee on a relentless path of vengeance and destruction," the game's Steam page says. After getting fired from his corporate job, "Alyx unleashes his powers and sparks a path of rage and destruction to get revenge on his former employer."

I know that sounds unsettling and grim, but one look at the trailer below and you'll see it's filled with over-the-top pixelated destruction. Alyx's cartoony superpowers in Vindefiant are a bit reminiscent of metroidvania Carrion: you've got long snaking tendrils that lash out from your body so you can swing and clamber through world like a giant spider, flinging people through windows and into machinery and bashing them into bloody pulps. It's pretty grisly, but hey, you're the villain, right?

The inspiration for Alyx's backstory comes from a real place: the developer's own experience in the game industry.

"In February 2023, I was made redundant from my job in the AAA games industry, and this was the final catalyst that created a prototype in June 2023 that was soon to develop into Vindefiant," developer Jordan Blake of Blakey Games said.

"I went to college to study game design and then Uni, and I dropped out of Uni after being offered my dream job. It was a big risk but exactly what I wanted to do," Blake told me via email. "I was then unfortunately made redundant from that job after half a year and I took the risk and went indie full time."

Blake's job was consumed by the same sorts of layoffs that have become distressingly common in the past several years. "I was affected by mass layoffs, right at the start of my AAA career, and also right at the start of the industry collapsing. It was a very difficult time," Blake said.

I asked if Blake was at all concerned about finding future work in the industry—having now made a game where a guy goes absolutely ham on his former employers for firing him.

"I think when I first announced the game there were some concerns. But as time went on I’m much more of the belief that a studio should be able to recognise the difference between a game and reality," he said.

(Image credit: Blakey Games)

"The experience of being made redundant was merely an inspiration to create a revenge game. But from there the story grew on its own, and Vindefiant has a complete world of its own with different characters and motivations. There’s been a lot of positive reactions from people saying the game is a nice stress reliever, brought some laughter to their day, things like that. That's ultimately what I want from Vindefiant."

I asked if Blake would ever consider another job in a big studio.

"I would consider working for another AAA studio in the future," Blake said, "but I'm much more aware of the reality of AAA game development now, and know not to get so emotionally invested in working as a team, as losing that was tough to deal with."

Blake also said the Vindefiant wasn't specifically made to draw attention to game industry layoffs, "but I like that it’s a byproduct of it. People are struggling. And my heart’s with everyone who’s still looking for a job in the games industry. Stay strong!"

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For me, the name Raphael Colantonio is basically synonymous with immersive sims, which for the record I love deeply. He founded Arkane, headed up Arx Fatalis, Dishonored, and Prey, and then proved immsims could work from an isometric perspective with the excellent Weird West.

So I was more than a little shocked when he said during a recent Quad Damage Podcast (via GamesRadar) that he gave up on the 2023 System Shock remake because, well, it was just "too hard."

The original System Shock, released in 1994, was one of the first games Colantonio tested while at Electronic Arts, which owned publisher Origin Systems. The experience was "fantastic," he said, because he was "a huge fan of Looking Glass," the game's developer; he also, appropriately and correctly, called out the groundbreaking Ultima Underworld, which came out a couple years ahead of System Shock, for helping inspire what would become his "passion for immersive sims."

"I was already hooked when I had a chance to playtest System Shock back then at EA," Colantonio said. "It was like some sort of destiny. I was so lucky, because I could not believe what was happening to me."

Given that formative experience, you might think Colantonio would be a big fan of Nightdive's brilliant 2023 remaster, an outstanding update of the original that we dubbed the Best Remake of 2023. But apparently that's not the case.

"I tried the one that came out a year or two ago," he said. "I got stuck in cyberspace. That gameplay was too hard. I was frustrated by it. But the rest was really cool, until then.

"It was a fun experiment, but it was not the best part of the game. I was avoiding it as much as possible."

In all fairness, the cyberspace bits in System Shock were kind of a hassle. Rejiggered as a Descent-like 6DOF for the remake, they're a big departure from the gameplay of the rest of the game, and for me at least they tended to land more as something I had to do than something I wanted to do.

Still, I can't help feeling a little, well, disappointed. Danny Glover was emphatically too old for this shit, but that didn't keep him from cleaning house when the need arose. Bruce Wayne was a broken-down old man when he kicked Superman's ass. And when the late, great Val Kilmer told Tom Cruise, "The kids need Maverick," well, the kids got Maverick. You know what I'm saying?

Of course, I'm kidding—mostly, anyway. And as someone who's walked away from a game or two because of time-wasting boss fights, a part of me appreciates hearing that other people too sometimes hit a wall in a game they otherwise dig and decide they've got better things to do.

