It's weird to feel affection for dreary bogs with names like Blood Moor, even if they do look like backdrops against which Kate Bush might do an interpretive dance at any moment. But Act 1 of Diablo 2, from the first time I left the Rogue Encampment to the moment I caught a caravan east, is carved into my bones.

Everywhere you go in Act 1 feels like somewhere you could have walked to from the first game. The fields, the graveyard, the haunted monastery, these places all inhabit the same idea space as Tristram. They look like locations from old movies like The Blood on Satan's Claw, or a Hammer horror with vampires in. For the duration of its first act, Diablo 2 was a direct sequel in a way the rest of the game wasn't.

You leave the Rogue Encampment, a conveniently compact hub compared to the more spread-out later towns, and either follow a rough path to various points of interest or immediately go off-piste into the wilds. You might find an optional dungeon, or a mysterious book on a pedestal that leads to a sidequest. Where the first Diablo was claustrophobic, a single dungeon beneath a village, Diablo 2 promised wide open spaces. Here is where that promise pays off.

The deserts of Act 2, bounded by rocks that can make the stairs to the next zone difficult to spot, and especially the jungle of Act 3, a tight maze full of dead ends, will make you miss this "wide corridor" linearity. Act 1 does open-world without time-wasting or boredom.

Corrupted rogues charge at you out of the rain, and when they die their howling spirits leave their bodies like they just opened the Ark of the Covenant. Goatmen bray and impish Fallen chant "Rakanishu!" while the soundtrack's ominous drums kick in. Shamans resurrect dead Fallen if you don't take them out fast, and nests spawn blood hawks if you don't deal with them quickly too. These tricks would be copy-pasted onto later enemies, but here they felt fresh, encouraging tactical play. And there were no bloody lightning beetles.

When you return to Tristram, via a portal unlocked at a circle of sinister standing stones, the village is in ruins. It burns down around you and Griswold the blacksmith, your old ally, is an undead monstrosity who begs for death. Even Wirt's just a leg (and a pile of gold). Destroying Tristram feels like the best way to pay homage to it. Diablo was always heavy metal horror where a happy ending would be out of place. Burning to the ground is the most Tristram thing that could happen to that perennially cursed place.

Act 1 ends with the Catacombs, a dungeon that feels more like the first game than later dungeons like the narrow Maggot Lair or the showy Arcane Sanctuary, with its teleporters and backtracking. The Catacombs, buried beneath a cathedral, full of rat men and gargoyles, are atmospheric and expansive, mysterious and spooky. (And altogether ooky.)

That's the vibe I want from Diablo. There should be lightning because I performed a ritual at a circle of ancient stones—not because I hit a beetle.

As World of Warcraft: Midnight gears up, Blizzard's released its player housing early for those who've pre-ordered the expansion—I won't wax poetic about the system (even though it really is quite good) instead, I wanna talk about player housing in general:

Why it's good, what it means, and how it relates to the broader ecosystem of MMORPGs as a genre. Because it really is crucial, even if it did take Blizzard 21 bloody years to get with the program.

MMOs are, in a lot of ways, about expression. In ye olden days of the internet, there was (and still is) a game called Second Life—this game is pretty much built on top of player-submitted stuff. Custom avatars, and, more to the point, UGC residencies that take place on a "grid".

Crucially, the thing has straight-up 3D modelling software in it, meaning players can not only look however they'd damn well please, but they can also create spaces for themselves, too. And while most MMORPGs today are focused more on hitting stuff and gearing up, there's a reason most of them incorporate player housing into their systems: It rules.

Most MMO players joke that the true endgame is fashion—and they'd be right, because you are liable to get so attached to your character, you'll simply want to spend hours dressing them up. In a way, MMOs are about ownership: Here is a big wide world, and here is a character that's yours to play with. Go play action figures with your friends.

Player housing, however, extends the power over your character (how they dress, what class they are, who you decide to talk to) and lets you reach tendrils out into the game world. Of course, in our digital hellscape, we can't even be said to own the games we've got on Steam, let alone have any physical, tangible control over these virtual bits of land—but the feeling of having a place in a world to call yours is deeply compelling.

What's even more compelling is what people do with them. I've been roleplaying for over a decade and a half, and over the spread of MMOs I've done that in, I've been to so many immersive places that nonetheless never saw an official developer's hand—bar the assets that were kitbashed together to make them.

I've been to pagodas floating in space and grimy criminal nightclubs, ice cream parlors and parks, casinos and airships, and too many fight clubs to count—I have seen someone grab all of The Elder Scrolls online's housing assets and, by jamming them hard enough into each other, recreated a nearly pitch-perfect facsimile of Howl's Moving Castle.

People get endlessly creative, and a robust housing system really provides the white lie that MMOs are trying to sell you: A functionally endless world full of places to explore. You could spend hundreds of hours just combing through Final Fantasy 14's neighbourhoods alone.

Home is the Heart

What cemented player housing as a crucial brick in the MMO ecosystem, however, was a stint in City of Heroes' (now-officially sanctioned) private server, Homecoming. I'd reinstalled the game mostly for nostalgia's sake, but I was also surprised to find a humble and relentlessly active roleplay community, still kicking: Galvanised by the doors swinging open to a game they thought was dead for years.

Helping this was the fact that City of Heroes also has a base editor—back in the day, it was far more limited in how it could be used, mostly weaponised for awkward guild-based PvP. But given the resources to do so, Homecoming's devs removed a whole bunch of limitations to both access and in-game cost.

The result was pretty absurd. Since you were able to break out of the bounds of the tiny square boxes the original base builder put you in, you could layer geometry on top of that and, well, basically just engage in level design. I knew people who spent hundreds of hours crafting sprawling cityscapes, parks, islands, and interdimensional restaurants.

