Nighthawks is what you get if you take the masquerade out of Vampire: The Masquerade. It's a world where everyone knows vampires are real and therefore nobody has to bribe the police into pretending exsanguinated bodies aren't constantly turning up in back alleys.

Instead, you just have to bribe the police into saying somebody else did the exsanguination. Wasn't me, officer, must have been one of the other dozen people dressed entirely in black who you never see when the sun's up.

Nighthawks is a text-based RPG reminiscent of Fallen London or Citizen Sleeper. You select a location from a map, do a little choose-your-own-adventure when you get there, and test abilities based on traits that increase through use. To be initiated into a biker gang I had to walk to their bar naked, which bumped up my exhibitionist trait—which, when maxed out, will eventually increase both my seduction stat (which is good) and infamy (which is bad).

Because I used the sewers to get to the bar I also increased a trait that got me one notch closer to being able to fast-travel through said sewers. Bringing companions on quests increases their respect for me, fighting thugs on the street pushes up my brawling stat, and so on.

Fighting is a simple matter of watching vitality dribble away while punchy sounds play, all the while hoping I win the fight before my health finishes dripping out of my pants completely. More complicated fights involve multiple skill checks and choices like whether to fight dirty or pull back to recuperate—a bit like Esoteric Ebb though never as involved. Combat's not the focus, however. Despite the obligatory Fight Club questline, Nighthawks is an RPG that's more concerned with people than punching.

Character creation involves defining your background and vampire sire, as well as choosing a single power. Though the veil's been torn down and everyone knows vampires are real, their more supernatural traits have been kept on the down-low. People might be a bit surprised when you spring the ability to talk to corpses or turn into a shadow on them. It's a nice balance—the big revelation happened less than a decade ago, so vampires are still mysterious enough to most people that they won't know how every single rule works. Yes, I do need to be invited in. No, I don't know how it works either.

At the diner

The first act of Nighthawks is a detective story where I hunt a traitor across Cradlebridge—the world's first integrated city, where vampires are regulated, have ID cards, their own political committee, and a clinic that hands out watered-down blood. Later acts let you take part in the integration project, joining the community and becoming one of Cradlebridge's movers and shakers.

In addition to the expected 'which faction do I align with' stuff there are a huge amount of sidequests, which feel like taking breaks from an Anne Rice saga to read a Clive Barker short story.

Several of these bite-sized narratives are effective pieces of horror (the dollhouse will stick with me), others are more comedic or dramatic. I've adjudicated a dispute between rats who took over an abandoned theme park, and learned the life story of an elder vampire so I could host his funeral. It's funny when it tries to be funny and affecting when it tries to be affecting, and that's not common enough in videogame writing. There were several twists, and I didn't see any of them coming.

Every choice you make and location you travel to ticks down the time to sunrise, though I found myself with more free time than I needed. You could say that's a commentary on immortality, but it feels more like a consequence of having time limits but knowing that if those time limits are too strict players will revolt.

A couple of chapters gave me till the end of the month to wrap up relevant storylines, which was more time than I needed. I started out feeling pressured to squeeze in one more thing every night, rushing back home just as the sun rose at 6 am, and then realized there were 10 days to the climax of the act and I'd already wrapped up every sidequest.

Though you can just fast-forward to the end of the month at your sanctuary, the first time I tried that I was warned I'd miss out on two events in between. Yet instead of being able to fast-forward to those events I had to manually sleep through each day, which meant also manually getting some blood to keep the blood meter from getting too low, and it was all a bit of a chore.

I only drink whine

That blood meter is fairly easy to keep full, especially in later acts when you become a big deal and sources of blood, whether bottled or fresh and willing, are easier to turn up. There's also a predator meter to keep track of, which can only be partially slaked with cheap over-the-counter human bean juice. There's a part of every vampire that needs to stalk the night, and because I didn't pay attention to how full that meter was getting, at one point I woke from a fugue state with my fangs in the neck of a rapidly cooling corpse. Sorry, officer, won't happen again.

While Nighthawks lets you play nice with your food and has plenty of vampire characters who do their best to live among humans without conflict, it doesn't shy away from portraying the undead as monstrous. One of your companions is right up there with the most detestable characters in videogames, and I'm glad Nighthawks was self-aware enough to let me give him his eventual comeuppance. The ability vampires have to turn people into ghoulish thralls is horrifying, and Nighthawks doesn't skimp on the implications of that in particular.

After years of having hardly any vampire games to choose from we've had a handful more recently (apparently the ebb and flow of vampire fiction's popularity is a recession indicator), but don't skip Nighthawks just because other options are available. If you are at all into the idea of being a bloodsucking creature of the night it not only delivers on that fantasy, but interrogates it at the same time. Sure, it's cool to be angsty and wear sunglasses at night, Nighthawks says, but it is a bit weird we think this is so cool. What does that say about us, hey?

Nighthawks understands why we might want to pretend to be a vampire, but also takes the time to deconstruct that want, to make a solid case pointing out that vampires are traditionally the bad guys for a reason and also living forever would suck after a while. It let me enjoy being a bloodthirsty parasitic monster and then feel a bit grimy about enjoying it. Then I felt good about feeling a bit grimy because joke's on you, Nighthawks, I'm into that shit.

Disclosure: Richard Cobbett, writer and programmer of Nighthawks, is a former contributor to PC Gamer.

Hellcard 2, a sequel to the original Hellcard which received 'Very Positive' reviews on Steam, is getting a new co-op demo that you can dive into right now. I'd encourage you to watch the rest of the PC Gaming Show Tokyo Direct first, but you could always download the demo while the show goes on.

Hellcard 2 is a co-op roguelite deckbuilder where you descend into dungeons and fight your way through evil minions and dragons made of paper. The paper models give the game an interesting look that makes the deckbuilding aspect feel more tactile and real—the new trailer we just debuted even starts with a scene that looks like a popup book opening.

You can play Hellcard 2 by yourself or with friends online. If you go solo, don't worry, you'll just control multiple characters simultaneously, so you won't be outgunned by the dragons in the dungeon. If you play with other people, you'll have to coordinate to make sure you're properly utilising all your cards.

One of the more unique mechanics within the genre is that monster placement actually matters. They can either be within melee or ranged distance, so you'll have to decide which cards are best for which threats. Will you go for an all melee deck and let enemies come to you, take them out from afar with a ranged build, or make a mix of the two so you can be ready for any and all situations?

For returning fans of the first Hellcard, what's new in this sequel is the inclusion of gear that your hero can wear. This will not only change their appearance, but also modify your deck and the stats and buffs you get. Let's be real, though, we're all going to pick what looks fashionable over what actually works the best.

If this sounds like your sort of game, download the demo on Steam.

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

Step aside Palworld, you are now merely the second most-played pastiche of the world's highest-grossing multimedia franchise on Steam. You've been overtaken by none other than Aniimo, the Genshin Impact-esque but non-gacha open world RPG, according to SteamDB. The numbers are climbing as I write this, with the game currently sitting at over 166,000 simultaneous players.

That's a lot! For reference, it's sitting ahead of likes of Rust, Delta Force, and Slay the Spire 2, with only the mighty Bongo Cat and its lessers (Apex Legends, Dota 2, etc) making up the list of eight games with more players on Steam right now. At the very top is, as always, Counter-Strike 2. Just imagine the numbers it'd enjoy if it also had cute little creatures that only say their own name.

When PC Gamer lead SEO editor Lauren Morton tried it, she wasn't wowed, saying "I can't find much about it that other creature collecting and gacha games aren't doing better"—though this was back in the closed beta from January. The game currently sits at a "Mostly Positive" rating on Steam, with many of the positive reviews praising its Pokémonishness and the negative reviews taking umbrage with its labyrinthine monetization tactics. So far, so Genshin.

If there's a lesson to be learned here, I imagine it's only that Pokémon enjoyers are still Pokédex entry #0143 levels of ravenously hungry for PC alternatives, which makes sense given that Game Freak only ever takes a break from its often Nintendo-exclusive cash cow series to give us keyboard-wielding dorks something entirely different and not as beloved.

If you decide to give Aniimo a shot, check out our list of the gift codes available at launch for some extra free stuff.

The wonderful world of Lufia is back, and this time, it's coming to PC. Just revealed in the PC Gaming Show Tokyo Direct was the world premiere of Lufia 1 & 2 The Sinistrals Saga—the iconic RPGs will be coming to Steam in 2027, marking the first time any games in the series will be officially available on PC.

If you weren't around in the early '90s, you may not know about Lufia. The original, Lufia & the Fortress of Doom, came out in 1993 in Japan and North America—it skipped Europe entirely. Its opening is pretty unforgettable, as it instantly puts you in the shoes of the heroes of a legend, fighting four godlike enemies called the Sinistrals. It's a bold way to start a game.

For the rest of the game, you play as one of the descendants of those heroes, fighting the same evil that returns almost 100 years after the game's opening. Lufia 2: Rise of the Sinistrals is actually a prequel where you play as the original heroes you get a glimpse of at the start of the first game.

It's a pretty big deal that these RPGs will finally be available on PC, as they're hard to get ahold of in their original formats. Lufia 1 was only released on the SNES, and physical copies can run into the hundreds of pounds. Lufia 2 came out on the SNES as well, but it also got a DS release that switched it into an action RPG.

Taito producer Yuichi Toyama says the team started looking into the rights for the project four or five years ago after fans clamoured for the series to be revived. This should be a remake done as close to the originals as possible. "Emulation as close to the original game as possible" was the goal, Clear River Games producer James Wragg says.

So, if you want to experience a piece of RPG history, you can wishlist Lufia 1 & 2 The Sinistrals Saga on Steam. Both games are being packaged in one purchase, so you can play through the whole Sinistrals story without having to dig up a hard-to-find or expensive physical copy.

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

Baldur's Gate 3 is pretty great right out of the box, but it could be argued that its second act lacks some variety. If you aren't endlessly dazzled by shadowy forests and J.K. Simmons, you might have wished you could hang out after the family drama in the Shadow-Cursed Lands is sorted and explore some less gloomy vistas before arriving in the game's eponymous metropolis.

As always, modders have you covered. An ambitious mod for BG3, simply called "Baldur's Gate 3: Act Two Expansion" just released after "almost two years in development," according to modder SquallyDaBeanz. As the description states, the expansion implements a custom zone called The Chionthar Wilds—"a whole new region to experience that is similar in scope to the Act 1 Wilderness."

With the mod installed, you can start adventuring in the new region (ideally with a party that's around level 8 or higher) after wrapping up in the Shadow-Cursed Lands, or via a quickstart button that takes you straight to the new stuff with options for equipment and hirelings.

Once there, the mod packs in new creatures to fight in over 30 new encounters, over 70 new items to collect, as well as new quests, NPCs, and cutscenes. EXP in the new zones is "artificially reduced," so clearing all this custom stuff shouldn't completely invalidate Act 3's difficulty if you're doing a full playthrough.

The new characters aren't voiced, and some of BG3's more ambitious aspects aren't accounted for (you can't speak with dead or animals, and choices you make in Chionthar won't ripple into the third act). In that way, it's an old-school sort of CRPG expansion, so break out your reading glasses and get ready to roll them bones. To further warp Baldur's Gate 3 until it's the D&D adaptation of your dreams, check out our list of the best mods.

A lamentable fact of our hobby is this: time marches on. Because our games have to be rendered in real-time by whatever tech we load them onto, they inevitably end up harder to run as the years wear on, and the gap grows between the tech we have and the tech the games were designed to run on. On PC, the task of keeping those games running tends to end up in the hands of dedicated fans—and god bless them.

You can't expect devs to maintain games in perpetuity. Unless, I guess, they happen to be the stewards of the Baldur's Gate and Planescape: Torment Enhanced Editions, which are still getting patches almost three decades after the original games released. Most recently (September 15), Planescape got a beta update to its, uh, beta update: a release candidate for an upcoming patch that will bring the game in line with the 2.7 patches some of Beamdog's other Enhanced Edition games already have.

As with those other games, the new Planescape beta (itself an addition to a previous beta from August) makes Steam Cloud saves work how they ought to: toggleable through the Steam client itself rather than via in-game options. GOG cloud saves now actually work, too and—this is probably the biggest thing—Planescape now has a UI scaling option in its settings. Leave it off and the game will keep its UI at god's own resolution, 1024x768, but if you flick it on it will adapt to better fit modern monitors. Like yours!

Aside from that? Mobile fixes and "significantly easier" dialog.tlk modding. That's the file that contains Planescape's voluminous text and dialogue. Good news for modders, but less meaningful to me and, quite likely, you.

There's no hint as to when Beamdog will convert the patch from beta to full-release, but I get the feeling it's not far off. Frankly? I'm just happy classic games like this are still getting TLC in any capacity. Fans will undoubtedly keep these games alive long after we're all dead and buried, but that they're still getting a measure of official support this far along? I just wish everything worked like this.

We still don't know a huge amount about The Witcher 4. But we do know it represents two big changes for the series thus far. The first change is, of course, that Ciri will replace Geralt as the lead character. The second is that CD Projekk will replace its in-house REDengine with Unreal Engine 5.

There's been considerable speculation as to why CDP is abandoning tech that's delivered some of the most cutting-edge visuals of the last decade, with some fans suggesting that Cyberpunk 2077's difficult development and compromised initial release might be a factor. But the studio's co-CEO Michał Nowakowski has formally dismissed this suggestion, stating the decision had more to do with CD Projekt's general ambitions than Cyberpunk specifically.

Speaking on the Deconstructor of Fun podcast (via GamesRadar+), Nowakowski addressed the claim that Cyberpunk was the straw that broke REDengine's back: "A lot of people think like this, but this is a bit of a false assumption," he explained. "Because the issue with Cyberpunk was not really REDengine itself.

Instead, Nowakowski said that CD Projekt never really wanted to be an engine developer in the first place, stating that. "The dream of the company was actually never to make technology." He conceded that CD Projekt did want to make "visually and technically cutting edge games", for which in-house tech seemed to be the optimal solution for the studio. But what ultimately drives the company is "telling the stories in the most convincing and immersive way."

Hence, when CD Projekt's leadership saw The Matrix Awakens demo of Unreal Engine 5, they decided that adopting third-party tech would be preferable to continuing building their own tech. "If we form a relationship with Unreal and if we work on certain things which are specifically required to make games of the size and scope and certain technicalities about it that we need for games, it could actually work."

