Grand Theft Auto 6—which you would be forgiven for thinking is a videogame, but is actually a civilisational event on par with man's exile from Eden—got a big infodump today, ahead of its preorders kicking off. One smidge of that infodump? A treasure trove of new screenshots to market the game's pricier Ultimate Edition, showing off Vice City, protagonists Jason Duval and Lucia Caminos, and a lot of guns 'n' cars.

Obviously, you would like to look at them, and I am nothing if not a servant of your will. So here are all the new screenshots Rockstar has published from GTA 6, divided conveniently by content.

Jason and Lucia

I'll be honest, I find these shots the most exciting. Ever since GTA 4, I've mourned the robust customisation options Rockstar gave us for CJ in GTA: San Andreas. Sure, GTA 5 had a suite of options, but I never felt like Michael, Franklin, or Trevor could get as varied as CJ could back in the day. Here, though? Jason and Lucia can look really dang different, aided in no small part by just how impressive Rockstar's graphics tech has gotten in the 13 years since GTA 5's release.

Guns guns guns

Looks like GTA 6 expands a whole bunch of GTA 5's relatively paltry gun cosmetics, taking a leaf out of Red Dead Redemption 2's book to let you style your weapons of war in all manner of ways. Including putting your names on them. Which seems like a bad thing to do. As a criminal.

Cars

Yes, Rockstar still likes cars a whole bunch, and I must admit they do look very good as they lounge in Vice City's sunset and neon. These are Ultimate Edition screens, remember—small temptations to get you to fork over $100 for the game's rich-guy edition, so if you want to get your hands on a lot of these wheels in particular, be prepared to pay for it.

Stores of Vice City

One of Rockstar's more egregious moves with its preorder campaign is that there are a few fancy customisation shops—tattoo parlours, vehicle mod joints—that will be straight-up closed if you don't have the (more) expensive edition. They do look nice though. Vice City's petit-bourgeoisie look like a classic rogue's gallery of Rockstar freaks and weirdos.

Boats

Florida, remarkably, is surrounded by water, and it sure looks like you'll be spending a lot of your time on the surf as you do your various crimes. My favourite part: that's a damn dolphin, no doubt rendered with Rockstar's classically unhinged attention to detail.

Well, gamers. It's been months of rumours and analysts offering their thoughts on what Grand Theft Auto 6 was going to cost. The big $100 has been thrown around a bunch in that time, despite living in a world where normal videogames cost $70. In this morning's meeting with a couple fellow PC Gamer writers, I theorised $80 would probably be the number.

Turns out, we were both right. Kinda.

In anticipation of pre-orders going live on June 25—here's when that'll be for wherever you are in the world—Rockstar has already laid out how much you can expect to pay. It's offering two editions, Standard and Ultimate, coming in at $80 and $100 respectively. Except I'd argue that the $80 is more of a basic edition, if Rockstar's insane marketing on the big hundo version is anything to go by.

That's because the Ultimate Edition is set to contain "an exclusive collection of premium vehicles, weapons, apparel, and action threaded across all aspects of Jason and Lucia’s story." How does that look in practice? Well, we know there's at least one exclusive salon offering haircuts for both characters, with makeup and manicures for Lucia and facial hair for Jason. There's also an Ultimate Edition-exclusive mod shop, where you can "Transform vanilla vehicles into magnificent works of art with detailed interiors, exquisite rims, and donk stylings." That's perhaps the most egregious one in all of the Ultimate Edition "goodies".

Whether these are customisation options you can only get with the Ultimate Edition, or whether there'll be some peasant stores for us $80 buyers, isn't entirely clear yet. Either way, I definitely have thoughts on locking away some of the coolest things about the series behind an extra 20 bucks.

I really can't help but feel like $100 is the price Rockstar (or at least the big wigs) want to charge. "Hey guys! You want the FULL Grand Theft Auto 6 gaming experience? It's only an extra $20!!" Or something like that. The developer is certainly marketing the Ultimate Edition as the best way to play GTA 6—literally, the pre-order news says it "amplifies the deepest and most immersive GTA experience yet".

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It does also feel a little strange to see all these extra cosmetics for a game we've barely seen any actual gameplay for yet. But hey, that's modern videogames for you, I suppose.

Locked shops and cosmetics aside, I am still pretty excited for Grand Theft Auto 6. All the excitement of new screenshots has been dampened somewhat by knowing they come with an extra price tag, but it's done the job of both giving me FOMO and making me hungry to see more of what Leonida has to offer.

Lords of the Fallen 2, which had been set to launch this fall, has been delayed to early 2027, a pause that CI Games CEO Marek Tyminski said will provide "additional integration, iteration, and polishing time." It will also, conveniently, move the game out of the immediate blast radius of Grand Theft Auto 6, which is coming in November.

"As development progresses, we have worked closely with the Gameplay Feedback Team, a dedicated group of seasoned souls-like veterans within our Launch Creative Team," Tyminski wrote on X. "Their valuable ongoing input, combined with the team’s vision, has identified meaningful opportunities to further refine and strengthen the overall experience.

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"These enhancements will benefit from additional integration, iteration, and polishing time, enabling the team to deliver the highest possible quality at launch."

No names were named, but Tyminski also acknowledged that the shift "strategically positions Lords of the Fallen 2 outside of a highly competitive holiday period, ensuring the game receives the dedicated attention it deserves."

Well, fair enough: It's hard to fault anyone for making way for a juggernaut, and it's not like we haven't seen this before: GTA 6's own delays, from fall 2025 to May 2026 and finally November 19, have caused headaches for everyone trying to schedule around it.

And it's not just a GTA phenomenon. Last year, Hollow Knight: Silksong sent numerous developers scrambling for cover with its surprise release date announced, and in 2023 Larian fired Baldur's Gate 3 out the door a month early to get out of Starfield's way. (Well, you can't always tell how these things are going to work out.) Going back even further, Cyberpunk 2077 made a big splash of its own in the 2020 holiday season.

A solid release date for Lords of the Fallen 2 wasn't announced, but Tyminski said it's now expected to be out in the first quarter of 2027.

Grand Theft Auto 6 is still five months away (on consoles, remember, no PC release date yet) and preorders won't be live until later this week. But that apparently hasn't stopped numerous websites from promising eager fans that they can get early access to the game right now for a price. Lest there be any doubt, cybersecurity company Malwarebytes is warning that they're nothing but a scam.

A report posted today says "a new wave of scam websites" are offering "VIP early access" to the next GTA in exchange for a grossly inflated price of "a few hundred dollars," payable in cryptocurrency. Malwarebyte also shared a few images of the scam sites in question.

One site leverages GTA 6, Mr. Beast, and Lego all at the same time—a powerful combo, no doubt.

But of course, there's nothing to be had. Worse, because payments are made in crypto, there's no way to recover or report the loss. The money is gone and there's no getting it back.

Stefan Dasic of Malwarebytes described GTA 6 as "the perfect bait" for scams like this in his report. Grand Theft Auto is among the biggest game franchises in the world, with hundreds of millions of copies sold, and it's been 13 years since GTA 5. The hype for GTA 6 is enormous, and "scammers simply exploit that excitement."

You might think that this sort of thing is way too obvious for anyone to fall for, but as a wise old friend once told me, you don't know what you don't know. I've been online for almost as long as 'online' has existed, and I write about this stuff for a living—but a 14-year-old with a smartphone, no matter how hip to the scene he may appear, might be tempted to take a shot.

But it's not just kids, to be clear. As the report points out (and as we've all no doubt seen once or twice in our lives), burning desire can overwhelm chilled caution, and verbiage used on these scam sites encourage impulsive decisions. They also look pretty legit, and the situation is further confused by the fact that preordering a more expensive edition for "advance access" to a new release is very common for videogames now.

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Dasic said Malwarebytes doesn't have information on how many people are visiting these sites but the bottom line is that, like all scams, they persist because they work.

"I am amazed when I see which scams managed to fool people," Dasic told PC Gamer. "There will always be at least one person that will fall for this—either being too young, or too immature, probably not well informed and just wanting to be the first to have their hands on something before everyone else."

Just about everyone is hot to trot for GTA 6, but keep this in mind and keep a clear head: There is no Grand Theft Auto 6 early access at this point. If Rockstar does announce some kind of premium "advance access" for GTA 6, you should only buy it from official sources. And last but certainly not least, if a site is insisting that you pay with crypto it's time to put your hand on your wallet and head for the door. (That last one is pretty much a universal truth, though, so apply it across the board.)

Grand Theft Auto 6 is set to launch for the PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X/S on November 19, and preorders—official, real, not-a-scam preorders—will begin on June 25. We're still waiting for the PC version to be announced.

I'm a FromSoft fiend, but there are hardly any other soulslikes I can stand. I can dig something a bit more removed like the first-person Lunacid or 2D Mina the Hollower, but there's an uncanny valley effect for me with stuff like Lies of P or Nioh: It's so close to being the thing I love, but doesn't quite bring it home.

Enter Prison of Husks, whose demo is live on Steam: It carries the same risk of comparison to the champaign of Souls with its camera, controls, and vibes, but manages to be different enough to really get my goat. The first thing that won me over was its commitment to a retro PS1 rendering style, boasting little touches that come off as genuine retro expression rather than hopping on an indie trend.

Those touches include a forced 4:3 aspect ratio, 640x480 default resolution, and chunky console menus. Through that filter, Prison of Husks looks to be blending Demon's Souls vibes and level design with Sekiro combat, as well as some flourishes all its own.

I'm a sucker for a good perfect block parry, and Prison of Husks' had me running back a demo miniboss dozens of times until I buried it. It's not perfect: Sometimes it felt like I didn't have a big enough window to meaningfully counter after a parry, and Prison of Husks lacks the crystal-clear feedback of Sekiro's stagger meter. But the combat felt good—better than most lesser Sekiros I've encountered.

As for the atmosphere, I was intrigued. It's the grey, towering gothic structures and specific strain of cryptic "ooh cursed one" that I associate with Demon's Souls and, to a lesser extent, Dark Souls 1. You play as some kind of life-sized doll automaton possessed by a wayward soul⁠—or maybe more accurately, you play as a wayward soul possessing doll automatons⁠—and you really ought to do something about all this entropic curse stuff in the air.

Prison of Husks is also trying some mechanical experimentation that I respect: It's leaning more action/exploration than RPG, with equippable gear but no complicated stat/class/leveling system that I noticed. Reading into Prison of Husks' Steam page, it sounds like there will be some build differentiation in the weapons and supplemental accessories instead.

I'm also happy to report that it runs great out of the box on Steam Deck⁠—even with throwback graphics, that's not always a guarantee a game is actually lightweight enough for the Linux-based handheld. As a bonus, the Deck's 16:10 screen is also a nice fit for Husks' 4:3 aspect ratio. Prison of Husks is planned to launch sometime this year. You can wishlist it and check out its demo for yourself on Steam.

Special commentary on this classic PC Gamer review provided by:

Dishonored review - PC Gamer issue #246 (UK, December 2012)

From the archives: The review below appears as originally written, with only minor changes in formatting and presentation. By Tom Francis

I think I can jump onto another light fitting from here. I’m wrong. I slip, fall, and land inches behind a gold-masked Overseer looking out of the fifth-story window. I only have a split second headstart in getting over our mutual surprise at the situation, and I use it to stab him in the neck.

A second after his body hits the ground, I hear carpet-softened footsteps coming down the hall. Panic. After mentally rejecting three even crazier ideas, I hoist the Overseer’s body over my shoulder and jump out of the window.

Dishonored is mostly a stealth game, where you play a kind of assassin, in a somewhat steampunk city. Those floundering qualifiers are part of the fun: you don’t have to hide, you don’t have to kill anyone, and while the city of Dunwall mixes matchlock pistols with crackling Tesla tech, it’s a rusty, crumbling place that feels unique.

If you don’t manage the stealth part, the first-person swordfight that breaks out is surprisingly fun, and surprisingly survivable. Time your blocks right and you can take out a squad of guards with vicious counter-attack executions. It’s not always viable later on, and I’m keen to avoid it on this mission anyway. My target is the Grand Overseer, head of Dunwall’s witch-hunting religion, and any alarm will send him running to his underground bunker.

As I sail out of the window, still holding the dead guard, I twist round and Blink back onto the window ledge. There are only six magical powers in the game, and you probably won’t use them all, but you’ll definitely use Blink. It’s a short-range teleport spell that’s almost free to cast, and quickly becomes your main way of getting around the game.

It’s silent, so it makes stealth faster and more versatile: you can Blink past the path of an approaching guard to stab him in the back when he investigates your former location.

And it also gives you a precise and reliable way to climb on the scenery. The game shows you the spot you’ll jump to as you aim the spell, so the kind of player who habitually falls off light fittings can still blink to a fifth- story window ledge without falling to his death.

City blocked

The ledge is safe and out of sight, but I don’t think it’s wide enough to drop the body on. And the huge, rainlashed courtyard below is crawling with guards. I circle half the building before I finally see an open dumpster at ground level. I think I can toss him into it from all the way up here.

I’m wrong.

Dishonored’s missions unfold across huge chunks of this plague-infested city. The best of them spend that space in breadth as much as length, letting you explore several city blocks outside of the building you plan to infiltrate. You’re free to sneak through the rat-riddled alleyways, clamber up to the rooftops and Blink between them, or dive into every open window and ransack the buildings for secrets and loot. It’s a fantastic sense of freedom.

There are even side quests in these extensive regions, and masses of incidental storytelling. Books, notes and diaries offer you enigmatic clues to stashes of loot, safe combinations and magical items.

The city watch patrol most of it, but other sections are ruled by thugs, the gutters crawl with plague- zombies, and some apartments are inhabited by stranger folk altogether.

This courtyard, though, is patrolled by Overseers. And a very dead Overseer has just fallen out of the sky and landed heavily on a spiked metal fence, dangling from it like a gruesome warning. I freeze.

They haven’t seen it yet. I slip quietly back in through a different window.

I’m in the meeting room my target is headed for, and there are two glasses on the table. My mission is to kill the Grand Overseer, but there’s an optional extra: he’s about to poison one of the few good men left in the city watch, and I’ve been asked to prevent it. I’m just about to do something clever with the glasses (see ‘Who to poison’) when the doors swing open.

Underseers

I Blink behind a screen in the corner of the room and hold my breath. The guards yell in alarm, I switch to grenades and brace for them to... rush out through the other doors.

They didn’t see me! They must be responding to something else going on. Oh, the bloodied Overseer I just threw off the building? I guess that might be it.

An objective note tells me I’ve prevented the poisoning, with my ingenious and totally intentional distraction technique, so now I just need to take out my target. I slip back out of the window before the metal shutters come down, and Blink down to street level. There’s a gutter down here with a tiny window into the Grand Overseer’s safe room, so all that’s left to do is to load my crossbow and wait.

As well as the openness of the levels themselves, there’s a pleasing amount of flexibility in how to tackle your targets. Prescribed solutions like the poisoning are blended with emergent ones, like planting a razorwire tripmine on the route to the target’s saferoom, or rewiring security to kill him for you.

Sometimes key information about your targets’ location or identity is randomised each time you play, so you have to gather clues through exploration and eavesdropping every time. And there’s even a nonlethal way of dealing with every target.

I won’t spoil what it is in this mission, but it’s a good one. In general, too, I like the ridiculous idea of a game about a ‘supernatural assassin’ going to such lengths to cater to the extremist player who’d want to leave every single person alive. And how many people you kill actually changes the later levels: the more corpses you leave in your wake, the more rats and plague zombies you’ll encounter.

I like all that. But Dishonored goes further. Characters start to moan at you if you kill too many people. The nonlethal objectives sometimes involve substantial side-quests that you miss out on if you don’t want to take that weird path. The game itself even says ‘Optional objective failed’ if you’re so audacious as to actually assassinate the person you were sent to assassinate. And if it feels you’ve killed more than it deems morally acceptable, you’re punished with a deeply unsatisfying ending.

It’s a strangely sanctimonious attitude for a game whose most interesting features all revolve around arranging inventively horrific murders. Particularly when the nonlethal objectives are often crueller than death—one of them leaves a woman unconscious at the mercy of a terrifying creep who’s in love with her.

