Doctors have confirmed it: It's physically impossible for me to turn my nose up at a mecha action game. But despite this dire prognosis, I've been suspicious of Gundam Rogue Orbit—Bandai Namco's mobile suit action game coming in spring—since it was announced back in June.

The problem is the giant monsters. I'm a Gundam traditionalist. Gundam, to me, isn't about fighting aliens—it's about traumatized child war pilots becoming so psychic that their brains explode. But this week, Bandai found a way to coax me off my high horse: With an extremely sick model kit.

My time at PC Gamer has coincided with my steady descent into Gundam model kit obsession: I'm currently at the stage of manually re-scribing mold lines, so the outlook is grim. As a result, I was particularly prone to react when yesterday, as part of its reveal lineup for the 2026 All Japan Model & Hobby Show, Bandai announced the HG 1/144 Bau Bahlam—a model kit incarnation of a mobile suit we'll see in Rogue Orbit. Look at this thing:

The Bau Bahlam was briefly visible in Rogue Orbit's release date trailer back in September, but these model kit renders are the first time I've properly taken in the design. Here's what jumps out at me:

• It's a mono-eye suit: It's factually proven that Gundam's best guys pilot mono-eye mecha, and the Bau Bahlam feels a lot like a spiritual successor to the Gouf—the classic close-quarters mobile suit first seen piloted by Ramba Ral, also known as the realest moustachioed man in the Universal Century.
• It has a CHAINSAW MACUAHUITL: If you're not familiar, the macuahuitl is a very cool, sword-like Mesoamerican weapon, consisting of a wooden body with obsidian blades embedded along its sides. The Bau Bahlam iterates on that design by swapping out one side of its giant robot-scale macuahuitl with a chainsaw, and the model kit includes a mock pull-cord so it can be posed like its revving the weapon's motor.
• And, for good measure, it's got spiked knuckle plates, because apparently being punched by a giant robot doesn't hurt badly enough on its own.

It's impressively menacing, and—if the mecha customization shown in the release date trailer is any indication—we'll probably be able to use its various bits on our own robot. Hopefully that includes the macuahuitl. It'd be cruel not to.

I still reserve the right to be obnoxious about Rogue Orbit's departure from the traditional Gundam conceptual palette once it actually launches, but rolling out impressive mecha designs like these is an effective way of softening me up in the meantime. Surely, a game willing to give its robots giant Mesoamerican chainswords has to have its heart in the right place.

Gundam Rogue Orbit launches on Steam on March 4, 2027. The HG 1/144 Bau Bahlam kit doesn't have a release date, but it's expected to be available sometime in 2027.

There is no more room in hell—the dead are at the beach. Grand Theft Auto 5, already burdened and bedraggled by the parade of mods I have inflicted on it, must now contend with a new disorder: revenants from beyond the veil.

I have installed ZombieInfection, which adds zombie and, indeed, infection. In any given populated space, you will look about yourself to notice that some of Los Santos' denizens are more bloody and shambling than usual. This is because they have been rejected by the grave.

Whenever these undead pedestrians brush up against other city-dwellers, the latter converts instantly to the horde. Before long, what began as just two or three bloodied weirdos becomes a city-threatening catastrophe, which is both horrifying and a good way of demonstrating the power of exponential growth.

Fortunately, zombies are just as prone to the impact of tornadoes, cars, fire, and so on as anyone else. They're also rather slow. More often than not, they get taken out by one of Los Santos' countless ambient threats before they can do any real damage. A lesson for mayors everywhere.

Shockingly, the curse of the undeath is so strong that it can somehow break my own aura of immortality. Franklin—you may have noticed from previous articles, where he does things like surviving tornadoes and being used as a ramp by cars—is invincible in my GTA 5 install. But let a zombie brush up against him for long enough and he will succumb to the afterworld like any other mortal. It's very scary. Happy Halloween.

If there's an Ace Combat fan in your life, you're likely already aware that it's a very good time for fighter jets dogfighting with arcade intensity. But if you're not already certain that exchanging near-infinite missiles is for you—you should be, but I acknowledge we all find truth at our own pace—Ace Combat 8's $70 price tag might seem a bit too high for a trial run.

Luckily, there's a phenomenal alternative that you can pick up for a fraction of the price: Project Wingman, a celebrated Ace Combat-inspired passion project that's currently available for $12.50 in the Steam Autumn Sale.

Project Wingman began development as a "portfolio piece" for its developers, eventually graduating to a successfully-backed Kickstarter project that nearly tripled its funding goals and ultimately launching on Steam in December 2020. It's an unabashed homage, drawing on the missile-heavy excess of its spiritual predecessors and elevating it to an even greater intensity of near-absurdist air combat.

It's more than an imitation, however: Project Wingman implemented its own roguelike Conquest Mode, where players can battle for territory against enemy squadrons and use the funds they earn in completed missions to build out their own airfleets. And unlike the latest Ace Combat—which had to issue an apology for its lackluster flight stick support—Project Wingman boasts comprehensive HOTAS compatibility for the intensive air combat sickos among us.

It's also got native VR support, if you think your stomach can tolerate the simulation of hammering a high-G turn.

But don't just take my word for it: Project Wingman is currently enjoying an Overwhelmingly Positive rating on Steam, where 93% of its more than 22,000 reviews are favorable. We were marginally less enthusiastic in our own Project Wingman review from 2020 due to an unsated hunger for a more hardcore flight sim experience, but if you're looking for an affordable entry into indulgent jet jousting, you'll be hard pressed to find a better option.

Project Wingman is available now on Steam at a sale price of $12.50.

Warhorse Studios co-founder Martin Klima is just putting it out there: He isn't a fan of the Grand Theft Auto series, and has no interest in playing GTA 6 when it debuts on consoles on November 19. Nonetheless, he's hoping that it's at least as big a hit as everyone expects it to be, for one particular reason: so other studios (like his) can take advantage of the opportunity to increase their prices, a move he believes is necessary for the survival of the industry.

The Grand Theft Auto series "doesn't appeal to me at all," Klima told PC Gamer in a recent interview, and not only that, he doesn't understand why everyone else is so gaga over them either. "I am not going to be playing GTA 6 unless I'm somehow forced to," he continued. "And the reason why it is so popular—it beats me. It's something which I just fail to understand."

Klima emphasized that he bears no ill will toward the GTA games or Rockstar, and in fact he thinks "it's really good that somebody is making these games that are really technologically marvels." And he hopes that when GTA 6 finally does arrive, it lives up to the hype.

The game industry is facing a big problem, in Klima's estimation. Games are ridiculously expensive to make, a trend that is likely to continue for the foreseeable future, as computing power continues to increase and gamers accordingly expect the complexity and scale of new games to match. But the new revenue streams needed to support those endeavours just aren't there: Audience growth has been more or less maxed out, and digital marketplaces are already providing maximal returns on units sold—as Klima put it, "We destroyed retail, and we took all their money."

The Covid-19 pandemic created an "artificial demand" that goosed things for a while, but that's faded away, as evidenced by the subsequent slash-and-burn wrought by industry executives who grossly overextended themselves and are now forcing others to pay the price. So, what's left?

"The last thing you can do is to increase the unit price," Klima said. "That would help a lot, but everybody's scared to death about it. Now, hopefully, GTA will blaze the trail, and it will allow us to increase the cost."

Rockstar and Take-Two are the only ones "who can afford, or who can dare, to increase the price of games, which I think is long overdue and also necessary for this business to survive," Klima said. "So I wish them all the luck."

I find the admission refreshingly honest: Not every game executive out there is willing to admit that they really want to jack their prices but won't do it until they can put the heat for it on someone else. That's typically the sort of thing you hear from industry analysts: In May, for instance, Bank of America securities analyst Omar Dessouky called for a higher price on GTA 6, not just for the good of Rockstar and Take-Two, but for everyone. If the next Grand Theft Auto can succeed at a higher cost, it will "raise the price point for the entire industry," he argued.

After months of speculation, Dessouky got his wish: Take-Two confirmed in June that GTA 6 will launch at $80, $10 more than conventional big-budget games—although by locking a significant amount of content in the more expensive Ultimate Edition, it's effectively a $100 game. That's a hell of a price, but even so I suspect Klima is going to get his wish too—and once the GTA 6 price normalization has set in, we're going to see quite a few more expensive games in 2027 and beyond.

Disregard that other thing I said. Grand Theft Auto 5 no longer only launches in windowed mode. It now only launches in fullscreen mode. We're choosing not to investigate this and are just hoping the whole thing works itself out.

Another thing to disregard: what I said earlier about Hulk: Ultimate Destruction. The greatest game of all time is, in fact, 2009's Prototype, which is about being a really angry flu who can take on the appearance of anyone he eats. You can turn your arm into a sword, you fight some sort of flesh-Christ in Times Square. There's a lot going on.

Anyway GTA 5 is like Prototype now, in that I have installed Shapeshifter V. This allows you to immediately become any pedestrian you happen to stealth attack, to no real discernible end. It is quite novel, though. So an outfit you like? Take it. Also, take the in-fit. You are a great roving blob on a quest to consume and to replicate.

I am fairly certain that the act of becoming a new person doesn't change your voice, so do brace yourself for the piercing screams of Shawn Fonteno to emerge from the throats of old men and young men as they find themselves whipped up in a passing tornado or teleported a few thousand feet into the sky.

But these are bagatelles. Overall, shapeshifting is another fascinating patch in the great GTA 5 tapestry I am forging. I just have to remember to only launch that tapestry in full-screen now. Or maybe tomorrow it will be windowed again. What an adventure.

Gears of War: E-Day is set to launch on October 6, though the early access period is live right now. In the lead-up to launch, The Coalition has posted expanded system requirements for the upcoming bug blast. These include what the game asks of your rig for top performance on the top settings—it's not easygoing, to say the least—but providing your GPU is at least capable of ray tracing, most should get by fine on medium settings.

An RTX 5070 Ti or RX 7900 XT will be required in order to run the game at 4K with the Ultra preset enabled. This is targeting a steady 60 fps, and I would assume, from the 12 GB of VRAM noted in the table below, that one should be able to swing it on a lower-end card with some assistance from upscaling.

Gears of War: E-Day supports DLSS 4.5, AMD FSR 4, and Intel XeSS 3.0 at launch, so we're not short of options there.

Otherwise, GPU demands are similar to those we saw back in June: an RTX 2060 or RX 6600 at a minimum, or an RTX 3060 Ti/6700 XT as recommended. It's only at 4K Ultra that demands seem to really ramp up. Though there is a blanket requirement for a ray tracing-capable graphics card to play Gears of War: E-Day. The devs explicitly say so on the new system requirements table:

"A hardware ray tracing capable graphics card is required. Graphics cards without dedicated hardware ray tracing support are not support."

You can't ask for it to be clearer than that. The game comes with ray-traced reflections, shadows, and global illumination.

CPU demands are pretty wide-ranging: from a mere Ryzen 5 2600X at a minimum, to a Ryzen 5 5600 as recommended. For 4K Ultra, it looks like eight cores or more are best; furthermore, a 3D V-Cache chip is recommended: the AMD Ryzen 7 7800X3D. The studio also suggests an Intel Core i7 14700K. I'd assume newer Arrow Lake chips would suffice, too, despite their slightly weaker performance at times.

RAM requirements are modest enough, even at 4K, at a mere 16 GB. Though only 12 GB are required to play the game. You'll have to make way for the game on an SSD, however, as 115 GB of storage space is required. That does actually need to be a solid state drive, so sayeth the devs.

Sometimes you have to roll up your sleeves and do what's necessary. No sentimentality, no squeamishness—just pure, solution-oriented bluesky thinking. This philosophy once guided Maximilien de Robespierre and now it guides me, in my equally epochal struggle to simply make Grand Theft Auto 5 boot in spite of the vast cargo of mods I have now encumbered it with.

Long story short: the game ceased to launch even in windowed mode, which had hitherto been a surefire way to coax it from its deathbed. After many restarts and a lot of graphics noodling, I was forced to ask myself if this was it. If this was the end of my GTA journey.

Then I started deleting essentially random files from the game's directory and now it works. So let that be a lesson to you.

Now that's out of the way: new mod. This one is called TornadoV and what it does, you see, is it adds absolutely ginormous tornadoes to the already somewhat hectic map of Los Santos (or what remains of it). Hit F5 to configure your tornadoes, hit F6 to spawn them.