With this in mind, CD Projekt pitched a "strategic collaboration" to Epic, where they would not simply license the tech but influence its direction from the inside. "We're actually, I think, the only team in the world outside of Epic that deals with the inside of the 'black box' that the engine is. Nobody else is doing that except for us and them, which we do through collaborative efforts together," Nowakowski remarked.

It'll be interesting to see what impact CD Projekt's input has on Unreal Engine 5 going forward, since the tech has thus far gained a reputation for being a stuttering mess. I'm also intrigued as to whether CD Projekt's input is limited to Unreal Engine 5, or whether the studio's voice carries through to the AI-heavy Unreal Engine 6—given Nowakowski's previous statement that the company isn't "planning to rely on AI making complete games".

In a new VGC interview, Final Fantasy 7 Revelation director Naoki Hamaguchi revealed that the upcoming JRPG is looking at a 200GB install size, bigger than almost any game out there, and certainly an outlier among singleplayer RPGs.

Hamaguchi was responding to a question about Revelation's retail, physical version. It was previously disclosed that Revelation would require additional downloads alongside the two blu-ray discs that come in the box. We're not even part of that particular conversation on PC⁠—we're lucky to get a download code in a plastic box these days.

"Things are still getting worked out, but it’s probably going to be around 200GB of game," Hamaguchi said. "I understand there are a lot of opinions about this topic, but at the end of the day, the fact is we need to overcome the hardware to a certain extent."

That's one big boy. For context, FF7 Remake requires 100GB of available hard drive space on Steam, while Rebirth demands 155⁠—Revelation's full system specs are not yet up on its own page. All told, the FF7 Remake trilogy will weigh in at 455 GB of space. While the original PS1 game was quite the contender in its time, shipping on three CDs, at the end of the day it consisted of about a gig and a half of data⁠—1.3 according to TheGamer, and 1.7 according to GamingBolt.

I think the biggest install I've ever tolerated was 150GB of Destiny 2, but I'm a different person now. Call of Duty has grown infamous as a hard drive hog, but it's also relatively modular. At a time of brutal storage markups amid the RAMpocalypse, 200GB is a tough ask for one game, but Revelation might be one of the rare few with the star power to pull it off.

The Witcher 3: The Wild Hunt Remastered releases on September 29 as a free upgrade for everyone who already owns the game. That's pretty exciting, even if you're like me and have played it through several times already: any excuse to reacquaint with the Butcher of Blaviken is welcome in my household, and the Songs of the Past expansion, scheduled for next year, feels like a dream.

Still, rather than replay The Witcher 3 over and over again I could opt to read the Andrzej Sapkowski books the games are based on. I could do that, but leaving aside the fact that reading doesn't have graphics or visceral interactive combat, there sure are a heck of a lot of Witcher books.

Thankfully a boxset exists gathering 8 of them. Amazon is currently selling this big ol' box for only AU$68, which is 50 percent cheaper than the usual AU$140. That RRP isn't too much to ask for eight sizeable fantasy novels and short story collections, so carving half that price off feels very generous indeed.

Significant caveat: since this boxset was released in 2024, it's missing the most recent instalment, Crossroads of Ravens, which released in September 2025. That's not something you should worry too much about: as my colleagues note in their rundown of The Witcher novels, Crossroads of Ravens is a standalone prequel, so you'll probably want to read the rest of them first anyway.

Once you do get the boxset (and they've very highly regarded in these parts) you'll probably want to know which order to read them in. This is not as straightforward a question as you would think: thankfully we have a resource for that.

To highlight what a good deal this is: the Kindle edition, an incorporeal digital license that you can't display on IRL bookshelves, is currently going for AU$94.99. Don't do that.

The Blood of Dawnwalker is a pretty excellent RPG, but there's one aspect of it that not everyone loves: Time. Simply put, it's a limited resource in the game, which restricts what Coen—that's you—can do. Our reviewer, Australian editor Shaun Prescott, found it injected a sense of urgency into the game, at least in the early going, but said he'd "also like to pick some nirnroot and play some Gwent, thank you very much"—that is, have the time to relax and fiddle with non-essential tasks on his own terms, at his own pace.

Other players clearly felt the same way: One of the first mods to come out for The Blood of Dawnwalker is the "Better Story Timer," which effectively eliminates the impact of the ticking clock entirely—and which has since become, by far, the most popular Dawnwalker mod on Nexus Mods.

How much of an impact that reaction has had over at developer Rebel Wolves is impossible to say, but in an interview with Eurogamer, studio CEO and game director Konrad Tomaszkiewicz said it might not be used for the game's sequel.

"We will play with it. If we will have parts of the story, or the whole story, to which it fits, then we will use it," Tomaszkiewicz said. "If we will have stories where it does not fit, we will not force it. We will play with this system and we will try to use it to boost the urgency of some events in the game. But I'm not saying that in every game we will have the same scheme or loop—it's not like this."

Tomaszkiewicz acknowledged complaints about the time mechanic, and the mods available to remove it. He doesn't have a problem with that, but he does encourage players to try Dawnwalker with the clock running first: "We balanced [Dawnwalker] in a way that it's possible to do around 80 percent of the content with the time mechanic so it's not so bad.

"The arguments of, 'I want to see everything in one playthrough,' I understand, but it's false to begin with, because even in games like The Witcher, you cannot see everything in one playthrough because you have choices and consequences, and different things happen when you choose different things," Tomaszkiewicz said.

I have that same feeling myself with most games—I want to see everything the first time—but Tomaszkiewicz is correct: The Witcher 2 forces players to make a choice at a critical juncture that unavoidably excludes a significant amount of gameplay, and that seemed fine; Obsidian's Pentiment, released to acclaim in 2022, has a very strict time mechanic of its own that's essential to the experience. Missing out on things in videogames is not all that new or unusual—if anything, it's the inevitable outcome of choice in videogames that so many players say they want.

Interestingly, Tomaszkiewicz said that complaints about the time mechanic have tailed off considerably now that Dawnwalker has been out for a couple weeks, because people have finished the game and realized they actually had more time than they needed—a pattern he expects to continue as players continue to wrap it up.

"There will always be people who will have a problem with that because they don't like time mechanics at all, but I think that is fine," he said. "They can download the mod and play without it if they want."

And yes, even though The Blood of Dawnwalker has only been out for a couple weeks, Rebel Wolves is already eyeballing a sequel: The studio is now looking for a lead writer to help "craft the next chapter in the Dawnwalker saga."

Just four months after the release of Zero Parades: For Dead Spies, and two months after laying off a significant number of employees, Studio ZA/UM has announced Zero Parades: Director's Cut, a major update that will add roughly 40,000 words of new content, a new encounter, and other improvements and fixes.

From the announcement on Steam: "Zero Parades: Director's Cut is the definitive edition of our espionage RPG, bringing more story, scenery and mind-fuckery to discover during your bid to reunite The Whole Sick Crew. And yes, we heard you: that includes more Melita."

All due respect to Melita, but the real centerpiece of the Director's Cut appears to be Quisach Roundabout, a new "dramatic encounter" about escaping the titular roundabout. As someone who lives in a country where roundabouts are still relatively new and rare, I'd say that sounds relatable, but apparently this adventure runs a little deeper than just having to figure out which lane you're supposed to be in.

"Hershel and her old friend Ramses find themselves stoned out of their minds, behind the wheel of a hijacked tuk-tuk and seemingly unable to escape the Quisach Roundabout late at night. The objective seems simple enough: take the right exit and head home. Fail to do so, and well... things might get existential. And possibly fatal."

The Director's Cut also offers a new "backstage mode," providing a look at technical insights into the game's development, cut content, and stories from art director Kaspar Tamsalu, new clothing, interactions, death screens, and "atmospheric additions," various quality of life improvements, "and loads more."

Zero Parades: Director's Cut sounds a lot like Disco Elysium: The Final Cut, which brought full voice acting, new characters, a new location, and more to the acclaimed 2019 RPG. But there's one notable difference: Where The Final Cut arrived a year and a half after Disco Elysium's release, Zero Parades: Director's Cut is dropping just four months after the original release. The relatively muted response to Zero Parades compared to Disco Elysium may be a factor in that seeming rush, particularly given that the studio previously cited that shortcoming as the reason for layoff of up to 32 people that was announced in July.

In any event, the response to the Director's Cut from Zero Parades fans is very positive, and it does represent a second chance of sorts for the game: It's coming as a free update for current owners on October 1, and will also mark the game's launch on PlayStation 5, which is set to happen on November 3.

Diablo 4's current Season of Hell's Legacy is focused on celebrating the 30th anniversary of the series, which debuted all the way back in 1997. As part of that effort, Blizzard has been reaching back into the past to bring back iconic characters and enemies like Deckard Cain, Baal, Mephisto, and of course the Big D himself.

The recent discovery of Rune word recipes from Diablo 2 had players wondering if maybe Blizzard has any other blasts from the past stashed away in the new season, and as discovered by redditor JT99-FirstBallot, the answer is a very big yes.

Tristram, of course, is the village that serves as the home base of the original Diablo, where players go to buy and sell items, and interact with a range of sadly doomed NPCs like Griswold, Ogden, Pepin, and Wirt. But it's more than just that: As the hub of what is arguably gaming's most influential action RPG, Tristram is a seminal piece of digital landscape, burned into the memories of old-time Diablo fans—and its destruction sometime prior to the events of Diablo 2 (sorry, mild spoiler there) was a genuine bummer.

What's particularly impressive here is how faithful this recreation of Tristram is. The visuals are obviously dramatically improved (although it looks just as I remember it—isn't the human mind a wonderful thing?) but the layout is spot on, and all the characters are there, doing what they do. What really lands for me, though, is the audio: I'm not a Diablo fan by any stretch these days (I haven't touched the series since Diablo 2) but that Tristram guitar riff hits like a truck, and Griswold's voice, well—that's Griswold's voice!

But the attention to detail runs even deeper. As YouTuber MacroBioBoi explains, this Tristram can be turned into Uber Tristram, a special zone previously only accessible during the Pandemonium Event from the Diablo 2 expansion Lord of Destruction. Uber Tristram is basically a copy of the destroyed village seen in the first act of Diablo 2, with one big expansion: You have to fight Baal, Mephisto, and Diablo at the same time. The payoff for kicking all that Prime Evil ass is the Hellfire Torch, an extremely powerful charm—and yes, the Hellfire Torch reward is waiting for you in Diablo 4 now, too.

Blizzard is clearly going hard to recapture the magic of Diablo's glory days for the 30th anniversary, and going deep too. Which naturally leads to the question: What else is in there? It certainly seems like there's more up the sleeve: The Uber Tristram bosses also drop a new item that players are still trying to figure out what to do with.

Now that Diablo 5 is coming—though not until 2029—there are no more expansions planned for Diablo 4, and seasons will be the focus. Blizzard says we can expect more storytelling though. Namely, it needs to bring about the apocalyptic return of Diablo to set up the events of the sequel, which will take place after Sanctuary has fallen to the forces of evil.

Microsoft, at this point, drips gore from head to toe. The megacorp has made a hobby of shuttering studios and laying off thousands of devs, in attempt after attempt to right the listing ship of its games business. No luck yet, on that front.

You might wonder how Playground's upcoming Fable reboot, in the works for a decade now, has evaded its parent company's reign of terror. In a chat with The Guardian, Playground co-founder and Fable director Ralph Fulton offered up a pretty simple explanation: Fable's just that important.

"I genuinely think Fable is an important game," said Fulton. "What has protected us over a long development cycle is that so many people within Xbox view Fable as vital to the DNA of the platform." That is to say, Fable is a potent Xbox brand, like Halo or Gears of War, and that's protected it from the chop.

It fits the pattern of Microsoft's studio closures. Though the end of studios like Arkane Austin (rest in peace), Tango Gameworks (before it was picked up by Krafton) and others felt brutal, they didn't strike at the heart of that amorphous thing you might call the Xbox brand. It did not claim the life of any character you might see plastered on a banner or standee at a Microsoft Gamescom booth.

Honestly? I might not have instinctually put Fable in that bracket, but I can see why you might, and in that light I can believe that Xbox execs would be timid about hurting it. Fulton, mind you, doesn't just think Fable's importance starts and stops at Xbox: "I would go a step further and say it’s important to video games as a whole. It offers a combination of elements that simply doesn’t exist anywhere else." Ironically, I suspect that wider importance matters less to games industry execs.

Aniimo codes can help you buy items to alter the stats or appearance of your adorable (only occasionally intimidating) Aniimo companions, or just straight up give you the items to do so. Whatever gift codes contain, they're free! So even if you don't need the rewards right now, it's best to redeem Aniimo codes as soon as pawsible, before they expire and your rewards are gone furever.

All active Aniimo codes

• aniimoidyll - 5 Aniipod and 10,000 Credits NEW
• aniimowelcome - 50 Glimmer, 5 Aniipod Pro, 5 Growth Flower
• twinewithaniimo - 50 Glimmer, 5 Aniipod Pro, 5 Growth Flower
• anyoneaniimo - 5 Aniipod and 10,000 Credits
• aniimoopenworld - 5 Aniipod and 10,000 Credits
• aniimolaunch2026 - 5 Aniipod and 10,000 Credits
• aniimobonus - 50 Glimmer
• ANIIMOGIFT - 10 Glimmer, 20,000 Credits, 10 Growth Flower, 5 Aniipod Pro
• Aniimo2026 - 20 Glimmer

Expired codes

• aniimoparty - 50 Glimmer, 5 Aniipod Pro, 5 Growth Flower

How to Redeem Aniimo codes

Aniimo codes are redeemed in-game from the settings menu, which is accessed from the main phone menu. You also need to complete "Chasing The Clouds" with Dr. Lewis to unlock the in-game mail menu to receive your rewards, though.

To save you getting lost in the tabs, here's step-by-step instructions on how to redeem codes in Aniimo:

1. Press ESC to bring up the phone main menu
2. Click the cog symbol in the column on the right to go to Settings
3. Select the Account tab on the left
4. Click the Gift Code Redemption option
5. Input the code and press Redeem
6. Open your in-game mail in the Esc menu
7. Press "Claim" to receive rewards

Codes are case sensitive, so you need to enter them exactly as shown.

Your reward will then be sent to your in-game mailbox. It should show up right away, but the message can take a few minutes to appear. If you haven't received your rewards after five minutes, try fast travelling to another area. If that still doesn't work, restart the game and check your in-box again after your log in.