All this in a game that had been "shut down" for over a decade! Point being, giving players absolute freedom in a specific box will draw in a specific kind of person: Someone utterly dedicated to creating rich spaces teeming with detail and beauty. Or they might just clip eight barrels into each other to make a dong, and you know what? Good. They're part of that beating heart, too.

My point is that housing in MMOs—even if it's taken a hell of a long time to arrive in one of the biggest ones—is as important as getting fat loot, dressing up your little guy, or pumping huge damage numbers. It's the easiest way to make a game feel not only lived in, but loved: Nobody's going to spend 30 minutes painstakingly clipping four wastebaskets into a crate just to make a stove (this is something I have actually done) if they don't care.

Who would win in a fight? Comics writers know this is what fans argue about, endlessly, and feed those arguments with crossovers and stories like Batman vs. Superman. Usually it's naff stuff where characters just biff each other for a bit and then abruptly form a getalong gang as if they weren't battering each others' faces in just five minutes ago.

The developers of Mortal Kombat obviously weren't going to do anything so weaksauce. In the Injustice games, Superman's gone full evil and started a tyrannical regime straight-up called The Regime, which Batman leads a resistance against. The inciting incident of the whole storyline kills off Lois Lane and the Joker, and it gets wilder from there. By the time of Injustice 2, Superman has been imprisoned for his crimes, Clock King's had his daft head blown up, Green Arrow's been killed and replaced by a version of himself from a dimension where his wife died instead, and Gorilla Grodd's taken over Gorilla City in a bloody coup. Take that, Zack Snyder.

All that stuff is only relevant in story mode, of course, and story modes aren't normally the reason people play fighting games—excepting Tekken's agreeably insane one, with people throwing their family members off cliffs or into volcanos, hurling motorbikes at helicopters, and fighting bears. Usually though, fighting games struggle to tell a coherent story because they've got so many characters to work with. But comic books have been dealing with that problem for decades, and Injustice 2 simply steals the format. In the DC Universe, everyone already has a reason to fight everyone.

Weirdly, the plot's a lot like Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League. Superman's a villain, Harley Quinn's a hero, and Brainiac's the final boss. Only in this version of events, Kevin Conroy's Batman is also on the side of the angels—well, if Harley and Catwoman count as angels—and you only have to defeat Brainiac once instead of over and over again until Warner Bros runs out of seasonal content to sell you.

The performances are much better than they need to be, thanks to facial animation that was well ahead of its time and voice acting by the likes of Jeffrey Combs from Re-Animator as Brainiac, Robert Englund from Nightmare on Elm Street as Scarecrow, Alan Tudyk from Firefly as Green Arrow, and Laura Bailey from Critical Role and basically 50% of all videogames as Supergirl.

Moments that could be ridiculous are embraced and handled straight, like Harley getting a double dose of fear toxin (one isn't enough because, she says, "I used to huff this stuff for kicks"), and hallucinating her greatest fear, which is the Joker coming back and convincing her to revert to the villainous sidekick she used to be. The same goes for Superman and Batman's final confrontation, where they reminisce about the old times ("I miss the people we used to be") before punching each other about the head and face for several minutes.

Where it gets properly over-the-top is in the fights, where suddenly characters can hurl each other into orbiting satellites or through the Earth's crust without anyone dying. The Flash has a super move where he runs so fast he travels back in time, dragging his opponent to distant epochs so he can throw them first at the sphinx then a tyrannosaurus rex, before returning to the moment before he left so he can throw them at themselves.

You go from that to fairly subdued scenes where Green Lantern regrets the fact he initially sided with The Regime and struggles with his anger issues. Then his rage manifests in the form of a Red Lantern whose sidekick is a cat that vomits blood, and also you're in Atlantis at the time. The dial swings between the sublime and the absolutely bugfuck as quickly as it does in superhero comic books, with as much cheerful disdain for tonal consistency as professional wrestling or French movies.

The one downside of Injustice 2 is that if you were depressed about Wonder Woman getting screwed out of a solo game after Warner Bros closed Monolith, unfortunately she doesn't get her due here, being reduced to Superman's second banana. But apart from her and Superman becoming fascists it's full of bang-on portrayals of its huge roster, including the first version of Harley Quinn to not annoy me.

Anyway, the answer to "who would win in a fight" is Swamp Thing.

Everything in Japan has a mascot. Towns, sports, corporations, train stations—even prisons have mascots themed around local delicacies. In Promise Mascot Agency, those mascots aren't just people dressed as a baby otter with a tortoise for a hat or whatever. Every big pink cat or walking block of tofu you see is a real living being who has to earn a living by opening shops and cultural events.

It's your job as an exiled yakuza with the same voice actor and off-the-charts unflappability as Kazuma Kiryu from the Like a Dragon games to manage those mascots, assigning them jobs, negotiating their bonuses, and bailing them out when things go wrong. It's like Kiryu got sick of that real estate management minigame and decided to try something less mundane.

That's just one slice of the strange cake that is Promise Mascot Agency. Equal emphasis is given to the time between jobs where you drive around a Japanese island in a boxy little kei truck.

I've heard Promise Mascot Agency called a "chore game" which doesn't really do it any favours, but pointing out that it's an open world collectathon probably doesn't help either. Ubisoft-style open worlds and the grindy JRPGs Promise Mascot Agency is geographically adjacent to have devalued the genre's currency. This take on the genre is different enough to make me enjoy it again, though.

It took me a while to realise the reason I was enjoying this particular open world more than the last few I played was the lack of combat. Being able to explore freely without having to worry about getting swooped by whatever annoying flying enemy a game's decided to fill itself with really does make things more fun.