If you take the hint and try to avoid killing, you hit a practical problem: there’s only one nonlethal weapon.

Your trademark retractable blade, your upgradeable pistol, crossbow bolts, incendiary darts, explosive rounds, grenades, proximity- triggered springrazors, the Jedi-like Wind Blast, the rat-powered Devouring Swarm, rewired Arc Pylons, Walls of Light and Watch Towers all kill.

Sleep darts don’t, so the merciful play style is limited to those and a very slow sleeperhold move. There’s still a quiet satisfaction to playing this way, but it’s much more repetitive than messing around with all the rest of the horrible toys the game gives you.

Gilded cage

The other thing that makes Dishonored slightly less exciting than it initially seems is that it peaks early. The most liberating missions are all in the first half of its 13-hour story. Some of the later ones are too plot-driven to give you that same freedom, and others are just too crowded with guards. One is set on a bridge, but if you drop down to the water to swim around part of it, you’re stopped by invisible barriers.

The game never becomes as straightforward or restrictive as a conventional shooter, it just doesn’t manage to play to its strengths all the way through.

What it never loses is the feeling of a world full of interesting systems to tinker with. Take the technology: every security device is wired to a control panel, and everything that needs a lot of power is wired to a whale-oil battery. Every panel can be rewired to turn the device to your side, and every battery can be removed to turn it off.

At one point I couldn’t find a way past an Arc Pylon: a Tesla-coil that obliterates any intruder in a certain radius. The panel to rewire it was in range of the Pylon itself, impossible to reach alive. The battery that powered it was on a low platform that I also couldn’t get to without going near the Pylon. But I could see it, and I happen to know that whale oil batteries are highly explosive.

I shot it with a crossbow bolt, the battery blew, and the Pylon powered down. While the guards investigated the blown battery, I crept over to the control panel and rewired it. There were a few more batteries in a nearby storage room, so I stole a new one and powered it back up, now working for me. It fried so many guards that I eventually had to replace the battery.

A perfect swarm

Part of the reason Dunwall’s oppressive government installs automated security like this is to curb the spread of rats, which are a system in themselves. They’re everywhere, but they don’t pose a threat unless they gather into a bona fide swarm. That tends to happen around corpses, which they flock to wherever they find them. Once they’ve picked the body clean, the swarm will happily move onto living targets: you or your enemies.

I got cornered by a swarm while sneaking through a manor house. I’d slipped past two thugs to get into a bedroom, but now the swarm was between me and the door. So to solve two problems at once, I shot the wall.

The thugs ran over to investigate the noise, the rats ran over to investigate the thugs, and while the seething mass of vermin and flesh wrestled with itself, I skirted round it and sneaked upstairs.

Then there’s the Possession spell: once you’ve invested enough in it, you can take control of any man or beast for a few seconds. The limitations are pretty strict: you can’t attack, you die if they die, and when the spell ends, you step out of your victim rather than returning to your original location. But you can use Possession to slip past security systems without hacking them, or to escape a crowd of angry guards. I loved taking control of a Tallboy, the towering archers on stilts. The rest of the guards just see you vanish, and search for you while their heavy backup mysteriously wanders off to be alone.

Something else Dishonored never loses is its aesthetic flair. Dunwall is a rotting city port defined by the sharp divide between rich and poor.

Everything is weathered, faded and crumbling except for the pristine soapstone mansions of the aristocracy, and the game art relishes that grotesque contrast. Every monied bureaucrat wears a caricature of a sneer, every plague victim an exaggerated look of permanent dismay.

The masquerade mission is the visual centrepiece: a silk draped party in a manor of dazzling opulence, attended by nasty socialites whose monstrous masks seem like an externalisation of their ugly indifference to the plague. In the street outside, its vomiting victims are cut down by the guards’ explosive arrows if they stumble too far out of the gutter.

Dishonored’s whole world is textured with an oil-painted smudge that brings out the 19th-century vibe—despite the sci-fi tech. That’s part of what makes its atmosphere so intoxicating: we don’t often get to explore a setting like this.

For all those reasons, I recommend turning off almost every part of the interface. There’s a thrillingly nerdy array of options for this, and I found myself getting more and more lost in the game once I’d tinkered with them: I learned to listen for the noise of my mana recharging, read street signs to figure out where I was going, and notice the way I was holding my weapon to check whether I was in sneak mode.

This is all PC specific, and our version gets all the special attention we like: field-of-view options, responsive mouse movement, graphics options—you can even ‘Disable rat shadows’. +5 to the score right there.

Assassin’s speed

The only thing I can’t vouch for is performance: Bethesda aren’t letting code out of their office at time of writing, so I’ve only played it on a 2.8GHz Core i7 with a 2GB GeForce GTX 670 graphics card.

On that setup—contain your shock—it ran smoothly.

The fact that someone’s still putting real effort into the PC version of their multi-platform game is one good reason to buy it. But with Dishonored, there are quite a few. The fact that it doesn’t have any unskippable boss fights. That it’s one of the few major new games that isn’t a sequel or a remake. That a developer went to huge lengths to allow players this much freedom, and a publisher gave them the time and money to make it this slick.

It’s a big, shiny example of so much we keep asking for in games, but rarely get. Luckily, the best way to vindicate it is to buy and then play an amazing game.

It's quiet, save for the faint pings of a street light shifting ever so slightly in the wind down the street. So quiet, in fact, you'd be forgiven for forgetting this is Grand Theft Auto 4.

What's before you better resembles Fargo. It flies closer to the likes of Twin Peaks, reimagined in video games over the years by the likes of Alan Wake and Deadly Premonition. Here in Heartland, an enchanting WIP total conversion mod from creators Kultur-Remix, less is more. Which is hardly how you'd describe Niko Bellic's over the top exploits under the bright lights of faux-NYC Liberty City. But that is sort of the point.

"Cities are nice and all," says Kultur-Remix, "but many of us have only seen Los Angeles or New York through a television screen. How many of us have been through boring suburbs or rolling plains and crop fields in flyover country? Sure, it sounds boring, and if you aren't familiar with suburbia or rural America, this may not be the game for you.

"But, if you grew up with them like our devs, or are at least willing to open your mind and explore a part of America that isn't frequently explored, you'll be in for a treat."

There's an omnipresent calm-before-the-storm vibe to Heartland. It doesn't quite stride into the realms of anxiety—that would do its placid, welcoming nature a disservice—but there is a distinct uneasiness that underpins its suburban purview. By design, it's hard to put your finger on it. It's perhaps body and mind-related, a point of muscle memory that extends to controlling the character models and animations of GTA 4 and simply expecting chaos.

The rise of liminal spaces horror in recent years, not least on social media feeds, treads a similar line in that the super-mundane can project more than meets the eye. In Heartland, this eerie minimalism is illustrated by Sharon's place in 2006 Midwestern America, where crop is king and opportunities are scarce. The mod's blurb describes the protagonist's life as "driven by video games and her job delivering food for the local pizza joint"—a situation that goes awry and is then untangled over the course of 30 missions as the hero finds herself exploring worlds "she never knew existed". In reality, all of the above was inspired by the creators' formative experiences while carving a path in rural suburbia two decades ago.

Kultur-Remix adds: "One of the lead writers has a job delivering pizzas and did it for a few years in a 1980s Buick Skylark. The setting in Heartland is based on many of our developers' lives in boring suburban and exurban hometowns; a boring teenage-young adult life screaming to be let out.

"Despite trying to draw from real life parallels as opposed to doing what GTA normally does and drawing from movies, the closest piece of media we could allude to Heartland would be 1979's Over the Edge. That said, no direct parallels or references have been made to it in the development process of Heartland. Sharon being based on Mary Lynn Rajskub's role as the pizza delivery girl in Weezer's The Good Life music video is probably the only deliberate reference to an outside piece of media in the mod."

From its top-down beginnings last millennium to GTA 5 and the lawless murder grounds of GTA Online, the Grand Theft Auto series has hardly taken a breath in 30 years, and so projects like Heartland, for me, deserve credit for what they don't do as much as anything else. That's not to say it's without its moments of unbridled chaos, but at its core, it's a game about a disenfranchised young adult, forged by its creators' experiences and designed to be relatable to its players.

"First and foremost, we want to bring a unique experience to a great game," Kultur-Remix says. "A story about post graduation young adult angst and a desire to fit in with a crowd, regardless of how bad that crowd may be. Sharon's story will be one many of us can relate to, regardless of social class or country of origin.

"But we would also like to design a map for roleplaying potential. Mods like LCPDFR are quite popular and we would be remiss if we didn't design it for mods or roleplay servers like that. For example, we have a town hall interior fully-modelled with a wing for the sheriff's department. It has zero relevance in Sharon's story but, if someone were to make a roleplay server with the map, they wouldn't have to look too far to find a place to start their game as a cop. We are hoping to make it all open source upon release so it can be adapted to whatever people please.

"Ultimately, through all of this, we are creating a time capsule within a post-9/11 world, depicting pre-recession life in America. Most of our devs have lived through it and remember what it's like, seeing all kinds of shitbox cars on the road before Cash for Clunkers got rid of them all; and turning on the radio and hearing nu metal and pop rock being referred to as 'new' music."

Of course, the rise of the cozy genre and, going back a little further, walking simulators have a lot to answer for here. Games like Gone Home, Tacoma, Firewatch and What Remains of Edith Finch are standout examples of era-specific worlds defined by nostalgia, and Heartland in many ways feels like the Grand Theft Auto modding community's answer to all of the above. There's a story, characters with rich lore, missions that follow the familiar GTA framework—but there's also wider themes of economic crises, the slow death of the middle class and the omnipresent threat of war on the world stage and how that impacts the daily lives of the blue collar workforce.

As a result, Heartland feels like one of the most authentic total conversions to surface from the GTA hobbyist scene in recent years, as a grittier, warts-and-all look beyond the action movie facade more closely associated with the series in 2026 and now on the cusp of its next blockbuster outing. It's for this very reason that the team chose GTA 4 as opposed to its successor to build Heartland on in the first place.

Kultur-Remix adds: "The short answer as to why we've chosen GTA 4 for the mod is because it's the underdog of the series, just like us.

"San Andreas, while a good game (and with all due respect to those who are doing story mods for 3D-era games), just isn't the best for character-driven stories because it's quite stiff. Heartland was originally a Vice City mod but switched for GTA 4 due to budgetary reasons.

"When we saw the HQ model of Sharon taking running and sliding to cover, we knew we'd made the right decision. Why we didn't choose 5 is mostly because it doesn't do driving, gunplay, etc. as well as the fourth main series entry did. We don't want to reinvent the wheel to tell a good story, so the logical step is to make it for number four.

"From here, we're focused on refining scripting, voice acting for the main characters, mixing radio stations, and working on interiors. And bug fixing too! We'll be damned if this comes out broken, given how long we've spent working on it."

Follow Heartland's development here.

I've spent an inordinate amount of my life watching Grand Theft Auto machinima over the last decade. And while I can certainly appreciate the amount of editing and effort that goes into each video's production—I don't always think of that toil when gawping at the finished article. According to filmmaker Jordy Veenstra, however, that polished end result only tells half the story.

To this end, Veenstra recently broadcast a pair of "Machinima Dev Streams" on YouTube and Twitch, offering viewers a rare look behind the curtain at the often messy, highly technical process of creating films inside GTA 5. Rather than focusing on a completed project, the streams documented the work as it happened through the lens of location scouting, scene-staging, camera planning, technical troubleshooting, and the occasional game crash for good measure.

"Instead of sharing and reflecting upon the final cinematic product, the streams showcased the creative process in real time," Veenstra explains. "The viewers could observe how environments were not merely evaluated for their aesthetics but also for factors such as symbolism, lighting conditions, narrative intentions and composition."

The streams also highlighted the less glamorous side of machinima production. Veenstra demonstrated the use of tools such as Menyoo and ScriptHookVDotNet while experimenting with staging techniques and in-game programming solutions. Some ideas worked, while others didn't. At one point, the game froze entirely, forcing a restart mid-stream.

"Sometimes things don't work the way we want to and we must work around them," Veenstra says, describing it as one of the key lessons of machinima production. "In true machinima-type fashion, the game even crashed a few times live on stream or froze in such a way that the stream had to be restarted: all with live debugging.

"These events are all examples of the hands-on and participative nature of machinima (such as testing, rehearsing, adjusting and on-the-fly decision-making) and I think the streams captured them very well from a wide angle perspective."

Veenstra explains that the idea for the streams emerged from a simple question—that after spending countless hours working alone on projects, he'd wondered whether there might be value in sharing the "creative process, lines of thought, hardships, euphoria, bugs/workarounds and other events" that filmmakers encounter during production.

Through this, the response has been positive enough that more streams are already being considered. Future broadcasts could explore subjects ranging from framing and depth-of-field techniques to virtual lighting systems inside VRChat, Veenstra says, where creators can build real-time light shows using DMX protocols commonly found in physical venues.

Veenstra adds: "I hope during future Machinima Dev streams that I am able to share broader creative insights from a multitude of technical angles, software and games, all within a typical hands-on fashion.

"I started this series of streams on a single line of thought. I was working by myself on machinima projects for hours on end and simply wondered: wouldn't it be interesting to share some of the creative process, lines of thought, hardships, euphoria, bugs, workarounds and other events that I encounter on a day-to-day basis for fellow filmmakers, machinima artists or other enthusiasts to see?"

I got pretty excited when I saw the gator on the recently announced Grand Theft Auto 6 cover art yesterday, besides from being an icon of Florida, they're also just cute lil guys. But it seems that I'm not as big of a fan as I thought, because there's something not right about that gator.

"Something seemed off with the number of teeth the gator on the cover had (of course it did—why didn't I think of that) so I did a count and it seems the gator has 60 teeth," ITehJelleh says in a Reddit post. For those of you who are thinking "So what", first off, you're just as uncultured as I am, and secondly that's a big difference to how many gators are meant to have.

gta6 from r/GTA6/comments/1u9tdlr/mistake_with_the_gta_6_cover

"Alligators normally have 74-80 teeth so this is way below the normal amount," ITehJelleh adds. Gators do also go through something called continuous replacement, which sees them constantly lose and regrow teeth, they can apparently go through 2,000 to 3,000 teeth in a lifetime. So maybe this gator is just having a rough one, or just a juvenile .

On the flip side, it could just be a silly mistake—but one that has rocked players to their core. "Unplayable," one fan jokes. "This is just going to be another Cyberpunk release." Others join in voicing their disappointment with Rockstar—"pre-order cancelled"—and who can blame them? Gators are sacred.

But how could Rockstar make such a simple mistake? Well, ITehJelleh thinks it could all be part of something bigger: "Could it potentially have a meaning?" Yeah, ok, I'll play ball. What if we're getting another trailer in 60 days, on August 17, or maybe there'll be 60 different dirt bikes to collect in-game. What if the game opens with you having to fight 60 gators? Not sure of any of that really sticks though, maybe it really was just a simple error. Anyways, I'm just going to stick with the moon for all my GTA theories.

Although my mental conception of time is convinced it came out perhaps three weeks ago, Nightdive's System Shock remake is three years old. The game released in 2023 after a long and winding road through development, consisting of various course corrections and reboots. All in all, it was eight years between the game's announcement—originally as a remaster—and players getting their hands on it.

Which is a long time, but it could have been longer! In the latest issue of PC Gamer magazine, Nightdive producer Daniel Grayshon revealed that, for a while there, odds were decent we would never get the System Shock remake at all.

By 2018, Grayshon had already been at work on various iterations of System Shock for a while, crafting and recrafting areas in accordance with whatever the project's direction was at the time. "I did feel like maybe some people—who were then with us—were trying to focus more on selling the game to a publisher to get more funding rather than actually build the game," he recalls, and after several years of wheel-spinning, things came to a head.

"The project had run out of money [in 2018]," says Grayshon. "I remember being so devastated internally. This was the big project that I was working on." But the devs weren't going to let it lie there—some of them formed La Résistance—a "small Discord group" of guerillas dedicated to getting "this game out come hell or high water."