What's the best item to get from codes?

There's usually a clear winner when it comes to items and currencies dished out via codes when it comes to live service games like Aniimo, but seeing as Aniimo isn't a gacha anymore the best items you get from codes is a little more subjective.

Aniipod Ultras guarantee a 100% catch rate with Elite potential for any catchable Aniimo, and they're one of the pricier items, so they're always welcome. Likewise if a Sparkling Cube or Prismana Orb ever shows up in codes, they guarantee a shiny Perfect potential, and rare Prismana form Aniimo, respectively. These two are even rarer than Aniipod Ultras, so if you ever see a code including one of these two Aniipod variants, make sure you redeem them before they expire!

Glimmer is the best currency to get, as it can be exchanged for a lot of helpful items, including Aniipod Ultras, Primegy (your daily stamina currency), and items to customize your player character and Aniimo. Otherwise, eggs are always nice, as even if you already have Aniimo included in an egg's specific hatching pool, there's always the chance it could be a rarer variant with better stats.

Aniimo smooshes cute creature capturing and open world exploration together to serve us a meal with notes of Genshin Impact, Infinity Nikki, and the grandaddy of trapping critters in balls: Pokemon. But although it may look like developer Pawprint Studio has included a side of gacha with that meal, it's actually a little more complicated than that.

Is Aniimo a gacha game?

Is Aniimo a gacha?

No, Aniimo is not a gacha game. Despite having all the bells and whistles a gacha usually throws at us—including about a thousand currencies and menus to stress over—Aniimo doesn't have any banner systems that gacha games like Genshin Impact or Infinity Nikki do.

All Aniimo, their equipment, Aniimo eggs, and anything related to cute critter combat and fashion is not linked to random odds, or reaching an arbitrary "pity" number that eventually guarantees something after enough pulls. You get Aniimo (and most other items) just by playing the game, seriously, and instead most (but not all) cosmetics are linked to coughing up a fixed amount of cash in the store.

I swear I heard Animmo was a gacha though

That's because Aniimo did have a gacha system, but only during its final beta. The Rift Exploration event—AKA a banner—was a very sneaky inclusion, because these rifts involved spending a premium currency for the chance to catch a Legendary Aniimo by filling up a bar, not pulling on a banner with a button press.

It didn't look like your regular banner system, but the capture rate for the Legendary Aniimo was so miniscule that unless you got very lucky, you probably had to rely on reaching "pity" to finally guarantee catching it—just like a banner in any other gacha.

Rift Exploration was very poorly received by beta testers and future players alike. The rifts reportedly got stale and repetitive real quick, plus, lots of people pointed out the developers had promised many times that Aniimo wouldn't be locked behind gacha. For Aniimo's full launch, Rift Exploration has been replaced with a token collection system.

Developer Pawprint Studio never mentioned Rift Explorations were changed because of the gacha backlash in the official blog post, but I'm willing to gamble (one last time) that it sure contributed to the change.

Aniimo monetization

Then how is Aniimo trying to get my money?

As a free-to-play live service game, Aniimo is of course still trying to shake down your wallet, even without a gacha system. Its monetization model of choice is a cosmetics shop where you convert real life money into Lumin Crystals, then exchange that currency for outfits and accessories for your playable character and Aniimo. Some cosmetics are available for free by using one of the other in-game currencies, but the coolest and cutest sets will inevitably be locked behind a paywall.

Another "give us your money" tactic is Aniimo's shop bundles, which asks for Lumin Crystals (your real money) in exchange for Aniipods, profile backgrounds, Aniimo stat alterations, guaranteed ways to get rare versions of Aniimo, or other types of currency. You can still get some of these items by spending the Glimmer or Credits currency instead, or from rewards by just playing the game, but you bet they're far harder to get this way.

Then there's the inevitable battle pass, which Aniimo calls a "Companion Handbook" (for twee capitalism purposes, I guess). A free tier is unlocked automatically, but two premium tracks include extra goodies, including Aniimo, cosmetics, and a fast-track to higher battle pass levels.

So how do you get Aniimo then?

So many ways. The main method is throwing an Aniipod to capture one minding its own business while you explore, during Alpha and Omega battles, or at an activated Bloom spot.

Another way to get Aniimo is by hatching eggs. These come in different rarities, with lots of variety in which Aniimo can hatch from what egg. You can even choose an Aniipod during the hatching process to turn that Aniimo into a guaranteed shiny, or one with elite stats to terrify the halls of PvP.

Other Aniimo are rewarded by completing events, the battle pass, or just playing the game. This includes Legendary Aniimo, which you get by collecting unique tokens, then playing through the Legendary's story before chucking your special Aniipod at it and guaranteeing a capture.

The Witcher 3 is getting an expansion, Songs of the Past, over a decade after its release—along with a pretty hefty remaster. And you might think hey, how is CD Projekt Red working on all of this and The Witcher 4 at the same time? The answer, like many studios, is that it's not doing it alone.

The studio's partnering up with Fool's Theory, a studio led by former CDPR folks, in a sort of cousinly collaboration. When speaking to PC Gamer's Joshua Wolens, Jakub Kutrzuba, an executive producer at CDPR, was asked if it was at all intimidating or scary to share The Witcher 3 with outside studios:

"Yes, yes it is, because we care very much about what we are doing here. Using this analogy of a baby? This is very correct. As a parent, I also think twice about leaving my baby with someone. But I know that there are people over there who are not me, who take the best care ever of them, and I think this is the case here. "

It helps that, as mentioned, Fool's Theory has former CDPR developers on its leadership (the studio was founded by Jakub Rokosz, a senior quest designer at the company). Kutrzuba says: "the fact that we have a really long history with many people from Fool's Theory … that helped a lot, because it's not like we needed to really understand the mindset and philosophy, make sure that we operate on the same level and we have the same aspirations.

"That was [already] clear, so that helped a lot. But it's never easy. Especially when we are thinking about collaborating on something where there is a lot of creative work, we are looking at these studios and the talent from the perspective of the narration. It's not an easy thing to tell a good story … but we would say this is what we want, right?"

In terms of searching for future partners for more projects—which'll be a necessity if they continue to broaden their scope—Kutrzuba says it's all a matter of making sure they've all got some basic assumptions down:

"There are studios over there like us who care about players, who care about what they are doing. It's not just a business for them. They want to do art. We want to do art, yeah? We consider games as art, and not everyone [does] over there.

"We know that having someone who operates in the same mindset is very helpful, because it helps us to be on the same page quicker. So we are also looking for some familiarity here and there, but I think that final part—and this can be maybe even the most important part—is the common understanding of quality.

"Because usually we are aiming very high, and it's so much easier to work with someone when you know that we have the same understanding of some abstract common words like what quality is, what high quality is, what CDPR quality is, what is a good story."

That understanding of story and art really is the main pillar, Kutrzuba insists: "If you don't have that, if you have a different understanding of the same terms, it creates a lot of tension during the development. So we are trying to make sure that before we start, we are partnering with people who understand these basic terms the same way as us."

I had an extremely good time with the Trails in the Sky 1st Chapter last year. As a big fan of the Trails of Cold Steel PC ports, finally getting the opportunity to try the first installment in the beloved JRPG series, with all the modern accoutrements of a full 3D remake, was truly a pleasure.

Falcom really didn't skimp when it came to upgrading the experience to the standard of its newer Trails games. There's only one problem: I wanted more.

Despite 1st Chapter being a pretty well-rounded story—clocking in at a perfectly reasonable 40 hours for me—it ends on a criminal cliffhanger. It's easy to see why so many say that 2nd Chapter is really just the second part of the first game, something I probably should've clocked considering the naming convention.

But having played Trails in the Sky 2nd Chapter Remake this last week or so, I can say it feels more like a victory lap, building on the setting, characters, and quests you completed in the first. It's very much what you'd expect from the middle child of a JRPG trilogy—the cogs are turning, the characters moving, we're going somewhere.

While I won't spoil too much, 2nd Chapter feels like a bit more of a coming of age story for Estelle, as she finds herself adrift as a newly-made Senior Bracer. With the help of familiar faces, you'll travel around Liberl investigating the activities of Ouroborous, the secret society who reared their head in the previous game.

So yes, it's the classic Trails recipe: cosy and comfy odd-jobbing as you help the citizens of Liberl, but with a dash of uncovering and foiling grand nefarious schemes. I'm about 30 hours into 2nd Chapter, but it feels very much like your typical Trails game in that sense—good news if that's what you like. I know I do.

There are a few improvements that jumped out at me, though, having played the 1st Chapter Remake so recently:

• The Bracer requests and puzzles are a lot better. I had one where I had to fix a lighthouse by reading a manual, another where I undertook a criminal investigation, and another where I literally had to beat a guy at poker, all which I could've failed.
• The new combat and craft animations look really good, both in terms of characters and bosses, who now have S-breaks.
• The party rostering is much improved. Though I love characters popping up and then disappearing JRPG-style, 2nd Chapter does a much better job of giving you a consistent roster and more character choice. Early in the game you'll even get to choose between two semi-permanent party members.

You may often be revisiting the same locations, but it's nice that the quests you completed also carry over from your 1st Chapter save data. There are so many NPCs you'll bump into who'll be like "Oh, I remember you helping my gran find her hearing aid." But the situation in each region will also feel different, like the story of Liberl has moved forward.

And, of course, you've got the same excellent character banter. Estelle is on top form, but I genuinely found myself getting engrossed in her emotional turmoil, yet drive to fight for the truth and closure. Trails in the Sky 2nd Chapter isn't as revolutionary as 1st Chapter was, but it's a strong sequel that certainly builds on what made the first remake so good.

If you want to play it yourself, it's out on September 17, or you can try the Steam demo first. You can also play the demo for the 1st Chapter, which is currently 50% off—I assume to coincide with 2nd Chapter's release.

Let's face it: JRPG monsters are pure nightmare fuel. Sure, there's a certain subset who are plain ol' cute, but for the most part they're a horrifying mash up of real world animals and mythical monsters, chimeric creatures amalgamating whatever bits and pieces the artist decided to chuck in the blender that day.

Not that I'm complaining, mind you—it wouldn't be a JRPG for me without them. I took absolute delight in Metaphor: ReFantazio's "humans" when I finally got around to playing it last Christmas, a wonderful take on the idea of what a monster even is, channeling Hieronymus Bosch's 500 year old paintings into some extremely distressing bosses.

But I never thought I'd find a top tier creepy JRPG monster in a Trails game. The series does have its darker moments, but for the most part, it's pretty homely and rustic, following the lives of regular folk. Trails in the Sky in particular is very chill, as you wander around Liberl as Joshua and Estelle, completing requests and odd jobs to earn their Bracer stripes.

However, while playing the Trails in the Sky 2nd Chapter Remake recently, I ran into a monster in Kaldia Tunnel in the game's Zeiss region who freaked me out. The Faerie Epitaph was in the original game and kind of resembles a melted angel statue, but with this full 3D remake, Falcom added a fun trick to this monster.

The Faerie Epitaph doesn't move, at least, not when you're looking at it. As you can see in the video, it moves Weeping Angel-style, inching closer whenever you look away. Obviously, I hit the first Faerie Epitaph I saw because it's clearly a monster, but it took me quite a while to realise that another was following me around Kaldia Tunnel. I only clocked it when I turned around after opening a chest and came face-to-face with one. Maybe it's just me, still scarred from the first time I watched Blink, but monsters that move when you're not looking are uniquely terrifying.

It's such a wonderfully creepy little detail to add as part of a full 3D remake, but it's kind of indicative of the lengths Falcom has gone to reworking these games for modern audiences. As a fan of Trails of Cold Steel, I was super impressed by Trails in the Sky's 1st Chapter Remake last year, and I've been having a great time with the 2nd Chapter Remake so far—when I'm not getting spooked by monsters, that is.

The gears are still grinding on Skyblivion, the massive mod that aims to recreate The Elder Scrolls 4: Oblivion in the newer, prettier technology of The Elder Scrolls 5: Skyrim Special Edition. A release date still hasn't been announced, but it's definitely getting closer—and once again, the dev team is asking for help.

What's notable, though, is the kind of help the developers are looking for: Not to finish the mod, but to tell the world about it.

As we approach #Skyblivion's launch, we’re looking for volunteers to join our communications team! If you have experience in video production or social media, we’d love your help collaborating on everything from trailer creation to developer interviews.

— @skyblivion.com (@skyblivion.com.bsky.social) 2026-09-15T21:47:15.782Z

"With our release getting closer, our communications team is expanding—and we need your help spreading the word!" the dev team wrote on the Skyblivion Discord. "We’re looking for volunteers with a background in video production or social media to help support projects like trailer editing, gameplay captures, and developer interviews. You'll be working alongside our communications department to get the word out!"

Nothing about the state of the mod was shared, and that remains the big question. Skyblivion was supposed to be out in 2025 but in December of that year was pushed into 2026. In April of this year, Skyblivion project lead Rebelzize admitted "there's always the chance shit hits the fan and we suffer another major setback," but added that "from what I see internally, I am pretty optimistic."

The team has been mostly quiet since then, apart from a couple calls for assistance on Discord and social media, and a tribute to modder Kettlewitch, "a close friend and mentor," who died in June. Gearing up for a promotional push is surely a sign that the end is in sight, but no guarantee of anything imminent—and with less than four months remaining in the year, 'imminent' is just about essential to avoid another delay.

Which would not be the end of the world. Skyblivion is a volunteer project, so fortunes will not be won or lost on its scheduling. But a delay would be disappointing: It's been in development since 2012, and it sure would be nice to get to play it, rather than just talk about it.

It's a sad day for aficionados of undead porn games, but a good one for pretty much everybody else: Valve has rescinded the adults only rating it had applied to the upcoming narrative RPG Nighthawks, meaning it will appear in standard searches on the storefront and won't be blocked from sale in some regions.

"Phew. What a roller coaster," Dave Gilbert, head of publisher Wadjet Eye Games, wrote on Bluesky. "Thank you everyone for your amazing support while we got this sorted. If you weren't able to wishlist before, now you can!"

I tested for myself, and sure enough, Nighthawks now appears in Steam searches even if you're not logged in. Previously, the adult rating meant it wouldn't show up unless you were logged in and had your account set to display AO-rated games.