The one frustration is that sometimes you're called out of the blue to help a mascot out of a job-related jam (like not being able to fit through a narrow doorway) by playing a card game. Said card game is a bit too simple to support the multiple screens of repeated hoo-ha you have to skip through to get to it each time.

Fortunately you don't have to engage with these the second they pop up and can put them off until you're ready, and even if you ignore them completely you'll just lose some of that job's rewards. They're an annoying interruption but not a fatal one, and by the late game I was drowning in consumable items that minimise the chance of events popping up and could basically forget about them.

There's an entire visual novel's worth of engaging story in Promise Mascot Agency, but the main thing I've taken away from 25 hours with it is that I'd really enjoy tootling around the Japanese countryside in a fuel-efficient little truck.

There are lots of things to dislike about Oblivion. The weird-faced NPCs. The boring main questline. The speechcraft minigame. Those things stop being issues—or at least recede way into the background—when you go to The Shivering Isles.

There's a portal in Niben Bay that lets you escape the trad fantasy land of Cyrodiil. Bypass the guard telling you that only crazy people enter (and they come out even crazier), and on the far side you'll find a humble waiting room with a ticking metronome and a flat-voiced man waiting at a table. Does his collar make his bald head look like it's emerging from a flower? Yes, but everything else about him and this room is profoundly ordinary. Then you sit down, and in the tones of an officious immigration officer he tells you you're about to enter a place that's holy to Sheogorath, the Prince of Madness.

Then the walls dissolve into light and butterflies, which swarm past to reveal a landscape of giant mushrooms under clouds like dancing fireflies.

The Shivering Isles is split in two. Mania is a bright wonderland full of iridescent bug monsters whose blood will get you high. Dementia is a faded swamp full of glum people who would probably be better off drinking medicinal bug-juice. Prince Sheogorath is just as bipolar as his realm, his goofy ramblings usually ending with a grim threat. It's not a land to be taken seriously.

Which helps a lot. It's difficult to make a character in Oblivion who doesn't look like they've just been dug out of the ground, and Bethesda ran with that in creating the gurning stretch-faced goobers of The Shivering Isles. Their twisted smiles and wide-eyed leers take the cheek sliders to sinister extremes.

Sheogorath is rare in having two sides to his personality, because almost every other NPC is so focused on a single trait that to call them two-dimensional would be an insult to paper. Jayred Ice-Veins won't shut up about bones. Duchess Syl is paranoid about assassins and spies. Amiable Fanriene is afraid of walls falling on him while he sleeps.

They're all extreme stereotypes with absurd vocal tics, and Bethesda's in-house voice actors clearly have a great time with them. A cast who struggled to portray the ordinary folk of Oblivion turn out to be better-suited to the cartoon exaggeration of The Shivering Isles, where everyone talks like the "Where is My Fish?" scene from Monty Python's Meaning of Life.

Which is why it's difficult to be upset by the portrayal of mental illness. There's a blacksmith who self-harms, which you can tell because her name is Cutter and every line of dialogue she has references cutting. Drug addicts and suicide risks are presented with as much sensitivity as the guy who is obsessed with one fork in particular. They're as subtle as Muppets and as difficult to take seriously. You may as well ding Miss Piggy for being an insensitive portrayal of narcissism.

Sidequests are the best thing about Oblivion, and The Shivering Isles is all sidequest. In the ruins of Vitharn you find ghosts fighting an endless siege, repeating the battle that led to their deaths. Work your way inside the fortress and you'll meet spirits who explain how their failures led to Vitharn's fall and damn them to this repetition. To free them, you have to break the cycle. Find arrows for the archer on the wall, find a power source for the wizard, find the doll the warrior is convinced he's married to—even here the characters are ridiculous—and eventually they'll change their fate and earn their freedom.

That's hidden in a corner of Dementia you probably find just by exploring, which is an act The Shivering Isles richly rewards. Work your way onto the roofs of Crucible, the Dementia half of the city of New Sheoth, and you'll find stashes of trinkets hidden away as well as a fight club who meet at night to bash hell out of each other. You may also stumble across Split, a town where everyone has a double—a wizard did it, they explain—and each wants you to murder the other.

If you missed the bizarro fantasy of Morrowind, it and its giant mushrooms have been hiding in Oblivion the entire time.

People will tell you the strangest and best parts of Bethesda RPGs are the sidequests, and sometimes that's true. (It certainly was in Oblivion.) But one of the most Wild Wasteland moments in Fallout 3 is part of the main storyline, sitting right there on the critical path.

Your quest in Fallout 3 is to find your dad, Liam Neeson. It's a better hook for an open world game than the search for your son in Fallout 4, because everyone knows Liam Neeson can take care of himself. Bouncing across the Capital Wasteland, you're free to take your time—fight fire ants, help an inexplicably Canadian lady research her book—safe in the knowledge you can return to Dad Quest later on.

You finally track the deadbeat down to Vault 112, where you expect some kind of dungeon crawl, maybe a fight with some mutants or remnant Vault dwellers. You find something else entirely.

Vault 112's inhabitants have spent the last 200 years in a simulation, bodies suspended while their minds experience a series of pleasant virtual realities. Your dad went in to talk to the scientist who built it, Stanislaus Braun, and the only way to get him out is to follow. As the headset lowers over your face, the familiar loading screen message "PLEASE STAND BY" appears, to be replaced by the sedate black-and-white street called Tranquility Lane.

In this white picket fence American Dream, Fallout 3 becomes an episode of The Twilight Zone. While most of the residents are ignorant of their true nature, playing out their good neighbour roles in a place where there was no war and there is no wasteland, one is different. A little girl named Betty, watering flowers with her dog in the middle of this circular street, is aware of the real world. Her voice slips, becoming that of the elderly scientist Braun, and things get extremely Village of the Damned.