Which wasn't the easiest gig in the world, especially for Grayshon. He was tasked with building System Shock's Citadel Station—its entire setting—in an engine he had no experience with: Unreal Engine 4. "I was going onto websites, finding tutorials, finding whatever I could just to get a foot in the door."

Not to spoil the story, but he pulled it off in the end, and the System Shock remake came out to much acclaim, albeit with a few tweaks from the original game to make things make sense in a modern engine, like doors that were no longer "paper-thin" or staircases that, well, made sense in physical reality. "It’s still very faithful to the original game," says Grayshon, "but it has a lot more staircases in it, and lot more of a spaced-out feel to it … because it just mathematically wouldn’t work [otherwise]." But it nearly wasn't anything. Thank god for that band of Nightdive System Shock die-hards, eh?

It may sound impossible, but the wait for Grand Theft Auto 6 is almost over. After a couple of delays, Take-Two Interactive CEO Strauss Zelnick has reassured fans that GTA 6 will release on November 19 this year, and now we have the pre-order date to prove it.

Rockstar just randomly—hold on a second, let me check what moon phase we're in—yup, randomly announced that pre-orders for GTA 6 will start on June 25, which is just a week away. Everyone, try to keep your composure.

Alongside the pre-order announcement came the official cover art reveal. It's nothing particularly surprising, as it follows the same design we've seen before with multiple fluorescent images spliced onto the cover. It's almost a shot for shot recreation of Vice City's cover art, with a couple of images swapped around.

This time we've got our main protagonists, Jason Duval and Lucua Caminos, a speed boat, a sports car, a helicopter, a hot chick, and then a couple of dudes with guns and motorbikes. Oh, there's also gator, because Florida—I mean Leonida.

Then, if you look extra close at the tattoo under the woman's bikini strap you can see it reads "Vice Baby". This checks out as GTA 6 takes place in the fictional state of Leonida, which is based off of Florida, and will let players return to the sunny streets of Vice City, the fictional city which is based off of Miami.

But aside from nitpicking at the details, players just seem elated to have any new information thrown their way, which is understandable considering we haven't had anything major since GTA 6's second trailer which came out over a year ago now. But now all we have to do is wait one week for pre-orders to open and then 21 more weeks for the game to release—easy!

There are tons of new activities in Dave the Diver: In the Jungle, from turn-based jungle combat against spiders and snakes to hunting game birds in the woods with a rifle. But one activity had me more excited than all the rest combined: fishing.

Weird to say it, but after catching hundreds of fish in Dave the Diver, Dave can finally do some fishing—not with a harpoon or net gun or an underwater shottie, but with a good old-fashioned fishing rod. Once you've got it you'll be able to fish in several ponds scattered around the jungle and start collecting new fish types you won't find anywhere else. But first, you've got to acquire a fishing rod, and that means bringing down a very mean fish.

How to get the fishing rod in Dave the Diver: In the Jungle

To get the fishing rod, you'll first need to do a favor for one of the villagers. Look for Basu, a friendly fellow who lives east of Dave's cabin, just on the edge of the lake. He's usually just outside his house, though he may be fishing off his dock, so you may need to enter his house and walk out the back door overlooking the water.

Talk to Basu and ask him about his favorite things. He'll start talking about Piraiba Catfish, requesting that you serve the fish in some form in your restaurant. He won't mention the fishing pole, but that's the reward for bringing him some Piraiba Catfish.

To find the Piraiba Catfish, go diving in the lake and start swimming to the right. You want to be at a depth of between 35-75 meters while you explore. The Piraiba Catfish will typically appear around the middle of the lake at that depth. It's dark gray with a white underbelly, it's about three times larger than Dave, and it's got long whiskers. Here's what it looks like:

The Piraiba Catfish is a tough customer, so make sure you have extra ammo as one of your hotbar items and spare oxygen (healing) as the other. It has a tendency to swim directly toward you and try to suck you into its mouth.

As it tries swallowing you, you'll have to beat a quicktime event to avoid it, and if you fail, you'll have to play another quicktime event to escape from its stomach. I'd recommend circling it while taking shots with the sniper rifle, switching to your shotgun when it's close up, and swimming either directly up or down when it's charging at you to avoid its mouth.

After you've killed the catfish, either summon your salvage drone to take it away or cut off some of its meat with your knife. Leave the lake and head back to Basu. Once you've delivered a piece of Piraiba Catfish to Basu, he'll give you the fishing rod. His shop also becomes available, where you can buy bait and fishing rod upgrades.

Now you can go fishing at any of the fishing spots in the game! They're all marked on your map with a fishing rod icon. There's a pond to the west of the village by the waterfall near the shooting range, and there are three fishing ponds on the jungle map. You can also fish off of Basu's dock next to the lake.

Oh, there's some new DLC for Dave the Diver where you do more spearfishing and restaurant management, but this time it takes place in a little village where you can do quests and win favor with the locals like it's Stardew Valley? And it only costs $10? Sounds like a cute little distraction, perfect for the weekend.

Except the weekend is long gone and I'm still playing. I've sunk more than 25 hours into the new "content pack" for Dave The Diver, called In The Jungle, and I'm happy to say I'm not finished yet. In addition to Dave's usual scuba diving and bartending, I've battled a half-dozen new bosses, hunted birds with a rifle, become an expert beetle manager, been in a car chase, and watched my friend get swallowed and regurgitated by an enormous frog. Heck, I've even gone fishing the old-fashioned way: with a rod and a reel. Imagine that! Finally, fishing comes to Dave the Diver.

Just like the base game, In The Jungle is packed to the gills with activities and swimming with quirky characters—and it's big enough it almost feels like it could be a standalone game.

Deep dive

In the DLC, Dave has been asked by his pal Dr. Bacon to investigate a remote village where a dead dinosaur has washed up next to a lake, and Dave, as he always does, agrees to help out. Bancho the legendary sushi chef comes along and sets up shop in the little village, where the locals are a bit wary of the newcomers. Soon, Dave is making routine dives to spearhunt and Bancho is cooking up his catches. There's no sushi this time (you can't serve freshwater fish raw), but that doesn't stop Bancho from dramatically researching and grilling dozens of new recipes.

The daily dives for dinner work like they do in the base game, though Dave has some new upgradable gear to play with like his "Jungle Gun" which can quickly switch between a sniper rifle, shotgun, net gun, and assault rifle. I know that sounds extreme for catching fish, but this lake is a dangerous place, filled with ravenous piranha and enormous crocodiles. The lake is just the beginning, as the deeper Dave dives, the more dangerous and bizarre the sea life gets.

What's more exciting this time around is the surface world, where the side-scrolling of the dives is swapped for a Stardew Valley-like perspective. You can explore the village and visit the homes of the more than 30 new characters stuffed into this DLC, running around in all directions instead of just back and forth. This perspective extends to Bancho's outdoor restaurant, meaning you have to navigate around tables and chairs while serving meals, grilling appetizers, and mixing drinks for your evening visitors.

This perspective shift adds a lot: the base game was segmented into the different gameplay sections, but here it all flows together. Walk from Dave's customizable cabin in the morning right out into the village, gather some resources like plants and herbs, chop down a tree and chip out some ore to make a bit of new furniture for the restaurant, stop and chat with a few locals, then stroll down to the lake, pop on your scuba gear, and dive right in. In the Jungle makes it feel more like Dave is really living in the world than the original game ever did.

Jungle gym

Then there's the jungle itself. You'll grab your trigger-happy pal Cobra and your new gadget-making friend Muna and carefully explore the branching paths of the jungle, which is filled with dangerous creatures like giant spiders, venomous frogs, vicious baboons, and massive snakes.

That's where another new system appears: turn-based combat. You control Dave and his friends as they battle, using their offensive and defensive skills against the threats, leveling up after wins to unlock even more abilities. There's a timing element to much of it, too, so tapping a button at the right time can mean doing more damage or blocking your enemy's attacks. It's a refreshing addition to the mix, especially Cobra's abilities, which involve flinging sticks of dynamite or using his incendiary sniper rifle on the monsters. Cobra is anything but subtle.

Why explore a jungle when you're supposed to be looking for lake monsters and running a restaurant? Well, there's an ancient temple hidden in there somewhere, and, yes, it's got even more new challenges like a series of ever-more intricate block-pushing puzzles. If Link ever quits the Zelda series, I'm starting to think Dave could fill in nicely.

What else? Well, you can manage a collection of horned beetles, battling them against each other in a rock-paper-scissors combat system. You can go bird hunting, which works just like the old Duck Hunting game for the NES. Fancy a bit of Rock Band? There's a minigame with the local musician. There's a block-stacking activity, lots of fishing to do in jungle ponds, and a mobile app that lets you use the distance you've walked and swam to level up a virtual flower…

I guess I should stop being surprised at just how many different activities Mintrocket packs into Dave the Diver, but I can't. Every morning you wake up in the DLC, you really have no idea where the day will take you and what new game or system it'll place in your path.

New in town

Motivating me beyond all the minigames is Dave's evolving relationship with the villagers. While they live in the jungle in modest huts far removed from modern society, they're anything but primitive. They read manga. They use mobile phones. One villager gave me his CD player because he streams all his music these days. Each has a disposition meter and the more you gently interact with them, the more you'll learn about their likes and dislikes and find ways to win them over.

What really makes it all work is that Dave is just such a lovable character. He's constantly risking his neck for others to take on fearsome sea creatures and horrifying jungle monsters, yet he's completely bashful when anyone tries to thank him, always deflecting the praise to give someone else the credit. Just like in the base game, Dave once again won me over with his humble charm, and that made it completely believable that he was capable of winning over the villagers by being so kind and selfless. It was pretty heartwarming when the prickliest of all the villagers eventually approached me with a small gift near the end of the game. And Dave, of course, was completely bashful in accepting it.

What else is there to say? In the Jungle is great, it's inexpensive, and just as filled to the brim with charm and activities as the base game. I was expecting this DLC to be a tasty snack, but turns out it's a big ol' meal.

Epic announced several upcoming Fortnite collabs earlier today, including one with Vampire Survivors. But a few hours after the presentation, Vampire Survivors developer Poncle left a Reddit comment suggesting that the partnership might not happen after all.

While the post is brief, Poncle seems to be reacting to a recent video which demonstrates how Epic artists use generative AI to assist with the design of Fortnite characters and locations, and perhaps also to today's reveal of generative AI features in Unreal Engine.

"Following today's news about gen AI usage by Epic to create all sorts of game assets, including Fortnite characters, we're currently 'reviewing' our collaboration with Fortnite," the developer wrote. "We'll let you know if anything moves forward."

At Unreal Fest today, Epic showed off a new experimental plugin feature that integrates generative AI models like Claude and Gemini with Unreal Engine. In a blog post about features coming to Unreal Engine 6, Epic said that these tools will act as "creativity and productivity multipliers so that teams can focus their efforts on essential creative and technical tasks of development rather than time on time–consuming manual tasks." During the presentation, it demonstrated using generative AI models to change the lighting or add objects to a scene.

The more immediate concern for Poncle, however, may be the video Epic posted earlier this week (embedded above) in which artists use generative AI to quickly develop character and environment concepts for Fortnite. Assets created for the Vampire Survivors collab could presumably be made in the same way.

I've asked the studio for more information on its concerns, and PC Gamer has reached out to Epic for comment.

It's unclear when Poncle and Epic made the collab deal. At the presentation, Epic announced several other collabs coming to Fortnite: Control Resonant, Phantom Blade Zero, and Sonic Racing: CrossWorlds.

A week removed from Summer Game Fest, one of the demos I can't stop thinking about is Onimusha: Way of the Sword. The behind-closed-doors demo was different from the one that's available on Steam—it took place slightly later in the game and showed off one of the game's "open areas" within Kyoto.

Several things stand out in Onimusha: The art, the methodical movement, the sword-wielding zombies, but most of all, it was the swordplay. For all of the comparisons to Sekiro that this reboot is likely to receive, let it be known its melee combat is in another league.

Slices and stabs connect with slow, bone-splitting followthrough. Blades clash, drag, deflect, and spark as if they're laced with fireworks. After years of a FromSoftware brand of floaty, spammy sword swinging dominating the action game, Capcom has dumped resources in the opposite direction: extravagant animations, feedback, counters, and cleaving limbs from their bodies.

It was a great demo—enough that I now can't wait to play the whole thing in September—but it was also too easy.

That was after going out of my way to play on "Action" mode instead of "Story," which my demoist advised against at first. Against the might of Musashi Miyamoto and his Oni Gauntlet, rank-and-file Genma troops weren't much of a threat. They went down quickly, didn't attack all that often, and rarely challenged me to counter instead of dodge. I didn't struggle much at all until the boss fight that ended the demo—a many-armed monstrosity that handed me my ass twice before I figured out his gimmick.

This is where I have to add that I'm not particularly skilled at this sort of game. So I wonder: Is Onimusha too easy? Many seem to think the same of the public demo, so I took the question to the source—game director Satoru Nihei—after my hands-on.

"Both the demo and also the version you've tried here today are early on in the game. So there is that kind of sense that a lot of basic enemies are going to be a bit easier just because of where it sits in the game," Nihei told PC Gamer through an interpreter. "But on top of that, especially with the demo that we released, Musashi comes fitted with a lot of skills and abilities that are not going to be accessible at the beginning of the game."

Nihei noted that the demo build I played in Los Angeles also had button reminders over enemy heads that don't exist in the full game. That's good to call out, because the specific advice offered by these in-world prompts made that final boss easier to solve. Capcom decided to juice Musashi's abilities in these demos so that players can get a "feel for the full range of action" in the final game. He's aware this caused issues with balance, but the team isn't concerned about the final product.

"We're quite confident that with the release version, especially with the progression, because abilities will be given gradually to Musashi and enemies will scale up in difficulty. For the [full] game, we feel more confident fans will be satisfied with the difficulty."

That said, don't expect a plethora of difficulty options at launch. Capcom confirmed that Way of the Sword will have just the two presets I chose between in the demo: Story and Action. Onimusha is out on September 24, one of a terrifying wave of games coming before GTA 6.

If you were waiting for GTA 6 to drop when it should have done on May 26 (well, on console at least), you were probably more than a little perturbed by its delay to *checks watch* no time soon, i.e. November. That's to allow Rockstar to "finish the game with the level of polish you have come to expect and deserve." Frustrating, but fair enough, we can wait.

But if you aren't content waiting, what's to do? 'Nothing at all' is what probably comes to most people's minds. But not Ziwen's. No, that would be far too simple for the AI start-up entrepreneur, who has decided to "beat the real GTA 6 to launch" (via X user Fashion Ruined My Life).

"Day 1 of building GTA 6. Still feels fake typing that out. Upgraded to Claude Max 20x just for this... No studio, no publisher. Just whoever shows up... The goal: beat the real GTA 6 to launch. Ambitious, probably stupid, doing it anyway. If you can model, code, build levels, or write music and lore, come join. Looking for a couple contributors to cook this."

This is it; this is what the brave new world of AI and vibe coding has brought us. The sheer brass, the gall, the bravery to stand up and say, 'I will make GTA 6, and I'll do it before November.' I love it. I hate that I love it, but I do.

I won't spoil the whole journey, which is of course still ongoing, but just to give some teasers for Ziwen's project:

After progressing from day one's Tic-Tac-on-a-field, day two takes a Roblox-esque character to a Roblox-esque world with jittery floors.

Day four involves a cinematic with alligators falling from the sky. And gameplay of a character doing his best impression of Edward Cullen in daylight.

Day six—the latest update as of the time of writing—is more of the same, but there's a "real main menu", a loading screen, and the "whole front-end wired end to end."

Things are already at a point where they're requiring development to get a little more serious, though:

"We've been building in Godot the whole way, it's starting to show its limits on the AAA stuff. So this week I'm going to go test Unity to see if we can get the actual game into AAA stuff as well. For a game built by a loop of agents, the only question that matters is which one they can read, edit, and push on their own. Godot's good at that. Unity might be better, with way more assets off the market. I'm going to find out... I'll report back which engine they build faster in."