In a separate post, Nighthawks developer (and former PC Gamer contributor) Richard Cobbett also expressed relief at the change: "Now I can get back to only stressing over people actually liking it!"

Oh, thank goodness. Now I can get back to only stressing over people actually liking it!

— @richardcobbett.bsky.social (@richardcobbett.bsky.social.bsky.social) 2026-09-15T20:03:50.795Z

The entire situation was bizarre. Nighthawks, a game about life as a new vampire in a world where the existence of vampires is known, began as a 2018 Kickstarter project; it promised depth, complexity, great storytelling, hand-drawn art, and absolutely nothing about sex.

The same is visible on the Nighthawks Steam page: A little sexy, maybe—it's vampires, after all, and you know how they are—but hardcore sex? Not so much.

Complicating matters further, Cobbett told us when the AO rating was first imposed that nobody was really sure what had caused it. "Vampires are inherently a bit sexy, and Nighthawks is definitely a mature game in terms of content," he said over the weekend. "However, regarding nudity, sex, and similar elements specifically, it's really all very mild, usually comedic in tone when it happens, and far less explicit than anything you'd see on HBO."

Why exactly Valve walked the rating back is also a mystery. Gilbert told me in a chat today that Valve didn't give him any "clear insights" into the initial rating, or why it was changed. He did say, however, that "Valve was very helpful in expediting the review on my appeal so we could get the AO rating dropped and the game itself approved for release. Regardless of how and why it happened, they did everything in their power to make it right. So I’m very grateful for that."

The experience of the surprise AO rating was very stressful, Gilbert said, and he was "basically swimming in cortisol" throughout. But he also acknowledged that, with the resolution in place, it was a "net positive" overall, and that the number of wishlists on Steam had "basically doubled overnight."

"I did not expect the whole thing to go as viral as it did. It called a lot more attention to the game that I am normally capable of on my own," he said. "I wish I could say I planned this as a guerrilla marketing stunt, but I’m not that dumb and I’m not that smart!

"I have no illusions that all of those new wishlists are sincere, and that a nonzero chunk of them aren't 'protest wishlists,' but anything that pushes the algorithm into thinking we are popular isn't a bad thing."

With "a decent night's sleep" behind him, Gilbert said he can see the humor in the situation, adding that he'll "be dining out on this story for a long time." He also recognizes, though, that he was very lucky to get the outcome he wanted, as quickly as he did.

"I had the contacts and the fanbase and the (relative) clout to make a bit of noise and get this handled quickly. Many devs in the same situation wouldn't be able to do that," Gilbert said. "At the very least, this has shed a big light on the problem and made Valve aware that this is a big problem many indies face. Hopefully it means that others will have an easier time of it going forward."

Classifying Nighthawks as a hardcore sex game does put a light on the imperfections (and frustrating opacity) of Steam's rating system (and yeah, now that we've got a happy ending we can admit it's kind of funny too), but the sheer number of games on the storefront means change to its classification system may be unlikely: More than 19,000 new games launched on Steam in 2025 alone.

Nighthawks is set to launch on September 22. and alongside Steam will also be available on GOG.

While server issues stalled the start of Diablo 4's new season for many players, a few were able to get in and discover something Blizzard carefully left out from official materials.

The focus for Diablo 4's Season of Hell's Legacy is celebrating the series' 30th anniversary. Blizzard went back to Diablo 2 and brought back Deckard Cain (in a dream) and three of its most iconic bosses: Diablo, Baal, and Mephisto. Each of them have updated versions of their old models and attacks, too.

Blizzard didn't indicate that it would be doing more than just a nostalgic storyline for season 15—but it is. Diablo 4 streamer Dioxide was able to squeeze past the login issues and found a number of new Runes available. Normally, these slot into your gear and give you passive bonuses, but Dioxide discovered there's more to them than that.

When he dropped two specific runes and a low-quality chestpiece into Diablo 4's crafting table, the Horadric Cube, it showed "???" as the recipe instead of one of the many listed on the side of the interface. When he clicked the transmute button, out popped the Stealth chestpiece, a Unique item from Diablo 2.

It turns out Blizzard added some of the Rune word item recipes from Diablo 2 without telling anyone. The Stealth armor is created exactly as people did more than two decades ago. It has different stats than the original, but carries the same relative power in Diablo 4 because it has two more stats than a normal Unique.

Now everyone is eager to see what other recipes are available and what other things Blizzard has hidden in the new season. The recent trailer has a pretty obvious hint for Diablo 3's rainbow-colored Whimsyshire level near the end with a creepy teddy bear: It isn't clear how to access it, but I'm sure someone will figure it out before the end of the day.

Ever since the release of the Lord of Hatred expansion for Diablo 4, Blizzard has been intentionally leaving stuff for players to find on their own. Nobody knew they would actually add the cow level, for example. I think it's a great approach when so many previous seasons felt kind of solved before they even began, and it maintains some of the mystery that the older games always had.

The Witcher 3 is the perfect videogame. Is that hyperbolic? Maybe a bit. But it's unquestionably one of the greatest RPGs of all time, a game that arrived with a 92% review score and somehow got better through years of fixes, upgrades, and expansions, the last of which provided a perfectly satisfying conclusion to the epic of Geralt (and an even higher review score).

In his review for that brilliant denouement, former PC Gamer editor Tom Senior committed himself: "If one of these expansions came out every year I'd still be playing The Witcher 3 in 2020." Good news for Tom, then, because a surprise third expansion, Songs of the Past, is on the way in 2027, and a full remaster of the base game and first two expansions is set to drop ahead of that—later this month, in fact. CD Projekt Red has big ambitions for that remaster, aiming to make it not just look and run better, but to feel better too—like a new game, rather than a 2015 release with a fresh coat of paint.

There's clearly a lot going on, and it invites a question: Given the esteem in which The Witcher 3 is held, and the hard-earned ending it granted Geralt, is there any worry about messing with it? For CD Projekt's vice president of narration Marcin Blacha, who served as the lead writer of The Witcher 3 and story director on its two expansions, the answer is an easy 'no.'

"For me, The Witcher 3 is not a monument and is not untouchable," Blacha told us in a recent interview. "It is still vivid in my memory, and it is still something that is not maybe a point of reference, but something that still may be improved. When I'm playing The Witcher 3, I still find some places that I think maybe nowadays, I would do it differently.

"So, you know, adding a new expansion is not such a huge deal. In fact, discovering we still have it, you know, we have this thing, and we are still able to create a story that fits not only vanilla Witcher 3 but also Hearts of Stone and Blood and Wine. It is still a very uplifting feeling—a time machine that brings me 10 years back, when I was younger and maybe more passionate and more enthusiastic."

The remastered update is focused on visual and gameplay tweaks, but if he were going to fiddle with narrative elements, what sort of things would Blacha do differently? "Maybe some things I would make more nuanced," he continued, like adjusting Dandelion to make him a bit wiser and more supportive rather than just comedy relief, or adding more choices and consequences in Geralt's dealings with the world around him.

But Blacha also acknowledged that some of those changes would arise not from any problems or shortcoming in the game, but simply because—rather like Geralt—he's changed over the years.

"It may be as well, my process of aging, when I see some things from a different perspective. Maybe the problem is not in the game but in me, looking at the game with a different eye," Blacha said. That doesn't mean Songs of the Past will be the videogame equivalent of a grumpy old man sitting on his porch yelling at the kids, though.

"We have a crew that has both veterans from The Witcher 3, but also developers that joined Fool's Theory or the project quite recently," Blacha said. "So I hope it is not a geriatric expansion. It will be fueled very much by the passion of writers and quest designers and developers of Fool's Theory in general."

The Witcher 3's remastered update is set to launch on September 29, and will be free for anyone who owns the base game. The Songs of the Past expansion is currently slated for a 2027 launch.

If you need evidence that the team behind The Witcher 3's upcoming expansion, Songs of the Past, is composed of Bonafide Witcher Sickos, try this: the expansion's lead writer wrote her bachelor's thesis on Hearts of Stone almost a decade ago.

Fool's Theory's Paula Mejsner took a comparative literature scalpel to The Witcher 3's first expansion in her 2017 thesis—long before she got to work on the game itself—titled (in English) "Videogames as a way of experiencing literature: Analysis of the 'Hearts of Stone', a DLC to 'The Witcher 3: The Wild Hunt'".

When I sat down to chat with her about her work on Songs of the Past, I had to do something that I'd never forgive someone else for doing to me: I asked her about it.

"That was at the time when I played Hearts of Stone, and The Witcher, and I was studying comparative literature. That's when I fell in love with The Witcher… [the thesis] touches upon what I said when it comes to how rich The Witcher is, when it comes to literary references."

Specifically, Mejsner wrote about how The Witcher channeled the spirits of classic Polish literature, "like The Wedding from Wyspiański and the whole character of Gaunter O'Dimm, as this devilish character that is also based on many, many other pieces of culture.

"I wanted to analyse it, and I did this to probably prove to some of my professors that games are worthy, and they are also texts of culture."

As for how the Mejsner of 2017 would feel about actually getting to write an expansion? She'd be pretty thrilled. "To be honest, I'm pretty proud with myself, that I did manage [to work on The Witcher]. But, you know, as always, there's been a lot of luck in the process. But yeah, it truly is a dream come true, because this is what I dreamt of when I wrote my thesis. It's pretty awesome to write Geralt."

The Witcher 3, being one of the best RPGs of its era, naturally has a lot of very good quests—quests with weighty, significant choices that give you pause to think. In speaking with PC Gamer's Joshua Wolens, story director Marcin Blacha says that pause is a sign that he and his team have done something right in a story choice.

"First of all, the choice has to make you think," Blacha says, "So it cannot be obvious. You cannot simply go after one of the choices by simply pressing A all the time, so that's the first thing. Second of all, in addition to having this balance, it needs to have its own gravitas. It must be serious. It must make you think about either life or humans or this particular problem or the difficulties that the characters may have right now.

"I always repeat that when you have a really big choice in The Witcher 3, it must be constructed in such a way that the player puts the controller away, stands up, and starts walking, thinking about the choice, and then goes back, and then the player picks one of the choices."

Which tracks—when I think back to the most impactful choices of the RPGs I've played, there's usually at least been a jarring, 'sit back and think' moment that's knocked me back into my chair, if not off it entirely:

"So it is about thinking," Blacha continues. "It is about making the player immersed into the game and the problems that characters have, but also saying something about either who we are or how the world works, or how difficult life can sometimes be."

In regards to the upcoming DLC, Songs of the Past, and whether it'll have any hard choices to make? "Obviously. I mean, we are not trying to avoid difficult choices, and we are not avoiding making players uncomfortable. So I can promise that you will have both in Songs of the Past, and sometimes you will regret [your choice] and you will need to load the game to repeat your choice."

As if September wasn't busy enough, The Witcher 3 is calling us again. CDPR's remaster will be launching as a free update on September 29. The studio's goal with this new version is to make it feel like a 2026 game, rather than a 2015 game that's been dusted off. And while this is the second time it's had a glow up, the team has been focusing on different things.

"The next gen update a few years ago, it was quite a substantial update," executive producer Jakub Kutrzuba tells us. "At the same time, it was driven by the new generation of consoles, so there was a specific need. We wanted to bring the game to the new generation, and it was very much technical oriented." With the remaster, however, CDPR's brief has been a lot broader.

"With the remaster, it is even bigger and it's also quite heavy, maybe even heavier on the technical level," says Kutrzuba, though it should still run fine on Steam Deck. "But what is more important is that we are touching these aspects of the game which weren't touched since we launched it. I'm talking about the animation. I'm talking about the gameplay. I'm talking about the quality of life, how you actually play the game."

CDPR realised that only doing another technical update "would probably not be enough". The team wanted to make it "shine again" and give both veterans and new players an experience that wouldn't contain any "bad surprises" or anything that would make them think that The Witcher 3 got old.

"We wanted to make it [comparable] with any other game which is launching these days," says Kutrzuba.

This meant that CDPR had to change the animation system, the camera work, enemy behaviour in combat, pathfinding, and then add all sorts of small quality of life improvements. Anywhere the team identified the potential for frustration, it made changes. Anything that could be done without "rebuilding the game from scratch", basically.

Kutrzuba says the best evidence that CDPR has succeeded is that the team can't go back to the old version of the game. "It's so easy to get used to these new improvements that it's hard to go back."

I can't deny I'm excited. But also, I don't have time to play all the brand new games coming out, so I definitely won't be replaying The Witcher 3 in 2026. Next year when the new expansion arrives, though? Yeah, I'm gonna be all over that.

The Aniimo release time is almost here, unveiling the world of Idyll and its many creatures for you to catch. This game certainly seems to be trying to tap into that Palworld vein of an open world filled with recruitable monsters, though admittedly with fewer guns and survival crafting elements. Aniimo is also free-to-play, though apparently not a gacha game, so expect some slightly different monetisation. All that said, here's when you can play Aniimo.

Aniimo release times for each region

The Aniimo release date is September 15 or 16 depending on your timezone. For folks in the US, it'll be the former, while for those in Europe and the UK, it'll be the latter.

Here's exactly when you can load in:

September 15

• West Coast US: 7 pm PST
• East Coast US: 10 pm EST

September 16

• UK: 3 am BST
• Europe: 4 pm CEST
• Australia: 12 pm AEST
• New Zealand: 3 pm NZST

If you're unsure whether you can run Aniimo, you can find its specifications on the Steam page.

Can you preload Aniimo?

Yes, the Aniimo preload unlocks on September 14 at 10 am (UTC+8), which means it's already available. You can download the Aniimo launcher from the official website and then preload the game itself—the size is about 40gb, though the actual download was only 28 for me.

Diablo 5 may be set in a lonely world ravaged by a demon lord, but you'll still be able to team up with your friends like in previous Diablo games.

Senior game director Joe Shely confirmed that Diablo 5 will fully support multiplayer in a group interview with PC Gamer: "Like Diablo 4, it is a game that you can play solo or multiplayer, however you please, and you should be able to play all of the content with your friends."

Specific details about multiplayer, like if you can run into other players in the open world like you can in Diablo 4's endgame, weren't mentioned. Blizzard said that information will have to wait until we're closer to its 2029 release.

One of the biggest changes that differentiates Diablo 5 from Diablo 4 is its return to having a procedurally-generated overworld and dungeons. This is supposed to convey the shifting nature of the world as you travel across the continent with your caravan cleansing it of Diablo's corruption. It's possible that this might dramatically change how you'll interact with other players once you're finished with the campaign, especially if everyone experiences their own version of Sanctuary.