That last bit is a point of concern, as F6 is also my button to enable noclip and jet about the map at speed. So I can't do that without summoning a twister now, I guess. Okay.

It's good fun, anyway. Franklin really does go to pieces as the mod stuffs him in an express elevator to God's kingdom. As for the rest of the world, well, with everything in a constant state of explosion, fracas, and breakdown, a slowly migrating whirlwind really just sort of blends in.

Here's that mod to let you play Elden Ring while dressed in Big Walk cosplay you asked for.

There is an anxiety to my movements now. The stench of death lingers about Grand Theft Auto 5 like petrichor after hard, hot rain, and I am nervous that any addition will finally nudge it over the edge.

As we've previously established, the game now only launches properly in windowed mode, and once it churns through all the modifications I have burdened it with, it deposits me in an empty void where Franklin Clinton's house used to be, sending him tumbling through the abyss. Every time I load GTA 5, Franklin screams.

Anyway, I added a new mod. It's called Fortnite Floss Dance [OIV] and it adds "Smooth looping Floss dance, same speed as Fortnite." Convenience is its philosophy: whenever you begin flossing, music will play automatically, so you don't look weird. Don't like the music? Its volume is controlled by a slider. Also, the entire UI is in Arabic, which I did not expect when I downloaded it but which adds something indefinable that I like a lot.

What to say? Franklin flosses now. He flosses indiscriminately, indefatigably. Nothing can deter him. The ongoing chaos of a semi-deleted Los Santos does not faze him. His endlessly perishing and replenishing bodyguards do not concern him. Smash him with a car and he will only right himself and keep going. There is only him, the music, and a command in a language I do not speak but which I must assume reads 'Begin flossing'.

Videogames are so cool.

Do you like videogames

Can a game go on life support? Can it begin, in its dotage, to show signs of the ailment that everyone knows—but would never say—is the thing that will one day bring it down for good?

Grand Theft Auto 5 can. Installing my latest mod, Dynamic Traffic Colours, has brought my installation of the game to the point that it's failing death rolls. It will only launch in windowed mode, now. Trying to fullscreen the game before it has loaded will leave you suspended in the void. Quite literally: you will reside in an eternal black screen from which escape is impossible, unless you hold CTRL+ALT+DEL.

Anyway, once I was in and windowed, I encountered a mystery. The point of Dynamic Traffic Colours is to mix up the hues of Los Santos' cars. I think it is doing that, but with a conservatism that borders on timidity.

For the most part, the cars I see (and, to be fair, many of them more-or-less implode on spawn) are the same humdrum colours you get all the time. But then, like a vision, you get a car that's a garish mix of tints, sailing past you and into the side of a building.

So I don't really know what's going on there. Perhaps it's a lesson to change my thinking. Rather than letting me gorge myself on clown cars, the mod presents them like rare, nourishing treats: oases in the windowed desert. I'm thankful for that.

It's hard to imagine Sonic the Hedgehog without his Jungian counterpart: the gun-toting, swear-uttering Shadow the Hedgehog. But Shadow is a relatively late addition to the series' extensive roster of anthropomorphic animals, debuting long after the Genesis days in Sonic Adventure 2—more than that, he was never supposed to stick around.

According to a report from One More Game, Sonic honcho Takashi Iizuka said at the recent Tokyo Game Show that Shadow's popularity was a big surprise to Sonic Team when SA2 came out. "If you have played Sonic Adventure 2, people may know that Shadow basically sort of died at the end of that game," he said.

"We were originally intending to just kind of 'die the character out' (kill him off), but the character Shadow was just so very popular that we decided to revive him in Sonic Heroes.“ He also noted that Shadow is his personal favorite character, and he wants to give him more of a spotlight in the future.

Not that Shadow has ever gone completely by the wayside. He's one of the only Sonic characters other than, well, Sonic, to have his own videogame (even if it wasn't exactly acclaimed) and he was more recently the star of Sonic X Shadow Generations, the best version of one of the best Sonic games on PC. He also remains a fan-favorite among modders, who have the cure if you thought Sonic Mania ought to have been Shadow Mania. We would also be remiss if we didn't mention that the great Keanu Reeves went on a personal journey to voice the beloved bad boy erinaceid.

Sonic Team's relatively lenient fangame policy follows a long history of granting fan whims a hand on the proverbial wheel. How might the world be different if Shadow had truly died at the end of Sonic Adventure 2? We would have never gotten to see him play Olympic-level sports against Bowser, I guess.

In the 1990s, Spanish videogame label Gaelco was responsible for a string of arcade games (and also electronic dartboards) that hardly anyone outside Spain knows about, bar perhaps the occasional breakout like World Rally.

Retro specialists QUByte Interactive are bringing two of Gaelco's obscurities to Steam this year, resurrecting arcade action games Thunder Hoop and its sequel TH Strikes Back. The genetically engineered and oddly named Thunder Hoop of the title is a hand-blasting hero who fights armies of mutants unleashed by the evil Dr Genbreak.

The original Thunder Hoop, from 1992, is a platformer in which the teenage hero has to fight cartoonish monsters across a cityscape that includes the obligatory sewer and underwater levels. The 1994 sequel ages him up to a beefcake adult who has heard of shirts and thinks they're for cowards, and includes a lot more run-and-gun action against women in latex, and a sequence where he goes Super Saiyan than flies into space for a Gradius-style scrolling shooter bit.

Both games come with modern quality-of-life features like save states and a rewind function, as well as customizable screen filters for that CRT look. The sequel includes local co-op, while the first game's multiplayer mode has to be played in alternating turns. The Thunder Hoop Collection will be available on Steam from October 8.

I've got so many games to play, both for coverage and my own growth and edification. But I can't stop playing Bloodborne. I'm almost done with my first playthrough since I got it working in emulation on my PC, and I want to immediately run it back in New Game +.

I've also got an idea for another build to try: "John Bloodborne," just straight-up recreating the guy from the box art, Saw Cleaver plus Blunderbuss. I was experimenting with the Cleaver before finding Chikage on my main dude, and I've really slept on it all these years.

This isn't my first rodeo, but now that Bloodborne is so close and convenient on my desktop, where I spend so much time for work and fun? This is dangerous.

I have filled a yawning void in the soul of Los Santos. I have returned the heart to a heartless world. I am a teacher, a healer, a gardener of human happiness. My efforts have ensured the general flourishing of society and the wellbeing of the spaceship Earth.

Grand Theft Auto 5 has Working Hotdog Vendors now.

Based on the evidence, Rockstar probably intended the hot-dog-purchasing experience in GTA 5 to work much as it did in GTA 4. Why didn't it? A mystery. Dundee was busy working on horse testicles, or whatever it is they do up there, and forgot.

Anyway, it works now. You can now stroll up to the meat-slingers of Los Santos beach and give them five (thanks Obama) dollars for some sort of fleshy tube in a bun. This is electrifying.

The hot dogs heal you, just like in real life, but my favourite part is how they interact with the random-teleport mod I hucked onto my teetering GTA 5 pile just yesterday. One moment you'll be handing over your money, the next you will be perched atop the not-Hollywood sign, lazily chowing down on your grub. Also, the bodyguards that the celebrity mod has assigned you will keep manifesting in thin air next to you before plunging to their deaths. This does not interrupt the hot dog consumption process.

It's great. GTA 5 should have been like this the whole time. I can only hope that GTA 6, with its budget of 'roughly Saddam Hussein's gold bullion reserves,' will let you fully experience hot dogs.

The first thing I noticed about Ace Combat 8 was the weight. My F-18C's control yoke felt more like the reins of a mustang, guiding my aircraft's control surfaces while afterburners strained against an ocean's worth of air pressure, desperately pleading for a faster climb or a tighter turn as bandits closed on my six o'clock.

If that sounds dramatic, that's because it is. While Ace Combat has always married its arcade flight action to bombastic theatrics, Wings of Theve soars to greater heights than the series ever has before. Most missions had me zig-zagging between deadlocked frontlines, paving the way for allied advances and turning the tide of seemingly unwinnable battles. Diving to street level to unload a salvo of rockets on an advancing enemy tank column will invite fevered cheers from beleaguered comrades, while your retreating foes tremble at your power, cursing your name as you soar back into the safety of the clouds.

That cloud cover is given real mechanical importance by way of a dynamic weather engine that permeates almost every mission. Clouds loom over battlefields like skyscrapers, offering moments of much needed reprieve from relentless missile barrages at the cost of blinding and disorienting you in a sea of ice and turbulence, which enemy fighters will try to capitalize on.

Some of Wings of Theve's best moments were when pursuers boxed me into a dense pocket of cloud cover, forcing me to blindly hammer the throttle and commit to a mach-three, nose-down drag race. I can't count how many times I leaned in close to my ultrawide monitor in a killing trance, trailing the serpentine contrails like the guiding lines of a racing game. Both weather and handling changes massively elevate Wings of Theve's aerial gameplay over previous games in the series, with dogfights eschewing the High-G Turn spam that characterized Ace Combat 6 and 7's campaigns for hair-raising chases.

You'll be menaced by the Republic of Sotoa's ace fighter squadron, "The Shadows", who dramatically proclaim their arrival by broadcasting their traditional hunting songs on open channels. While the Shadows lack some of the individual character of the ace squadrons that characterized prior games, with each one boasting a similar black and gold livery, there's a wonderful variety to the character of the individual pilots. Taking a scalpel to these formations will result in unique dialogue, like the cries of a student who outlived her mentor, or a veteran's stoic acceptance that this is his last flight.

Higher than ever

Wings of Theve also boasts the series' strongest writing to date. I'm thrilled to say that prequel miniseries Hour Zero's decidedly dated portrayal of the Republic of Sotoa (relying on some bygone "War on Terror" tropes) isn't echoed in the game itself—while there's some superficial connections one could draw between them and contemporary MENA countries, Sotoa is far more a technocratic khanate than a rogue terror state.

Fleeing the rapid desertification of their homeland wrought by the industrialization of neighboring superpowers, Sotoa seeks to dismantle and colonize their western neighbors, with an invasion force spearheaded by a fleet of supermassive land battleships—enormous amphibious war machines—protected by kinetic bombardment satellites, the presence of which can be oppressively felt across the game.

An early highlight is when D-Day esque mission to capture a beachhead is dramatically interrupted by a land battleship blanketing the skies in a sheet of constant railgun fire from hundreds of kilometers away, leaving you and your allies madly scrambling in a fevered retreat. Hours later, I saw that same land battleship engage allies in a neighboring province, the barrage of cannonfire lighting up the midnight sky with a sunrise of tungsten and fire.

Above: An encounter with "Podarge" aerial transport crafts.

These superweapon encounters stand tall, even in a series tripping over them—while taking on the land battleship fleet can occasionally feel a little too rigid on replays (with the ability to deal damage gated behind the timing of scripted allied bombing runs) there is an undeniable, spine-tingling spectacle to seeing cities crumble beneath their treads.

More thrilling were the supermassive "Podarge" aerial transport crafts, flying tight like WW2 bombers while laying down thick blankets of flak in overlapping cones of fire. Shrouded by radar-obscuring jamming planes, hunting these leviathan planes again had me hunched inches away from my monitor, shaking off pursuers while attempting to discern the difference between contrails and stratus clouds.

I encountered a pair of Podarges again a few hours later, almost kissing the ground while lugging a payload of land battleships to reinforce the base I was besieging. It's a moment I don't think I'll ever forget—engines roaring, the twin transports deploying a tide-turning payload, then banking, hard, both ships careening past me in a near-miss with such intensity that the strain of their airframes elicited a pained shriek, something halfway between a whale call and a death cry.

Guns, guns, guns

Another area where Wings of Theve improves on its predecessors is its approach to mission design—the prevalence of free-form annihilation missions, where you're tasked with reaching a target score within a limited timeframe, means that air-to-ground specialized airframes are viable choices for most of Wings of Theve's runtime, with nothing like Ace Combat 7's feel-bad mid-mission switchups (Pipeline Destruction, Battle for Farbanti).

You'll be briefed on the locations of local airfields and highways where enemy fighters will launch from, easily negated by a salvo of rockets, bombing-run, or pre-emptive strike from your wingmen. When reinforcements do flow into the mission area, your intelligence officer will announce the make, model, and heading of enemy aircraft into the area. It's a wonderfully immersive quality of life feature that helps keep you immersed in the action, minimizing the time spent deciphering a radar screen.