Godspeed, Unity. May the AI agents treat you well.

Raphaël Colantonio, co-creative director of Dishonored, has been streaming a playthrough where he's joined by different members of the team at Arkane who worked on whichever level he's currently replaying. It's been interesting, and has resulted in the unearthing of titbits like Arkane being tapped to make Thief 4 and Blade Runner before they ended up with Dishonored.

Most recently, Colantonio played the Lady Boyle's Last Party level with co-creative director Harvey Smith, lead gameplay programmer Stevan Hird, and level designer Anthony Huso. Noting how much loading there was between the streets outside the mansion, the mansion's outdoor area, and then the foyer, Smith came to the defense of the humble loading screen.

"People think it's an improvement that we got rid of loading screens," Smith said, "but honestly I think a break between one area and the next where you feel like, 'OK, that is behind me, I'm in a new pristine area,' and also being able to do the tips as part of the world-building, the art and the little in-fiction notes? I actually have a soft spot for all that."

Colantonio backed him up, saying, "There's something about it, yeah. It's true." Though he was also busy at the time trying not to play "super sloppy," something he apologizes for throughout this series of streams. Playing a game he hasn't played since before it released 14 years ago, while talking about it, and with a controller, has made for a playthrough with high chaos and a lot of hot exits.

But that's not what we're here for. We're here to hear Arkane drop goss like their passion for loading screens and the fact there was a plan at one point for Daud to cut off Corvo's hand—the one that gives him his neat Blink power—which he would then have to retrieve. Or vice versa.

"I love the idea that your creepy marked-by-the-Outsider hand, your undead hand, either you have to play through as it for a while to get it back to Corvo or you had to go find it," Smith says. He goes on to point out the idea ended up being re-used in a sense when a character in Dishonored 2 gains powers by using a mummified hand with the Outsider's mark on it. Nothing is wasted.

Now they've finished the party they only have four more levels to play. Unless they go through the excellent Knife of Dunwall and Brigmore Witches expansions, which I hope they do—they're my favorite part of the entire Dishonored series. And maybe after that the crew can get back together for a playthrough of Prey? The fingers on this mummified hand are crossed.

Special commentary on this classic PC Gamer review provided by:

Cave Story+ review - PC Gamer issue #236 (UK, February 2012)

From the archives: The review below appears as originally written, with only minor changes in formatting and newly taken screenshots. By Chris Donlan

Over on a Cave Story messageboard, X-Calibar has a problem with Cave Story+. It’s to do with Balrog, a boss who looks like a suitcase. In the old days, his catchphrase used to be “Huzzah!” Now, thanks to the HD upgrade’s alternate translation, it’s “Oh yeah!”

X-Calibar isn’t happy. “‘Oh yeah’? What kind of charge is that?! Even ‘Booyah!’ might make more sense.” If you’re wondering how a game could inspire criticism of this granularity, you probably haven’t played Cave Story. Daisuke Amaya’s homebrew classic is a uniquely polite 2D platform adventure in which you’re dropped into a subterranean world where a villainous doctor threatens a group of bunny people.

You save the day by exploring, shooting weird animals, fighting bosses, and collecting items that, more often than not, open up new parts of the environment, where the whole thing repeats.

Except the whole thing never feels like it’s repeating. Cave Story’s levels manage to be intricate without appearing confusing, and they retain a clear sense of forward momentum even as the storyline branches and the Easter eggs pile up.

An orderly series of unlocks brings shape to the game’s wayward narrative, and each new gadget you’re handed broadens your options, allowing you to double-jump with special boots, for example, or use the kickback from the machinegun to pogo your way from one ledge to the next.

There’s a levelling system, but it focuses on your weapons rather than your character, and it rewards skilful players with more powerful attacks while punishing the careless with regular downgrades if they take too many risks. It’s a reminder that, while Cave Story is sugary on the surface, it’s pleasantly tart underneath. Even before you turn to Cave Story+’s new bonus challenges—a boss rush, some pitiless platforming gauntlets, and the option to repeat the campaign with a different lead—you’re going to struggle to see absolutely everything on your first playthrough.

By the time you’re considering that second playthrough, you’ll have crossed over to the other side, joining the informal community of speedrunners, FAQ writers and Cave Story cartographers who have fallen into this deceptively slight platformer never to emerge again.

It’s not so bad down here, though: there are secrets to find, endings to unlock, and plenty of lovely weapons to master. Cave Story’s upgraders, Nicalis, may have instigated a contentious dehuzzahification of the original, but they also delivered a perky and stirring soundtrack remix, and new art that evolves the retro stylings of the first game without lapsing into twee indulgence.

It’s a sensitive reworking, and Cave Story is entirely deserving of the attention. Huzzah—as a dear old friend of mine used to say.

I didn't like Dying Light 2 much when it launched back in 2022. But I can't deny that Techland has really committed to supporting and turning around its controversial sequel. Over the last four years, Techland has reworked the game's parkour system, added Volatiles to Villedor's nights, injected its combat with greater oomph, and added various features like New Game+ and replayable bounties.

While its lofty narrative ambitions were never quite realised, the foundations of Dying Light 2 are now far more robust. Now, the game's latest update aims to let players expand upon those foundations, bringing significant improvements to the game's modding and UGC functionality.

"Patch 1.28 is something we wanted to do for a long time—opening Dying Light 2: Stay Human much more to player creativity and giving you not only new ways to play the game, but also inviting you to create it with us," writes Techland's UGC program manager Rafal Polito in an article on Dying Light's website. "The Breach is our way of opening up Dying Light 2: Stay Human even more to UGC content and adding new gameplay ideas and different kinds of experiences."

What all this amounts to, essentially, is a combination of official mods and better mod support for Dying Light 2. Once players have completed the game's Prologue, they can talk to two reintroduced characters from Dying Lights' universe—Tolga and Fatin—who act as the gateway to a broader portal of UGC experiences.

As for what these experiences are, they include official mods like a third-person mode and a low-gravity mode, to featured mods created by the community. Polito highlights a couple of examples like The Atomborne, a map that attempts to transform Dying Light 2 into a gothic-as-heck soulslike, and the upcoming Dead Circuit, which converts Dying Light 2 into a snazzy-looking Dead Space knockoff.

As for why Dying Light 2 is going down the UGC route, Polito states in his article that "a lot of you have asked us for this". But it is worth pointing out that UGC is the engine that powers the biggest games in existence today. Minecraft, Roblox, Fortnite: If you want to make a truly obscene amount of money in the games industry, convincing your community to make new stuff for your game is the way to go—assuming that you have the resources and the community to make your game a platform.

I think it's fair to say that Techland has the resources—the Dying Light games have been enormously successful for the studio. Whether it has the community is another matter. According to SteamDB, Dying Light 2's daily steam concurrents are in the low thousands. That's decent for a four-year old, primarily single-player game, but those aren't the kind of numbers that power a Minecraft-style behemoth.

Still, a UGC world filled with decaying zombies is probably more appropriate for your child than Roblox is, what with its endless child safety concerns and exploitative approach to monetisation. So, all the more power to Techland, I say.

The Death Stranding movie was announced way back in 2022—a length of time that may well have worked out for it given how videogame movie adaptations are suddenly on a hot streak. The project is still in its early stages and the specifics are being hashed out. But one detail has recently been confirmed by director Michael Sarnoski, which is that the cinema version of Death Stranding won't be a straight retread of Kojima's scenic delivery simulator.

During a chat with IGN live (via Eurogamer) about his latest movie The Death of Robin Hood—which arrives in cinemas later this month—Sarnoski shared some additional details on progress with the Death Stranding film: "I'm writing the script right now, and [am] hopefully almost done with that and really excited to dive into it," said Sarnoski, who previously directed the well-received prequel A Quiet Place: Day One.

Rather than retell the story of Sam Porter Bridges' journey across Kojima's 'I can't believe it's not Iceland' depiction of North America, Sarnoski instead says the movie is "a story with my own characters and my own corner of the world." He does hint that viewers "might see some characters from the game pop up"—so there's still hope for a Dollman cameo. But all-told, Sarnoski wants to "explore something that's meaningful to me."

Whatever Sarnoski's vision for Death Stranding, production company A24 seems pleased with progress so far. "They've read a draft. We're working on some revisions together, and they all seem super excited and happy with it," Sarnoski says. Perhaps more importantly, Kojima himself seems pleased with the story Sarnoski is writing. Certainly, Sarnoski is impressed by Kojima, as he keenly explained during the interview:

"I was impressed that when he read this script, without me needing to talk to him about it, he knew every single [film] reference," Sarnoski says. "He was like 'Oh, you're doing a Come and See reference there. I see that. I like that'. He just knows movies incredibly well."

A Death Stranding flick isn't the only game adaptation A24 has in the works. Alex Garland's Elden Ring movie is filming right now, and is expected to release in 2028. Numerous videos from the set have leaked online, including footage of guards strolling around what might be Conwy Castle in North Wales—likely to be serving as a stand in for Elden Ring's sprawling Stormveil Castle.

I love a mech game, but I especially love when a mech game lets you get out of the cockpit and just run around. It makes things feel so much less gamey, and it more fully sells the scale and power of a mech to contrast it with the perspective of a puny little human. Few games ever do it, though.

It's an obviously hard thing to do: People and mechs are vastly different sizes, you need to program more and deeper systems of interaction, and how do you even balance such a wide gulf in durability and firepower?

Titanfall, the early access Psycho Patrol R, and the upcoming Brigador Killers are the only games I've played that boast this feature. Halo arguably comes close with its vehicles, but I'm gonna say Mister Chief gets to sit this one out⁠—"Mech" means legs, baby. Apologies to all the car centaurs people made in Armored Core 6.

When I recently spoke to brothers Hugh and Jack Monahan, Brigador Killers' lead designer and artist respectively, I wanted to ask about this feature so dear to my heart, as well as Brigador Killers' long lead time⁠—it's been a decade since the cult classic original game first launched. Turns out the two topics are closely related.

How hard could it be?

"We joke that the seemingly innocuous question of 'What if you could get out of the mech?' added five years of development time," said Hugh. Superficially, Brigador Killers strongly resembles the first game, with similar pre-rendered environments and an isometric perspective, but functionally it's like comparing an FPS and a first-person immersive sim⁠—the shared perspective belies a huge step up in complexity.

"You can talk to characters in this game, you can do a lot more," said Jack. "It took years to get down to adding the mechanics involved with running around as a human rather than driving only vehicles in Brigador, which is orders simpler. We put all that in⁠—in part⁠—so that the inhabitation of a character on the ground, and being able to talk to people, helps [players] who are more driven by story."

Jack also argued that adding on-foot gameplay is helping overcome genre misconceptions that players have had about Brigador, like assuming it's an RTS due to the art style and perspective. "It's been worth several years of development on Killers," said Jack, "Because you don't have to explain that you're the little guy running around. If there's a little guy and he's in the center of the screen, everyone knows that's your little guy." But changing some of these expectations had knock-on effects elsewhere.

"I shoot a guy in a mech, it's reasonable to not be able to pick up a gun off the ground, [but] completely unacceptable at an infantry level," said Hugh. "Now we need to be able to pick up and drop guns, now we need an inventory⁠—why don't I have a backpack to put the stuff in? Then I want to be able to drive a car. But a car should be able to fit into a flatbed.

"I see this payphone, can I interact with the pay phone? Or there's a guy walking next to me on the street, I want to talk to that guy. You start running into more and more of the expectation of interaction with the world [that's] completely different as a person on foot."

It sounds like the brothers found all that extra work to have been worth it, though. Hugh was particularly happy with how it met some of their fans' desire to spend more time in Brigador's world without blowing it up⁠—or at least before blowing it up.

"We just want to have cool scenes where you can walk around and get more of a picture of what it might be like to be in this place," said Hugh, "Because that fantasy is a big part of the enjoyment of interacting with games."

They've also got a lot more help this time around. "Brigador was built by four people⁠—two coders, and then Hugh and I," said Jack. "I did all the art, he did all the design, and that was going to kill us. We have steadily expanded out a team on the early id Software model, which was almost everyone that works on the game originally came to it as a fan, as a modder.

"They built so many cool maps, or did so many cool edits, now they're punished for it for eternity: By having to build more of it."

You can wishlist Brigador Killers and check out its demo for yourself on Steam⁠—it recently received a substantial update with added story content, quality of life improvements, and weapon descriptions. There's also the original game to catch up on, if you haven't already.

Before I tell you about Tomb Raider: Legacy of Atlantis, the second remake of a game that has also been ported and remastered more times than I can count over the last 30 years, I want to tell you about Tomb Raider, as I played it in the late 1990s. I remember it in fractured snapshots:

• Finding that trapezoid box in my dad's sock drawer after he came home from a business trip, and somehow not exploding with excitement
• Pressing the Function key that switched from lo-res to hi-res graphics, awed by the sharper polygons
• The eerie quiet of that first cave, punctured by each intrusive shot from Lara's pistols
• Diving through glittering pools, worried about how quickly she'd run out of air, but exhilarated by the feeling of arriving at a new place no human had set foot for hundreds of years
• Learning the hard way to quick save before jumps, because not pressing a key to grab a ledge at the right moment was as likely to kill me as misjudging my spacing
• Falling off a waterfall and hitting the ground below with a sickly snap, the camera lingering on Lara's limp body
• How real Croft Manor felt as a place to explore Lara's life and practice her acrobatic moves
• The almost casual way you come around a corner into a lost valley and see that T-Rex come lumbering toward you out of the darkness
• Cycling through those "look at our 3D models" menus, the way you begin the game by opening Lara's passport exhibiting style in a place I didn't know games could be stylish

I never saw the end of Tomb Raider. I may have barely even seen the middle, but I do remember the wobbly floor under a tempting lever that collapsed with me on it. With no good save to go back to I just… gave up, instead replaying the first few levels I enjoyed. I was not a very determined kid.

I didn't see Lara's first adventure through to the end until Tomb Raider: Anniversary, which I bought in the 2010 Steam Winter Sale and enjoyed a great deal. But even within the span of a decade games had changed so much that Anniversary was fundamentally different from the game it recreated.

Much of Tomb Raider's grit and obscurity were done away with, puzzles made more intuitive, jumping friendlier with automatic ledge grabbing and a generous grappling hook. The mansion was now a puzzle box tutorial rather than a playground. The T-Rex no longer wandered in from the dark—it was siloed off into a tropey videogame boss arena and defeated by quicktime events rather than panicked pistol fire. Lara had developed reservations about killing in cold blood.

Yet just a decade removed from the original game, Anniversary was still more like a game from 1996 than a 2026 remake will ever be. A manual grab option restored some of the platforming's original rawness. The menus retained that swirly '90s flair. Still three years before the trendsetting Uncharted 2, Lara wasn't yet prone to talking to herself while solving puzzles.

The Legacy of Atlantis developers call their new game a "reimagining" rather than a remake, but in playing it I was mostly struck by how strictly we've come to define the form of a big budget videogame in 2026. The menus look identical to everything else. The arrival of the T-Rex triggers a scripted chase sequence. The Peruvian jungle is now lush with life, realistically bright with beams of light pouring through the trees and shadows darkening the corners. Scraped white edges mark the rocks Lara can easily clamber between. Bright targeting circles appear on the objects she can yank with her grappling hook.

Making a 3D game was a new and uncertain thing in 1996. Tomb Raider's developers at Core Design were figuring it out, and the game they ended up making was by its nature experimental. It controlled like nothing else. Its environments were foreboding by necessity of a short draw distance. They didn't have the programming sophistication to make Lara hesitate near a cliff's edge, so precision was essential unless you wanted to break her neck.

By comparison, Legacy of Atlantis feels like a game of Tetris played with nothing but I blocks. It's all been figured out. This is how you do a puzzle, this is how you do locking-on, this is how you signpost the jumps. There are options to make combat or puzzles easier or harder, so you can say everyone can dial in the exact experience they want. Crafting ingredients dot the area, so there's always something to click a button on just a few steps away.