Running into a bunch of other players might ruin the illusion that you're a lone hero fighting back against the forces of Hell. Blizzard says Diablo 5 will incorporate a lot of things it learned from Diablo 4, but it's unclear if that will include things like world events and bosses. Diablo 4 is also overflowing with skins and cosmetics that, if carried forward, would suggest there must be some way of showing off your fit to the other heroes of Sanctuary.

It doesn't seem like we're going to get any concrete answers about this for a while, though. Next year, Blizzard will start to post regular updates about the game's development to see how fans feel about it. Maybe one of them will shed some light on the scope of multiplayer in Diablo 5 and whether or not it'll continue what Diablo 4 started.

Wouldn't it be nice if more of Blizzard's classic games were available on Steam? People could easily play them on their Steam Decks! But no, that's not happening. Instead, we're getting Cyberpunk 2077 on Battle.net.

After announcing at GamesCom that The Witcher 3's upcoming remastered version would release on Battle.net as well as the expected platforms, Blizzard and CD Projekt have announced at BlizzCon that Cyberpunk 2077 and its expansion will release there later this year. They'll be joining other non-Blizzard games everyone forgets are available on Battle.net like Sea of Thieves, Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 3+4, and The Outer Worlds 2.

Diablo 2 Resurrected, Diablo 4, and Overwatch remain the only Blizzard games available on Steam. The original Diablo is still on GOG, though the first two Warcraft games were pulled from that storefront when they were remastered a couple of years ago.

The collaboration between Blizzard and CD Projekt will also be bringing Geralt to Diablo 4 in the form of a skin for the barbarian class, which will be available to players who prepurchase The Witcher 3's Songs of the Past DLC on Battle.net, with more "Witcher-themed content" threatened for 2027. Next year will also see Edgerunners-themed cosmetics coming to Overwatch. The show's second season will premiere on Netflix on October 20.

Nighthawks, the long-in-development vampire RPG due to be released later this month, is the latest game to run afoul of Steam's increasingly stringent rules regarding adult content. According to publisher Wadjet Eye Games, the game has been labelled 'Adults Only'—causing it to be removed from Steam search and outright delisted in certain countries like Germany—despite claims from both developer and publisher that the RPG's depictions of sex and nudity are very mild.

"We are aware that Steam has classified Nighthawks as an adult game and has excluded it from searches," Wadjet Eye boss Dave Gilbert wrote on Bluesky. "We are working on it. Valve is under the impression that this game is way sexier than it actually is." Gilbert further commented that "Valve is basically treating Nighthawks like a porn game!" in responding to a reply to his initial post.

A game being labelled Adults Only can affect its visibility in several ways. Adults Only games will not appear in Steam searches by default, requiring users to log in, verify their age (which requires the use of a credit card in some countries) and adjust their preferred content settings before they become visible. In addition, the label can cause games to be delisted outright in certain countries.

In a statement to PC Gamer, Nighthawks' creator Richard Cobbett (who, for the sake of transparency, is also a PC Gamer contributor) provided an overview of the situation, and how the Adults Only label is likely to affect Nighthawks' launch:

"It's very bad news for us, because it immediately makes the game persona non grata in several important countries like Germany," Cobbett wrote. "We're not sure exactly what triggered the issue, but we've obviously contacted Valve and we're hoping that they will quickly remove the scarlet letter."

Cobbett also outlined the themes and ideas Nighthawks explores and depicts, and explained why the Adults Only label has come as such a shock: "Vampires are inherently a bit sexy, and Nighthawks is definitely a mature game in terms of content. However, regarding nudity, sex, and similar elements specifically, it's really all very mild, usually comedic in tone when it happens, and far less explicit than anything you'd see on HBO."

Going into specifics, Cobbett added that "in terms of content, we're talking a few butt shots and some other censored naughty bits, mostly as part of companion romances and similar content, where you don't get to see anything explicit and sex scenes typically consist of a fun 'date' type adventure to explore the relationship and different character dynamics along with perhaps a small slice of cheesecake, but ultimately don't go much further than a tasteful fade to black followed by 'Ten minutes later.'"

Nighthawks isn't the only game to be recently caught out by Valve's stricter adult content policies. In July, the indie adventure Future? No thanks! was forced to delay its release on account of a weeks-long Steam review process, which was triggered by the presence of 'dozens of untextured polygons depicting ass and boobs' in one of its sequences. The review process was eventually completed in the game's favour, and Future? No Thanks! released on Steam on September 4.

Part of the problem is that Valve's rules on what qualifies as adult content are somewhat byzantine. Valve requires developers to appropriately age gate games with mature or adult themes, but doesn't itself draw a line between the two, requiring developers to make that judgment for themselves. Matters were further complicated last year when Valve added another rule that prohibits "Content that may violate the rules and standards set forth by Steam’s payment processors and related card networks and banks, or internet network providers. In particular, certain kinds of adult only content."

Ultimately, Cobbett concluded that "If you're not scandalised by the likes of Dragon Age, you're really not going to get too hot and bothered here either. We're hoping that Valve will quickly reverse the decision and approve the game so that everyone can get to be the vampire they deserve to be as planned next week."

PC Gamer has reached out to Valve for comment. Nighthawks is set to launch on September 22.

Diablo 5 is shaping up to be very different from Diablo 4. The sequel is set a hundred years after Diablo 4 in the aftermath of Diablo (the demon)'s apocalyptic destruction of Sanctuary, and it's going to bring fundamental changes to combat, classes, and loot.

Several Diablo 5 developers took the stage today at BlizzCon 2026 to talk about their vision for the game, noting that everything is still a work-in-progress and subject to change between now and the spring 2029 release window.

A lot of Diablo 5's biggest changes feel like a response to both player reception of Diablo 4—specifically what it lacked compared to previous games and competitors, like Path of Exile—and the much darker setting, which Blizzard is "doubling down" on.

The campaign begins several years after a golden age for Sanctuary, right as it falls into the hands of the big bad Diablo. Like Mephisto in Diablo 4, Diablo will be a full character as opposed to just a boss you fight at the end. Much of the story will involve restoring the western continent and Westmarch, the most iconic location in the series, from its ravaged state.

Here's what I gleaned from the 30-minute panel:

• Diablo 5 will go back to procedurally-generated dungeons and open-world regions that will change every time you return to them
• Towns won't exist; instead, you'll have a caravan of NPCs you'll meet throughout the story (one of your buddies will be a treasure goblin)
• Sidequests will all come from the people in your caravan
• The demon hunter and monk classes are returning
• New classes will show up too, including the plague knight: a heavily-armored class that spreads disease around the battlefield
• It will launch with more classes than every Diablo game has launched with combined
• Items will have tiers, starting simple and growing in complexity as you progress
• Belts and set items are coming back
• Items will take up multiple inventory slots based on their type, like Diablo 2
• The team is experimenting with items that require certain stat thresholds—which is also reminiscent of Diablo 2

Blizzard said we can expect to hear regular updates on the development of Diablo 5 starting next year, and emphasized that it will be changing things as it goes along based on player feedback.

Diablo is returning: At BlizzCon today, Blizzard announced that Diablo 5 will be set a century after Diablo 4 in a Sanctuary that has succumbed to the Lord of Terror, Diablo himself.

That's not until 2029, though. In the meantime, Blizzard will continue the story of Diablo 4 with seasons, but no more expansions are currently planned for the game.

"We're all focused on [Diablo 4] seasons and getting to Diablo 5," said Diablo game director Brent Gibson in an interview with PC Gamer at BlizzCon. "We feel like we told the Story of Hatred. We had a great conclusion with Lord of Hatred with what we have with Mephisto, and we are moving towards telling the Story of Terror."

Even if no more expansions are currently planned, the Diablo 4 story isn't over. Given the premise of Diablo 5, Blizzard now has to bring about the apocalypse, and it sounds like we'll see how that plays out in the upcoming seasons. Nothing's set in stone, though.

"The events of Diablo 5 happen 100 years after everything that's happening with Diablo 4, and so that gives us a lot of room to kind of still ride the wave with all the fans on where the story can go as we make our way there," said Gibson. "So continuity is something that we're really excited about, but we don't necessarily have a perfect picture on exactly where that's going to go because we want to see how fans are reacting season to season."

I also asked whether we can expect a Path of Exile/Path of Exile 2 situation, where a live service game and its sequel end up running concurrently, or if we should expect dev resources to fully switch over to Diablo 5 after it launches.

Gibson indicated that support for Diablo 4 isn't going away so long as people are playing it, pointing to the continued support for Diablo 2: Resurrected, which got a new class earlier this year, as evidence of Blizzard's commitment to the whole Diablo "universe."

"I think you can expect that—you know, Diablo 4 players, they love the game, there's tons of them out there," said Gibson. "We're continuing to support the game for a very long time."

It's unclear what that support will look like, but Diablo 5 is a ways off yet and it sounds like plans are expected to evolve with feedback. Diablo 3 won't necessarily be the template, but it's currently in a kind of time loop, cycling through its biggest seasons.

You can catch up on more BlizzCon announcements in our recap of the Opening Ceremony. Tyler Colp has also collected the big details about Diablo 5 revealed during a breakout panel.

The biggest surprise of BlizzCon might be Diablo 5, which Blizzard announced will release in spring 2029, six years after the 2023 launch of Diablo 4.

The sequel will take place about a century after the events of Diablo 4. Sanctuary is no longer on the verge of apocalypse in Diablo 5: It's been fully apolcalpyted. The Lord of Terror—aka Diablo himself, absent in Diablo 4—is back, and he won.

"The heroes are gone, Sanctuary has fallen, and Diablo has won," declared Diablo 4 director Joe Shely. "For the first time, you won't be fighting to stop Diablo from taking Sanctuary. You'll enter a world where he already has. There are no towns or safe places waiting to protect you."

There's not a ton to go on in the trailer, but it is, fittingly, dark and grim: Everything's on fire, grubby peasant guys proselytize on behalf of the victorious demons, and angels are getting crucified. After the title drop, we get a brief view of the titular Diablo himself, out of focus and wreathed in fire.

2029 is still a ways off, but it's nevertheless surprising to hear news of a new numbered Diablo sequel. Given Diablo 4's live servicey shape, I expected another expansion roadmap rather than a full-blown sequel.

For comparison, there was a 12 year wait between Diablos 2 and 3, and an 11-year gap between the initial launches of 3 and 4, both about double the projected wait between 4 and 5.

Development times have been trending longer in the industry, not shorter, and I'm curious how Diablo players will respond to what would usually be regarded as pretty great news—do you think Blizzard should have stuck with D4 as a platform instead of already starting on a sequel? Sound off in the comments.

Regarding Diablo 4, Blizzard did announce that the Amazon class is coming, and talked about the next season, an anniversary celebration looking back at Diablo's past, but didn't announce a new expansion.

At BlizzCon 2026, Blizzard president Johanna Faries took to the stage to announce that a Diablo animated series is in production with Netflix.

The announcement was light on details, and did not come with a trailer or release window, but Faries did note "great discussions being had" regarding adaptations of Overwatch and Warcraft. Faries also allowed that Blizzard's other properties could see similar treatments.

“After decades of bringing entire universes to life through our games, we’re partnering with some creative powerhouses to tell even more stories beyond gaming across new screens," Blizzard wrote in a press release about the project. "A new animated series set in the world of ‘Diablo’ is in development with Netflix. More details will be shared in the future, but this is only the beginning, with even more taking shape across our universes.”

It feels like the early 2020s gold rush of streaming TV videogame adaptations is cooling down—RIP, Halo show. But we also know what's worked really well. Netflix's animated adaptations of Cyberpunk and League of Legends, Edgerunners and Arkane respectively, are huge and much-beloved, with reaches well beyond their respective playerbases.

An animated adaptation from the same outfit behind these other hit gaming adaptations strikes me as a slam dunk. We'll have to wait and see if the goliath partnership is able to land the plane.

The Blood of Dawnwalker is good stuff—over the course of a week I drank deeply and had a grand ol' time walking on walls and carving people up with my monstrous claws. But as a choice-laden RPG that promised a lot of agency, it ended up being a bit of a disappointment. There were plenty of choices to be made, but rarely did they leave an impact on either the world or the white bread protagonist, Coen of Laslea.

Rebel Wolves made Coen in the mold of Geralt of Rivia, in that he's a defined character who you can nudge in different directions, but Coen is no Geralt.

By The Witcher 3, CDPR had the two previous games to lean on, along with a boat-load of books, which helped the studio create a well-defined, consistent character no matter what choices you made. Coen, on the other hand, is just at the start of his journey, and in Dawnwalker, his defining feature is that he loves his family.

Look, I don't mind Coen. Will de Renzy-Martin gave a good performance, but it's hard to do much with a character who's just a nice boy. And while the writers did some interesting stuff in regards to Coen's childhood trauma and his obligation to his family—is it love, or is he trapped in a prison of responsibility?—he's mostly just a pleasant dude.

The choices players face fall into the traditional binary category, which in this case means you can either choose a Coen who is willing to do everything to save his family except become a monster, or a Coen who is willing to do everything to save his family including becoming a monster—but is still mostly a good egg.

Unfortunately, this changes surprisingly little. If you let a vrakhir collaborator go free or murder them, it might change how you feel about the character you're playing, but the world itself couldn't care less. Until the epilogue, most choices you make happen in the background, in a vacuum, and the choices you'd expect to have the greatest impact, like how you choose to defeat Brencis, are largely detached from the kind of Coen you've been playing for 40 hours.

I played Coen as wholesome and naive, but I still found myself able to get every ending. It just came down to which route to Brencis I decided to settle on at the last moment. How I comported myself had no impact. And even though I tried to be consistent when it came to how I roleplayed Coen, the voice direction would often take things in a very different direction, transforming, for instance, what appeared to be a neutral statement into an angry criticism.

This is something that often bugs me in voice-acted RPGs. The acting and direction can dramatically change the tone of a line in a way that feels incongruous to the rest of the conversation, and this happens so much in Dawnwalker. It's something CDPR deftly resolved in The Witcher by making Geralt incredibly stoic. Doug Cockle has plenty of range, but when he's playing Geralt it's extremely subtle, which maintains the consistency of each dialogue sequence.