The hodgepodge squadron of irregulars that you fall into the seat of, Joker Flight, grew on me quickly, deftly responding to my orders, downing whole flights of bandits and crippling superweapon subsystems. Noise is a bona-fide music geek, practicing guitar between sorties and gushing over his favorite band, while Tasha is a bubbly foreign stunt pilot turned reluctant soldier, reckoning with the blood she has to spill to live up to her mother's legacy. Mentoring them both is Baxter, an aging college professor turned reserve pilot, struggling under the weight of a military conspiracy to keep the legacy of the legendary ace "The Wings of Theve" alive at any cost. The real "Wings", your deceased predecessor Jane Rex Cope, manifests as a delirious ghost drowning in an ocean of exhaustion, only able to deliver the occasional wounded poetic to you as his legacy gradually unravels.

Afterburners to full

There's also a wonderful interplay between narrative, music, and dialogue—that aforementioned Sotoan hunting song is a common leitmotif across Wings of Theve, with each Shadow downed in a mission seemingly removing a voice from the choir. More often than not though, your allies will belligerently drown out those chants themselves by blasting their own music instead. This results in some truly beautiful harmonization where the game's already eye-watering orchestral score is elevated by both Tragically Hip-esque rock choruses and monastic tribal chanting, a dynamic ensemble that sent chills down my spine in tight, ten minute minute intervals.

There is a consistently high quality of both writing and dialogue across Ace Combat 8's campaign that I think even series veterans will find surprising. Dialogue still has that dubbed anime charm, delivered at an "Stand Alone Complex" standard. Mark Bodie's performance as Cope is a stand-out as well—the depth of exhaustion he conveys adds a distinctly Shinto flair to his character.

Characterization aside, the story itself is great—series veterans will doubtlessly recognize longstanding tropes (starting from nothing, falling from grace, becoming a legend), but the twists and turns along the way coalesce into a third act so vast and dramatic in scale that I was left in disbelief. Wings of Theve's narrative, mechanics, and music unite behind a two hour Macross-esque climax that stands head and shoulders above prior Ace Combat finales.

Wings of an Angel

Given how stunning Ace Combat 8 looks, I was pleased to see mostly stable performance at 1440p, only getting some occasional hitching during first-person cutscenes, framerates occasionally scraping under 60 when the screen was enveloped in a gargantuan fireball.

I also have minor gripes about the lack of an FOV slider, as Wings of Theve undoubtedly plays best from the cockpit view, and there are times where it can feel a bit like staring through a funnel. The only bug I encountered across two playthroughs was some light input ghosting on the sticks, which only occurred in the wake of a framerate dip, causing me to careen into a building. Thankfully, these issues are few and far between.

At the time of writing, there's a moment from each and every mission that still lingers in my mind, with only a scant few being owed to scripted encounters. Ace Combat 8: Wings of Theve is an eye-watering, fist-pumping marriage of arcade action and cinematic flourish, and one of the best games I've played in years.

Today is Control Resonant's launch day, and as I wrote in our review, it's peak Remedy. It's a gorgeously surreal atmosphere to sink into—but I had one main complaint. Its combat system centers around building ways to turn your piddly attacks into heavy hitters, which has the unfortunate side effect of making most of its hours of monster fighting a slog of inflated health pools.

Or at least, that was the case until earlier today. Ahead of launch, Remedy released a launch day hotfix that essentially looked me in the eye to say, Nice review you wrote there—would be a real shame if someone made it irrelevant.

In a Steam news post explaining its changes, Remedy said it's been "keeping a close eye" on player feedback, and based on early responses has juiced protagonist Dylan Faden's combat performance to cut down on the game's pervasive damage sponginess.

"Based on what we have seen so far, we have decided to deploy a hotfix (1.3.3) at launch to address a few specific things: enemy health pools feeling too high, requiring too many hits to Falter (stun) enemies for executions, and Dylan’s overall combat strength early on in the game not feeling powerful enough (even if the man just woke up from a coma)," Remedy said. "We strongly believe these changes will improve the gameplay feel and flow while still providing a challenge."

In other words, Remedy took what I advised in the review—that players should use the in-game Assist Mode settings to spare themselves collective hours of chipping away at health bars by boosting Dylan's outgoing damage and Falter buildup—and made it the default experience.

And that's fine! It's fine. It'll be a better time for everyone else. It's just that I fought a lot of things during those 30 hours of my life. That's all. But I'm fine!

Remedy also made sure to note that, if you still want to do more fiddling with flow of shapeshifting weapons and boulder-throwing, there's a suite of granular Assist Mode options like enemy aggression adjustments and ability recovery rates for fine-tuning your play experience. If you want, you can even turn Dylan invulnerable and basically set combat to "no." If that sounds appealing, go with God. I won't judge. It's not like it's your job to know.

And if it was someone's job, I'm sure they'd be acting very normal about it.

Control Resonant is available now on Steam.

It's the greatest challenge I've yet faced. Not in Grand Theft Auto 5, in life (I was a sheltered child). Forget hit squads, forget running a billion-dollar privacy-invading company, forget bad credit, forget the absence of gravity. My enemy now is space itself, the third dimension. Maybe spacetime. Never been clear on what that is.

I have installed the Random Teleport Challenge, which is not a challenge in the American Gladiators sense but more of a challenge in the debilitating disease sense. Every 50 seconds, the game whisks me to one of 28 locations scattered across GTA 5's map. I have no list of which locations these are, which makes the whole thing quite exciting.

I don't know how you live your life, but for me, it's actually quite disruptive to find myself randomly spatially displaced every 50 seconds. It's probably how the Quantum Leap guy felt, if he sometimes Quantum Leapt underneath a truck.

It's a confusing and disconcerting time. Utterly impossible to plan for. But you know what? It taught me an important lesson, probably. Not sure what it is yet, but this seems like one of those things people turn around at the end of and say they learnt an important lesson, so there must be one in there somewhere.

This will probably make it quite difficult to experience mods going forward. I may have to edit an .ini file. Or maybe I just live like this now, ever jaunting. Ever lost in the creases of the sheets of the universe. Just check under the nearest truck; I'm probably there.

Every nation has its kooks—excepting of course the Swiss—but there's something utterly American to me about the UFO sighting. It's probably something to do with the sheer size of the place. A tired, potentially hopped-up trucker, trundling across the endless plains of… whatever state has endless plains in it, spying something mysterious and illuminated in the canopy above? That's America to me.

Also America to me: the Grand Theft Auto videogame series, so it was only natural that I bring real UFO visits to Rockstar's fake LA. I installed UFO Sightings, "a simple script that spawns a UFO at random locations throughout the map."

Its aim is to be eerie and mysterious, which is probably why it limits UFOs to appearing at night. I didn't know that at first, though, so I spent quite a lot of time flying around Mount Chiliad at high noon, trying and failing to find visitors from other worlds. I did find the now-ever-present swarms of hitmen trying to kill me, though, so I had fun.

Once I realised my error, I nudged the game clock forward. Voila! All of a sudden, a distant part of the map glowed red. "UFO sighting reported" declared a pop-up. My reaction was swift—I immediately took flight (I have Superman powers; don't worry about it) and headed towards the marked zone.

Now, look, here's where things didn't quite go as I planned. In my idyllic visions, the American spaceman-spotter sees a hazy disc in the middle distance. He squints, he rubs his eyes, he thinks but is never sure that the object he's looking at is aliens, and there is no one in a 10-mile radius to back him up when he talks about it later. His defining trait is uncertainty. If he speaks, he becomes a disbelieved outcast. If he keeps quiet, the questions haunt him to his grave.

The truth wasn't quite so romantic or secretive: My UFO appeared about 30 feet in the air over an intersection in downtown Los Santos, flashing with enough enthusiasm to immediately kill anyone who's even familiar with epilepsy.

I guess it worked out. At some point, possibly in response to me shooting it with my laser eyes, it stopped flashing and began to ascend, eventually vanishing completely. Maybe I never saw it. Perhaps it was never there at all.

Have you heard? Crazy Taxi is coming back. As a game, yes (with some rather off-putting gen-AI mixed in there), and also as a movie. You may have heard this. What you have not heard is that I, personally, am bringing Crazy Taxi back. I am bringing it back to Los Santos, to Grand Theft Auto 5.

Simply put, I have installed the aptly-named Crazy Taxi Mod, which has populated my doomed and bedraggled city with a new variety of quest: a taxi quest. A crazy taxi quest.

Approach a yellow circle and the game will prompt you to hit H. Hit H and you will enter a world of point-to-point transportation. The mod gives you a selection of cars, all yellow, and none of which I can remember because all the cars in my game are seized by irresistible movement, which means they immediately jet off the vehicle-select screen as soon as they appear.

An added consequence of this behaviour is that you have to choose a car quickly. The mod will teleport you into the one you've chosen, whatever its location. Wait too long, and the car you want to drive will have either taken flight or ploughed into the side of a building and exploded.

Regardless, once you're in, it's pure Crazy Taxi. You've got a time limit and the sidewalks have punters. Pick them up and your time limit extends. The goal is rapidity, to keep your pickups and dropoffs frequent enough that your time limit is actually growing in the aggregate, rather than depleting.

Or it would be, but my various fares keep getting scared off by the rolling gang war that Los Santos has, at this point, descended into. Or they get hit by cars, or shot by my bodyguards, or they have bad credit maybe. Who knows? Point is, they sometimes fail to actually get in the car, leaving me idling my big yellow taxi forlornly at the side of the road, eternally.

But aren't we all doing that in some way, when you think about it?

Arkheron is an enigmatic blend of a fast PvP action game and a dungeon crawler that's all about competing with other players to reach the top of an evolving tower. That enigma element is a key part of Arkheron's core narrative, along with its wild mix of loot-driven action-RPG combat and competitive knockout action that feel equal parts Diablo and Hades. But the developer's lengthy journey to create this quirky, high-stakes mash-up of genres is also something of an enigma, and their concept is steadily building an audience.

During a recent visit to developer Bonfire Studios ahead of Arkheron's crossplay beta starting on September 25, I spoke with Bonfire Studios CEO Rob Pardo (former Chief Creative Officer of Blizzard Entertainment) about the making of Arkheron. Along with some time diving into the game, we heard from Pardo about the studio's nearly 10-year journey to make a new type of arena PvP dungeon crawler. It's got loot and a large lobby size, but it's very much not trying to be a battle royale Diablo.

"I would say the years were absolutely worth it," said Rob Pardo, CEO of Bonfire Studios. "What's always tough is that 20/20 hindsight; you always wish you didn't go down so many dead ends where you could have made smarter choices at the time, but I think for me, because I've been through so many product cycles now at Blizzard, I think it comes with the territory of trying to innovate in a new direction creatively."

Arkheron has the look of a traditional isometric action-RPG focusing on loot, but it leans into more competitive, real-time, precision-based combat that feels especially inspired by Hades. But unlike a roguelike, you're racing alongside your team to loot up and fight rival squads, the strongest of which ascend to the upper levels of the tower. It's a refreshing, energizing spin on often slower-paced dungeon crawlers, and that competitive edge makes the dives feel chaotic and exhilarating.

But one thing Arkheron leans into is its strange, alluring setting, with a style that feels like a dark-fantasy spin on the Backrooms. Arkheron is set in a mysterious purgatory that draws individuals from across time and space. Players take on resurrected spirits known as echoes as they journey through a massive, evolving tower built from the memories of vanguards and other lost souls. As the echoes climb the tower, they collect loot, battle other echoes, and even take on the roles of the lost vanguards to learn more about the mysterious tower and its secrets—but only one team can reach the top.

Over the last year, Bonfire has steadily been rolling out early playtests, giving players an early crack at Arkheron's unique competitive format. Those playtests generated useful feedback that led to the creation of a new mode called Spires, a smaller 3v3 variant that will coexist with Arkheron's standard 45-player format.

According to Pardo, the steady pace of development and the rollout to players have helped the game take shape as it approaches its eventual launch.

"You can't get rid of the trials and tribulations and going through the wrong paths in game development—I sometimes say that one of the reasons why it's so hard for a great game to come out, and for a studio to be able to replicate that success, is because all the learnings and the mistakes are no longer in the released game," said Pardo. "But when we did the alpha test last year, it was the first time we put the game out for people, and it was really validating for a lot of the developers who had spent five to six years working quietly on Arkheron. It was just across the board really positive, and I think after that we had to start rolling up our sleeves and do the work of hearing the harder feedback and figuring out what we want to change in the game."