These are not inherently bad things, and Legacy of Atlantis, despite some clear unfinished wonkiness (Lara's jump currently has her hang in the air in defiance of gravity for a smidge too long) is not a bad game. But it has "reimagined" a game that was once weird in the most conventional way possible, 30 years later. I don't know why the developers needed to use generative AI to make it when it all seems so perfunctory.

I'm glad that you can still buy Tomb Raider, and Tomb Raider Anniversary, and Tomb Raider Remastered—Legacy of Atlantis won't replace any of them. But its modern sheen made me reflect on how much of the 1996 Tomb Raider's identity lies in the space between what its developers could make and what they wanted to evoke.

In 2026 it's easier than ever to get close to the latter, creating a near-photorealistic game that looks and moves like a Hollywood swashbuckler. But that's the glitter of fool's gold. The real magic of Tomb Raider lies in all the unassuming bits that now seem old, clunky, hostile.

Big-budget game development can't produce an artifact that feels like that anymore. But I don't actually think it's impossible. If Amazon really wanted to reimagine Tomb Raider as it was 30 years ago, it would hire the developers of a game like Pseudoregalia or perhaps Dread Delusion. Otherwise we're just dressing Lara in the fashion of the decade, dooming her to chase the latest trends instead of giving her a chance to create some new ones.

It's been a bit of a journey for Toys for Bob, the studio behind the very good Spyro: Reignited Trilogy, that's now making its own original Spyro game as an independent studio, as announced at the Xbox Games Showcase. Despite Reignited's smashing success selling over 11 million copies, Toys for Bob was shifted to be a support studio for Call of Duty: Warzone back in 2021, also lending a hand to Overwatch 2.

Then, in 2024, Microsoft laid off a whopping 1,900 people after acquiring Activision Blizzard, which caught 86 staff from the studio in the crossfire—the very next month, the studio announced it'd be going indie.

Now, in a chat with IGN, it's been revealed that Toys for Bob's motivations were… well, about what you'd expect, given that turbulent past: "There was a corporate mandate for us to move and support larger initiatives," says studio head Paul Yan, "Games like Warzone and Overwatch 2. And Toys for Bob stepped up to support those initiatives and support those teams and those games, and we're very proud of the work that we did."

However, "deep down inside, we knew that it wasn't the right fit. And we were getting away from the types of games that we love to make and we're best known for doing."

The layoffs crystalised the studio's desire to go independent, though Yan is far more diplomatic about it: "Right around 2023, around that time period, Microsoft was in the position of acquiring Activision … With the amount of change that was on the horizon with the acquisition, and the transition that was coming up, we felt that was the right time for us to say 'let's double down and bet on ourselves in a big way, and let's propose something really radical'.

"We put forth a plan that said 'hey, we'd like to buy back our independence and take back creative control, organisational control, financial control, and then spin out as a separate company in order to focus on the kinds of games we love'," and, pointedly, "to preserve the team and all the tenure that we'd built."

In a Summer Game Fest Q&A session attended by PC Gamer, Yan said that it took "many mini miracles" to achieve the buyout, and affirmed that the studio is in a much happier place making the next great platformer than toiling away in the Call of Duty mines.

Personally, I'm, pleased as punch. Spyro was a huge part of my early gaming days—I played the original trilogy back on the PS1 and I was very bad at it, on account of the fact I was around five years old at the time—so for there to be a new Spyro game on the horizon from a studio clearly invested in going back to formula has me hyped.

As reported by Automaton, action platformer Hotel Barcelona has finally pulled away from "Mixed" user review status on Steam to "Mostly Positive." This came after developer White Owls Inc. updated the game in a number of ways, including cleaning up its controversial deployment of generative AI.

The sidescrolling roguelike action game is notable as a collaboration between two eccentric, much-beloved Japanese auteurs: Goichi "Suda51" Suda (No More Heroes, Killer7) and Hidetaka "Swery65" Suehiro (Deadly Premonition). It was a dream team for a certain kind of PS2-brained freakazoid (complimentary), which made its rocky launch all the more painful.

Hotel Barcelona received a tepid response from critics and players⁠—PCG news writer Joshua Wolens accused it of "trying too hard"—and the bad vibes were sealed with the discovery of AI-generated audio and visual assets tucked away late in the game. Hotel Barcelona's publisher, CULT Games, was quick to respond to the discovery, and apologized for the generative AI assets.

Swery65 himself took to Twitter to celebrate the improved user reviews, crediting them primarily to the big "Under New Management" patch that came out in March, and declaring that "The curse of MIXED is broken." The patch in question looks like a real Cyberpunk 2.0 sort of Hail Mary, changing everything from enemy balance to basic movement and tossing all players five free skins to boot.

As a big Deadly Premonition fan who's Suda-curious by reputation, Hotel Barcelona seemed right up my alley until shit hit the fan⁠—now I think I'm going to give it another look the next time it goes on sale. You can grab Hotel Barcelona over on Steam, where it also has a demo if you'd like to see whether those balance changes are to your liking first.

We included Elden Ring and Armored Core developer FromSoftware among our notable Summer Game Fest no-shows, and that's not technically true anymore: The studio piped up during today's Nintendo Direct to say, "Yeah, Duskbloods network test sometime this summer, I guess."

The Switch 2 exclusive's new trailer is even more cryptic than its first. It's the sort of mood piece that would make more sense as an initial teaser than a follow-up.

We got a few shots of gothic exteriors and stained glass windows, then close-ups of John Bangs (give this fella a haircut!) and some manner of rat man with glowing tattoos (I like the cut of his jib, at least). The narration? You better believe it's ominous and incomprehensible.

FromSoft's playing the hits, Duskbloods is not beating the Bloodborne 2 allegations, and I'm just miffed that this next game from one of my favorite studios is an exclusive (however temporarily) for the Switch 2, a worse handheld PC shackled to Nintendo's domineering software walled garden.

It feels like it's just about that time, you know? "Freaky teaser trailer for FromSoft's next big thing" o'clock. Elden Ring Nightreign certainly isn't getting support, so the studio can spare that manpower. Duskbloods' Nintendo-exclusive, multiplayer nature makes it feel like it can't possibly be FromSoft's next big thing, could it?

I'm still lighting a candle for an Armored Core 6 expansion-sequel in the series tradition, which seems less and less likely with each passing year. If nothing else, at least we have Elden Ring's Tarnished Edition DLC to look forward to. Bandai Namco has yet to reveal a price, but the pack will add two new classes, plus a number of new weapons and armor on August 28.

I had damn near forgotten that Square Enix was making Kingdom Hearts 4. I was starting to wonder if Square Enix had also forgotten Square Enix was making Kingdom Hearts 4. It's been total radio silence since the game's initial 2022 announcement—four long years with nothing but a three-minute reveal trailer to sustain the gaggle of eager fans (hi, it's me, I'm eager fans). Until now, that is.

The game made a very surprise appearance during today's Nintendo Direct, offering a brand-new 90-second trailer that'll hopefully keep me going for another four years. It's pretty in keeping thematically with the 2022 reveal—a gigantic heartless manifesting among skyscrapers in Quadratum (the Kingdom Hearts version of Tokyo, more specifically here Shibuya) while protagonist Sora does some of his classic airborne flips and tricks while flourishing his keyblade.

We get a wee glimpse of some of the cast, too—there's Strelitzia from one of the mobile games, who we saw in the first trailer, along with Organization XIII member Luxord. The most interesting appearance by far is who appears to be a young Xehanort, holding a comically busted umbrella over Sora.

At least I'm going to assume it's a young Xehanort, considering the art Tesutya Nomura drew earlier this year to commemorate the series' 24th anniversary has him in the exact same getup (with an umbrella that hasn't actively been mauled by a strong gust of wind).

I am still getting whiplash from seeing Sora in a more grounded setting compared to previous games—and I'm going to generously assume that the emptiness and slight crustiness of the setting is a Switch 2 thing, not a Kingdom Hearts 4 thing—but this tiny little glimpse of my clown-shoed boy spinning and flipping around enemies, and getting launched into the odd skyscraper here and there, has already gotten me incredibly giddy.

Unfortunately there's still not even a vague release window for this thing. But it's exciting to know that the game'll at least be on PC and console at the same time—the trailer uploaded to the Kingdom Hearts YouTube specifies that it'll be "multiplatform at launch" while listing Steam, Epic, and Xbox on PC alongside our console siblings.

I have spent the last two weeks in a blissful kind of agony. When I'm not playing Derelict Star, a very humble-looking 2D exploration platformer that looks like it could run on a Commodore 64, I'm thinking about it. At least a half-dozen times I decided I'd had enough. Faced with an impossible-seeming obstacle, against which I'd beaten my head for hours, I figured it's my duty as a time-conscious adult person to move on. I've seen what Derelict Star is doing and can appreciate it: isn't that enough? Nope.

I have to confess I'm obsessed with this humble but quietly ambitious lil' conundrum. It's a bonafide work of art. It's enveloping and gorgeous, and the way it makes me feel reminds me why I fell in love with videogames.

Derelict Star is a momentum-based 2D platformer with a 1:1 aspect ratio. Its spartan pixel art style makes Celeste look like a Naughty Dog splurge. It has a strict, rigorous but masterable physics system. There's no boss battles, combat or kill rooms. It's about a little pixel person stranded in space who must retrieve from a sprawling old space freighter at least eight power cells to power up their ship in order to get home.

This freighter is a massive world of ultra-parsable grids, ridden with secrets: it's austere and beautiful in its own way, but purely functional in its visual design. It's basically a landscape of squares. The pixels are so chunky and parsable that I know the difference between dying to a lava coral and standing as close as possible next to it, all the better to gain enough momentum to reach a nearby platform that—five hours ago—I thought I couldn't possibly mantle. The pixel art is primitive by most modern measures but the precision it confers is absolutely crucial to this game's design.

It's tough. I have no qualms with abandoning games, even games I like. But Derelict Star feels too good in my hands. Even when I felt like I'd reached my skill ceiling in this superlatively twitchy platformer, I kept going back to noodle in it. And every time I returned, I happened upon a whole new region of its sprawling map that taught me how to tackle those areas that seemed insurmountable before. This is a special kind of metroidvania—like Öoo—whose inaccessible regions aren't gradually reached with the aid of a new power-up or skill, but for unlocking the mysteries of how the player-character works.

This is a game about learning how to move. It has a lot more in common with a Codemasters F1 game than it does a vaguely puzzly metroidvania (which it also is). It trades in perfect but vibe-driven execution. It wants you to feel out curves, sometimes right angles, just so and at the right speed. It needs you to be locked in. A challenging movement is never obviously possible until you pull it off. When you learn to pull it off with aplomb, the game sings anew with endless potential. Moment-to-moment experimentation is baked into its design. It demands that you keep trying.

Now that I've finished Derelict Star, the 30 odd hours I've spent with it could be dilated into, I dunno, maybe two hours max. And now I feel forlorn because I want to do it again.

Star Jumps

My little pixel person has a jetpack. At the bottom of the screen is a meter that shows how much speed I've accrued via running on flat ground. If I jump and use my jetpack from a static position it's piddling, but if I fill the meter from blue, through orange, into red, via running, and then jump, I can leap vast distances. Sometimes I can maintain a red-level momentum even if I slow down, so long as I don't collide with any momentum-killing surface, all the better to effectively float upward through impossible vertical gauntlets.

There are endless subtleties to the way this jetpack person can be thrown and weaved upwards, downwards or through tight corridors of instant death, in a way that seems bizarrely untethered from the world's steadfastly gridlocked expanse. That is your superpower in Derelict Star, basically: the world is a grid, but you are not fixed to it.

This collision of ultra-readable obstacles with expressive play is where the heart of Derelict Star's compelling tension and agency lies, and it's what makes it stand out among dozens nay hundreds of similar looking platformers. The rules during the first hour are the same as the rules 30 hours later; you are never better equipped, but you're constantly learning.

Importantly, Derelict Star doesn't sidescroll: the world unfurls as discrete rooms. Sometimes I use my momentum, my speed, my amazing ability to float, not just to reach platforms but to peek into places it might be possible to reach. In this world of discrete "rooms" there is always usually a regional novelty: maybe there's slippery ice, or maybe there are vines that stop me from jumping (but which can give me a huge amount of vertical momentum if I grasp onto them at speed when they're on walls). Maybe there are collectible dots that give me a brief vertical boost. Maybe there are bouncy airborne bubbles, or bouncy blocky nodes that can propel me great distances, if only I hit them from the correct angle at the right speed. Along the route to every crucial power cell lies a new confusion to my jetpack fellow's path.

Checkpoints are abundant, and from each it's possible to fast travel to another via a map which plainly shows where each power cell is. This gives Derelict Star its freewheeling, explorative atmosphere: if things are too tough, it's three button presses towards another region you might feel better equipped to master. It's a sandbox of platforming physics problems, and once I understood its pace and cadence, I realised that it isn't designed to thwart me. This isn't a masochistic game: it gives me all the time and space to learn, and a whole sprawling world in which to figure it out. It's easier than, say, Super Meat Boy. It's like Celeste: you can finish it. This is not a masocore platformer. It's a patience platformer.

I am always conscious of my hands when I play Derelict Star. I am amazed by what they can achieve. It is extraordinary when I realise that I'm not even thinking too hard about what I'm doing: my hands bleed into the game, and my brain bleeds into my hands. No other medium can capture this zen-like, trance-like expressiveness. Derelict Star is a Rez-like, or a Foddy-like, in this way.

It's essentially a toy, yes, but this focus on fine-tuned movement emboldens the quieter thematics in Derelict Star: this is a game of exquisite, quiet loneliness. Nothing (or at least, nearly nothing) wants to kill you. It's a little puzzle box escape room. There is music, but it seems to creep into the foreground delicately; it's a spacey, synth-laden variant of silence. In Derelict Star you're adrift, and you have all the time in the world. It feels good to just poke around.

This is a maturing medium with countless, and growing, forms of player expression. But Derelict Star is about your hands, man. It's an evolved and aberrated take on the arcade. It's an interplay between hands and eyes. It's unapologetically a vintage game, but a very serious one. It executes on its concerns with formidable severity and quiet technical prowess. It knows that mastery is the province of obsessors; but it also knows that the route to obsession crosses through the pastures of the pleasure of simply trying. And it makes trying feel delectable, sublime.

When I think about Derelict Star, a few days after completing the wily beast, I admittedly struggle to articulate the pleasure of interfacing with it, save for what I've written above. I reckon it feels a lot more like a gorgeous song than a piece of software. It definitely made me dance with my fingers. My fingers are still operating to its logic.

Despite what you may have heard, Marvel's Blade, the daywalker action game in development at Arkane, is not cancelled. The proof of life came from Arkane lead concept artist and assistant art director Jean-Luc Monnet, who delivered a short-but-pointed reassurance to fans on X after the game missed its second Xbox Showcase running.

"Let us cook."

Concern about the fate of Blade, and Arkane as a whole, is understandable. Despite making some of the best immersive sims (and thus, by definition, some of the best videogames) ever, Arkane has struggled to put a genuine hit on the board. Dishonored 2, despite its lineage, did not sell especially well, and Prey is a massively underappreciated gem; and the less said about the Bethesda-imposed live service catastrophe Redfall, the better.

Microsoft closed Arkane Austin in 2024, a year after Redfall's release, and that brutal handling made the future of the studio as a whole seem far less certain than it should be. PC Gamer's Fraser Brown, in fact, wrote that the absence of Marvel's Blade during the Xbox Games Showcase had him worried about Arkane—and this was in 2025. Rolling through 2026 without even a reminder of its existence naturally conjured up even deeper concerns, especially given Microsoft's desire to prove that it's still in the fight—and the fact that it had relatively little to actually prove it.

So it's reassuring news for Blade fans, but possibly still a bit of a stressful situation for the more specific crowd of PlayStation-owning Blade fans. As a licensed Marvel game, my assumption is that it will be released on all platforms—but platforms haven't been announced, and Microsoft's recently turned its eyes back to console exclusives as it gets ready to fight the next round of the console wars. Insomniac's upcoming Wolverine game is a PlayStation 5 exclusive—it'd be a hell of a get for Xbox if it could turn the tables with Blade.