Braun's in charge of the simulation, a virtual god, and it's gone to his head. He's begun making the dream into a nightmare, tormenting the inhabitants for kicks then resetting reality, over and over, and will only hand over your dear old dad if you take part in his twisted game. You're a child too in the simulation, which makes it even more messed up when Braun's game escalates. The first task is making a boy cry; by the end you're committing atrocities.

Fallout is at its best when it's offering multiple solutions to quests, letting you write your personality across its design. The first two games had three solutions for almost every problem—violent, diplomatic, or sneaky—but Fallout 3 often reduces that to two—good karma and bad karma. In Tranquility Lane, there are still good and bad karma options, but the bad karma ones branch like a network of arteries.

When Braun tells you to murder Mabel, it's suddenly a Hitman level in miniature, her house overflowing with deathtraps. You can sabotage a chandelier to fall on her, or go full Looney Tunes with a roller skate at the top of the stairs. You can talk to the neighbours to learn she loves to bake pies, then rig her gas oven to explode. Or you can hack her house's security to lock the doors and turn her Mr. Handy robot hostile, then evade the thing while it flamethrowers and saws her to death.

To top that, for a finale Braun tells you to become "the Pint-Sized Slasher." You find an evil clown mask and a knife, then kill every remaining adult in Tranquility Lane. 

Fallout is a black comedy from the moment you see US soldiers gunning down Canadians in the street during the first game's intro, but that dark sense of humor was lost in the sequel—replaced by sex jokes and pop culture references. Tranquility Lane brings it back. I can't help but laugh when I'm the Pint-Sized Slasher. The jaunty music, the bright surroundings, the clown mask, all absurdly contrasted with the simulated citizens who come apart at the joints just like the raiders you shoot for the other 50 hours you spend in Fallout 3.

"Wasn't it fun?" Braun asks afterwards. Sure it was. I was killing people in a videogame, that's what I signed up for. There's no way to spare them. The good karma choice is to activate a failsafe that kills the residents in real life, ending their torment while leaving Braun alone in this hell of his own making. Which is the darkest option yet. There's no way out of Tranquility Lane without blood on your hands.

Some horror games are set in spooky castles, abandoned mental asylums, derelict spaceships, or circuses with an unwise hiring policy regarding murderclowns. Others are set in less outlandish locations, like suburban streets, shopping malls, hospitals, schools, or ordinary homes. I find the second kind have the most impact, haunting my thoughts long after they're over like a picture I shouldn't have looked at on the internet.

The Silent Hill games are especially good at this, and have made me feel even more ambivalent about hospitals than I already did. Hospitals are stressful places to begin with, but Silent Hill 2 also visits places as comfortably mundane as apartment buildings, a nightclub, a historical society, and even a bowling alley, all of which it imbues with terror. A brief scene in a cemetery turns out to be a rare moment of safety. Though eventually Silent Hill 2 descends into a dark underground prison, its horrifying finale is saved for somewhere else: a holiday resort on a lake.

The scariest things in Silent Hill 2, whether geometry-faced butchers or mindblowing revelations, are accentuated by the ordinariness of their backdrops. We anticipate creepy stuff going on in gothic mansions, that's the whole point of them, but the worst thing you expect to encounter in a bowling alley is a 7–10 split. Silent Hill takes innocuous places and peels their skin back until the walls bleed with rust and the floors flake away to reveal fragile chainlink over bottomless pits. 

What the chuck?

I used to live in an apartment building with an evacuation map on the wall just like the maps in Silent Hill and it freaked me out every time I saw it, but there's a risk when horror games choose innocuous settings. If players aren't personally familiar with them, they won't have that element of recognition. 

I wasn't frightened by the animatronic mascots in Five Nights At Freddy's not because I'm so very brave, but because I didn't grow up in a country where fast food restaurants have mechanical hosts. There's no Chuck E Cheese in Australia—they tried in the 1980s under the name Charlie's Cheese because "chuck" means vomit here, but even with the name changed it didn't catch on. Freddy's is as exotic as any Transylvanian castle to me, and doesn't inspire lasting dread.

More often than not it's an effective technique, though. The most frightening places in Vampire: The Masquerade – Bloodlines and Call of Cthulhu: Dark Corners of the Earth are regular old hotels. Both lull you into a false sense of security. In Dark Corners you can lock the doors of your hotel room before bed, but nothing will stop the locals from kicking their way in to kill you in your sleep, forcing you into a heart-hammering rooftop escape that culminates in the most frightening thing videogames can throw at you: precise first-person jumping.

Meanwhile, Bloodlines makes you a vampire with superpowers, so you expect to have nothing to fear from an empty hotel, even if it's haunted. But when you get there the well-paced scares—popping lightbulbs, a distant child's laughter, figures running past you down corridors but disappearing when you round the corner—combine with the mechanical worry of your blood meter slowly emptying because there's nobody around to feed on to create a singular moment of traditional horror. In a game that's otherwise about confronting the personal horror of your own monstrous nature, it's quite the achievement. 

Alienation station

That's not to say more obvious locations don't have their place in horror games. The Shalebridge Cradle in Thief: Deadly Shadows is a perfect example: a mental asylum that is also a haunted orphanage, one cliché draped on another like a sheet over a corpse. It still manages to be memorable through a combination of claustrophobia, excellent enemy design—those twitching, cage-headed lunatics—and a command of light and darkness that benefits it both as a stealth game and an engine designed to freeze your blood solid.