Preparing for beta

The upcoming crossplay beta on September 25 will make Arkheron's larger offerings available to players on PC, along with the first hands-on for the Xbox Series X and PS5 builds of the game. It's also a big moment for Bonfire, as it turns its focus toward building a lasting audience across multiple platforms — a common struggle for multiplayer-only games like Arkheron.

Speaking to Pardo about his time at Blizzard Entertainment, he explained that he's not only leaning into his experience making Diablo, World of Warcraft, and StarCraft, but also letting go of previous concepts to adapt to today's market.

"I think what was important for me in my Bonfire journey is just being clear. I'm not in the creative driving seat, but my role needs to be about taking care of the whole team and the studio," said Pardo. "But I do have a creative background, and I totally want to carry forward the knowledge and wisdom of development processes that I had from Blizzard. I may not be designing character kits, but what I can do is offer a lot of perspective on how we should approach development.

"There are a lot of things that Blizzard did really well while I was there, which is like a really good iterative development process, or how do we bring the community around the games?" he explained. "We're making the game better and better, and I think there's a lot to like in terms of design principles. I think all those we try to bring forward and continue to evolve them, but it's more about: How do I create the right development culture and support our team to make that possible?"

Arkheron's release date is still to be determined—especially in light of a chaotic release schedule for the remainder of 2026. Still, despite the extended development period and nearly a decade since its founding, the developers at Bonfire Studios are steadily building a new type of PvP action game that leans into its strange but alluring concept. It's a fast-paced, squad-focused dungeon crawler that's all about peeling back the layers of its weird world.

For the developers, it's a concept that's taken time to bring into shape, but one they're especially keen on bringing to the finish and into the hands of players.

"It's very much been an odyssey; there's just been ups and downs [with developing Arkheron and a new studio]," said Pardo. "It can be like this with any game, right? So I've been through enough cycles at Blizzard on new games and new teams, but then you layer on that it's a new studio and it's going to be a new IP, and you're going to go through a global pandemic and all the things we went through. I think it's been, overall, a journey of joy, terror, and a story of resilience."

What happened

• On September 10, Rockstar Games published new mod guidelines on its website, which it says are intended to "maintain a fun, creative, and welcoming place for players and content creators."
• The guidelines are seem primarily targeted at mods for the FiveM and RedM platforms, which Rockstar acquired—along with their developers—in 2023.
• Rockstar says mods must "respect our games": As part of its "right to set limits on how others can use our games and brand," the studio says mods can't expand or modify official storylines, missions, and characters, and can't combine settings and characters from different Rockstar franchises.
• Rockstar says modders can't incorporate other intellectual property or real-world likenesses, and forbids cheat menus or modifications that interfere with its official multiplayer and online services.
• Rockstar calls its official modding platforms "the exclusive licensed home for our community to monetize their mods," forbidding alternative monetization or commercialization of mods for its games.

Do these guidelines have any teeth?

Like Rockstar's more formal terms of service and platform license agreements, these guidelines are the sort of standard rhetorical armament a company equips itself with when in case it needs a quick fix for something egregious: If a mod emerges that could give the studio a legal or financial headache, all it'll need to do is tap the sign before giving the offending user-generated content the boot.

Of course, those guidelines are theoretically more difficult to enforce on platforms the studio doesn't own. For Rockstar, removing a mod that breaks its commandments is easy enough on FiveM. But if that mod's on a third party site—like the one our Josh Wolens used to murder a charmander on the streets of Los Santos—making that problem go away isn't so simple. House rules are a lot harder to enforce at someone else's house.

That hasn't stopped Rockstar in the past, however: In 2021, it sent takedown notices to a number of modding projects that reverse-engineered, restored, or reimplemented elements of older GTA games. It announced and released its trio of GTA Trilogy remasters later that year.

It might feel minnowish compared to modern open worlds, but Los Santos is still a schlep to get across. Whether you're on a bike, in a car, or hoofing it on-foot, it takes a while to get from the city itself out to the northernmost boonies. Well, no more.

Flights V is a mod that turns GTA 5's airports into, ah, airports. That is to say, you can now rock up to a desk in the terminal, pick up a ticket, and jet off (as a passenger) to one of a select few other points on the map: LSIA, Sandy Shore Airfield, McKenzie Airfield, or Paleto Bay International Airport.

I'm not entirely sure that the real-world LAX airport maintains routes to podunk personal hangars out in the middle of the desert, but America is a strange and bewildering place.

It is a replication of the true airport experience par excellence. You know how in airports you can choose what kind of plane you want to travel on, and how the space between the jet bridge and the plane itself is protected by a vast bank-vault door? We've got that. You know how the departures lounge is filled with dead-eyed half-people staring listlessly into the void? That's here too.

Okay, that one actually is accurate, I guess.

My only issue is that actually trying to board a plane can sometimes result in an infinite loading screen. This is inexplicable. It is assuredly not related to previous mods that have deleted a vast swathe of the exterior world map, nor my attempts to carry NPCs on my back into the plane. It's just plane travel, you know? They always find ways to make it a little bit worse.

While I've been pleased to watch Capcom begin teasing out previews of the expanded monster roster we'll face in Monster Hunter Wilds: Ascendance, its returning Elder Dragons have left me with a persistent feeling that something's still missing—something utterly detestable and unsettlingly phallic.

Thankfully, that hole in my life has been filled. Over the weekend, Capcom confirmed that Ascendance will be a homecoming for its most hateful horror: Khezu, the flabbiest, drippiest member of the Flying Wyvern family that for years has given hunters cause to ask "why is it like that" and "how did they manage to make it even worse?" If you're not already acquainted with its many unpleasant aspects, allow me to introduce you:

But not everything about Khezu is horrifying

While there are few aspects of the Khezu's existence that don't inspire visceral repulsion, there is one thing that's reassuring: During a preview event at Capcom's Osaka HQ in 2024, I had the opportunity to ask its motion capture staff—whose responsibilites include performing and capturing animations for many of the studio's monsters—whether they're provided any mental health counseling following Khezu mocap sessions. I was assured that all of Capcom's motion actors have access to whatever care they might need.

Monster Hunter Wilds: Ascension launches in 2027. You can wishlist it on Steam now.

Modder Doneda has released a particularly funky and exciting mod for Elden Ring Nightreign, porting Dark Souls 2's Frozen Eleum Loyce and Frigid Outskirts as a standalone map. They also have a trailer up for the project on YouTube. Doneda's a bit of a Dark Souls 2 expert⁠—they previously restored the remains of a cut sewers map to the sequel for demonstration purposes.

Gun to my head, I think the Brume Tower is my favorite DS2 level, but Eleum Loyce still feels like a dear old friend. I enjoyed base DS2 more than most, but the Lost Crowns DLCs were on a whole different level. Other FromSoft DLCs may be better in a vacuum (Old Hunters, Shadow of the Erdtree), but there has never been a more staggering, exhilarating leap in quality between one of the studio's games and its corresponding expansion.

While Brume Tower may be my beautiful baby, it just wouldn't fit in Nightreign like Eleum Loyce does: The wide open Outskirts and walled city can mimic the mini open world of Limveld in a way the twisty, narrow Brume Tower couldn't manage. My favorite detail is that it looks like the night two circle narrows down on the underground chaos arena where you fight the Burnt Ivory King, a fun and creative recontextualizing of the level's original flow.

Doneda's new map is already available for download on the Nightreign Nexus. You'll need to install Mod Engine 3 beforehand to run it⁠—most, if not all Nightreign mods require the utility. Doneda seems intent on making more modded Nightreign maps, and you can follow their work on YouTube or support them via Ko-fi.

You talk about love/hate relationships, I'd say I have a ⅔ hate, ⅓ love relationship with Nightreign. Its Deep of Night update gave me and my friends incentive to keep playing, while it introduces some truly incredible boss fights⁠—stuff like The Balancers and Libra give me hope that FromSoft can still surprise, delight, and challenge in a post-Promised Consort world.

But Deep of Night also subjected us to the most frustrating, artless version of FromSoftware difficulty I've yet seen, and the studio appears to have quietly stopped supporting the game to work on The Duskbloods⁠—and hopefully something else, too?

Perhaps I should take the glass half full view of FromSoft releasing a multiplayer game, supporting it a bit, but not feeling compelled to turn it into a forever empire of live service returns. In the absence of official support, though, there have been some weird, exciting things happening with Nightreign. Yui's Nightreign iteration of her signature Seamless Co-op mod is a welcome addition for more "chill with your friends" -style play, while I've been intrigued by gameplay videos of TerraMag's SotE and ds3 weapons, a "no duh" addition that I'm still surprised FromSoft didn't manage itself.

Perhaps the most famous British meal is fish and chips. It's hard to beat a perfectly battered, crispy piece of fish, served with salty, pillowy soft chips absolutely drowned in vinegar. I'm getting hungry just thinking about it. But we're here to talk about Fish & Ships, a new co-op game about a group of fish piloting an airship in search of the ocean.

If you enjoy co-op games like Peak, then Fish & Ships looks like it'll be right up your alley. Take to the skies with your mates and engage in some shenanigans.

It looks like you've got to navigate your craft through a ravine with multiple plateaus cut into the cliff faces where hilarity can ensue, like shooting an old guy in the face with a shotgun. Damn, he was just sitting on his porch enjoying the sunshine. Let's assume he was guarding something necessary to progress, shall we?

As well as guns, the fish have a lot of boxes (maybe those contain the guns?) that you can throw overboard and smash into each other's faces. Physical comedy is a big selling point of Fish & Ships. There's also a shot of the airship trying to navigate a floating minefield, it looks tricky.

I can see this game being incredibly fun to watch streamers play. I, unfortunately, do not have a big enough group of PC pals to pull off the kind of aerial hijinks seen in the trailer, but I'd love to see other people taking part in all the fun.

There's no launch date for Fish & Ships just yet, so wishlist it on Steam to stay abreast of all the news.

Check out our Steam page with all the games, updates, and DLC featured in the show. You can also read our roundup article which includes every announcement from the show in the order it aired.

How cool would it be to wake up on an alien world with super powers? That's basically what happened to Superman himself. Now it's Albert Haltree's turn to fly around and save the day in Undefeated: Genesis, an action RPG with a new demo out now.

Al woke up one day on the alien world of Voltissia, and, for some unknown reason, he awoke with super powers. In the new trailer debuted at the PC Gaming Show Tokyo Direct, we see Al's powers in full force. He can fly, shoot beams from his eyes, fire magical orbs from his hands, and summon a barrier that reminds me of the AT fields in Neon Genesis Evangelion. All that while in the air, too.

He seems just as deadly on the ground, utilising quick combos to dish out heavy melee damage to four-armed cyclops enemies. We also see some more animalistic opponents; one seems to be a big crab and another a gorilla or troll of some sort—Al is on an alien world, so anything is possible.

All we know of Voltissia right now is that the main civilisation on it was destroyed by a mysterious explosion 500 years ago and these mutated creatures appeared right after. Could they be the remnants of that society? I don't know and I don't care, I can just use laser eyes on them all.

As you engage the beasties, you'll unlock new superhero abilities. These will affect the way you fly, explore, and fight. So, you're encouraged to zip around looking for combat encounters.

If you want to fly, shoot lasers, and just get into some general superhero business, you can download the Undefeated: Genesis demo on Steam right now. It's coming out some time in 2027, so make sure to wishlist the game, too, if you enjoy the little slice you'll get to play in the demo.

Check out our Steam page with all the games, updates, and DLC featured in the show. You can also read our roundup article which includes every announcement from the show in the order it aired.

Heads up, hotshot: you are being dispatched to a hostile alien planet. You will have to overcome life-or-death challenges that test your wits, physicality, and raw luck. You may die. You will almost certainly be hurt. Also, the whole thing is being televised. How many friends would you like to take with you?

If you answered three, you're in luck—Marked For Mayhem is a four-player dungeon crawler which just got a world premiere at the PC Gaming Show Tokyo Direct, and I pretty much just gave you its elevator pitch in the opening paragraph. The aim of the game is to venture to planets that would really quite like to kill you and complete bounties, beat foes, take on bosses, and even partake in a few minigames.