I've seen more of Gen Atlas, the new game from Ico and Shadow of the Colossus creator Fumito Ueda, than was on display in Friday's trailer. But not much more. In a meeting with Gen Atlas's developers and publisher Epic Games on Sunday, I saw just another minute or so of the game's so-far silent protagonist wandering the desert; more colossal robots; a bit more shooting; and a lot more sand.

It was tantalizing, but the kind of footage that simply created more questions than it did provide answers. But the real purpose of the meeting was speaking with Ueda about the development of his studio's new game—the first in a decade, and the first he's ever released on PC.

Epic's publishing team introduced it as a "whole new sci-fi adventure that has all the hallmarks of a classic Ueda experience," so that's where I started.

What, for you, defines a 'classic Fumito Ueda experience?' When you think about the experience you want to deliver to players, what is that, in Gen Atlas?

Fumito Ueda, director: "For me, the first thing that is important, and what I think defines a Fumito Ueda game, is that it's something different and unlike anything else available in the market. Not that it needs to only be unique, but in totality, the uniqueness also needs to be balanced within the game experience. Secondly, it's important to me, and I hope signifies what is a Fumito Ueda game, is that this experience is something you can only see, and can only be built, because it's a videogame.

In Shadow of the Colossus, I remember the moment it transitioned from cutscene to camera control shocking me. The way it looked and felt—no other game felt that way at the time. You used filmic language in a way that was not common in games then, but is much more common now. You were ahead of the curve, but for you now, what is the secret sauce when other games have caught up to that cinematic presentation?

You just asked me a great question because it's a difficult one for me to answer. I consistently think about how I can bring in something unexpected. It's an element of surprise, but I don't think about it in a way that's just for impact's sake. It has to be unexpected but also at times sort of familiar. Let's say there are default or given standard-ish game mechanics across many games. Because I know that's very familiar and comfortable to a lot of players, I don't just take it as-is. I want to continue to refine it.

And in the end what's entertaining to the player is what I am always in the pursuit of, making sure it's fun to play. So in that sense it might sound like 'okay, we need to think of something to integrate or carry over from things that already exist.' But if it's a copy and paste process anyone can do that. So I'm thinking about what is the fun and entertaining essence that's in there, but to come up with some sort of additive that will make it even more entertaining, but also unexpected at the same time.

The shooting mechanic seems like a specific example of this in Gen Atlas. There are many shooters in videogames, so what's the unique mechanic you tried to bring to the shooting that will surprise players or feel different from other games?

One thing I want to make sure that people don't misunderstand—yes it's new, and probably unexpected from me, but it's not going to be the main mechanic in this game. Simply said, it's really one of the ways that you're going to be able to overcome hurdles in the game.

But it's not 'how many enemies can I shoot down and how many points can I earn.' It's not implemented in that kind of way. It's one of the ways that you're able to progress, and I want to be very selective of the word: I don't know if 'frustration' is the right way to frame it, but whenever you're playing a game you want to be challenged, right? And you start to feel a little bit of frustration because you're not winning in the most simple and easy manner.

For me, you want to give a healthy amount of frustration, but by the time you earn or learn how to use said mechanic, you see the potential of having that sense of achievement once you utilize it. The shooting mechanic in this game I position as such that maybe there's a more effective way to overcome some hurdles, and that's how I see this kind of naturally implemented in the game.

The nuance of "frustration" vs. "challenge" comes up at this point, and Ueda's interpreter elaborates:

It's more being challenged—it's not intentionally giving players frustration, but to be challenged, and then at a certain point you feel like you have on-boarded a new mechanic and you're going to be able to accomplish [your goal], and the sense of achievement once you've done that is what we're looking for here. The shooting mechanic is one of the ways that he thought, in this world's setting, is a way to do that.

That suggests to me, and maybe I'm reading this wrong, that shooting is perhaps a quicker, more direct solution for challenges or puzzles where there might be an alternative way of getting around it.

The short answer is yes.

But to add, it's also for players to feel that your existence matters in the setting. So for example, in Ico it's not that you have to defeat all the enemies that you encounter. That is not what the game is asking you to do. But in the moment, you may feel as if you have to defeat certain enemies, or you can choose not to. So in that sense, it's not to score points, but it's there so that it matters, and you feel that you do exist in that world.

In Shadow of the Colossus, defeating the colossi gave you this feeling of triumph but also mourning, because you'd killed these majestic creatures. Are you trying to evoke that same feeling with the robots in this game, or are they fulfilling a different relationship with the player?

In the trailer you'll see robot vs. robot, and then the main character and the robot. In Shadow of the Colossus and what you experience when you defeat them, feeling a little mourning from killing the creatures, there isn't something that is similar to that internal conflict in that way. But maybe that's all I can say at this point, for that.

Is your character also a robot in this game, or are you a human in a suit?

At this point Ueda checks with the Epic publishing team: Has he previously used the word "humanoid" for the player character?

Yes, so, not a human with a robot suit on, but a humanoid. And the [big, flying] robot head is obviously part of a robot.

"Humanoid" is still ambiguous. Is that intentional?

Ueda asks the publishers how much detail they're giving at this point, who respond "let's keep the mystery"

I just wanted to make sure I understood! You strike me as someone who draws inspiration from many parts of your life, or many places, not just other games. What about Gen Atlas reflects who you are now and where you are in your life compared to prior games?

On inspiration, just at a high level, I think you're spot on. Where I grew up, how I grew up, what I consumed over my lifetime, all of it is a source of my inspiration, and it's really hard to call out any one or two, whether pieces of work or even genre in terms of entertainment or media that I've consumed. But for Gen Atlas, thematically, there are some thoughts that went into it.

First of all, videogames are part of a large space of entertainment, and when I think about entertainment, I want to think about what's going to appeal to the audience. Even for all of my previous work, there's a theme that hopefully is very universally not just appealing, but accepted. In Ico, there's a boy and a girl relationship. With Shadow of the Colossus, anyone would want to go after giant monsters. You want to live out that dream and see what that's like. With The Last Guardian you start with something that's cute and loveable and charming as a pet, and now it's this large creature that you want as your companion.

When you boil it down to the simplicity of these things, they're not that unique, and I want to stay true to what is going to be appealing to a lot of people. What do they want to live out in a videogame fantasy story? Who do you want to be in these game universes?

The next thing I thought about, which is now what you see here in Gen Atlas, is of course I want to go into a giant robot. I want to fight giant robots. That's where it all started.

Even in real life, here we are today talking about whether robots are going to maybe control our next decade. We're going to see more real life stories about humanoids and robots taking over parts of our lives and world. So I felt that this, as a theme in general, would be of interest to a large audience, and from there I started expanding on that idea, building the world, and now it's a sci-fi world. So it didn't start off with deliberately thinking I was going to build a sci-fi world. It started off with the theme of wanting to have robots in this game.

You mentioned the backdrop of AI is influencing our culture now. As a creator, do you have strong feelings against the use of AI in games?

Personally, not just AI, but I'm all about learning new technology. There's so much information, so I just have my antennas up to try to absorb as much information about the very fast-paced way that things are moving. So personally I have a high interest in R&D.

However, when it comes to our actual work at Gen Design studio, we really only use it in a way that is efficient and effective on the project management side—coming up with schedules or looking up how to best use a new tool we haven't had our full onboarding experience with, or summarizing meeting notes. That's the extent we use it in-house. Everything that is considered game development is made by our own people, made by humans.

I imagine there are fans who will probably be relieved to hear that last bit.

Yes, I hope so too.

As a writer for PC Gamer, I'm excited this is a game I'm able to cover. How does it feel for you to be directing a game for the first time that's not exclusive to PlayStation? That's been your life for a very long time.

Obviously all my previous games have only been released on one platform, the PlayStation audience is the only one that's been able to play it. I have nothing but excitement and am happy that this can reach a lot more players just from day one. I'm looking forward to it as much as I think new players are looking forward to experiencing a Fumito Ueda game.

In terms of how I feel about this being the first time it's going to be outside PlayStation, is there something that comes back to me about trying to entertain the PC audience? I don't think there's really a large divide in that sense. Whether you're console-focused or a PC-only player, I think what you're looking for and hope to get out of a game you purchase or download is a new experience. There's something fresh and something new to look forward to. In that sense I'm seeing it as a very similar market, whether it's console or PC. I just want to deliver something that feels new to those players.

A very different question, but can you tell me anything about the sand in Gen Atlas? I'm curious if there are systemic interactions with wind, or if the environment changes a lot.

Ueda gets quite animated about this; apparently no one has asked about sand.

I think what I can say, and maybe it's a hint, but the two real central themes of this game are we wanted to feature robots, that's one very apparent obvious thing, and there's going to be a vast sort of span of time that is also a key element in the storytelling, and so the environment—there are changes that happen over these large amounts of time. Perhaps that has something to do with how you see the environment, and how the changes are going to be apparent.

For reasons I can't quite explain—except to admit that San Andreas was very good—the entire Earth has become one big millenarian cult awaiting the arrival of Grand Theft Auto 6, which will purge us of our sins and deliver us to apocatastasis. It will also make four hundred quintillion dollars.

No wonder, then, that its current November 2026 release date squats on the calendar like a big criminal troll, warding off any who come near. No studio wants to release in the vicinity of GTA 6, leading to a very lopsided 2026 release calendar in which every game has tried to squeeze itself into September. Well, every game but one.

"Maybe not *every* publisher," wrote Furyu Games in a post on X, responding to a Kotaku story titled "Sony’s State Of Play Showed That Every Publisher Is Terrified Of GTA 6". Furyu declared, boldly, like its upcoming roguelike Crymelight is due out November 5, two weeks prior to GTA 6's launch (and concurrent with Guy Fawkes Night; he would've been a fan). "Maybe we’re just not afraid enough".

Furyu has form for this sort of thing, as the studio itself notes: "Last year, [Furyu-published] Kemono Teatime launched on September 4... the same day as Hollow Knight: Silksong."

Which is, let's be absolutely clear here, very much a marketing manoeuvre. Being the plucky little studio that picks a David-and-Goliath fight with Rockstar is an arresting image, so arresting that Devolver Digital has made hay doing much the same thing—even moving the release date of an upcoming mystery game in order to make sure it releases on the exact same day as GTA 6.

But it's still pretty funny, if you ask me, and I suspect it's a good move for a smaller publisher whose games don't have GTA 6 levels of hype. Sure, releasing some big AAA thing the same month as "the largest game launch in history" won't do you any favours, but putting out a smaller game? Some of that GTA 6 aura might just rub off on you.

Back in 2020, Senua studio Ninja Theory announced a new game, Project Mara, that aimed to "recreate the horrors of the mind" with a "real-world and grounded representation of mental terror." A year later we got a look at the game's absurdly photorealistic apartment, but beyond that it pretty much fell off the radar until yesterday, when studio head Dom Matthews said work on the project has been ended.

Cancellations suck as a general rule, but word of this one came amidst the announcement of Ninja Theory's new Senua game, entitled simply Senua—"an out-and-out action adventure game," Matthews said in an Xbox Wire interview, with "broader gameplay, more combat depth, and an interconnected world."

That's also part of why the new game isn't called Hellbade 3: "The title of just Senua really reflects that this is something fresh and new and different."

"It is a different style of game. I think Hellblade 1 and Hellblade 2 had an intention that we delivered on—but this is a different intention," Matthews explained. "I think of it as being additive—we’re taking all of that goodness and adding the types of things that people expect from a premium action-adventure game."

Senua takes place after the events of Hellblade 1 and 2, and is set in Purgatory—specifically, her vision of it. "She’s trapped between life and death on a quest to reach the afterlife and be reunited with the ones that she’s loved and lost," Matthews said.

"Her belief is that by healing the wounds of her life, she can find the peace that is the key that unlocks the gate to the afterlife." Hellblade players will recognize characters and themes from those games, but "this is a game that welcomes in new players as well—it’s all very much presented in a way that, if you haven’t been there, then you’re fully going to understand and get what’s happening in this title."

This will also be the first time since DMC: Devil May Cry, which came out in 2013, that the entire studio will be dedicated to working on a single game—and to make that happen, Project Mara had to die.

"I took the decision to not work on that any further," Matthews said. "These decisions are never easy, but I did so to take the opportunity to have all of the talent and expertise in the studio, all 85 creatives, working together to realize the potential of what Senua can be."

So it's a good news/bad news situation—obviously weighted toward the good, especially if you're a Senua fan. But I can't help feeling a bit disappointed by the demise of Project Mara, a game that looked to "combine the best of game design and technology with cutting edge clinical neuroscience and psychiatry to help with mental suffering and to promote mental well being," except instead of helping the goal was messing with in the worst possible ways. I don't know if that sounds like a good time, exactly, but I'd sure like to try it.

Senua is set to launch sometime in 2027, and is up for wishlisting now on Steam.

After Friday's trailer for Gen Atlas, the new game from acclaimed Ico and Shadow of the Colossus director Fumito Ueda, I saw two strains of reactions. Mostly there was gushing praise and excitement for a new Ueda game a decade after The Last Guardian.

There was also: "That framerate tho."

I wasn't shocked at the reaction. In 2006, Shadow of the Colossus pushed the PlayStation 2 to its limits, often running at below 30 frames per second to deliver on the scale of enormous colossi and the physics that made the whole world feel tangible. To this day, people use a specific workaround to be able to play 2016's The Last Guardian at 60 fps on a PlayStation 5, rather than a not-so-stable 30 fps on the PlayStation 4 where it launched. So when a few scenes in the trailer for the still-in-development Gen Atlas seemed to be a bit choppy, of course people immediately glommed onto them.

Fumito Ueda wasn't shocked by the reaction, either.

"Our team is well aware that parts of the trailer were not fully optimized, so I'm not surprised to hear and see those comments," Ueda said in an interview with PC Gamer.

The goal with the Summer Game Fest trailer, he said, was to set the stage, "giving the audience enough to really start thinking about and wondering what Gen Atlas is all about." Being able to show players a glimpse of the game's world outweighed concerns about it being unfinished.

"I was fully aware, but I have no doubt that our skilled engineers, with support from everyone at Epic, are going to get us to the level that we need to [be]," Ueda said. "In-development games always go through this phase of what can we show and how much. We did our best we could in delivering this trailer for this moment."

The one major difference between this Ueda game and the three he's directed over the past 25 years, of course, is that it's on PC. PC gamers certainly have strong opinions about framerates, but we're also accustomed to being able to throw extra horsepower or upscaling algorithms at any game that's running poorly.

Hopefully Gen Atlas's choppy moments will be smoothed out by the time we can play it, which is "closer than you might think," according to Epic. But if not, well, I have no doubt that the modders will come running.

My thumbs are raw. My pulse is elevated. My regrets are many. Nestled in a corner of this weekend's Summer Game Fest Play Days event in Los Angeles is, I suspect, a perfect videogame in the making.

N+ Infinity Times Two is a floaty ninja platformer—the latest in a series that started over 20 years ago as a browser game. Then came the Xbox Live Arcade darling N+ in 2008, followed by N++ in 2015. Canadian developer Metanet has awoken once more for N+ Infinity Times Two, a multiplayer-focused sequel that had this writer yelling in a roomful of strangers.

The beauty of N+ is that you could map its controls to an NES gamepad: Move, jump, and sometimes become a missile. The full game will have five modes, but Metanet was only showing off two this weekend:

Race: A mad dash through bespoke 2D tracks that's all about dodging hazards and harnessing your ninja's exaggerated momentum. When you cross the finish line, you transform into a steerable missile that can blow up the competition.

Tag: A 2v2 game of keep away between ninjas and hunters. If a hunter touches a ninja, they're dead. The team that survives longest as ninjas wins. Also, the hunters can turn into missiles whenever they want.

Both are simple, but genius. Our first few races were casual and gentlemanly, but eventually the room got wise to a few strategies. You can deliberately hang back in the middle of the pack, placing a bet that the lead ninja will hit a trap and make your life easier. Or you can go for the gold pickups placed along the outskirts of the stage—bonus points that can turn second place into first place if you're quick. No matter what, the quickest still gets the major advantage of not having to dodge player-controlled missiles. I'd like to say this was me, but more often than not I was the overzealous frontrunner who showed everyone where not to jump by immediately blowing up.