Final countdown

But Dawnwalker has something most RPGs don't: a ticking clock. And while the most obvious benefit is the sense of urgency it blesses the game with, it also seemed like a promising roleplaying mechanic—helping players to better define their version of Coen by determining what's most important to him.

This is felt most keenly in the prologue, before Coen becomes a dawnwalker. You have one day to do some chores before everyone in the village has to visit the church to get drained by their undead rulers. It's impossible to do everything. Do you focus on helping your fellow villagers? Or do you spend the day hanging out with your family? What's most important to your Coen?

Even during this single day, there's a tangible sense of time moving inexorably forwards. For instance, early in the day you'll meet your siblings, who want to spend time with you and go down to the river. If you decline initially, later you'll find that they've gone to the river by themselves, and you can meet them down there, or just continue to ignore them. There's a schedule.

This promise of time's fickle nature is largely done away with after you complete the prologue. You have 30 days to finish the game—if you want to save your family, anyway—but within those 30 days any time pressure is just an illusion. You'll meet people on the second day who want your help, and they'll still be waiting around for you by the 25th day.

In my entire playthrough, outside of the prologue, I only encountered a single quest where I ran out of time. I could have caught up with an old friend who joined the rebels, but once I'd completed all the quests for the organisation, they mobilised to take on Brencis, at which point I could no longer hang out with my pal. According to our guide lead Sean Martin, who completed every quest Dawnwalker offered, he only found one other example of this happening.

So I never had to make any tough choices. Do I hang out with the mean vampire lady and learn more about the monster I'm becoming? Or do I have a magical adventure with the friendly witch who wants to help me save my family? It doesn't matter because I can always do both.

Evening plans

There's definitely an argument for making Dawnwalker's time limit 20 days instead of 30, but I think that might make the adventure feel too rushed. Instead, sticking with 30 days but putting individual quests on a timer would make a lot more sense. This forces you to make decisions about how Coen should spend his time every day, as well as giving NPCs more agency, while still letting you do a lot.

Being made to choose between staging a jailbreak or assassinating a high-ranking soldier is a much more effective way to establish who Coen is compared to the extremely common choice of: drink a barrel of blood or smash a barrel of blood. It also leaves room for meaningful consequences—like discovering the terrible fate of the prisoners if you opted to do the assassination mission instead, and having other characters actually reference it.

What's frustrating is that you occasionally see glimmers of this, like the time of day you do a quest subtly changing how things play out.

When I tried to meet up with the rebels for the first time, I played through it twice: once during the day, and once at night. At night, I found a rebel being harassed by soldiers, who were immediately hostile to me. After I quickly murdered the soldiers, the rebel took me to meet her friends, but I sensed a trap thanks to my supernatural skills, and avoided getting my leg stuck in a snare.

Attempting this in the afternoon, I was actually able to talk to the soldiers instead of killing them immediately. Rather than fighting, I bribed them to leave the rebel alone. But when I was brought to meet her fellow rebels, I walked right into the snare trap.

This was cool! Though it didn't actually matter at all. In vampire form, even though I avoided the first trap, the rebels ended up jumping me and chaining me to a tree. No matter the time of day, the end result was the same.

I also randomly encountered one of the vamp bosses in a cathedral I'd broken into one evening, at which point I could take her out there and then—dropping from the rafters and plunging my claws into her.

Discovering that some characters had lives outside of the quests attached to them was neat, though taking her out early actually undermined the narrative—it meant I would have missed out on all the context that made her character more than simply a ghoulish monster. So I killed her, felt badass for taking her out early, and then immediately reloaded an old save—letting her live until I'd completed the quests building up to our final confrontation.

But both of these encounters gave me a glimpse of what could have been: a game where time forces your hand, where NPCs have routines and deadlines, where it genuinely matters if you do a quest at noon or in the wee hours of the morning. A glimpse of a better RPG.

Clockwork

Most of the time, however, when you choose to do a quest only really changes the mechanics you can take advantage of. Which also means, given the choice, you should usually try to do things at night, when you're stronger and can teleport. Anything requiring witchcraft, meanwhile, can only be done during the day, so you're not really making a choice there. In this way, time becomes a largely perfunctory feature.

When that illusion is broken, The Blood of Dawnwalker becomes incredibly familiar: a checklist of tasks peppered across a big map, which you can largely do in whatever order you fancy. The story is excellent and the fights are a big step up from The Witcher 3, but the narrative, the way Rebel Wolves has constructed the tale of Coen of Laslea, is surprisingly rote.

Ultimately, what we ended up with was another big open-world game not so different from Spider-Man, Horizon or Assassin's Creed, where there are roleplaying nods and lots of time devoted to storytelling, but where the bulk of the agency is mechanical—how you build your character, rather than how you define their personality. Which is fine! It's just not what Rebel Wolves sold us on, or what I was hoping for from a story-driven RPG.

I've been keeping a close eye on Starfinder: Afterlight for a few reasons—firstly, I'm a Pathfinder 2e sicko, and Starfinder 2e works on a ton of the same rules. Secondly, because I love a good CRPG, and thirdly, because this game has a surprising amount of financial and voice acting heft behind it.

After getting a surprising €828,164 (around $960,000) funded out of a humble €75,000 ask on Kickstarter, the game managed to snag Red Dead Redemption's Arthur Morgan for its narration. It also just so happens to be getting voice direction from Neil Newbon, who you might know as Astarion from Baldur's Gate 3—and the man's voicing an interstellar priest bug, which is as charming as it sounds.

Alongside some promising key art, I was curious to see if Epicteller Game's debut game could put another solid CRPG on the market—and after going through the playtest, I was rendered… cautiously optimistic. What I played was very rough around the edges, missing features, customisation, and so on.

I shan't say its official demo, which is now out on Steam, has quelled my apprehension completely. It has, however, left me feeling like Epictellers can pull this thing together with enough polish, given the marked improvement from the playtest I enjoyed in March.

First up, the bad: It still runs terribly, and doesn't have any graphical settings at all yet, animations for combat are a touch clunky, and you can't make a custom character—which is a huge draw of any CRPG, though you can pick from three custom premades.

It's also a fairly linear demo, and while I'd be a fool to expect the breadth of something like Baldur's Gate 3, it'd still be nice to have a little more space to roam, meaningful NPCs to talk to, and a side quest or two. As it stands, the demo's just a series of hallways connected by story, with a few choices to make.

But in comparison to what I played in March? It's clear that the polishing is being done. The demo opens with a gorgeously-animated intro that sets the space-swashbuckling tone well, as your ship is assailed by the dreaded Corpse Fleet. Your captain, Khali, heroically tackles their leader off a ledge and leaves you to defend a set of escape pods carrying your crewmates.

You crash-land on the backwater of Akiton, and mysteriously, five years have passed—not a terrible setup for an RPG by any means, and much improved by the fact you immediately meet Newbon's effusive and peppy bug priest with a baby strapped to his chest. Don't worry, it's traditional for Shirren, the little guy's fine.

And while this game chugs, performance issues can be fixed—the more important part is its aesthetic, which is impressive for a studio of this size. Character portraits are lovingly rendered, the comic-book style cutscenes are cute, and Akiton is bright and colourful, plus will look measurably more so when Epictellers figures out how to get it running at a reasonable framerate.

The voice-acting, for a smaller-scale project, is also charming, if a touch inconsistent, but there's a great marriage of voice talent and spectacular character design for your companions, so the focus is in the right place.

The UI is much-improved, carving up character features and abilities into neat little icons, while also tucking plenty of info for min-maxers like me into nested tooltips. And while the combat in the demo is tethered to low-level play, which isn't exciting in any TTRPG system, I can vouch that it will get more interesting as time goes on. As a Pathfinder 2e freak, the three action system has made an evangelist out of me.

It'll need a better tutorial to pull in the layman, mind. I was merrily applying +1 status bonuses and avoiding the dreaded multiple attack penalty because I'm already deeply familiar with the system. As it stands, though, the game awkwardly hucks a bunch of missable tooltips at you in the right corner of the screen. I don't usually advocate for pop-ups, but given how crunchy Starfinder 2e can be, it wouldn't hurt to hold your hand. Or, at the very least, let you know that spamming attacks won't help you.

It's hard to properly tell the trajectory of any given, early project like this—game development is a monstrously complicated business and I'm working with two data points—but I wouldn't bet against Epictellers being able to get this thing ship-shape in time.

The Witcher 3's recently revealed expansion Songs of the Past will bring more to CD Projekt's acclaimed fantasy adventure than a new region to explore and quests to pursue, it will also introduce a new weapon for Geralt of Rivia to wield—a gnarly silver chain. Well, "new" might not be a wholly appropriate term for it. Geralt's chain weapon—which appears in the novels—was originally seen in the opening cinematic for 2007's The Witcher, making it one of the earliest things players see in the trilogy. But it hasn't appeared as a tool players can use until now.

Apparently though, CD Projekt has previously considered introducing the chain, having discussed it more than a decade ago during The Witcher 3's original development: "We were talking about implementing the chain even during the original Witcher 3." Jakob Rokosz, Songs of the Past's Game Director, told BBC News (via GamesRadar+). "But it was impossible to do at the time for various technological reasons and challenges,

Rokosz didn't go into detail about what those challenges were. But reading between the lines, it sounds like they had to do with the chain's animations or physics engine. "A few things had to click together, because we were actually able to address those challenges and issues," Rokosz explained, noting that they did this during the remastering process for The Witcher 3. "Then we were able to implement a weapon that just feels natural and very fluid and basically realises the fantasy you either read in the books or have seen in the trailer."

But the chain isn't appearing solely because CD Projekt can do it. Senior quest designer Despoina Anetaki, who was also being interviewed by the BBC, explained that the weapon "fits with the narrative theming" of Songs of the Past. "It fits with the new enemies that work with the chain," she continued. "We were able to do crowd control with the swarmions that swarm you and you have to keep them away from you."

Swarmions, I should point out, are a somewhat unimaginatively named new enemy-type coming to Songs of the Past. It also sounds like the chain will act as an alternative to (or outright replacement for) the crossbow introduced in The Witcher 3. Anetaki describes it as "a very cool weapon for players who might be sick of the crossbow by now," suggesting it's designed to play a similar role.

If you want to know more about Geralt's silver chain, our own Joshua Wolens saw the weapon in action at Gamescom last month. Like the crossbow, the chain slows down time when you use it and lets you target specific body parts. Joshua had plenty else to say about Songs of the Past too, like how it focuses on Geralt's friendship with Dandelion, and how much livelier its new region feels than those of the base game and its expansions.

The Genshin Impact 7.1 livestream codes are here, giving you a little Primogem bonus before we head into the new Snezhnaya update. For those new to this, Hoyoverse runs a livestream for each of its games every six weeks, showing off the new characters, events, and quests set to drop, but it also includes three currency codes as a little viewing incentive.

In this version we have Vesna and Vodyanitsa, Anemo and Hydro characters respectively, as well as rumoured reruns for Skirk and Escoffier. As usual, I'll add the codes below as they drop during the stream—these usually expire within a day, so be sure to claim them if you want them.

Genshin Impact codes: All current livestream Primogems

• Rekviem - 100 Primogems and 10 Mystic Enhancement Ore
• Vesna0923 - 100 Primogems and five Hero’s Wit
• PrimaDonna - 100 Primogems and 50,000 Mora

How to redeem Genshin Impact codes

You can redeem your Genshin livestream codes once you've reached Adventure Rank 10 by playing through the game's intro, but for most of you that won't be an issue unless you've literally just started. Otherwise, you can claim codes via two methods.

The first is through the game itself::

1. Open Genshin Impact
2. Enter the in-game menu
3. Choose Settings and then Account
4. Select Redeem Now and paste a code into the box
5. Collect your Primogems from the in-game mailbox

Or you can redeem codes online through the dedicated website:

• Head to the Genshin Impact code redemption website
• Input your info and select character region
• Add a code in the box and choose redeem
• Collect your rewards via the in-game mailbox

The games industry's been in an (understandable) fuss lately about the prophesied death of physical media from Sony, which has announced it'll be going discless for the foreseeable future. Players are really angry because it's not exactly great if the one place you can buy your games also controls the entirety of the pricing—as Sony hypothetically would on its PlayStation consoles.

Things are a little easier for us over here on PC land, but this recent allergy to download-only games has had fans up in arms whenever they get a whiff of digital exclusivity. As is the case with Final Fantasy 7 Revelation which, even though it's getting a physical disc version, will require a digital download.

Speaking with IGN, director Naoki Hamaguchi claims to be with gamers on the importance of physical media: "Personally, I'm very happy that we are able to release a physical disc version of FFVII Revelation considering how the entire gaming market, or the landscape, is veering towards the disc-less direction."

Regarding the download requirement, however, Hamaguchi says it was there to avoid compromising on detail: "When we had an internal discussion with the development team about how we wanted to approach the physical discs and the physical releases of FFVII Revelation, initially there were conversations about using the same disc size as we did for, say, FFVII Rebirth.

"But if we were to do that, it would mean that we would have to make a compromise in terms of the fidelity and the quality of the game. So as a development team, we didn't want to do that. We didn't want to make any compromises for the game. So realistically, the only choice that we had was to release this physical disc, but with certain sections of the game being a digital download format through the physical disc."

Which is an interesting take on it, depending on its implementation. On the plus side, a hypothetical PC version of this sort of thing skirts around a couple of the problems folks have with gaming's disc-pocalypse: It still lets gaming stores set the price, giving folks a wider range of options for purchasing, which is healthier for the consumer on the whole.

It also, depending on implementation—like whether the game requires a code—might preserve the second-hand gaming market, though I'd be surprised if Square Enix didn't slip a sneaky set of numbers in there to drive up sales.

On the downside, it also makes them inherently perishable. I don't think Square Enix is going anywhere for a while, but over the course of decades? Sure, anything can happen. And if it does, and Square can't provide a download for the rest of the game, then the disk becomes inherently useless. Counter to an ever-evolving future, at the very least.

The brands are at it again but this time I'm inclined to let it slide, because it's so nonsensical (which is a nice way of saying dumb) that I can't help but be charmed. Ikea, the Swedish furniture-and-stuff giant, has released a mod for Skyrim called Kallax Storageborn: A new companion who is also a shelf, who is also voiced by Matt Berry.