To do that, you'll need to cooperate with your pals. But this is no love-in: you're competing with them too. In addition to trying to beat missions as a team, you're all competing individually to see who can nab the highest score. And if that ain't a dose of tension that will absolutely, definitely result in a few teams biffing their missions in a fit of competitive pique, I don't know what is.

We get a little of this in the trailer, where we see teams of competitors uniting to take on big robotic bosses, taking on hordes of foes in spacious arenas, and navigating environmental hazards. But they're collecting points all for themselves, too, and at the end just one of them gets to take centre stage as the singular winner.

It's an interesting wrinkle, ain't it? I rather like the idea of compelling players to deal with two contradictory impulses at once—to function as a team and to win as an individual. I'll be honest, it's the kind of thing that might lead to me and my pals not speaking to one another for months. But so long as I win, well, it's all worth it.

Check out our Steam page with all the games, updates, and DLC featured in the show. You can also read our roundup article which includes every announcement from the show in the order it aired.

Good news co-op fans, Mycopunk just revealed its 1.0 launch date at the PC Gaming Show Tokyo Direct. It's coming October 20, so you only have to wait exactly one month for it. If you're unfamiliar with Pigeons at Play's FPS, let me get you caught up.

You and your friends play as a squad of robots who get sent to alien planets to kill the fungal monstrosities that are infesting everything. Neat. Each world you arrive on has a mission for you to complete. These can range from simple objectives like clearing an area of enemies, or more complex ones like building railguns to shoot down space ships. You get multiple lives per mission, so you can go solo if your friends are busy, or at least not get annoyed when they croak.

While you're going from place to place planetside, you'll want to make sure you're killing every enemy you come across. They get dismembered as you fight, and be sure to destroy those pieces, too. Like a lot of fungus, just one piece remaining can keep the thing alive. Other enemies can absorb the detritus and become even stranger monstrosities for you to face later.

Between missions, you can hang out in a space station, customise your loadout and upgrade your gear, play minigames, and socialise with friends and NPCs. The upgrade system for weapons and classes is interesting. You install shapes into a hexagonal grid, so optimising space is essential if you want to make the strongest build possible.

If you want to give Mycopunk a go before it launches next month, you can download the early access version on Steam right now. It dropped its Freeze & Fester update back in August, so there's even something for anyone who put it down over the summer.

Check out our Steam page with all the games, updates, and DLC featured in the show. You can also read our roundup article which includes every announcement from the show in the order it aired.

"A machine will never hate itself enough to become better." That's the unbelievably metal quote we just saw in the latest Virtue and a Sledgehammer trailer, revealed on the PC Gaming Show Tokyo Direct alongside the game's launch date: October 27.

We showed off some of the hammer-wielding action in our June show, so we already knew this was going to be a bizarre descent into the human psyche, as well as a game about smashing robots to bits. I love destructible environments, and I'm getting serious Red Faction: Guerrilla vibes from the carnage on offer here. What's more, these new words tell us a lot about developer Selkie Harbour's and Deconstructeam's views on self-improvement: it is fuelled by hatred, not love.

In hindsight, that's pretty obvious when you consider the premise of Virtue and a Sledgehammer. You're returning to your hometown and tearing it down brick by brick, all while smashing through the androids that have digitised your once-neighbours.

There's something therapeutic going on too, though. In the last trailer we aired, we see flashbacks of moments from our protagonist's life. Visiting a grave, hanging out with friends in the woods, strangling a woman in the woods. Add to that the therapy-esque questions that get more and more deranged as the trailer goes on, and there's clearly a lot to unpack here.

I love videogames that offer deep, emotionally nuanced storytelling. I also adore ones where you can relish in the act of playing, either through sheer destruction or systems that let you interact with the world in creative ways. Virtue and a Sledgehammer is doing both. October 27 can't come soon enough.

If you also can't wait, head over to Steam and check out Virtue and a Sledgehammer's demo or wishlist the game ahead of launch. Get a feel for that sweet, sweet, stylish sledgehammer-swinging action.

Check out our Steam page with all the games, updates, and DLC featured in the show. You can also read our roundup article which includes every announcement from the show in the order it aired.

I can relate to the explorers in Core Keeper, because if I found an ancient, glowing orb, I know without a shadow of a doubt that I'd touch it, consequences be damned. Seems a lot of you feel the same way, because years after its early access release, Core Keeper is still going strong. We've just premiered a trailer for its new Riders of the Underground update, launching tomorrow, and it's a corker.

The main addition, as the name of the update suggests, is rideable mounts. Every type of cattle can now be ridden into the depths. All you have to do is grab a saddle, a new item, and approach your desired mount. Once you've tamed your ride, you can change its name and decide on its behaviour—will it stay in place, follow you around, or roam aimlessly? You decide.

But where will you ride your mounts to? Well, the new Moss sub-biome, of course. This place has lush greenery and no predators, so it's a good place to sit back and unwind. You can go in there and nab an Orex, a dinosaur-like mount which looks dangerous but is a big softie at heart.

We do see some pretty vicious looking monsters in the trailer, though. A trio of snake-esque creatures burst through the sand and let out a loud screech. I don't want to have to tussle with them. A mysterious set of doors also opens up at the end of a dark cavern. I'm not sure what mysteries await within, but I wanna find out.

We won't have long to wait, because the Core Keeper update goes live tomorrow, September 21. So, now is the perfect time to dive back into the game, or grab it from Steam if you've not played it yet.

Check out our Steam page with all the games, updates, and DLC featured in the show. You can also read our roundup article which includes every announcement from the show in the order it aired.

It's always vampires versus werewolves. In games like Skyrim, you can be one or the other, but not both. In Twilight, you had to choose team Jacob or team Edward. Now we're all grown up, it's team Charlie and Carlisle all the way. In Vaewolf, you don't have to choose, you play an elf who's half werewolf and half vampire.

Vaewolf is an action game where you hack and slash your way to vengeance. The PC Gaming Show Tokyo Direct just debuted a story trailer that gives us a good look at the events that led to our protagonist going down the path of violence.

Werewolves destroyed their village, leaving them as the only survivor. They must have been nicked by a claw or tooth, because they can transform into a devastatingly powerful werewolf form and smash through enemies.

I'm not too sure where the vampire form comes into things, though. Maybe they got bitten later? Or maybe they were always a vampire and that's how they survived the doggo attack? I don't know. All I know is switching between the two forms looks fluid and awesome, and I'm a fan of the isometric view and drawn art style.

Even the standard elf form looks pretty sick. You've got a bow, obviously, and can do cool tricks like firing multiple arrows at once to make it more like a shotgun. The game promises the ability to quickly change between all of these forms, leading to brutal combos as you play.

Vaewolf is coming out sometime in early 2027, so for now, wishlist it on Steam.

Check out our Steam page with all the games, updates, and DLC featured in the show. You can also read our roundup article which includes every announcement from the show in the order it aired.

Back in 2020, the first Neon Abyss served us up a run 'n' gun roguelike filled with glorious colour, overwhelming action, and like a billion possible builds. It was a sugary-sweet thinker of a game, so it was, tickling all the bestial regions of your brain even while it put that grey matter to work.

Well, now it's back. We just saw Neon Abyss 2 at the PC Gaming Show Tokyo Direct and, brother, there sure is a lot going on here. The game's gearing up for an October 8 release date—it's currently out in early access—and to celebrate it's getting a new final boss: Theia, God of Vanity.

We get a glimpse of Theia towards the trailer's end, as she menaces players with rainbow eyebeams. In other words, she looks to be a characteristically extravagant bossfight who will, no doubt, put paid to more than a few of your runs when the game finally hits in full. "Theia is a distorted blend of broken mirrors, sharp gemstones and radiant neon auras that dazzle from the beginning of the fight," say the devs. "Each attack across her three phases is accompanied by blinding flashes and shattering audio designed to disorientate Agents."

Theia isn't all the trailer consists of, mind you. There's also a whole bunch of the game's four-player co-op combat, as you'd expect, and some time dedicated to showing off the weapons and abilities the game lets you put to use. All quite normal.

Anyway, then there's fishing, beach sports, basketball, a sorta-kinda Bejeweled-esque minigame, and plenty else besides. I can't furnish you with information about any of this, really, except to say that catching a sufficiently large fish will apparently net you 365 points, which I imagine is good news.

Check out our Steam page with all the games, updates, and DLC featured in the show. You can also read our roundup article which includes every announcement from the show in the order it aired.

Once upon a time, if you fought the king and won, you became the new king. Thems were the rules. I'm not sure if those are still the rules—I live in the UK, so maybe even pondering this is treason—but I reckon these days you'd just get arrested. But, we don't have to wonder about real life when there are videogames like Fool King that delve into this exact subject matter.

In Fool King, which just debuted a new trailer at the PC Gaming Show Tokyo Direct, you've got to fight your way through the legions left behind by past players to take a shot at the immortal Fool King themself.

It's an asynchronous autobattler, so your strategy is all in how you construct your own hordes of troops. There's a lot of medieval and fantasy options to choose from. You've got standard units like archers, catapults, and knights, and more spectacular grunts like fire wizards, hell bats, and one hulking behemoth that's just called hammer—probably on account of its massive hammer.

After deciding who to send into battle, you can imbue them with the power of gods. There are four godly playstyles with over 120 upgrades at your disposal. Teleport straight to an enemy that tries to attack you, give your melee units a 50% attack speed buff, or turn your foes undead as soon as you touch them. If you want to get hands on with some of these abilities, check out the Fool King demo on Steam.

Although the game is an autobattler, you don't just send your troops into the fray without any guidance. You can make use of the terrain, taking advantage of choke points like bridges or cover in tall grass.

And as for the asynchronous aspect of Fool King, you're actually going up against other players' armies. Defeat enough, and you can claim the throne for yourself and declare "rule-breaking" decrees that will affect others who try to come after you. I'm not sure exactly what that means, but we don't have long to wait to find out. Fool King is out November 16, 2026. Wishlist it on Steam.

The demo is out now, with the early access game releasing November 16, 2026.

Check out our Steam page with all the games, updates, and DLC featured in the show. You can also read our roundup article which includes every announcement from the show in the order it aired.

How illegal can golf be? You stand on a neatly manicured lawn and whack a ball into a hole. Rinse and repeat up to 18 times and that's it, that's golf. Well, if you sneak onto a golf course with your mates at night and play a few holes, then it becomes Really Illegal Golf, a new game that just got its world premiere at the PC Gaming Show Tokyo Direct.

Developed by Pushlab Games and published by No More Robots, Really Illegal Golf is a multiplayer game where you and your friends have to sneak around the city, playing golf in all the clubs you've been banned from.

Rather than taking a relaxing stroll through the hills, you'll be sneaking around in bushes avoiding the watchful eye of security guards. If there are too many guards in your way, just zap them with a taser or blow them up with a grenade—this is really illegal golf, after all.

You won't just be breaking onto golf courses, oh no. That would be mildly illegal at most. As you progress through the game, the levels get harder and even more criminal. Eventually you'll be golfing on army bases. Those guards may shoot back if they spot you, so be extra careful there.

As a 31-year-old man, I know how hard it can be to co-ordinate a bunch of friends to play the same game, so fear not, Really Illegal Golf can also be played solo, just like real golf. There's no release date for the full game just yet, but you can download the demo on Steam.

Check out our Steam page with all the games, updates, and DLC featured in the show. You can also read our roundup article which includes every announcement from the show in the order it aired.

It's been more than a decade since the last Deus Ex game, and it's unlikely we'll see another one any time soon. Yet while Adam Jensen's story remains frustratingly unfinished thanks to the cliffhanger ending of Deus Ex: Mankind Divided, the indie scene has offered fresh hope for fans of sneaking through moody cyberpunk cityscapes in the form of newly revealed immersive sim Tokyo Walled City.

Unveiled at TGS 2026, Tokyo Walled City is described by developer Grim Ronin as a "stealth action retro-cyberpunk immersive sim with survival horror and RPG elements". So, Deus Ex with scary bits, basically. You play as Reiko Kimura, a mercenary who is trapped in a dense, fortified district of Japan's capital, the name of which implies it is inspired by the Internet's favourite historic enclave Kowloon Walled City. Blade Runner is another clear inspiration, with the opening shot of the game's trailer showing a cityscape that directly references Blade Runner's "Coke billboard" scene.