Tag is where things got a little heated. Were this Mario or Super Meat Boy, I don't think platforming at each other would be all that thrilling or even challenging, but N+'s uniquely floaty, expressive gymnastics are the perfect fit for a PvP environment. It's as if Metanet somehow designed N all those years ago with PvP tag in mind. Tracking down ninjas takes a level of anticipation—reading their movements, routes, and cutting them off where you believe momentum will carry them.

One showdown at the top of a spire played out like an interpretive dance, fidgeting in place to be hard to read, bouncing up walls, and picking up speed on anything that qualifies as a ramp. It's like playing tag on the moon, except there's laser mines and the fall damage is brutal.

N+ Infinity has all the ingredients of a party game that my friends will obsess over, and frankly, it's been way too long since one of those came along. You know the type—the TowerFalls, Nidhoggs, and Samurai Gunns of the world. This sort of low-barrier, high-skill-ceiling game had a moment in the early 2010s, but they disappeared around the same time the Jackbox Party Pack was born. As much as I enjoy a Jackbox night, we've kind of burnt out on the endless improv and silly drawings. The last time I had everyone over, I fired up TowerFall for the first time in probably 10 years, and the room immediately locked in for sweaty arrow flinging.

That sort of timeless game design is rare, and with Metanet's track record of perfectly precise platformers, I believe they're capable of the same here. I can't wait to play the full thing, which will also include co-op levels that play like traditional N+, sometime in 2027.

There's something deeply satisfying about delivery games—in a sense, most videogames are about getting from point A to point B, but being incentivised to do so in style's always a great table on which to set a cosy adventure. As the case seems to be with Into the Wind, a gorgeous, ghibli-esque looking action adventure/delivery sim with a mind to do just that.

Making its debut in the PC Gaming Show, Into the Wind is the inaugural game of developer Bloom & Gloom Games, and an open-world action adventure. It's being published by Three Friends, a newer publisher that nonetheless has folks from Minecraft, Deep Rock Galactic, and Valheim on its staff.

You play a young lad who has come into the inheritance of his uncle's delivery service after he's gone missing—as the trailer hints—in a mysterious cloud. Cue lots of gorgeously-rendered and charmingly-written NPCs, a deep, textured world, and uh—dog-fighting in the air.

In all seriousness, Into the Wind looks absolutely beautiful, and I'm sure there's a context in which the protagonist's do-or-die battles above his comfy little island wind up being justified. Strange unmanned vehicles coming out said cloud, perhaps? After all, it looks like the motorcycle's sapient, or at least self-driving, which doesn't seem all that in keeping with the charming aesthetic.

Also, it can turn into an aeroplane. I'd neglected to mention that part. There's absolutely some magical mystery laid thick underneath Into the Wind's otherwise cosy exterior.

I'm taken by the delivery segments more than the aerial combat, though—Into the Wind looks to be borrowing a page from the book of games like Death Stranding, though without as much simulation, where hitting a cow causes your hard-earned delivery to go flying.

Into the Wind doesn't have a release date, but you can wishlist it on Steam now.

Check out everything revealed at the PC Gaming Show.

Armatus has everything I love in a videogame: brutal melee finishers, lots of guns, a roguelite loop, demons, a man plucked out of his time and placed into ours, a city in ruins. The boundary between our world and another has been ripped open, and now an ancient warrior—that's you—has to get all those nasty hellspawn back where they belong: England wherever it is they came from.

The PC Gaming Show blessed us with a new trailer for the third-person roguelite, developed by Counterplay Games and published by Fictions, where we see the unnamed warrior tearing through the city streets.

Watching our crusader charge through the urban metropolis with their cape swaying in the breeze while also mag-dumping on alien-looking foes gives the whole thing an almost Destiny aesthetic. You also get access to a nasty purple scythe that you can impale enemies with, and a cool set of powers.

The game's Steam page promises you'll "start strong, end Godly," which is quite the offer. As with any roguelite, you'll die a lot and learn as you go, but it seems Armatus wants you to feel pretty buff right from the jump. You'll start with the scythe and a gun, but find celestial powers like holy fire and the ability to slow time along the way.

This is very welcome news. I love roguelites, but the early game of each run can often feel like a slog until your build comes online, so I'm glad to hear we'll be skipping that grind. The attacks shown off during the trailer look phenomenal, though, so I'm equally excited to get stuck in and start exploding things once I'm deep in a run.

Armatus is launching this winter, so you've still got a while to wait until it comes out, I'm afraid. Wishlist it on Steam now.

Check out everything revealed at the PC Gaming Show.

We're going back to where it all started with Resonance: A Plague Tale Legacy, the upcoming prequel to the iconic ratty action series. And thanks to today's Xbox showcase, we now know that its launch is just around the corner.

It's been a year since this prequel was first announced, and now thankfully we don't have to wait too much longer as its release date has been set for August 27, 2026.

The game follows Sophia as she works her way through Minotaur Island—all while shifting between the Middle Ages and ancient Minoan times. Resonance tells an all new story, albeit one that follows Sophia's origins 15 years before meeting Amicia and Hugo.

Resonance will also be trading the usual stealth-focused action of the previous games in this series for a straight-forward approach to combat. This may put some fans off, but not me—I was never a fan of A Plague Tale's sneaky ways, and am always up for some good old-fashioned street brawls.

Plus, Sophia is a hardened fighter, one that is well-versed in agile melee combat. Meaning we can also expect some parries to be coming our way.

If all of that doesn't get you excited, then try and rest easy in the knowledge that there'll still be plenty of puzzles to solve: "Guided by the knowledge safeguarded in your notebook, follow in your crew’s footsteps to explore a richly detailed world, unravel its secrets, and face deadly trials. Use a stolen Minoan sphere to solve ingenious puzzles by manipulating light—a force woven by Daedalus into the island’s very heart."

But with the release date so close, you won't have to wait long to find out whether this prequel is up your alley. At the very least I'm just eager to know more about the Macula's legacy, even if there has been an unfortunate lack of rats in all the trailers so far.

We love a good shadowdrop at the PC Gaming Show, so to be able to drop a sequel to one of my favourites is a real delight. Today we're here to tell you that not only does the ridiculously named 2 Fights 2 Tight Spaces exist, but you can get it in Early Access right now if you so desire.

2021's Fights in Tight Spaces was one of my favourite deck-building games, dropping you and your deck into a series of different action sequences and tasking you with getting through it. Cards allowed you to do things like move around your enemies, or do a cool jumpy flip kick that I don't really understand but meant you were kicking two people in the face at once.

In the world premiere trailer, shown at PC Gaming Show, it looks like there's been a few changes. The biggest addition seems to be co-op multiplayer, allowing you and some buddies to get together and beat up thugs as a group pastime.

There are some extra additions too. Like all of the best action movies you'll now be using your environment offensively, and the trailer has you dunking an unfortunate mook into a deep fat fryer like the most disturbing part of Spooks, if any of you can remember as far back as 2002. Outside of the environmental bits, it also seems like you're going to be taking actual weapons from your opponents too, with cards that will change what they do depending on whether you're armed or not.

Add in the lick of paint that makes environments more detailed, and it feels like a meaningful step forward, with some additions from the half-sequel Knights in Tight Spaces. If you'll excuse me, I'm going to hop into it right now.

Check out everything revealed at the PC Gaming Show.

"Don't stoop to their level, be the bigger man. Use your words, not your fists." That's what my mum always said to me when I got in trouble for fighting in the playground at school. I've been to therapy, I use my words these days, and honestly, I'm better off for it because I can't punch to save my life.

Sometimes I'd rather solve my problems with a sledgehammer instead of my words, though.

In Virtue and a Sledgehammer—developed by Deconstructeam and Selkie Harbour and published by Devolver—you forgo therapy and instead return to your hometown, construction tool/weapon in hand, and get to smashing. The reveal trailer showed off its Pacific Northwest setting, eerie vibes, android residents, and the smashing. The trailer we just saw on the PC Gaming Show also includes some heavy hits, but mostly delves deeper into the mind of the game, just like a therapist would do. Hey, wait a minute!

There's a montage of surreal, gorgeously lit scenes interspersed with questions such as "who is the most important person in your life?" and "how often do you masturbate?" Please don't answer any of these in the comment section below this article, thanks. It's clear there's more to Virtue and a Sledgehammer than just the sledgehammer, even though it's got quite a large role.

It's a seriously cool trailer, and it's made me even more excited for the game than I was when I first heard about it. I'm a sucker for the PNW and its gloomy beauty, and I love the soundtrack and art style we've been shown so far. I'm also curious as to exactly how the game's story is going to weave through me bashing androids and houses into tiny little pieces. Luckily, there's a demo out now on Steam so we can all dive in and answer that therapist's questions.

Check out everything revealed at the PC Gaming Show.

As the old saying goes: In space, no one can hear you have a pleasant time with a small cohort of your pals. Unless you have in-game voice chat. Or Discord. Or I guess you could just call each other. Do people still call each other in the space age?

Well, you can find out in Starseeker: Astroneer Expeditions, which just popped its head up at the PC Gaming Show to show off some co-op planetary exploration and remind us of its imminent early access release date.

Starseeker is, as you might already have deduced, System Era's followup to the really quite good Astroneer, its spacey exploration and crafting game that itself hit early access all the way back in—God help us—2016 (it came out properly in 2019). Starseeker seems a bit more chaotic, from what I've seen, and centres around an upgradable hub space station you can upgrade and hang out on with your pals before undertaking missions on various planets.

When you're down on those planets, you'll be fighting aliens and foraging/pillaging for loot. In true Astroneer style, you'll also be deforming the absolute heck out of the terrain—shaping planets like putty to ease your way across them or to plunder their depths for treasures.

Personally, I want to know how long it would take a full team of four players to completely erase a planet from existence like some kind of artisan-labour Death Star, but that doesn't come up in the trailer. Weird.

I guess I won't have to wait long to find out. Starseeker: Astroneer Expeditions hits Steam June 11 in early access. "Although it is hard to give a solid date, based on the goals we have, we estimate that the campaign will last around 1 year. We want to work sustainably while leaving enough time to respond to player feedback," says System Era. Well, that and I assume someone has to figure out this whole 'how long to delete a planet' thing?

Check out everything revealed at the PC Gaming Show.

I may not have been born in the '80s, but its aesthetic has endured so well I can both instantly recognise it and feel right at home. Deep, bold colours, wild hair, and camp, schlocky horror are all staples of the decade that I adore, even though I'm bald now. Upcoming revenge sandbox Gone Feral trades the hairdos for animal masks and pops you right into an old-school straight-to-VHS B-movie.

In the game's world premiere trailer just revealed on the PC Gaming Show, we get a glimpse at the bloody voxel action on offer. It doesn't get bogged down in the details. You're on a quest for revenge and now it's time to get to killing—so go get. Don't worry about why you were betrayed, just kill that cop and put on his uniform as a disguise so you can get closer to those who wronged you.

It's all a bit Hitman, which should be music to the ears of anyone twiddling their thumbs while they wait for IO to get back to the shiny-headed assassin. You can distract NPCs by throwing items, kick them off of ledges they have no business standing so close to, and you can use just about anything as a weapon, from boomboxes to turkey legs—have you seen the size of those things? That plus the animal masks also add a wonderful Hotline Miami feel to Gone Feral, but these levels are bigger, more open sandboxes that you can think and play around in rather than tight puzzles to be solved with quick reflexes.

What's striking about the game aside from the lush colours are the decidedly '90s Tarantino-esque spurts of blocky voxel blood that shoot out of the necks of the unfortunate NPCs who get in our unnamed protagonist's way. What's more, you'll be able to do this all in singleplayer or online co-op, which is going to make coming up with clever kills all the more fun when Gone Feral hits digital shelves. When that'll be, we don't know just yet. But fear not, it's being made by Just Purkey Games, run by Nathan Purkeypile, a 14-year Bethesda alum who worked on Fallout 3, 4, 76, Skyrim, and Starfield, so you know he's got the credentials.

If you want to keep up with Gone Feral, wishlist it on Steam now and sign up for the playtest.

Check out everything revealed at the PC Gaming Show.

It was probably Christopher Nolan's movie The Prestige that put the idea into my mind that old timey magicians were a bit seedy, a touch obsessive, and absolutely bonkers competitive with one another, perfectly willing to maim themselves and even die horribly to stay one step ahead when it came to performing illusions.

Magicians: The Devil's Deal was revealed today at the Xbox Games Showcase, and it's got quite the same vibes at The Prestige—plus a whole lot of Bioshock.

It's a cinematic trailer so it's hard to be sure, but it's a first-person shooter where instead of guns your weapons are playing cards and magic wands, and you battle deranged circus acts like clowns, strongmen, and jugglers. It also appears that you can use your magic to alter the environment and even reverse gravity to walk on the ceiling. Try that, David Blaine.

"You play as Jacob Menteuro, a fallen illusionist bound by a pact with The Devil and cast into Hell. Master deadly tricks, steal the powers of rival magicians, and escape the infernal world of Theatreland," its Steam store page says.

Magicians: The Devil's Deal is due out in 2027. And on a personal note, to all you magicians out there: you don't need to make a deal with the devil. Card tricks are fine. We all like card tricks! You don't need to sell your soul for actual magic powers.

Following yet another post-update drubbing from the Helldivers 2 community, Arrowhead has announced it is making sweeping changes to numerous parts of its sci-fi shooter. Of these, one of the studio's more interesting plans is overhauling the sense of progression in its live-service experience, both for individual players and the wider galactic war.

Arrowhead sketched out some of these ideas in a message to the community, but now the studio has published a more detailed article explaining its plans for the future of the galactic war. There's a lot to dig into, but in short, there are big changes ahead for major orders, fighting on planets, and how players improve their ships.

Let's start with the galactic war, where one of Arrowhead's main objectives is to give players a better sense of the impact they have upon it. "It's never been clear if the actions of the community lead to different outcomes, or if it's just smoke and mirrors," writes game director Mikael Erikson. "The reality is that the community impact on the Galactic War differs, but even in the cases where we did a lot of work to prepare for very different outcomes, we've struggled to communicate it in the game."

As such, Arrowhead is launching what it calls "galactic war campaigns" later this month. Describing these as an "evolution" of the current major orders, these will be longer objectives that take place over one to three weeks. According to Erikson, the intention here is that "it will always be clear what the active Campaign is, how it's going, what the outcomes have been, and what's at stake."

In addition, longer campaigns will come with better rewards that go beyond the usual dollop of medals that I always struggle to spend. Erikson says Arrowhead plans to experiment with these, but they'll range from "gameplay altering effects to cool items"

That's Arrowhead's plan at the galactic scale. But once campaigns are in effect, changes will also be made at the planetary level, via the introduction of planet warfronts. These will reshuffle mission distribution along a dynamically changing frontline, letting you fight defensive missions in Super Earth-controlled territory, battle directly on the front line, or dive into enemy territory to embark upon dangerous behind-enemy-lines missions.

Arrowhead says it has always wanted to do this, but felt like there wasn't enough mission variety to implement it until recently.. "The intention is to make it more fun to liberate planets with your squad and deepen the Galactic War and Community Progression systems. We want liberating planets to feel unique and epic for everyone," Erikson explains.

Finally, there are changes coming at the player level too. Arrowhead is swapping out personal orders for a broader 'personal campaign progression' system so that you're less likely to be at objective odds with your teammates. But arguably the bigger change is an overhaul to how Super Destroyers work.

For this, not only is Arrowhead altering the ship module system to provide a more personalised progression system, it's also adding new types of ships entirely. The first ship is being worked on right now by Arrowhead's newly formed ship team: "Our intention is that each new ship will have their own unique progression paths, specializations and customizations."

Even this doesn't represent everything. Other planned changes include raising the level cap to 300, better enemy and player traversal, improvements to the economy, and more. It all sounds promising to me, and I particularly look forward to hearing about a new objective and not having it completed by the time I drop in.