If you think that sounds weird, it gets weirder, because this mod doesn't just add a companion, it includes an entirely new questline built around the character. Becoming encumbered in the game, as will inevitably happen eventually, will give you the opportunity to visit an abandoned dwemer emporium, where you'll embark upon a quest to "unravel the origins of a mysterious master."

During this quest, you'll assemble Kallax Storageborn, a companion "with unfathomable storage capacity," who can be summoned with a newly-added Thu'um—Skyrim's famous voice of power—even when he's not your active companion. Your ultimate goal: Tidy up the clutter plaguing the realm of Nords and Dragonborn.

The mod also adds new loot including the Meatball Helmet, which sadly I don't have an image of, and the mighty Allenblade, which I do:

The Kallax, for the record, is an actual series of Ikea shelves, while Matt Berry once did a Movember voiceover for Hockey Night in Canada.

He's done a few other things you may have heard of, too.

The whole thing is obviously a marketing stunt, but it's worthy of a few minutes of my attention for two reasons. One, as I already said, it's dumb enough to be charming; and two, some real effort went into it.

The quest is an actual quest—we're not talking Witcher 3 levels of complexity here, but it's a real thing to do—and Matt Berry speaks more than you might expect. Why Ikea would invest this much effort into such a silly mod? This I cannot say, except—well, here I am, writing about Ikea in a positive light. Oh no, I've fallen into their trap!

Hey, at least I'm not crying over an old lamp.

If all this isn't enough to convince you to reinstall Skyrim again, you can get a look at the entire Kallax Storageborn experience from YouTuber ESO (via Kotaku), who recently streamed a playthrough of the whole thing. And if it is, you can snag the Kallax Storageborn mod, free, from Bethesda's Creations page.

A new hotfix for The Blood of Dawnwalker rolled out today, and you'll be happy to know that this one improves the game's overall stability, fixes several progression blockers, fixes an issue with controllers that was causing frame rate drops, gets rid of the famous red pipe—more on that later—and keeps dead folks from talking so much.

That last point, about the stiffs who won't shut up, doesn't figure as one of the update's highlights, which developer Rebel Wolves breaks down thusly:

• Improved the game's stability
• Fixed several issues that blocked quest progression
• Fixed an issue that blocked players from saving the game
• Connecting controllers with the outdated GameInput software should no longer cause FPS drops
• Torches can no longer grow uncontrollably

Still, it's interesting. Conversational corpses are almost always upsetting, and not just because the dead shouldn't speak, although that's certainly top of the list. But also, they never have anything good to say. If you find yourself conversing with the remains of the recently departed, you can be just about 100% sure that it's not going to be a happy conversation about how well everything is going. Quite the opposite, in fact.

There is one example of chatty corpses that weren't entirely bad, to go off on a bit of a tangent: Atomic Heart is full of them, a bizarre side effect of the game's alt-history Soviet technology, and most of the talking dead are reasonably cool about the situation. But that's also more of a 'fading echoes' thing, rather than a body that just will not die, and I imagine that would have a way of leading to more philosophical exchanges.

In any event, from the patch notes, for a more prosaic take on the topic:

• Dead NPCs can no longer start dialogues.

And then, yes, there's the pipe: "We are no longer using that one red pipe asset we weren’t supposed to use." That's a reference to a discovery last week of a placeholder asset in the game, bright red and clearly marked "Do not use this asset!" which somebody nonetheless used.

Kind of a shame that it's gone, really: I like to think of rogue placeholders as a kind of digital monument that everyone hears about, visits, and then ever-after can tell people, yeah, I saw that thing. I was there. Alas, I have not yet played Blood of Dawnwalker and so I will not get to see it, except on Reddit, which doesn't really count.

The Blood of Dawnwalker hotfix 1.0.4 is live now on Steam—the full patch notes are below.

• Stability
  • Multiple improvements to the game's stability.
• Gameplay
  • Fixed an issue that blocked the tutorial progress if Voracious Bite was used a bit too fast.
  • Fixed issues that caused Coen to get stuck inside certain houses with no way of getting out.
  • Crake can now talk to Coen even during his training sequence.
  • Dead NPCs can no longer start dialogues.
  • Fixed an issue that disabled blocking under certain circumstances.
  • Fixed an issue that blocked players from saving the game.
• Quests
  • Ocha will no longer attack Coen when attacked by guards.
  • Fixed an issue that caused Coen to get stuck in a cave in the "Deep Down" quest.
  • Fixed an issue that caused Murohn to not spawn under certain circumstances.
  • Fixed an issue that caused one of the possible solutions for the "Hive and Seek" quest to end prematurely.
  • Progressing the "On the Run" quest no longer causes infinite loading.
  • "A Lone Wolf's Hunt" now appropriately shows the difficulty level.
  • Fixed an issue that caused a soft-lock after following Sara.
  • Investigating the rag is now optional in the "Smoke and Ashes" quest.
  • Fixed an issue that caused a blocker in "The Heart Wants What It Wants" quest.
• Art
  • Coen and Iorgu will now drink from their cups even on low graphical settings.
  • We are no longer using that one red pipe asset we weren’t supposed to use.
• Audio
  • Fixed issues that caused music to stop playing in the prologue.
• Miscellaneous
  • Connecting controllers with the outdated GameInput software should no longer cause FPS drops.
  • Torches can no longer grow uncontrollably.
  • Fixed an issue that prevented Quality preset mods from applying properly.
• Plugin
  • Fixed issues with VSync when using FSR Frame Generation.

With more than one million copies sold just a few days after its release, a "very positive" rating on Steam, and an enviable 83% review score from PC Gamer, vampiric horror RPG The Blood of Dawnwalker is a hit. And less than one week after its debut, developer Rebel Wolves is already planning what comes next.

Unsurprisingly, "what comes next" is more Dawnwalker: Jakub Szamałek, narrative director at developer Rebel Wolves, wrote on LinkedIn (via Dexerto) that "we're not resting on our laurels," but are already thinking about where to take the game from here.

"I'm looking for a lead writer to help me and the narrative team craft the next chapter in the Dawnwalker saga," Szamałek wrote. "We're looking for someone who, to put it bluntly, writes EXCEPTIONALLY well, has a track record of excellence and experience in team management."

The job listing provides more detail about what's involved and it's heavy stuff, with responsibilities ranging from writing in-game documents and dialog to collaborating with the narrative director—that's Szamałek—and other team leads, and managing the entire writers team. You'll also need "a minimum of six years of experience as a writer/narrative designer in the video game industry with a track record of outstanding achievement."

That might sound like a lot for a studio that's only got one game under its belt, but remember that Rebel Wolves was founded by veterans of CD Projekt: Szamałek himself was principal writer on Cyberpunk 2077, Thronebreaker, and the standalone release of Gwent, and before that earned writing credits on The Witcher 3 and its expansions. In fact, numerous CD Projekt personnel took time last week to offer congratulations on the game's launch.

In Thousand Hells: The Underworld heists, I've sort of taken on the role of the dad in that one tweet about feeding cats to coyotes. But rather than serving up pets to jackals, I'm dutifully feeding bands of doomed adventurers into the psychological, corporeal, and spiritual wood chipper of the "tactical narrative" game's bespoke hellscapes.

Those hellscapes—from the primordial twilight taigas of the Midnight North, to the melting fever-dream dominion of the Hell of Nightmares—form a mesmerizing kaleidoscope of abyssal imagination. Made by the developer behind the phenomenal King of Dragon Pass and Six Ages games, its pedigree is obvious as each game guides my hand-picked party of hell raiders through encounters rich with the implied culture, tradition, and history of their respective afterlives.

I just wish I weren't spending quite as much time feeling like my efforts are futile.

A game of Thousand Hells, designed for quicker, more repeatable sessions than developer A Sharp's prior work, begins in the Eternal City, a metropolis where the thousand worlds conjoin, and from which daring (or foolish) heroes can embark for their thousand associated underworlds. After a quick character creation process, I'm given a task by a benefactor—reclaiming the spirits of two murdered princes, for example—that I'll need to embark into one of four hells to complete.

If I hope to have any chance of survival, however, I'll need a party, gathered through a team-building process in which I'm cobbling together an incomplete picture of my potential recruits' talents and traits. Those traits will serve as Thousand Hells' basic gameplay mechanic: As my party and I embark for more demonic climes, I'll be playing our traits as game tiles during the randomized set of turn-based trials we'll encounter.

The better those traits match the task at hand, the better my dice roll will be for surpassing a challenge. If my party finds itself being forced to navigate a storm-tossed chthonic undersea, I'll have better odds nominating our sailor or scout to direct us than our streetwise poet with a profound fear of water.

When I find myself with a well-rounded party, Thousand Hells feels like the unfolding of my own personal mythological epic, weaving together heroics and improvised cunning with a tapestry of otherworldly creatures and crises. My parties have hewed the head from a titanic eel on the banks of an ocean that has never known the light of day. I've bartered for my safety with a swarm of brain-bats by offering the pickled thinking organs of a renowned philosopher. I've looted the tomb of a tyrant-king after breaking the spell that kept his murdered slaves in ages of spectral servitude.

More often than I'd like, however, starting a new game will ultimately mean watching with growing frustration as my party is slowly ripped apart by a series of consecutive defeats when their randomized traits don't prove applicable to their particular quest's encounters.

The main issue is that, despite leaving the Eternal City with a party of four, I can only nominate one of my characters to do most of the work in any given encounter. They'll be able to randomly draw on one trait from each of their comrades, but it often means an unlucky initial shuffling of talents leave me with the sour-tasting suspicion that a run wouldn't have been doomed if just one of the skills that was wasted on my shaman was possessed by my cutpurse instead.

Even if I've picked a warrior well-suited for a duel with a bronze-skinned guardian demon, that doesn't mean the talents most crucial for my champion's victory will present themselves when I need them. He might be combat trained, but if I keep drawing tiles tied to his ugliness and religious devotion when all I need is his sword arm to swing, that demon will be free to dismember him without much trouble. And his injuries will only make his chances worse if there's something else that needs stabbing later in our quest.

Thousand Hells boasts some truly best-in-class procedural storytelling, but it's content to subject me to back-to-back miseries without recourse. Its hellscapes are worth the price of admission—but it's a price with a punishingly sharp edge.

Thousand Hells: The Underworld Heists is available on Steam now.

An amazing scene played out over the weekend at a Breaking Benjamin concert in Holmdel, NJ, as captured by Reddit user im_all_ears (embedded above).

Band frontman Benjamin Burnley spent over four minutes imploring the audience to download his Fallout 4 mod in an effort to stick it to another modder who Burnley says bullied him over the quality of his work.

"There was a modder in the community that was really mean to me and bullying me, saying, 'Oh, your mod is shit. You don't know what you're fucking doing,'" said Burnley. "So I'm doing this every fucking night, and blowing his fucking downloads out of the water."

That was a mere two minutes into the four-and-a-half minute rant. Someone behind the scenes at the venue even joined in, putting the mod's details up on screens.

"Even if you fuckin' don't play that game, go and download it. It's on Nexus Mods," said Burnley. "Tomorrow I better see all my motherfuckin' downloads going up."

One attendee shouted: "Play some music!" Others in the crowd were loving it. Burnley kept going, telling the audience to wait for his new update to drop before downloading the mod.

"When you post a mod, you're supposed to be able to grow and learn and make it better," Burnley said. "And right off the bat, this fucking asshole was shitting on my mod."

Sure enough, the mod, which is called 'True First Person,' was last updated on Sunday. Here's how Burnely describes the mod on its Nexus Mods page:

"Fallout 4's vanilla first person shows a pair of floating arms. This mod replaces that with a True First Person perspective where your player character's full body is rendered and visible in first person. Look down and you'll see your body, legs, clothing and equipped gear as part of the same character you see in third person. Your perspective also stays in first person during interactions that would normally force the camera out, such as workstations, power armor, etc."

The mod is tagged "AI assisted," so presumably an amount of vibe coding went into it. The comments are now full of fans reacting to the concert, so actual assessments of how well it works are hard to come by, but Burnley has posted a video of the mod in action.

"Brother I'm at your concert right now. You have my download," reads one post on the mod's page. Burnley, whose Nexus Mods username is "killemloud," thanked the poster that same night, after the show.

Breaking Benjamin was formed in 1999, and has a previous connection to gaming: the single "Blow Me Away," which it recorded for the Halo 2 soundtrack.

The reception to Final Fantasy 14: Dawntrail's story has been as much of a journey as the expansion itself. It was never going to be easy, being the first expansion to build a brand-new arc following a decade of excellent storytelling, and unfortunately it didn't quite land initially.

Criticisms around its core narrative have largely abated over the last few patches, though, as we near the next expansion Evercold in January. And with its final batch of quests now unleashed upon players I'm here to declare: this might be the greatest final MSQ patch we've ever received.

Spoilers ahead for Patch 7.56 of Dawntrail, if that wasn't already obvious.

Dawntrail's final quests serve as less of a light teaser for what's to come in Evercold, and instead feel like a straight-up prologue to the expansion. That's wildly different from what I've come to expect from these patch quests. Sure, we usually spend a few patches building up to what's next, dropping little hints and then using the final patch quests to introduce a new character or setting as a fun little hype-builder.

But this felt… different, somehow. Almost as if we were playing the first few quests of Evercold. The patch already goes ahead and drops us straight into the ice-clad Fourth—that's the reflection we'll be spending our time in during the expansion—and almost immediately into an encounter against foes we'll undoubtedly face in the future.

Our character introduction teaser comes in the form of Visna, an adorable young catgirl with her wits about her and a dab hand with a crossbow. Oh yeah, that's the other thing: this patch seems to be straight-up showing off the currently unrevealed physical ranged job. Creative Studio 3 still seems to be keeping its cards somewhat close to its chest with it, though. Visna doesn't have many animations, aside from one move where she cleaves clusters of enemies and calls out to her falcon.

But just being able to see it, without even knowing anything about it, is the exact sort of pre-expansion hype I'm a total sucker for. Coupled with Visna charismatically explaining what the Fourth's all about: Differently-branded folks confined to certain homes, all of which happen to be gigantic airships on account of the surface being completely frozen over for the last 500 years. Get too close to someone with a different brand? Well, according to Visna, there's a good chance one or both of you will die for it. It's a great opportunity to info dump in advance, already letting us know what we're in for.

The whole thing builds up to getting us ready to head to Evercold's first location, Naglfar, while cleverly confining us to a tiny, separate area that still gives us a glimpse of what sort of vibe we can anticipate. The real thing'll come with Evercold itself, naturally, but it felt like I was already able to dip a toe into the expansion even while restricted to a singular floating platform.