Yet even in more typical horror settings, a dose of normality helps. The grisly spaceship Ishimura from Dead Space is frightening at first, but after a few hours there I learnt to expect necromorphs bursting from its blood-soaked vents. Though Sevastopol Station from Alien: Isolation was also floating helplessly in space and an alien was just as likely to slither out of the ceiling in a hall full of graffiti, it never stopped being scary. Its rooms were rather less full of corpses and rust, often antiseptically well-lit, with ordinary desks, old computers, and executive toys. It felt like an office for a paper supply company, all square edges and coffee cups, accentuating the sleek, gangling silhouette of the alien and its elemental wrongness.

They say familiarity breeds contempt, but in horror contempt is useful. Familiar locations trick us into thinking we know what to expect, and there's power in yanking those expectations out from under our feet to reveal the thin chains separating us from the abyss.

That's right, I love Mass Effect 3's endings. Come at me, internet.

Actually, don't. Because I don't love Mass Effect 3's final endings. They were fine. Reasonable. Good, even. The standard complaint against those endings is that they don't reflect your decisions through the trilogy up to that point. That's not entirely true—the ending I picked was perfectly in sync with Shepard's actions and decisions over three games. The 'pick-from-three-options' Deus Ex-a-like structure was pretty cheap, but it ultimately resolved a seemingly unresolvable plot thread.

That's beside the point, though. Mass Effect 3 is a game about endings. Every main mission is an ending. Most of the side quests are an ending. From the start, the story is concluding and stripping away everything that had been built over the past two games. Many are brilliant, the kinds of memorable farewells that have genuine emotional resonance. That's quite an achievement for a big-budget RPG series about fun space adventures.

It should go without saying that I'm going to be spoiling Mass Effect 3. And the Citadel DLC, too.

Note: This article was originally published in 2015. It has been updated for the release of Mass Effect Legendary Edition, as we look back at each game in the trilogy. You can read our new review of Mass Effect 1 here.

Brilliant Ending #1: Mordin

Granted, ME3 leans a little heavily on sacrificial resolutions. Mordin, Legion and, ultimately, Shepard her/himself can all potentially offer themselves up for the greater good. Mordin Solus is my favourite of these, precisely because he isn't a capital-H hero. He's a scientist, whose greatest achievement in the eyes of his people becomes his greatest source of regret. His guilt over his involvement in the Krogan genophage is apparent in Mass Effect 2, as is his belief that it was necessary.

By ME3, it becomes clear that he's determined to fix what he's come to see as a mistake. Assuming your Shepard isn't a colossal dick, he gets to do that. He carries himself well as he steps into the elevator leading to the room that will simultaneously release the cure and kill him in a big explosion. But there's a hint of sadness there—a small crack in his resolve. Unlike many of Shepard's companions, Mordin isn't a hardened badass. And yet he's sacrificing himself anyway, because it's his mistake to fix. As he says to Shepard, "My project. My work. My cure. My responsibility."

His final muttered bars of Gilbert & Sullivan might be a step too far into fan service, but so what? He's earned it.

Brilliant Ending #2: Thane

There's no grand sacrifice to Thane's ending. He was dying. Then he dies. There is, however, a quiet, sad triumph. Thane's story revolves around his son, Kolyat, and his desire to rescue him from a life of crime. By the time of his death, he's succeeded. Kolyat stands with him, as does Shepard—who, in my game, he was romancing. He's surrounded by his family, and—save from the fact that he won't get to share in Shepard's final battle—content with what he's achieved.

This isn't a fate experienced by many major game characters. The Mordin end? Sure. The Shepard end? Sure. Dying in a hospital, surrounded by loved ones? Not usually, no. Mass Effect is a game series about big, galaxy-shifting decisions and impossible odds. And yet, Bioware still takes time to remind us to cherish the things that matter to us as individuals; both the people we love, and the goals we're driven to achieve.

Brilliant Ending #3: Citadel

As should be evident above, Mass Effect 3 is a pretty sombre game. The Citadel DLC pack couldn't be more different. It's brilliant; a campy celebration of the series' successes and quirks. Tonally, it has no place in the main campaign. It's better experienced after the fact, as an almost non-canon epilogue filled with jokes and fan service.

There are too many great moments to mention, and it feels pointless to pick out individual bits for praise. It's the most consistently funny Bioware has ever been, helped largely by the fact that it's deconstructing and poking fun at deeply ingrained tropes and systems.

It also functions as an ending proper, too. The final conversation—after the threat has been defeated and the party has petered out—is between Shepard and his/her closest companion. "We've had a good ride," that companion will inevitably say. "The best," Shepard states, summing up three games and hundreds of hours in two simple words.

I'm a huge fan of Jennifer Hale's performance throughout the series, but even I'll admit that Mark Meer offers the best delivery of this line. It's emotional, almost unbearably so, and a reminder that it was more than just the fans who were saying a final goodbye to a character they'd grown to love.

America’s Pacific Northwest is one of the most beautiful places on the planet, but there’s also something hauntingly mysterious about those dark woods and forested valleys. This landscape inspired David Lynch and Mark Frost when they created supernatural soap opera Twin Peaks, and ultimately Finnish horror game Alan Wake, which turns ten years old today.

Remedy’s love of Lynch has been apparent since the Address Unknown theme park in Max Payne 2, and its latest game, Control, has similar echoes. But Alan Wake is its most overt homage to his work. Like Twin Peaks, the game uses a place of stunning natural beauty to tell a grim, twisted horror story, and it’s this contrast that makes Bright Falls such an evocative setting.

You arrive by ferry, in a disarmingly peaceful introduction to the small town and its picturesque surroundings. The fir trees and foggy mountain peaks are realistic enough, but Remedy’s take on the geography is exaggerated. It’s almost a caricature of the region: what you imagine it looks like, rather than the reality. The valleys are a little too deep, the mountains a little too steep.