The rest of the trailer offers a montage of all the classic immersive sim tropes. Vent crawling, disabling security cameras, hacking into computers, 0451, shooting out lights, leaning around corners. But TWC isn't a straight Deus Ex knockoff. There are shades of Dishonored in here too. Reiko is considerably nimbler than JC Denton, able to skip across rooftops with ease and perform drop assassinations with a blade.

What stands out to me is how sleek the whole thing looks. Making immersive sims as an indie developer is hard, but as I mentioned when writing about the Escape From Butcher Bay-ish Deficit, making indie immersive sims that feel good to play is even harder. And while I think some of Tokyo Walled City's animations could do with a little tidying up, the general movement and gunplay all seems tightly designed.

On Tokyo Walled City's Steam Page, Grim Ronin promise the release version will feature a "hand-crafted vertical city full of freeform exploration", stealth and sound mechanics that "track visibility and noise propagation" and a toolset that includes silent pistols, high-tech traps and grappling hooks. No launch date has been specified, but Tokyo Walled City will be an early access game initially, with a planned public alpha of 18-24 months.

While Tokyo Walled City is likely the closest we'll get to a new Deus Ex for some time, hope for that series isn't completely lost. After cancelling a Deus Ex project several years ago, venture capitalist firm Embracer Group said it's now looking to make a new Deus Ex game earlier this year. But even if Embracer is committed to such a notion, the resulting game would almost certainly be years away.

As reported by IGN, a trove of data from Rockstar has made its way online, with the big ticket items being Grand Theft Auto 5's source code, remnants of canceled GTA5 singleplayer DLC, as well as an early version of GTA6's map that can be loaded into the prior game.

It's unclear how or why the data is making the rounds now, but the consensus appears to be that it was first extracted from Rockstar in the infamous 2022 Lapsus hack that revealed GTA6 to the world.

GTA YouTuber TJGM has a video and a number of posts on X covering the long-rumored Liberty City project. The gameplay in the video comes from a canceled mod, and not the leaked material. The most notable thing TJGM showed off is a map of audio loading zones contained in the leak: The demarcation for coastal ambient audio could be turned into an effective map of the multi-island city. This iteration of Liberty City would have been larger, and possessed a different layout from its most recent predecessor in GTA4.

User affmal on Twitter has been sharing screenshots and findings mostly focused on the Agent Trevor files, which appear to be more intact and substantial than the Liberty City stuff. Affmal has shared a full mission list, and has been loading map and model data into GTA5 to explore. The coolest thing affmal has shown off, for my money, is an underwater base map like something out of Deus Ex.

TJGM has a few posts showing screenshots of an early version of GTA6's map loaded into GTA5, with markers (unclear if from Rockstar for dev purposes or placed by the user) denoting areas like "Alligator Farm," "Coast Guard," and "Disused Theme Park." The map is "very unfinished" according to TJGM, and reportedly dates to 2015. He has three posts showing corresponding locations from this unfinished map and GTA6's trailers side-by-side for comparison.

This is only the latest development in a GTA6 build-up that has been defined by major leaks, and it's possible there is still more to be uncovered in this tranche. GTA6 itself will finally release on November 19, but not on PC. While Take-Two boss Strauss Zelnick acknowledged that "the PC platform is becoming more and more important" in a recent meeting, there's still no word on when we can expect the hotly anticipated crime sim on our system of choice.

While Monster Hunter Wilds' performance issues dominated the conversation about its reception on PC, one of the other ongoing sources of player frustration was the entry's approach to difficulty. Initially, a number of players thought the game was too much of a sleepwalk—but once later updates started amping up the threat level, many of those same players thought Capcom's solutions were inelegant, relying on arbitrary increases to monster damage.

In an interview with PC Gamer at this year's Tokyo Game Show, Monster Hunter Wilds: Ascendance director Takuro Hiraoka said Capcom's goal for the base game was to avoid driving away newer players—but he's working to ensure the expansion's endgame will satisfy players who thought its approach to difficulty missed the mark.

Speaking via translator, Hiraoka said balancing difficulty is "one of the most challenging things to get right in a game," and his objective—first and foremost—is to prevent a situation where players don't feel like they can finish the game they've purchased, because it's not likely that those players will ever come back.

"In my mind, that's where the difficulty curve should be for Wilds, and I think we achieved that—but the player base was so good and so skilled. We had a bit of a gap in expectations. Maybe players got better than we expected in the intervening years," Hiraoka said. "We've grown the audience greatly since Monster Hunter: World, and that was a game where a lot of players dropped off before finishing the story because it got too hard too quickly. We're trying to tackle that issue, which I see as a problem."

The reception to Wilds' difficulty, he said, has been a learning experience for Capcom, informing how the studio is working to appeal to "not just the hardest of the hardcore" with the Ascendance expansion while making sure challenge-oriented players don't feel alienated by the effort.

"We expect that if you purchase the DLC, you're going to want to see as much of the story that we've presented as possible—but for players who want to go far beyond and have the really toughest challenges, we expect that the endgame loop is what really satisfies their needs," Hiraoka said. "We're working on that balance at the minute."

Along similar lines, Hiraoka said that the aggression showcased in Capcom's recent Ascendance weapon breakdown videos shouldn't lead players to believe that they'll be able to completely outclass monsters with their new Boost Bracer attacks. While the videos are edited to highlight the impact of those new mechanics, he said it's "not quite so constant and aggressive" over the course of an actual hunt.

"There is a cadence to it, where the player is building a gauge, keeping an eye on how many charges they have, and deciding when they want to bust out those actions. And you only have a certain amount of time in boost mode whenever you do activate it," Hiraoka said. "Overall, the player hasn't become this hyperaggressive, constant demon mode type of presence. It's a new tool in your box. How to strategize on when to use it, and the way it changes each weapon's gameplay, is for the players to discover."

Monster Hunter Wilds: Ascendance launches in 2027. You can wishlist the expansion on Steam now.

Grand Theft Auto 6 is coming! Not to us on Team PC, mind: It will eventually, but right now it's a strict console exclusive. Why? Hard to say: Publisher Take-Two Interactive has taken pains to reassure PC gamers that they're very important and loved, but also, y'know, not now.

The latest reassurance to gamers on personal computers came during Take-Two's annual shareholders meeting, held yesterday, during which Take-Two chairman and CEO Strauss Zelnick was asked about the potential impact of PlayStation 5 Pro shortages—ironically, driven at least in part by the looming launch of GTA 6—on the company's plans for releasing the game on PC.

After clarifying that the question is really about "the cadence of PC launches," Zelnick continued, "The strategy of the company is over time, generally speaking, to launch for any platforms for which there's a meaningful audience. But that isn't always the case, and certainly if platforms were no longer viable, we would change that strategy. And I would note that the PC platform is becoming more and more important to our company over time."

So, what does that mean? Essentially, that Zelnick doesn't want to talk about it: GTA 6, for better or worse, is a console exclusive, and that's clearly where the studio's focus is.

Which isn't to say Zelnick's response isn't confusing, but that's something of an ongoing pattern: In May he said PC can account for up to half the total sales of major game releases, but that GTA 6 is debuting on consoles because Take-Two is focused on "serving the core consumer," which apparently does not include PC gamers—those gamers who, you may recall, can account for up to half the total sales of major game releases.

Those struck me as inherently contradictory statements, and saying the PC is "becoming more and more important" when it's clearly already very important doesn't really clear that air. I can understand why Zelnick wouldn't want to just come out and state the obvious reason for holding back GTA 6 on PC—double-dipping—but if he did, we'd at least be able to relax and say, 'Well, yeah, that makes sense.'

Speaking of not wanting to talk about things, Zelnick was also asked about GTA Online during the meeting, to which he reminded attendees that GTA 6 is "a singleplayer experience," and that GTA 5 Online "continues to be a robust business for us" that Take-Two will continue to support. The CEO of Twitch thinks GTA 6 multiplayer will come out next year, but it's not entirely clear whether he's speculating or relaying inside info.

Grand Theft Auto 6 is set to launch on PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X/S on November 19. We'll get it someday.

In a previous life, long before I began making millions writing about videogames professionally, I wrote marketing copy for a finance firm I still don't really understand. Do you know the fine art of embedding payment iframes in customer payment gateways? I did. Once. Do you know the riotous history of the SWIFT international banking system? What about SEPA? No? What a sheltered life you must lead.

My point is this: absolutely nothing is more interesting, cooler, or sexier than finance and banking. We all know it. There was a whole song that was pretty much about just that. And now, I have integrated this glamour into Grand Theft Auto 5. I have installed Realistic Bank System – San Andreas ONE.

Exciting times: I can get into debt now. The thrill of thrills is that San Andreas ONE lets you apply for lines of credit in ways that are fascinatingly reminiscent of real life. GTA 5's protagonists even get actual, meaningful credit scores (based on… something) that impact their eligibility to open new lines of the stuff. Franklin's was 680 (Good), in case you're wondering. That gave him a positive soft eligibility for getting a loan. Yes, this thing has soft and hard credit checks.

Anyway, I got a $30,000 line of credit and set it as my default payment method. Anything I purchased in GTA 5 would go onto the credit card, not my actual money, at least until I maxed the thing out. This was largely immaterial, as in my position as megacelebrity and CEO of Facebook, I am incontinentally rich. But still, nice to have.

The only thing that didn't quite take was the mod's implementation of physical bank branches. I could go in, sure, and mix with the hoi polloi who also wander in to do their banking, but I couldn't actually interact with the teller. In fairness, this might be because of the constant, chaotic churn of my modded Los Santos, which is ever disgorging flaming corpses in and around their desks. I guess it would be sort of hard to work in those conditions.

Over the last two weeks, Capcom dropped a parade of weapon breakdown videos showcasing the new Boost Bracer mechanics coming in the Monster Hunter Wilds: Ascendance expansion. Serving as a sort of on-demand sicko mode, the Boost Bracer lets hunters juice their combat actions with additional speed and impact, and adds some deliciously over-the-top attacks to the existing weapon movesets.

PC Gamer spoke to some of the lead Monster Hunter developers at TGS to pick their brains about how the Boost Bracer evolves the flow of Monster Hunter combat—and which weapon they expected to gain the most fans with its new moves. Asked what weapon they'd stake 10,000 yen on climbing the popularity rankings in Ascendance, one of the developers had an immediate answer.

"Hammer," series producer Ryozo Tsujimoto said without hesitation. "I think the hammer should definitely go up a place or two."

As a hammer main myself, my natural inclination is to cosign Tsujimoto's objective appraisal of the weapon's self-evident efficacy, utility, and inherent nobility. But I'm obligated as a journalist to acknowledge that there might be some slight favoritism in play.

Tsujimoto, who's worked as Monster Hunter series producer since the release of Monster Hunter Freedom 2 in 2007, has a decades-long record as an avowed hammer diehard. At the 2023 Justdan Game Festival in Taiwan, he revealed his Monster Hunter Rise guild card, which confirmed that he'd used the hammer in each and every one of his 895 completed hunts.

He literally doubled down on his hammer devotion in prerelease interviews for Monster Hunter Wilds: Asked by PlayStation Asia how he'd utilize mid-hunt weapon swapping—a new feature in Wilds—he said "both of my weapons will be hammers."

To Tsujimoto's credit, and at the risk of revealing even more of my personal biases, I'll note that the hammer's Boost Bracer toolkit does look pretty sick. In its Ascendance hammer breakdown video, Capcom showed off the return of Rise's Impact Crater switch skill as the new attack that'll let hammer hunters enter boost mode. And once they've engaged sicko status, they'll have access to a mid-charge boost dash for repositioning and closing distance, as well as a brutal new one-armed slam that can follow up the hammer's heaviest charged attacks.

If you suspect this coverage has a compromising pro-hammer slant—and at this point I suppose I can't blame you—Ascendance director Takuro Hiraoka offered a second opinion: While the long sword has always enjoyed its place at the top of the MonHun weapon popularity rankings, he said gunlance will likely win over some converts.

"There's definitely an appeal—a special kind of romance—to gunlance this time that'll maybe see it go up the rankings as well," Hiraoka said.

If you haven't seen the Ascendance gunlance breakdown, I should clarify that the appeal in question involves using the gunlance's explosive shells to perform airborne plunging attacks and overheated stake thrusts. If that isn't a special kind of romance, I don't know what is.

Monster Hunter Wilds: Ascendance launches in 2027. You can wishlist it on Steam now.