Everything ends right before we plan to set off to Naglfar, leaving Evercold in the perfect position to throw us straight into the action. Not that I mind a little new-expansion-preamble, but Creative Studio 3 slapping it in the previous expansion is a great way to get the ball rolling on the next one even quicker than it might usually be able to. It was all incredibly refreshing in a way I simply had not expected, and I could feel myself getting those new-expansion fuzzy feelings even with Evercold four entire months away.

I think it's an excellent direction for Dawntrail's final moments to take—especially in an expansion that has been largely disparaged on the narrative front—setting the stage in a way that feels a little bit different to expansions past. It's still difficult to tell what sort of expansion Evercold is going to be based on a relatively short batch of quests, but I'm incredibly excited to find out.

The Elder Scrolls 6 is hotly anticipated—and has been for a full eight years following its announcement at E3 2018 and complete silence on it ever since. Instead, Bethesda worked very hard at trying to push Starfield which, for a studio that was once the pinnacle of open world RPG makers, just wasn't quite up to snuff.

The setting was a little dull and boilerplate, the procedurally-generated planets didn't have much on offer, it looked a touch dated, and so on. It was left out to dry at The Game Awards, was thrashed by reviews on Steam, and it had the misfortune of coming out in the same year as Baldur's Gate 3, which is one of our highest-scoring games of all time.

According to Bethesda veteran Kurt Kuhlmann, most of the developers at the studio were surprised to be working on Starfield instead of The Elder Scrolls 6. And it's not as though Kuhlmann was some small fry who wasn't in the know: He joined the company in 1996, wrote the main questline of Oblivion, and was the co-lead designer on Skyrim before leaving the studio in 2023.

Speaking with Frvr, Kuhlmann says that "we all expected [The Elder Scrolls 6] to be directly after Fallout 4. Why wouldn't it be? That's what we did, and that was kind of the expectation. And then Fallout 76 came along."

Fallout 76 sidelined the studio for some time, as the project "wasn't originally supposed to involve our whole studio. But then, I mean, what we were supposed to be working on next—it wasn't ever that we were about to suddenly work on TES 6, even though that's what I think most people wanted."

He then describes Todd coming in with the Starfield-shaped steel chair: "Todd was like: 'No, we're doing Starfield. I got that approved. It's going to be a new IP. It's going to be this ambitious [game]. It's going to be the greatest space RPG ever made.'"

Kuhlmann, who it should be noted left due to a "tough conversation" wherein he was refused a lead role on TES6, theorises that Todd Howard "had maybe the opportunity and the ability to go to the people running ZeniMax and say, 'I want to not do TES 6'" after the successes of Fallout 4. "Which seems like a pretty hard sell, right? And it must have been."

Kuhlmann, understandably, "would've much rather have been making TES 6 instead of [Fallout] 76 and Starfield, personally. And I think that would probably be true for the majority of the studio. That's what most people wanted to do, you know?

"It wasn't like Starfield was this big internal like, 'Hey, we all want to make this space game, Todd.' It was very much, 'Guess what, team? We're making this space game.'"

This picture of Howard as an accidental force of nature in the studio does track with other accounts from former Bethesda employees, including character artist Dennis Mejillones, who said—while comparing him to George Lucas—that "a lot of people were afraid to say no to Todd, and I think that hurt him."

Atlus will probably remake Persona 1 and 2 one day, according to a new interview with series producer Kazuhisa Wada conducted by Rock Paper Shotgun.

"For me, I think a remaster or remake is some kind of cultural preservation," Wada said. "As a creator, it’s your duty to take the things you’ve done and make sure they’re not lost, and are still around in the modern day. From that same perspective, Persona 1 and 2 are something we’ll probably eventually do too.”

Persona Revelations was released on the original PlayStation in 1996. It's actually been lightly reissued before, in 2009 for the PlayStation Portable, and surprisingly, there's even a 1999 PC port that was never released in the west. While it focuses on a cast of school students, the social links system—arguably the series' best trick—wasn't introduced to the series until Persona 3. It's the Persona game that feels closest to the older Shin Megami Tensei games, since it has first-person blobber-style dungeon exploration, though overworld exploration is conducted via an isometric third-person perspective.

Persona 2: Innocent Sin released in 1999, also for the original PlayStation. It replaces first-person dungeon crawling with third-person exploration.

Both games are definitely worth saving from obscurity: I wouldn't necessarily advocate for full-scale remakes, but reissues with a bit of spit and polish would definitely be welcome, especially if, as Wada says, the motive is preservation.

But I'm once again puzzled why Atlus and Sega haven't exhumed some of the brilliant PS2-era Shin Megami Tensei games that remain locked to antiquated consoles. We do have a fairly flimsy port of Shin Megami Tensei 3: Nocturne (you need to use a mod to unlock its 30 fps lock) and, confusingly, standalone curio Raidou got a very thorough remake last year; Atlus went as far as revamping its combat, among upgrades.

But where is Digital Devil Saga and its sequel? For anyone who can't get enough of Atlus's Press Turn combat system—and I fancy there are a lot of us—these can't come soon enough. And then there's the huge, oxygen-stealing elephant in the room: Shin Megami Tensei 4 remains a Nintendo 3DS exclusive. SMT 3 and 5 are both available on PC—and are both great, especially the latter—but this fourth instalment remains in utmost obscurity.

The Persona series is undeniably great, but there's a surreal sci-fi severity to the Shin Megami Tensei games that I really, really love. And since those PS2 games will probably scrub up better, and faster, than the Persona games, I'm begging Atlus to address their reissues in this order, please:

• Shin Megami Tensei 4
• Digital Devil Saga 1 and 2 (perhaps together)
• Raidou Kuzunoha vs. King Abaddon

After that, feel free to do what you like, Atlus.

Final Fantasy 7's remake trilogy has, at the very least, given us a trio of pretty solid RPGs—I had a great time with the first, and I'm soon to buckle up and finally give Rebirth a go. But I can't help but wonder, quietly, whether or not Final Fantasy has fallen into the same 'fear of new IP trap' as other games.

That's not to say that the FF series isn't getting new games. Final Fantasy 16 came out in 2023 and snagged a solid 79 from us in our Final Fantasy 16 review. And yet, a small part of me wonders what new and exciting games we might've gotten if Square Enix had devoted the Remake team to making new final fantasies, rather than spending three entire big-budget titles and over half a decade rehashing a classic.

And yet, Square seems reluctant to release its grip over the FF7 cast. That's per a PAX West panel (thanks, GamesRadar+) wherein director Naoki Hamaguchi said (via translator): "We want to make this a work that creates new fans 20 or even 30 years from now," a game that can "move beyond being a classic of the past and shape it into an IP with an ever-evolving future."

And listen, I don't want to be a grumpy old git about this, but… that's just what Final Fantasy is in general, surely?

It does seem weirdly backwards that Square Enix has invented a franchise that allows for the best of both worlds—a recognisable, strong brand with recognisable mainstays and iconography that, nonetheless, allows the developer to make a new world with a new cast of characters with every entry.

In other words, Final Fantasy is… already meant to have an ever-evolving future. Will there be other ever-evolving futures within that ever-evolving future? Like a constantly ever-evolving matryoshka doll?

That's not to say Square Enix isn't going to stop trying or making new FF games, obviously. But after three full-length remakes following Cloud, I can't help but feel bone-tired at the idea that we'll be hearing more out of him in the immediate future. Let the blonde twink rest, for heaven's sake.

The early access RPG Entropy is a very different beast to its developers' previous work. Dread Delusion was a shockingly good homage to first person RPGs like King's Field or The Elder Scrolls, while this new game is distinctly JRPG-inflected, nailing a lot of the feel and intangibles of something like Final Fantasy 10 or Lost Odyssey.

But you can't just put it into the JRPG bin and call it a day. Entropy boasts a large party size for tactical battles, permadeath, locational damage, as well as an approach to reactivity and storytelling that feels more PC gaming than PS2 gaming. When I spoke to lead developer James Wragg recently, he told me that's very deliberate.

"In many ways, if Dread Delusion was my take on The Elder Scrolls, then this is my take on Fallout," Wragg said. "The original Fallout, Fallout 1, is one of my favorite games, and we're riffing on that quite a lot with Entropy."

Having played Entropy's demo and a bit of early access, I immediately got what he meant. Part of that inspiration is visible in the locational damage system, similar to OG Fallout's called shots (what would eventually become VATS in the 3D games).

You can incur a penalty to accuracy to target a specific limb or zone on an enemy, to the benefit of greater damage or inflicting a debuff. Wragg provided the examples of how it might work in more advanced battles: disarming a foe with an especially powerful weapon, or shredding the bulbous Resident Evil weakpoint of a mutated enemy.

Entropy's specific flavor of post-apocalypse also rhymes with Fallout 1—it's desolate and in your face in this similarly striking way, with what little levity there is feeling like a remnant of the pre-collapse world, such as the play in Entropy's opening scene. Another major inspiration for Wragg: Mordheim, a small-unit tactics spinoff of Warhammer first published by Games Workshop in 1999.

Old school

"What I love about tabletop is, it's just pen and paper," Wragg said. "You can house rule stuff as much as you want, so we've got a bunch of custom rules in our [Mordheim] campaign. It really encourages creativity because you make your little guys and you customize them based on how you load out your character.

"Something like Mordheim has so much character customization⁠—almost beyond most video games⁠—because it's tabletop. The developers never actually had to code in the graphics of swinging all these different weapons, and I think that freedom I found really inspiring."

Wragg noted that Entropy's low-fi graphics allow for a similar level of leeway: His team can implement a large number of unique weapons and statuses without each one requiring (or having to seamlessly mesh with other) labor-intensive assets and animations. "I think if we were working in more high fidelity, we would have had to rein in that ambition a bit" said Wragg.

This more tabletop-oriented style of RPG seems to be something of a full circle moment for the developer. He told me that, as part of his earliest hobby-level development on what would become Dread Delusion, he began seriously boning up on tabletop history and how it influences digital RPGs.

"I just found myself being like, why? Why do RPGs do these things?" Wragg told me. "If you're designing an RPG, you have to go back to the source on tabletop games because so many of the systems that exist within modern AAA RPGs, they originated with Dungeons & Dragons and all those other spin-off games and war games.

"It just comes from the core of wanting to understand how games tick. It just feels natural to go back to the roots of tabletop role playing games if you want to work on a role playing game, because they really haven't deviated all that much from them, even at this point."

Entropy is available now in early access on Steam, and it also has a substantial free demo. Elsewhere in our conversation, Wragg talked about how he and his team just love sidequests too much to make a game with a smaller wordcount like they originally planned.

Sometimes it's nice to just find something cool and fun and free on the internet, and the Cartographia Imperialis is just that: A 3D galaxy map of the Warhammer 40K Milky Way you can peruse in your browser.

It has the same simple, awe-inspiring majesty as Mass Effect's take on the concept, and you can explore it like an isometric videogame: Left click and drag to pan around, right click to rotate the camera, mouse wheel to zoom in and out. You can click on notable planets or regions to get little lore entries, or pull 'em up by name in the index to snap straight there on the map.

I'm not sure where creator Sami Gashi sourced the text for entries, pulling straight from official sources or paraphrasing in their own words, but I quite like the very in-universe prose. Take the entry for largely-unremarkable hive world Jouran, for example: "Its dossier is a reminder that strategic maps hide ordinary misery behind a clean point of light," the entry reads. "Jouran's value lies in quotas met, bodies counted, and local authorities willing to preserve output by any sanctioned means." That's good stuff.

Perhaps best of all, Cartographia Imperialis is completely free with no ads, and the map is shockingly lightweight for its graphical presentation and the current state of the internet. It loads super quick, and I haven't experienced any slowdown clicking around.

The only thing I'm missing is a nod to the Koronus Expanse of Rogue Trader fame, my personal gateway drug into the 40K universe. But that feels like a peevish, small-minded complaint given how cool and freely-given this thing is. Creator Gashi has a Ko-Fi page set up if you would like to support them⁠—they indicate an interest in creating interactive maps for other fictional worlds as well, and I'd love to see their take on other settings.

If you're looking for other, similarly impressive and open-hearted delights on the modern internet, I would point you away from the dark future of the 41st millennium and towards the links. Putt.day is low-key one of our favorite games of 2026 here at PC Gamer. It's a free, browser-based minigolf game that plays like proto-friendslop favorite, Golf With Your Friends, and it's updated with a new, community-sourced hole every day like minigolf Wordle.

On September 5, Rebel Wolves took to Twitter on the official Blood of Dawnwalker account to announce that the dark vampire RPG had already surpassed one million copies sold just three days after its September 2 launch. "Thank you for playing, sharing, supporting, and being part of the community," the developer wrote in its celebratory post.

I was in a Star Wars Zero Company-shaped hole during Dawnwalker's contemporaneous review period, but everyone on our team who played has been pretty pleased with this very Witcher-like RPG from ex-Witcher devs. Australian editor Shaun Prescott awarded it an 83% in his review, praising the storytelling and combat, but wishing that Rebel Wolves had gone harder on Dawnwalker's unique time mechanics.

"Blood of Dawnwalker is an effective piece of worldbuilding and storytelling then, but it doesn't make good on its promise as an innovative piece of RPG design," Shaun wrote. "Maybe Rebel Wolves worried that too many players would fall afoul of the passage of time and thus loosened its severity."

He was even more on the money than he could have realized when he wrote that: Some of the first mods for Dawnwalker do away with the time limit entirely. I appreciate the "have it your way" ethos mods can have, but I think a bit of friction can be a very good thing. I unilaterally declare PC Gamer to be a pro-time limits publication.

Zooming out, it's exciting to see both Dawnwalker and Zero Company get rave reviews and strong sales during this challenging time for the industry. Disney hasn't announced any numbers for Zero Company, but it's sitting at a beefy 15,562 reviews and "Very Positive" on Steam a week and a half after launch, a compelling indicator that it's doing well. The similarly multi-platform Blood of Dawnwalker, by comparison, is at 8,296 total reviews after having passed the million mark in total sales.

Of course, Zero Company's success has a tinge of uncertainty to it that Rebel Wolves has been spared: 80% of developer Bit Reactor's staff is reportedly on furlough, awaiting sales revenue and further investment to secure their jobs.