Alan Wake began life as an open world game, and there are still traces of it. The tallest mountain in the region can be seen from most places, which helps you keep track of where Wake’s journey is taking him. Brief driving sections let you travel long distances, giving you a limited taste of what the game could’ve been like had Remedy stuck to its original vision. Access the game’s built-in free camera, pull back, and you’ll see that the whole world is always there, but that you’re confined to a relatively small corner of it.

Wake’s travels take him to the Oh Deer Diner, a homage to Twin Peaks’ Double R, and Cauldron Lake, which is based on Oregon’s dramatic Crater Lake. Other landmarks include the historic Bright Falls Coal Mine, the Sparkling River Estates Trailer Park (most likely inspired by Twin Peaks’ equally rundown Fat Trout Trailer Park), and the Bright Falls Dam. It’s a quintessential slice of rural Americana, albeit one haunted by shadowy, murderous ghosts.

Remedy is based in Finland, but the team spent a lot of time in the Pacific Northwest, taking reference photos and getting a feel for the geography and climate. “We drove about 2,000 miles around it for a period of almost two weeks,” says Saku Lehtinen, art director. “We went to places like Astoria, a very typical Pacific Northwestern coastal town. We went to North Bend, where Twin Peaks was filmed, which is just outside of Seattle. The story in Alan Wake has fantastic elements, but it has to be rooted in reality.”

“It’s a naturally exciting setting,” says writer Mikko Rautalahti. “It’s also something you don’t see in games a lot. We wanted wide open spaces instead of corridors and underground complexes. The nature there is beautiful and rich, but it’s also perfect for a horror game. Take those deep, dark woods, add something weird and horrible lurking there, and you’re all set.”

Remedy even went as far as using NASA star maps to make sure Bright Falls’s night sky was accurate. Night is a big part of Alan Wake, and you spend much of the game traipsing through foggy, moonlit forests.

Remedy’s proprietary Alan Wake Engine is, even now, stunning to look at. The way the pale moonlight shines through the swirling mist is really atmospheric. The weather effects are superb, with trees swaying in the wind and forks of jagged lightning lighting up the sky. Creating their own bespoke tech delayed the game for several years, but the results are still spectacular.

Returning to Alan Wake today, the combat is a little repetitive and it often feels stiflingly linear. But the quality of its setting makes it worth returning to. The Pacific Northwest is a place we rarely get to visit in videogames, and Remedy captured its essence perfectly here.

"I want to have fuck with you."

This is just one of the many embarrassing lines that came out of my mouth after failing a dialogue option in Disco Elysium. My character was barely standing, trying to come to his senses during the worst hangover in history. Pieces of his mind were now loose, arguing with each other and mocking their host. In another corner of this unshackled subconscious lied the Thought Cabinet, recording feelings and mementos that can evolve over time. In my experience, it also served as a reminder of past mistakes.

Both my character’s thoughts (which are skills in disguise) and RNG are to blame for my verbal atrocities, despite the fact that my character was already a mess. Everything from dialogue to mental and physical interactions in Disco Elysium have randomized outcomes dictated by dice throws. Leveling up the fragments of your mind can provide leverage and some actions can be repeated several times, but others happen in an instant, and you will likely face a risky situation unprepared more often than not. 

It’s in the mundane tasks that Disco Elysium's dice rolls thrives the most. Before heading out of his room, I attempted to grab a tie stuck in the ceiling fan and was injured so many times that I had to stop trying to avoid actually dying. The frustration was tangible, and I quickly realized that these skill checks played a big part of the experience. Worse scenarios than the rogue tie would follow, like the one involving the woman in the corridor.

I’m a shy person, not the kind to deliver pickup lines minutes after meeting someone. But there was something about Disco Elysium’s main character, struggling to get a grasp of reality while also being tangled around misery in its most livid form, that pushed me towards flirting when I saw the dialogue option. Of course, the outcome would have been completely different if I hadn't failed the odds. As the inner voice of Suggestion warned, it was already too late. "The words have already left your mouth…"

She laughed in my face after I mumbled history's worst pick-up line and asked me to repeat it. I chose the dialogue option with the correct sentence, but she then asked to hear my first mistake one more time. The embarrassment was worse than losing a health point or getting locked out of a quest. Ten minutes in, and I was already a complete buffoon.

And then she said something that stuck with me after I apologized: "Don't be, it was funny. And, anyway, who gives a shit? Who gives a shit about any of it?"

Anyone who has ever played an RPG would likely expect repercussions for their actions as the story progresses, especially after such a vulgar introduction. A character who now dislikes me? A potential story path shut off? But that clearly wasn't Disco Elysium's style, and I didn’t consider reloading a previous checkpoint. This was already part of my character, for better or worse, so I stuck with it.

Hours later I was trying to do some real detective work alongside Lieutenant Kim Kitsuragi, my sidekick in Disco Elysium, who happens to have almost the exact opposite persona of my intellectual Frankenstein's monster. After too much time procrastinating, Kim and I went to investigate the crime scene we were here for: a body hanging from a tree.

I tried to inspect the body three times. The first failure was on me, since the odds were below 30% and I took the risk anyway. I puked. My partner then suggested using ammonia to deal with the horrid stench, but it only made things worse. I still couldn't get close to the decaying body. The dire need to compose myself evolved into a case for my Thought Cabinet, fittingly called "Volumetric Shit Processor," in case you were still wondering if this was an ordinary RPG.

I had to roam around for half an hour and try again with my mind fresh. My character felt sick once more on his third attempt. It was clear that I needed to level up my Endurance, so I took on side cases until I had gained enough experience.