At the Future Games Show today, Vampire Survivors creator Luca Galante talked about making more Vampire Survivors spin-offs—noting the success of Vampire Crawlers as a motivator—some of which he's calling "Survivatons."

It's a "stupid" name that is "short for survive-a-ton," the masked Poncle head said in the interview.

The Survivaton label "encompasses internally developed games that build on the foundation of the studio's flagship title, Vampire Survivors, in collaboration with selected content partners," Poncle said in a press release. "Each project will aim to introduce major gameplay changes, content expansions, or genre twists exploring ideas substantial enough to stand as their own games."

The first Survivaton will be revealed "very soon," and Vampire Survivors itself will be renamed "Vampire Survivors - First Survivaton."

Galante also revealed Vampire Survivors: Legacy of the Blood Moon, a small add-on for the original. It'll feature "eight-plus characters, eight-plus weapons, plus evolutions," and will be cheap: around 80 pence (a little over $1 USD), Galante said.

Even as Poncle works on Survivatons, there'll be more to come for the original Vampire Survivors in the future. Patch 1.15 just dropped on Steam with "a new stage, new characters, new weapons, and new Darkanas."

"I'm not planning to let go of Vampire Survivors anytime soon," said the creator.

The genre spawned by Vampire Survivors has a couple of popular names. Steam has settled on "bullet heaven," though some prefer "survivors-like." It doesn't sound like Galante is pitching "Survivaton" as a replacement for either, just a name for official Vampire Survivors spin-offs—but who knows, maybe it'll catch on.

The final announcement is the establishment of Poncle Japan, "a dedicated Japanese subsidiary focused on deepening the studio's presence in one of the world's most important gaming markets." The new studio will be run by Sawaki Takeyasu, known for his work on Devil May Cry and El Shaddai.

Visit a waterpark and you've gotta assume someone has peed in the pool. Lots of someones, actually. Soaking in anonymous wee is just the price you pay for an afternoon of waterslides and river rafting.

But at Water Station One, billed as "the galaxy's most unregulated waterpark," a little bit of pee had some major consequences.

"Since the waterpark is on a space station they can only use special space water," Lazy River creator Mike Boxleiter explained at Day of the Devs. "Because of the special properties of space water you should not pee in the pool. If you do pee in the pool, the pee will go back up into you and turn you and everyone else in the water into zombies."

Everyone get that? No follow-up questions? Good. It's basic space water science, people.

In Lazy River, everyone in the park has been turned into zombies by pee except you and your friends, who now need to escape the outbreak by rafting down the park's river ride. That means building your own raft from scavenged resources, arming yourself with weapons like water cannons and pool noodles, and fighting your way through the park's automated defenses.

It looks like a silly good time: cartoony Left 4 Dead vibes mixed with survival crafting and ragdoll physics. Cobble together a raft from inner tubes, arm yourselves with water pistols, cook some hot dogs on the grill to keep your health up, and gather what you can find on land before scurrying back to your mobile base as the zeds swarm you again.

Even on your raft, you're not completely safe. "You're gonna get hop-ons," Boxleiter said gravely. As you travel down the river you'll eventually build your humble raft up into a floating fortress, and you'll need it: the park's robotic defenses want to contain the zombie outbreak—and you and your friends with it.

It looks like a lot of fun, but don't put your swimsuit on just yet: Lazy River isn't coming to early access until 2027. In the meantime, here's its page on Steam.

Someone has overdosed, so said the panicked man running down the street towards the infirmary. I follow, pushing through the red swing doors into the hospital reception area, and find a family huddled together in the adjacent waiting room. What happened, I ask. And I'm politely, but no less promptly, told to mind my own business.

They're right, of course. Because if this scenario were to unfold in real life, despite my best intentions, random strangers are indeed entitled to privacy. I should admire their manners in such a moment of distress, truth be told. Herein lies my first distinction that separates hyper-serious text-only Grand Theft Auto roleplay, and the fast-paced, voice-based servers I'm otherwise familiar with.

New world order

I've spent years cooking up off-the-wall roleplay encounters in the voice-based GTA 5 roleplay platform FiveM, and have revelled in the breakneck speed in which most of these encounters unfold. From robbing banks while posing as a journalist to running a nightclub as an active vampire, FiveM, in my opinion, is at its very best in its immediate experiences, where spontaneity and on-the-fly exchanges make and/or break each set-piece.

With speed comes variety—roleplayers definitely take themselves seriously in the throes of VOIP-only spaces, but if something goes awry or doesn't quite go to plan, the next tale is never far from the horizon. This is true of FiveM, alt:v, NoPixel, New Day, and the wealth of RP platforms whose servers tend towards all of the above, and while there definitely are players in it for the long haul, there is a strong element of pick-up-and-play to the majority of sessions I've ever experienced.

The opposite is true in text-only servers. I've long been intimidated by the seriousness of these spectrums, to the point where I've pretty much avoided them entirely. And while I've barely dipped my toes into the narrative-heavy scene at this stage, I've nevertheless been blown away by what I've seen so far. Stepping away from FiveM et al's action-oriented roleplay, what I've found has been more thoughtful, more precise and more longer-form; where stories gradually develop and actions have genuine consequences.

The hospital example above is but one pretty superficial example, but I've played in enough VOIP servers to confidently suggest the same scenario would have unfolded like a high-drama soap opera.

As a plumber who recently moved to Los Santos following the death of his family, I'm currently pursuing an honest life. The allure of the city's criminal underbelly is there bubbling away under the surface—this is GTA, after all—but my most enjoyable RP experience last week was installing a bathroom suite for a young student couple in Vinewood. It was a nice evening by the time I'd sealed the last fitting, so I decided to walk home. I chatted to a man busking on the edge of Union Square about the stock market. I went home and had an early night. It was lovely.

And so here I am, pausing the monotony of real life in the city of Glasgow to lose myself in the monotony of pretend life in the city of Los Santos. Perhaps it's an age thing. Perhaps it's getting older and realising that the unbridled chaos of vanilla GTA Online—where it's sometimes difficult to walk 10 paces without being sniped or stabbed or blown to pieces by a flying motorcycle equipped with homing missiles—is sometimes too much. Perhaps it's realising that the meme-inspiring, TikTok-fueling, fast-pace-favouring RP scene is fun but exhausting.

And perhaps it's realising that there's something endearing about being content just existing in a quieter slant on San Andreas—where today it's about fitting toilets, and in six months it could be about owning my own plumbing firm and treating someone else to the pleasure of working for me.

In GTA Online I have an arsenal of guns and umpteen illicit businesses. In FiveM I have an unhinged personality and a thousand faces. In GTA World I have a backstory and a civilian's dream.

At today's Summer Game Fest showcase, we learned that a pair of new Cuphead games are in development. One is a "hand-animated" successor to the original 2017 sidescroller, which emulates golden age cartoons. The other is retro in a different way: "an 8-bit action platformer named Mighty Cuphead Adventure."

The really notable thing about Mighty Cuphead Adventure is that it's being developed in assembly—a low-level programming language—to the specifications of the Sega Master System, an 8-bit console released in the mid-'80s.

"While the game will absolutely be compatible with modern consoles and PC," developer Studio MDHR said in a press release, "players who want a true blast from the past will be able to experience it on a physical cartridge on the Sega Master System home gaming console."

The commitment to developing Mighty Cuphead Adventure with techniques from the '80s mirrors the commitment to using hand-drawn, 1930s-style animations in the main Cuphead series. The developer will share more details about the game "in the months ahead."

N Plus Infinity Times Two is the newly announced follow-up to Metanet's beloved N++. The latter had a killer soundtrack, especially for those among us who scour Hardwax and Boomkat daily for blink-and-you'll-miss-it vinyl pressings of austere techno. In a medium where many studios opt for chiptune or generic filmic string orchestras, it was a welcome deviation from the norm: N++ both looked and sounded like the future.

The soundtrack for N Plus Infinity Times Two will shift gears a tad. "Instead of Berlin techno," Metanet's Raigan Burns said during a presentation last week, "this time our main reference was UK Garage, and all the sub genres that it birthed, which [are] generally melodic, colorful, and mostly broken beat, rather than the claustrophobic, tension-laden 4/4 techno of N++".

UK garage is an antecedent to British dubstep, whose most famous example is probably Burial or Kode9 (the later US manifestation of dubstep, i.e. stuff that sounds like Skrillex, is a whole different beast). Countless other genres have sprouted from UK garage including grime, bassline house, and future garage. To summarise: without having seen the tracklist, the soundtrack to N Plus Infinity Times Two promises to be much more sonically diverse than its predecessor.

Metanet has spent a lot of time getting it right too, especially because they've refused to lean on recommendation algorithms to connect stylistic dots. "Another big change is that with N++, we used recommendation algorithms on SoundCloud and YouTube to help us find new music," Burns said. "But after 10 years of living in an increasingly algorithmically driven society, we can't stand it anymore. So for this game we kind of went full organic, free range, and just kind of brute forced it by hand."

He goes on: "So in the end, we spent almost 1,500 hours curating the soundtrack, which is basically two hours every evening for two entire years, listening to a few seconds each of almost half a million different songs, exploring like every back alley and sub-genre that we could find on Bandcamp to find the perfect music. The end product is something that we think is going to be truly unique in video games, with about 60 different songs from half a dozen completely different styles of modern electronic music, and it's all exclusively from the 2020s."

Burns promises the soundtrack will range from "flowy dreamscapes" to "intense bangers". Representing the latter is Zorza, a producer from Metanet's hometown of Toronto.

While we wait for N Plus Infinity Times Two's 2027 release date, here's the N++ playlist to provide some shelter from the foul post-Suno slopscape:

As a fan of fishing in games, my ears perked up at the sound of a rod and reel during Summer Games Fest. It was the trailer for Last Harbor, where the fishing quickly turned from a peaceful pastime to a struggle for survival.

That's because this isn't just a fishing game, it's a co-op and PvP zombie shooter, and to make things even more interesting: according to developer and publisher tinyBuild, it's based on a true story.

No, obviously, there weren't actually zombies running around attacking people. Last Harbor is "inspired by true events of spending the lockdown of 2020 on a boat stuck in the beautiful San Juan Islands of Washington state," says tinyBuild.

"Fishing, exploration, the feeling of dread while surrounded by beauty, and walking around quaint, seemingly abandoned town centers while trying to avoid other people. We aspire to replicate this feeling of isolation as you navigate the abandoned remains of a cluster of islands off the US coast, teeming with the undead."

Not a bad origin story for a game, really. And it sounds like an interesting concept, too, because there's a lot at stake as you pilot your boat around hunting for resources.

"The undead roam the land and the few remaining survivors have taken to the sea in search of refuge. To survive, they must maintain and upgrade their boats, venturing back to the land they once called home in search of resources, loot and sustenance. But every expedition could be their last and it’s not just the zombies that are out for blood," says tinyBuild.

"Anchor next to an unexplored island, launch your dinghy and venture ashore. Stay alert of your surroundings, as other players won’t hesitate to part you with your hard earned loot if they stumble upon an unmanned boat."

You aren't in constant peril, however:

"Find safe harbors where guards keep the peace and the people safe. Socialize with other players and rent anchorage to keep your boat safe," tinyBuild says.

Sort of Sea of Thieves-y, but with safe harbors and zombies? Plus, fishing? I could be into that. There's no release date announced for Last Harbor, but we'll keep our eyes peeled for more information.

A sequel to horny action game Stellar Blade was announced at Summer Game Fest, and my first reaction upon seeing it was that I'm not sure GPU is up to the task. That futuristic city looks cool, but phew, even the trailer seems to struggle in moments. I don't know if I'd be able to hear the game over my fans.

The footage is, of course, "from a game currently in development and is subject to change," developer Shift Up says. The action looks pretty smooth in interiors, as does the new protagonist's vacuum-sealed bodysuit.

Blood Rain will take us "beyond the events of the first game, introducing new protagonist Evie and expanding the world in a bold new direction," the studio says.

We weren't the biggest of fans of the original Stellar Blade—it's "Nier: Automata on horny steroids," we joked in our review—but it delivered something a lot of people want, and I have a feeling Blood Rain will, too. (I'm gonna have a hard time not thinking of BloodRayne whenever I read the title, though—remember the Uwe Boll movie?)

The original Stellar Blade was published by Sony, and didn't come to PC right away. Blood Rain will be self published, and given that the trailer was captured on PC, I expect it'll launch on Steam.

No release date or platforms have been announced yet, though.

"While the project is still in early development, Shift Up has made incredible progress and is looking forward to sharing more details when ready," the studio said in a press release. "The team is hard focused on building upon the stylish action, world-building, and core elements that fans have adored from Stellar Blade, while evolving the universe in ambitious new ways."

More than a decade after the release of one of the best action platformers ever made, N Plus Infinity Times Two is the next ninja parkour movement sim from Canada's Metanet Software.

If you love N++ I know what you're probably thinking: decade old or not, that game has over 4,000 levels, and it got a massive free expansion just last year. Why does N Plus Infinity Times Two need to exist? Well, because the Metanet duo of Raigan Burns and Mare Sheppard have kinda turned N into Smash Brothers. And also, kinda, Rocket League. Other games mentioned during a presentation last week include Counter-Strike, Towerfall, and It Takes Two.

"We don't think we can substantially improve upon [N++] in terms of being a hardcore single player platformer," Burns said. "So for this new project we're trying to go a bit perpendicular, and we're trying to apply the same basic process [we did] to N+."

To recap: N released in 2004 as browser-based freeware. In 2008, N+ released as an Xbox Live Arcade exclusive, and like all XBLA games it needed to have an online component. Thus, N+ added some neat multiplayer modes to a format that had previously been entirely singleplayer focused.

In other words, N Plus Infinity Times Two is to N++ what N+ was to N.

"For N Plus Infinity Times Two, we're kind of setting out to make the ultimate version of that initial foray into multiplayer platforming," Burns said, "this time bringing to bear two decades of learning and knowledge and development of our craft to help us make a significantly better experience for everyone."

Enthusiasts and pedants will point out that N++ did have multiplayer, but it only supported local play. N Plus Infinity Times Two will support both online and local multiplayer for up to four players, and it'll boast five main game modes across cooperative and competitive. You can play it by yourself, but multiplayer is very much baked into N Plus Infinity Times Two's design.

Of the five modes, Metanet showed two: Racing is, as the name implies, a race to the exit, with each character collecting as much gold as possible on the way and setting off traps to hinder opponents. Whoever reaches the exit is automatically equipped with a rocket launcher, all the better to slay dawdling opponents. One nice visual touch here is that each player leaves behind a color-coded trail, making it much easier—in theory—to follow the movement of your stick thin avatar on a busy screen.

Tag Team was also shown: Sheppard said "It plays kinda like if you turned Counter-Strike surfing into melee only deathmatch", though here is where Rocket League was a major inspiration too. It pits two ninjas against two hunters:the former must survive while the latter hunts them with traps and contact damage. Oh, and the hunters can turn into rockets. Anyone who knows N games knows how dangerous rockets are.

Other modes include co-op, one-up, and trials.

Burns said that part of the motive for making N Plus Infinity Times Two was to try to explore possibilities in the 2D platformer that aren't done (to death) elsewhere. "A big source of inspiration for N Plus Infinity Times Two was to go back to the source," he said. "[Shigeru] Miyamoto himself never referred to the original Mario games as platformers, he used the term athletic games.

"We've always thought that that's a very inspiring way to think about platforming as a sort of virtual athletics," he went on. "So the concept for the new game is basically just that soccer is more fun than track and field, and in the context of platforming, there's an entire world of new possibilities once you change the core conversation from the single-player context of, like, it's a level designer and a player conversing, to a multiplayer context where it's players conversing together, and the level design becomes more of a conversation starter rather than the focus."

But, for those who are averse to the concept of a multiplayer focused N game and have also finished the thousands of levels in N++, there will be a full singleplayer campaign, and the multiplayer modes will each have a solo practice component.

"We recognize [singleplayer] is what people love and what they will be expecting," Sheppard said. "And we love it too, even if we are maybe ever so slightly bored of that. We think we've done it really well up to this point and there are still lots of ideas to explore."

N Plus Infinity Times Two will release in 2027.