In the first minutes of Control Resonant, Dylan Faden—prototypical sadboy, perpetually kicked puppy, and regretful mass murderer (he got better)—is thrust into a metaphysical war when Jesse, his psychokinetic former protagonist sister, wakes him from a seven year coma by stabbing a magical shape into his chest. She promptly disappears, leaving the Federal Bureau of Control directorless, outgunned, and forced to rely on the man who once killed hundreds of its staff to confront the cataclysm of interdimensional forces violently reshaping Manhattan into a labyrinth of otherworldly logics.

Dylan and the FBC might be going through it, but Remedy is flexing all its finest talents: sculpting uncanny hellscapes, placing tactical redactions in bureaucratic lore collectibles, and capturing endearingly human performances in circumstances beyond human comprehension. Unfortunately, melee combat isn't on that list of strong suits—and Resonant's open world expects you to do a lot of it.

New weird

Remedy's environmental artists and lighting tech specialists are at the height of their powers in Resonant: The stark, brutalist surrealism that saturated the Oldest House in the first game has boiled out of its breached walls and onto New York's streets, reconstructing blocks of brownstones and downtown shopping districts into a sprawling, dreamlike mazework of impossible architecture and alternative physics.

Roadways have abruptly become cliff faces, with pavement—and the buses parked on it—bent skyward at perpendicular angles. Rows of pixel-stretched structures bleed into chasms where chunks of cityscape have simply fallen away.

Whole neighborhoods spiral upwards, outwards, inwards. Some are swallowed in the telltale oilslick haze of Hiss corruption. Others have been reconfigured according to the alien logic of the Patterning—a newer, stranger force whose spreading influence sorts apartments, taxis, streetsigns, pigeons, and unevacuated denizens into inscrutable designs of sprawling radial symmetry.

It's arresting, at turns breathtakingly incomprehensible and queasily familiar. Nestled into the mutated Manhattan's warped streets are pockets of untouched city life: abandoned cafes and laundromats and bespoke art galleries, which only heighten the sense of eeriness through their proximity to reality's active unspooling.

It's gorgeous, a sequel that's begging for an inevitable photo mode update. And it's a pleasure to move through, with Dylan's accumulating collection of mobility superpowers—floating, air-dashing, double-jumping, and eventually, freely reorienting gravity—allowing for truly impressive feats of traversal design.

I just wish I could say the same for all the hours of fighting I had to do.

Break in the pattern

I wanted to enjoy the concept of Resonant's combat. While Jesse wielded a manifold pseudogun in the OG Control, Dylan employs a different sort of shape-shifting weapon technique courtesy of the object his sister impaled in his sternum. It's called the Aberrant, and in his hands, it can assume and discard the shapes of different melee weapons on demand: Depending on your preference, it can be a hatchet; a scythe, a pair of short swords, a hammer, a drill, an orbiting, levitating sawblade, and more.

Playing a guy who can throw rocks with his brain and has a stick that can be infinite swords should be cool. In practice, it's… aggressively fine.

While eventual unlocks add necessary depth and variety, Resonant's opening hours suffer from the cardinal sin of its combat design: It's an action game where basic attacks don't have the juice. On its own, pushing the attack button won't achieve much except lightly grazing the heavy enemies that need to be killed to finish each fight. Instead, Dylan has to pile on temporary damage bonuses—granted most easily by staggering and executing lesser enemies—to make swinging his magical mystery club worthwhile.

Resonant's handful of boss fights are more engaging threats to navigate (though the sheer heft of their health bars still feels like a slog). But the endless rounds of generic creep culling that make up the bulk of playtime don't provide particularly interesting problems to solve. Instead, they're the same predicament with a binary outcome: Either you've stacked enough damage buffs that hitting a heavy enemy will accomplish something, or you can spend your time whittling away at its health bar until you get a chance to set yourself up properly.

To be fair, sometimes a guy will have a forcefield on him. This provides the benefit of occasionally making things more annoying.

Still, if all the pieces of Dylan's combat kit are moving with the right rhythm, it can deliver sparks of satisfaction. When there's nothing to trip up my flow of staggering fodder, buffing myself with their execution, and tearing into heavy enemies with damage-boosted obsidian daggers and stone-clad fists, Dylan's capacity for carnage makes an enjoyable spectacle as he launches from one short-lived target to the next.

Something inevitably will trip up our boy, however: My last ounce of power—the resource that fuels my combat abilities like rock telekinesis or toggleable fire damage—will be wasted when inconsistent auto-targeting flings my boulder at the wrong enemy. I'll earn an expendable damage buff from a perfect dodge just for Dylan to lunge past the Hiss horror I intended to merc and spend it whiffing at empty air.

I'll be staggered enough times by the sheer volume of Mold monster projectiles that I'll miss my peak damage Goldilocks window. An enemy will teleport away just as I'm winding up a triple-buffed finishing combo. Or, after watching the same enemy's execution animation a few dozen too many times, it'll just feel like another few seconds separating me from the parts of Control I'm actually interested in seeing.

That said, I'm still willing to award points for the fact that the Board—the FBC's unknowable astral plane patrons—celebrate every one of Dylan's executions with an exultant, interdimensional honk.

Altered items

Even without those irritations, the spectacle of Dylan's repetitive executions can't sustain Resonant's 30+ hour playtime. Its combat isn't compelling enough to seek out—but it expects that I'm eager to do so. As I beelined towards the story leads and sidequests that most caught my interest, I'd enter areas where the enemies had scaled past my current level—a nebulous figure calculated from my current number of weapon upgrades, spent talent points, and collectible health and power increases.

An underleveled Dylan makes Resonant's damage-sponginess even more pronounced, forcing me to circle back to combat encounters and world activities I'd intentionally noped out of just to get the Faden family's sweet, soft killing machine back up to par. But even that progression scheme feels confused. Keeping pace with enemy scaling provided an excess of weapon upgrade materials and talent points—resources I needed to spend to level up, but had regularly run out of interesting options on which to spend them.

I quickly settled on a comfortable and capable set of weapon forms; once those were maxed out, any additional resources I gathered were spent on weapon shapes I never needed. Meanwhile, the glut of talent points I earned meant I was regularly choosing talents for abilities I didn't even have access to. By the time I unlocked the game's final combat ability, I'd already been upgrading it for hours because I had few other options left on the tree.

As progression lost its luster, the late game's inflating enemy health pools and damage resistances stifled whatever welcome Resonant's combat hadn't already worn out. Mercifully, its granular difficulty adjustment settings helped soothe the chafing: Once I'd seen all the moving pieces in Dylan's combat arsenal, I simply juiced his outgoing damage and stagger buildup to speed combat along in the story's last few quests. I recommend anyone else do the same—ideally, earlier than I did.

While carving up Hiss by the hundreds didn't hold my interest, Resonant's world did. Not all of its open world attractions are winners; I'm still not sure I understand one particular side activity I kept completing by aimlessly hurling boulders at rampant bits of junk. But I kept returning to Resonant for the privilege of existing within it.

It's not just because the world looks good—never before has the texture of concrete been so celebrated—but it's dense with intention that makes poking at its corners feel rewarding.

From the placement of blacked-out bureau reports to the deliberate layering of gravity-bending traversal routes, the pockets of Resonant's Manhattan that stage its puzzles, side quests, and collectibles feel hand-crafted and considered where so many open world spaces feel perfunctory. That exploration might cash out in another chest of materials or another wave of Hiss guys to delete, but as long as I got to soak in another FBC memo, bespoke apartment interior, or ominous arrangement of questionably mundane objects, I got the prize I wanted.

Human resources

Story-wise, the sequel can't fascinate in quite the same way Control could before it was a known quantity. But the embattled, functionalist footholds the FBC are fighting and failing to maintain throughout the city have an altogether different effect. Seeing the organization forced to abandon the redaction-heavy deniability of its paranatural purview to operate in the open and on the backfoot makes its mission of managing interdimensionally cursed radios and hellgate slide projectors feel impressively real.

That's thanks in large part to the talent and direction of Resonant's voice cast. From its prime players to its nameless, proximity-barking NPCs, its performances feel so thoroughly, believably exhausted: Since the first game, half of the FBC has been isolated in lockdown within the Oldest House for seven years, only reconnecting with their bewildered and directionless fellows in the outside world when this new, unknowable apocalypse breaches containment.

And I can feel it. There's a natural, organic cadence to the cast's line deliveries, making Resonant's writing read as genuine—whether its characters are overwhelmed to the point of breakdown by the scale of the crisis, entering a reverie over the metaphysical implications of a murderous stereo, or seething at the presence of the man who killed scores of their comrades.

Speaking of: Let's talk about my sweet, slaughter-stained son, Dylan. Having endured repeated tragedy, isolation, unethical experimentation, and hostile interplanar possession for most of his life, he's effectively a good-hearted 10 year old in the body of a 30-something year old man who can manipulate profound paranatural forces. I might have preferred another outing in Jesse's shoes, but I warmed up to the younger Faden sibling more than I expected—aided by his growing, stumbling rapport with his impromptu FBC handler, Special Agent Zoe De Vera.

Thanks to his compound of sheltered naivety and his regret over being an implement of attempted omnicide, Dylan's the best open world protagonist the FBC could hope to have fall into its lap: Even if he was worldly enough to know when not to offer his help, he's too guilt-ridden to withhold it. And as the game delves deeper into his past as the subject of the FBC's experimentation under all-timer bastard Dr. Casper Darling, he's an excellent lens for exploring the fallout of an organization that knows just enough to be dangerous to all of reality.

If only that fallout was more fun to fight.

Hideo Kojima took to his social media channels earlier today to announce Bill Skarsgård as the new lead for his upcoming stealth-action game, Physint. He also reaffirmed some of the game's casting announcements from before it changed hands from PlayStation to Xbox after a seemingly messy split with Sony. Physint's top-billed cast are:

• Bill Skarsgård
• Charlee Fraser
• Don Lee
• Minami Hambe

Alongside the casting announcement, Kojima shared a new poster for Physint featuring Skarsgård, Fraser, and the new tagline "The Next Cold War Begins." Tucked away at the bottom is, perhaps, the most exciting news for me personally: Third-billed on production behind Hideo Kojima and Hideo Kojima is the GOAT, Yoji Shinkawa, on "character and mechanical design."

The longtime Kojima collaborator and Metal Gear character artist also worked at Kojima Productions on Death Stranding, but it's comforting to get confirmation he was unaffected by the recent production dust-up.

Speaking of Physint's continuity, Fraser, Lee, and Hamabe had all been confirmed in a prior Kojima Productions announcement about Physint's cast. Skarsgård as leading man John Physint (working name) is the only new casting info⁠—though, like with Shinkawa, it's probably worth clarifying after everything that's happened.

I was initially disappointed. Based on John Physint's shadowy appearance in the game's first teaser, I was hoping Kojima would spring for Robert Pattinson in the role. He's a known gamer on a bit of an all-time career hot-streak, and feels like a perfect fit for Kojima's oeuvre. Skarsgård was pretty great in Robert Eggers' 2024 Nosferatu, though, and I can only hope he brings a similarly unsettling, sexual energy to Physint.

Kojima seems to be spinning up marketing for the game again now that Microsoft has scooped it from Sony. The PlayStation parent company reportedly cut Kojima off for going over budget and missing deadlines. There's been no definitive word, but it's hard to imagine that Kojima will be allowed to keep using Sony and Guerilla Games' proprietary Decima engine (which also powered Death Stranding) now that he's left the fold, potentially delaying this game that already felt like it was years away.

Kojima's other big upcoming project, O.D.—also published by Xbox⁠—looks much closer to release. Its "Knock" trailer from last year makes it look like a return to some of the ideas explored in Kojima's legendary demo for the canceled Silent Hills, P.T.

In an interview with Bloomberg, Twitch CEO Dan Clancy said that Grand Theft Auto 6 multiplayer will launch next year, in 2027.

Rockstar hasn't made any official announcement about GTA 6 multiplayer, what's going to happen with GTA Online, or when we can expect the PC version. It's a safe bet that Clancy is not authorized to make such an announcement, but his comment doesn't sound speculative.

"We spent a lot of time talking with Rockstar about their plans, and also helping them think about how they can engage our creators," Clancy told the publication. "You are going to see this big bump with GTA 6, but then an even bigger one next year when they launch multiplayer."