At last, the odds were on my side at 73%. I sat back in my chair and relaxed, waiting for the new dialogue to roll over and put all these setbacks behind me. Another roll of the dice—and another failure.

"Do it without me. I just can’t keep it down," I had to say.

"No, this is a two-man assignment, because it needs two officers to complete. I need your help," said Kim, exhausted from the whole situation. He then looked my character in the eye and added: "You need to keep your shit together."

Failing the odds in Disco Elysium is the most refreshing change of RPG design I've experienced in years. Instead of relying on a karma system to dictate whether or not I’m doing something wrong, mistakes are sporadic and, frankly, expected. They're not dead-ends. In both of these cases early in the game, failure at the hands of RNG ended up taking me down more interesting story paths. Even when I know the odds are on my side, there’s still a chance of being surprised by the outcome, consequences and absurdity lingering in my mind long after I stop playing. 

These moments present challenges to overcome that are unique to each playthrough. Not having control over the most mundane actions is exactly what shapes the character. There’s never a simple solution, and while failing often is a given, it makes victories feel much more meaningful. Besides the successful skill check, a flash of green across my screen, it feels like my character has learned from past mistakes, growing in the process.

I still think about my bold move with the woman in the corridor, and I worry about messing up around every obstacle that I stumble upon. But mistakes are bound to happen no matter what, even if it's uncontrollable RNG that makes me throw up three times in a row on the same day. I’m sorry, Kim. Let’s give it another try tomorrow.

I'm no longer a cowboy in Red Dead Online. I don't ride around with a gun in my hand these days because now I carry a metal detector. At all times. Walking through towns, riding through the wilderness—I even carry it when I enter the saloon to play a bit of poker. And the moment after the metal detector has led me to a buried treasure and I replace it with my shovel to do some digging, I pull it out again immediately. You never know! I might get another hit. And I often do.

The metal detector in RDO (part of the collector pursuit) is a bit silly, a sort of steampunk lantern with a dome at the top that blinks and a little circle of alchemical sparks that glow at the bottom when you're near a buried treasure. Despite the fact that I've got two pistols strapped to my hips, a gaudy belt buckle, metal buttons on my vest, spurs on my boots, and lord knows how many bullet fragments inside my pudgy body, the only thing that sets this magical metal detector off is a buried coin, a forgotten arrowhead, or a box of hidden jewelry.

Is it logical? Nope. But I don't care. I love using detectors in games. Any kind of detector! Anything that blinks or beeps or flashes when I'm near some hidden stash, and does these things faster when I'm closer to whatever it is I'm trying to find, is instantly my favorite tool.

I was never a big fan of the car segments in Half-Life 2. The scout car's handling was awful, it was ugly, and you could never drive for more than a few seconds without having to get out and deal with antlions or Combine jerks or to poke around some crummy, ruined house looking for spare ammo. 

But in Half-Life 2, Episode 2, they replaced the scout car with a muscle car, which had a throaty roar, an extra seat so Alyx could ride with you, and most importantly, it had a little dashboard-mounted radar screen that would pick up the location of hidden rebel supply caches in the world.

Suddenly stopping every couple minutes was fun because there was a beep and a dot on a screen pointing to something. That's all I needed to suddenly enjoy driving around in Half-Life 2—a good reason to stop driving around in Half-Life 2. Now, hunting around those crummy houses was enjoyable, somehow, thanks to my detector. Dying Light's car-based expansion, The Following, also let you drive around looking for geocached loot stashes. Cars are better when they're really just proximity detectors on wheels.

And there's no better detectors than the ones in the Stalker series. They helped you navigate the deadly world by detecting anomalies and artifacts, beginning with the basic echo detector, which would beep more rapidly as you got closer to rudimentary artifacts. The bear detector (it didn't detect actual bears, sadly) was an upgrade that would point you more precisely in the direction of an artifact using a glowing green ring around the edge of the circular screen. The svarog detector was the most powerful of them, pinpointing both anomalies and artifacts on an easy-to-read radar screen.

But if I'm being honest, I love the basic echo detector best. There's just something about an item that beeps more urgently when you're getting close to whatever it is you're looking for. It makes it exciting, like playing hide and seek.

Maybe my love for beeping detectors stems from the motion tracker in the 1986 film Aliens (you get to use one in Alien Isolation, too), with the difference being the thing you were detecting was trying to find you and not vice-versa. Whatever the reason, whenever a game hides something on a map and gives me an item that beeps when I'm close to it, I'm happy to ignore pretty much everything else and just walk slowly around, listening to beeps with my head down, until I find it.

In the summer of 1999 I bought a copy of SiN, a first-person shooter by Ritual Entertainment that featured a preposterous hero named John Blade and some brilliantly dynamic, interactive environments. It was released a month before Half-Life, and thus was completely overshadowed, but Ritual did a lot of stuff Valve did in its game—and better. I loved it, at least until I reached a level set in some kind of underwater facility. I remember a lot of swimming, some frustrating enemies, and a labyrinth of boring corridors. 

And, being a lot more impatient in my teenage years, I decided to bypass the entire level by activating noclip mode. Noclip, as PC gamers of a certain age will know, is a console command that lets you fly around the level, passing through walls and ceilings. The term was popularised by id Software, its first-person shooters often featured a noclip mode—as well as many games built on the Quake engine including Half-Life and, yes, SiN. 

Teenage me was delighted, because I was able to breeze through that stupid underwater level. There was an undeniable feeling of guilt, a lurking sense that I was cheating the game—and myself. But over the years, in those glorious early days of PC gaming, I used noclip regularly in a lot of different games to get past sections I couldn’t be bothered with or that were too hard. I figured if the developer put it in there, surely I should be allowed to use it?