And if nothing else, there's no questioning his commitment to the genre: Following the success of Weird West, Colantonio's WolfEye Studios is now working on a "retro sci-fi first-person" game that sounds like it might just have a little bit of Prey DNA running through its veins. You better believe I'll be jumping on that at the first opportunity.

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Tekken 8 is losing the matchup against its own community right now, with its second season being met with near-universal criticism, tanking its recent Steam review rating all the way to Overwhelmingly Negative.

Currently, only 14% of reviews made in the last 30 days are positive, while its overall rating is still Mixed as Steam has flagged the whole thing as a review bomb incident. I don't know if that's necessarily true, though—sure not every thumbs down is inherently insightful, but it's clear the choices made for season two are not liked.

(Image credit: Bandai Namco)

Some of that boils down to the fact that, as a whole, Tekken 8's direction has been all-in on aggression and offensive gameplay. It couldn't be any more different to Tekken 7 which, by the end of its run, favoured incredibly defensive and turtle-y gameplay, though I maintain that was too far in the other direction.

But the community hasn't exactly been endeared to Tekken 8's more combative mindset, and for a moment, it seemed like Bandai Namco recognised that. Streams leading up to season two's changes seemed to have people convinced that the developer was going to put a greater emphasis on defensive gameplay.

Except, it didn't really do that at all. In fact, it's seemed to do the complete opposite. Characters who seemed to be ripe candidates for nerfs, like Bryan, were instead buffed, with fans feeling as though the roster has largely homogenised into coin-flip movesets rather than diversifying each fighter with distinct weaknesses.

(Image credit: Bandai Namco)

"No-one literally no-one asked for these changes, even new players never asked for more offense in a game that clearly lacks defensive options and is easy to mash buttons and win like in most Tekken games," the top negative review on Steam currently reads.

Steamer and competitive Tekken player IncosiderateRaccoon also left a Steam review which reads: "The developers do not understand the characters they design. They see that the character has strengths and weaknesses and continue to not let them have this weakness. Instead, they homogenize the character to be like the others making them overtuned."

The backlash hasn't died down in the days since the patch's release, which seems to have prompted director Katsuhiro Harada to quickly address the situation on Twitter. "It is clear to me that the result is a disconnect between what the community wants and the tuning results," he said in response to a thread between producer Michael Murray and a myriad of fans.

(Image credit: @Harada_TEKKEN via Twitter)

He continued: "We have our Battle & Tuning team working around the clock to read through all the feedback logs from the community and work on future policies and changes for the better."

It's a relatively short and diplomatic response right now, and I can imagine things aren't very fun at the Bandai Namco offices right now. While the developer has promised to address some game-breaking behaviour—mostly relating to issues with moves from Paul and Jack-8 right now—it's unclear how long it'll take for any major overhauls to fix the stuff people are most upset with right now.

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Terra Invicta, the space 4X from the creators XCOM's Long War mod, was already denser than a black hole when it launched into Steam early access back in 2022. But that hasn't stopped developer Pavonis Interactive from stuffing yet more matter into its strategic singularity where the alien defence of XCOM fuses with the geopolitics of Crusader Kings, with a brand new update landing this week, bringing a host of new features to the hugely ambitious strategy game.

"This update builds on the work done across our beta branches over the past several months," writes Pavonis in its Steam update blog. According to the developer, players can expect "new features, visual upgrades, balance work, and AI improvements across Earth and space."

Chief among these is the addition of exofighters, small ships that can launch from planetary bases and fly into low-Earth orbit. Naturally, Terra Invicta wouldn't be much of an XCOM-alike if it didn't counterbalance this small gift to humanity with a far bigger present for the game's alien menace. The extraterrestrials get two new alien ship classes, named the titan and the lancer, and they can also "deploy a new tier of advanced weapons during the endgame", so, good luck with that, Earth.

Beneath these additions are numerous changes to Terra Invicta's management layer. The update adds 35 new character traits and two new character classes, while nations can now invest in three new development paths—government, environment and oppression. In diplomacy, factions can now agree to share intel with one another, while in combat, players can now reorder formations at the outset of a fight.

The update also makes several improvements to the UI and visuals. The ship designer has been completely overhauled to support clearer shipbuilding workflows while most system interfaces have been updated for improved clarity. The tech tree has also been pruned to improve navigation and readability, and Pavonis has added a full ledger of incomes and costs to help manage your faction's finances.

Finally, there's those adjustments to the AI. Alien factions are now more effective at choosing targets in space, so you'll need to be more careful when arranging orbital defences. To compensate, AI human factions now build fleets more aggressively so hopefully you'll have a bit more assistance when it comes to combat.

You can read the full list of updates here. Remarkably, this update only brings the game version to 0.4.78, suggesting that even after three years of early access, Terra Invicta is still quite a way from realising its full ambitions. Then again, if any studio is familiar with being in it for the long haul, it's Pavonis Interactive.

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