I've reached out to Rockstar and Twitch for comment.

I grew up by a dry riverbed. This was, on the whole, positive, because what a big empty riverbed is good for is setting things on fire, firing air rifles, and walloping golf balls into orbit. Some say they never stopped travelling. They're still out there, somewhere, in the space between the stars.

The reason Grand Theft Auto 5 is worse than a riverbed is that you can't do that last thing. Or, well, you can, but only at officially designated golf courses, which are prisons for the soul. I have now fixed this omission. I installed Street Golf, which lets you play golf, but in the street.

Much like the previous two mods I've bolted onto GTA 5's sagging frame (LifeInvader Business Mod and Become A Celebrity), I was immediately impressed by how much of the mod there is. This is no ramshackle creation—the possibility of equipping a golf club and whacking some balls in the street—but comes with a suite of tweakable menus, golf stats, and potent balltypes. Normal balls? Yes. Fire balls? Absolutely. Detonating balls? Very much so. And super balls, which you can set to travel about 200x further than any other ball in your arsenal.

Being as I am now accompanied everywhere by a bodyguard, who is instantly replaced by an almost-identical bodyguard whenever he happens to get pancaked by a flying car or assassinated by a squad of mercenaries, I opted to use him as a kind of ambulatory mini-golf windmill.

My shots were angled towards him, alternately sending him cartwheeling hilariously down the street, sending him cartwheeling even further down the street (super ball, you see), or setting him on fire. The detonating balls never quite worked. The mod procced some sort of achievement when I successfully nailed him in the dome with a maximum-power shot.

It's a pleasant distraction. Whenever the travails of my life in Los Santos get too much I can, at any moment, drop into Golf Mode. Would that real life were the same way.

Back in May, myself and some of the fantastic PC Gaming Show team went to Finland to interview the brilliant creative minds at Remedy. We learned a lot about Control Resonant, the upcoming ARPG sequel to 2019's Control. We showed you a snippet of those interviews in our June PC Gaming Show, but now, we've declassified the full video.

In case you need a refresher, Resonant follows Dylan Faden, brother of newly-appointed FBC director Jesse Faden, who spent most of the original Control locked in a cell because of his dangerously powerful abilities and possession by the Hiss. After waking from a coma, he discovers the Hiss have escaped the Oldest House and are running rampant in Manhattan, New York. Simultaneously, or maybe because of their incursion, the island is being affected by an otherworldly threat called the Patterning. It's turning people into monsters and making everything look weird.

"It's not simply a matter of ordering things in a predictable way, it's affecting the people," says creative director Mikael Kasurinen. "It affects time, it affects light." Everything in the city is topsy turvy: Fortunately, Dylan has the ability to flip the gravity and walk on walls and ceilings—or are those ceilings and walls? It's hard to tell.

Remedy didn't look to other videogames for inspiration. Instead, the work of M.C. Escher was used for inspiration, as were films like A Field in England (a real trip that I'd encourage everyone to watch) and Paprika. But why not games? "There's this tendency of people not taking risks, and games start to resemble each other quite a lot," art director Elmeri Raitanen says.

What intrigues me most about Control Resonant is the Resonants themselves, people who have been twisted into monstrous bosses. Dylan can defeat them and gain their power, but you're not forced to fight all of them, or even specific ones, lead level designer Anne-Marie Grönroos explains. Being a more open world game than its predecessor, Resonant may require you to defeat a certain number of bosses, but there will be more than that number available to fight, and developers can't always be sure what powers you'll have at any given time.

This can lead to some unpredictable outcomes: The devs told me about one playtester who didn't get the gravity shifting ability until much later than they'd expected. That variability will make it interesting to see what sort of challenge runs emerge when the game launches.

Personally, I'm gonna go for all the bosses, they look awesome. We get a good glimpse of a giant that spits lava, a big floating head, and a smaller, more elegant Resonant who was once a dancer, performing in Manhattan when the Patterning struck.

Remedy worked with real dancers to get her movements right, and the score for her fight was very important, too. "I went through quite a lot of my kitchenware and built a rhythm based on Fibonacci numbers," composer Petri Alanko says. So beats in the music follow a pattern of 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21, and so on—you take the last number and add it to the number before it to get the next. Isn't maths neat?

That's not the only sonic trick Alanko used. Because Dylan is figuring out who he is without the Hiss possessing him, he's basically been reborn. "In the beginning, almost all the sounds that are related to him, they are formed of sine waves, which is basically the simplest form of sound," Alanko says. "Whenever he's evolving as a person, or as a weapon, some other frequencies, other nuances, other textures, the tonal effects behind whatever Dylan does, gets more complex and more, let's say interesting."

While Dylan and Jesse are related, don't worry about the Control universe going the way of Star Wars and only caring about one family. Kasurinen, the creative director, says he envisions a whole world, filled with different stories and characters. He took inspiration from pen and paper roleplaying games, and wants to create a universe with rules, but where players can see it from different perspectives.

You'll be able to see Resonant properly for yourself when it launches September 24. You can pre-order it on Steam. And don't forget to check out our upcoming PC Gaming Show Tokyo Direct, airing September 20.

You might have heard that I am Mark Zuckerberg now. This is true. Indisputable, even. But something isn't right—wherever he went, Zuckerberg Cool Original was recognised. He was a famous, or infamous man. When I stroll around Los Santos in Grand Theft Auto 5, even as the enormously wealthy owner of its barely-disguised Facebook parody, no one recognises me.

No longer. I have installed the Become a Celebrity mod (coincidentally, from the same author as the LifeInvader Business Mod), with the aim of becoming a prominent man about town. As with the LifeInvader mod, it's actually rather impressive in its feature set: the mod measures your public approval and your overall fame on separate axes, and allows you to undertake little repeatable quests to change both.

You start out, naturally, at zero fame, and the only things you can do to improve it are so-called "Z-lister" gigs. This means: busking. This means: busking upwards of 20 times at disparate locations scattered around Los Santos, each performance netting you about $500 and 0.5 fame points (which is not many fame points). This is fairly arduous, and made harder by all the flying cars, gang warfare, etcetera.

Also, people don't seem to appreciate it. As Franklin stood on the steps of city hall, strumming his heart on guitar, only his hired bodyguard offered any applause. Elsewhere, Los Santos either looked on impassively, ignored him, or died (due to the hazards, you see). Sometimes, to be fair to the stoic crowd, Franklin's guitar-playing animation would not trigger, and his 15-second performance would consist of him standing still and sort of grimacing.

I did it, though. All 20 gigs, eventually letting me crest a new summit of fame and take on a whole new type of gig: the Meet and Greet. In a sunny spot in the Los Santos business district, my fans gathered to revere and adulate me. They whooped, they clapped, they bounced up and down as Franklin stood stock-still and stared blankly into the middle distance. This is what it's all about. This is what I deserve.

The event was brought to an end when a significant portion of my fanbase was hit by a truck.

I have shifted from a position of 'really? A third-person action D&D game?' to cautiously optimistic about the upcoming Warlock: Dungeons & Dragons. Partially because of a really solid showing at Gamescom, actually leveraging the prospect of playing a spellcaster with a bunch of interesting interactions and some swanky-looking combat.

My optimism continues to grow after an interview with IGN, in which general manager Dominic Guay tells the site that the game will be getting rid of traditional quest markers—there's a compass you can turn off, but that's about it: "We wanted them to engage with the world, to figure things out and feel that when they found things, it was based on their actions and not just blindly trusting a waypoint."

While I'm not always opposed to a waypoint—it really depends on the kind of game—I can say that a surplus of hand-holding is always irritating. Developer Invoke Studios has lucked into a topical time to talk about this stuff, too, since such obnoxious waypointery has made us feel a lot better about not getting the PS5 exclusive Wolverine anytime soon.

Guay continues that "the core team on this game have worked on other open world games before and we've done the, let's say, the heavy-handed guiding approach before. What ends up happening at some point—and it's normal—a lot of players will just [blindly follow] the waypoint, and then you lose that agency, you lose that feeling of curiosity because you're like, well, why even bother? And so we didn't want to go there. We wanted the player to explore."

Instead of typical quests, the game revolves around "Mysteries", which sound like a sort of light immersive sim way of going about things. Like asking for rumours in a D&D game, players can bumble around town chatting to NPCs to accrue clues and information—creating the illusion of stumbling across something organically.

"Not only are there multiple entry points, but depending on how you stumble upon them, it might change how you interact with them … You can chance upon that Mystery from a completely different place, and then it'll lead you toward that settlement, and you'll know before coming in there's something fishy going on here. So then you'll approach that settlement differently than in this case where you learn it from within."

Not all of these mysteries are so straightforward—but this all sounds pretty solid to me. What'll really make this system good is whether Invoke Studios can pull it off in a way that feels natural. Creating the illusion that I'm some super-smart warlock detective is neat on paper, but if every beggar I bump into starts talking about a sinister basement, I might feel just as coddled as I am with big glowing map markers and prompts. Or yellow paint. At least we aren't doing yellow paint again.

Let's skip the preamble: I am Mark Zuckerberg now. The original Mark Zuckerberg? Who cares? He's knocked out in a ditch somewhere. Whatever. He's the past; I am the future. Specifically, the future of Mark Zuckerberg, who I am.

The latest mod I have installed into my increasingly uncontrollable build of Grand Theft Auto 5 is LifeInvader Business Mod, which grants you the ability to buy Rockstar's thinly veiled (which is to say, not veiled at all) parody of Facebook for the cool sum of a million bucks. I did not actually have a million bucks, but one of the 46,000 other mods I have installed let me grant myself that amount at the office's front door. In real life, this is called quantitative easing.

The mod is actually quite robust. It's not just a matter of buying the website and letting passive income roll in. You get a whole new menu through which you can staff up—acquiring devs of varying levels of talent—expand your server capacity, and even hire security to keep the hoi polloi away. You can donate to charity to buff your business' reputation, and have to keep an eye on staff morale.

Staff morale, by the way, is largely unimpacted by the flying car which has careened through the second floor window and begun gyrating around the server racks, gathering a pursuing swarm of monitors and wastepaper baskets behind it like a Saab Pied Piper. Nor do they mind, particularly, when armed men burst in and try to shoot their CEO, and they are equally unfazed when that CEO uses his laser vision to turn those men to hot slag.

Actually, while all this was ongoing, the mod kept serving me notifications: staff morale was at a steady 100% because the boss had showed up in the office, which is both appreciated and also not my experience of what happens when the boss shows up in the office. But Facebo—sorry, LifeInvader's developers are made of a different, hardier stock. It's a privilege to own them.

It's been just about a year since Kingmakers, the game about bringing a gun to a knife fight, was delayed just ahead of its planned launch, and we've heard nothing about it since. Today developer Redemption Road finally broke that extended silence with a new "deep dive" trailer detailing everything players will be doing in the game, and also opened the door to signups for an upcoming playtest.

First things first: I would be remiss if I didn't at least acknowledge the awkward cinematic interludes. They're really not great, and all I can say is that hopefully they're just bits of exposition built specifically for the trailer and not actually part of the game.

That aside, there's a lot going on here. Fighting large numbers of hopelessly outclassed enemies is still the central hook in Kingmakers, but you're also going to be leading armies on a strategic scale, building and managing settlements, and collecting resources so you can buy better equipment.

I'm really not sure how I feel about all that. Rolling into Bannockburn behind the wheel of a Leopard 2 has obvious appeal, but do I really want to be worrying about placing farms and erecting fortifications when I could be punching 120mm HEAT-sized holes in some peasant's hovel? But on the other side of that coin, what happens when the novelty of 'you have a sword, I have a SAW' wears off? Sooner or later it might be nice to have other things to do, especially if you're the kind of gamer who occasionally asks questions like, 'Why am I in Bannockburn with a Leopard 2?'

(The famous Battle of Bannockburn, for the record, does not actually feature in Kingmakers, which is about assisting Welsh nobleman Owain Glyndŵ in his 1403 uprising against the English.)

If you have similar questions about how the full Kingmakers experience will compare to the initial bonkersness of its 2024 reveal, the Kingmakers playtest may be a way to find answers, or at least get an early feel for which way it's headed. Go to the Steam page, mash the playtest signup button, and when (or if, I suppose) the time comes you'll receive an email notifying you that you're in.

One thing that isn't included in today's video, sorry to say, is a new release date—Kingmakers is still listed on Steam as "coming soon."