Bug report

I don’t use noclip to cheat these days, but it’s still, often, a very useful console command. In buggy games where progress can be halted by, say, a door or set-piece not triggering, it’s invaluable. More than once I’ve used the tcl (short for ‘toggle collision’) command in Bethesda RPGs such as Fallout and Skyrim to bypass broken sections of a level. An inelegant solution, and I really shouldn’t have to in the first place, but at least we have the option, unlike console players who can end up stuck. 

But my favourite use for noclip is peeking behind the Wizard of Oz’s curtain. I spend a lot of time exploring videogame environments, taking screenshots, making videos, and generally admiring the art. It’s a part of game design that has always fascinated me. Which is why, when a game has a noclip mode, I always take the opportunity to escape the bounds of the level and get an idea of how it was built. Even if a game doesn’t have a noclip command, it’s usually possible to hack one in using a tool such as Cheat Engine.

One of the first times I did this was in the original BioShock. Its equivalent of noclip is using the ghost and fly commands, and doing so gives you a fascinating glimpse at how Irrational built the stricken city of Rapture. During the opening bathysphere descent I flew out of the pod, soaring above the entire sequence, getting a bird’s eye view of it. And it was surprisingly beautiful, even when viewed from angles a player was never meant to see.

And it was possible to see how the developers had pieced it together. That whale that swims by waits patiently off-screen until the bathysphere passes it, like an actor waiting for their cue to go on stage. The amazing Rapture skyline, with its blinking neon signs, is mostly just flat images. You’d never know in the bathysphere, of course. But when you get up close, it’s like one of those towns in an old western where the buildings are all thin plywood facades. This does ruin the magic somewhat, but even knowing the truth, that sequence still gives me goose bumps every time I play it. 

Recently I used a camera hack to access a noclip mode in Hitman 2. I already knew IO Interactive had some of the best environment designers in the business, but being able to move around those levels freely made me appreciate their talent even more. I don’t know how developers feel about people poking around like this, and I’m sure some of them are mortified by people seeing assets that were only ever meant to be seen from afar up close. In any game with a large, distant group of people—the crowd in a racing game, perhaps—noclip lets you see the ugly truth. Weird, polygonal mutants that were only ever designed to give the suggestion of a person from far away, who you half expect to say “Kill me!” in a mournful voice. But for me it’s a way to appreciate their work on a deeper level. And if I ever replay SiN, I’ll be using noclip to skip that damn underwater level again. 

The emergence of the card game Gwent as a key part of The Witcher 3’s success immediately made me think of Final Fantasy VIII’s own TCG, Triple Triad. As with Gwent, you can power through the main quest without getting into the card collecting or AI-battling at all, but if you get involved in the scene, it only enhances your adventure. 

Final Fantasy VIII is an RPG set in a kind of academy for young soldiers, starring moody orphan Squall, his rival Seifer and a bunch of other kids. As that premise suggests, it’s very anime in style, and transforms from a relatively simple tale of war between two nations to a sprawling sci-fi dumpster fire about sorceresses from the future. 

I can’t defend it, and by the end it’s tricky to still enjoy it. FFVIII makes up for it in the smaller stories and character moments, as well as typically excellent worldbuilding from the team at Squaresoft. 

No matter where you find yourself, the people there play Triple Triad. FFVIII has an alternate talk button that challenges NPCs in each environment to a game. The scene then cuts away to a 9x9 grid, where ludicrously catchy, jaunty gambling music kicks in. 

Each player picks five cards from their deck. Each card has four numbers on it from 1 to 10, pointing up, down, left and right. For example, one of the game’s better cards, Ifrit, has 9 (up), 6 (right), 2 (down) and 8 (left). The goal is to flip as many of the player’s cards as possible until the grid is filled up—placing Ifrit below a card with a number 5 pointing down means the card will flip in my favour, because 9 beats 5. The score is then 6-4 to me. If my opponent has a card with a value of 3 or more pointing upwards, they can place that below Ifrit and flip my card in return, putting the score back to 5-5. If I end the game with more cards flipped than my opponent, I win and I get to take one or more of their cards. 

It’s simple to get to grips with, but the arrangement of numbers on the better cards means you can get pretty tactical. If it’s my turn first, I’ll always place Ifrit in the bottom left corner, because it’s unlikely the AI will have any cards that can flip an 8 or 9 from there. The ideal hand you want to build has a card you can play in any corner of the grid and dominate. 

That point takes a long time to reach. Initially, you’re given a pile of rubbish cards. Gradually, you start challenging other students and building up a deck. Almost every NPC in the world will play Triple Triad with you, which is cool, and that includes major story characters. I like the idea that this card game is the one thing everyone in a war-torn, varied world has in common. 

Certain NPCs carry certain cards, and challenging better players becomes one of Triple Triad’s larger goals. One small lad who runs around the school carries a ‘Mog’ card, one of the first decent rare cards you can win. I like the idea of Squall outsmarting a small child at this daft card game then taking his most treasured card away. FFVIII would be improved exponentially if you could see the kid’s crushed expression, and Squall offering a condescending “them’s the rules, son.” Of course, if you take on this kid and end up losing your Ifrit card, like I did on my first time playing through the game, the salty tears will be entirely your own. 

Later, the game makes it easier on you by handing over a few more powerful cards gratis—the demonic Diablos, for example, is one of the rare cards with a ‘10’ value, represented on the card as an ‘A’. This means it can’t be flipped at all. From here, you can start challenging the secret CC Group at Balamb Garden, your home base—and in a nice twist, the greatest Triple Triad player in the game is later revealed to be a member of your party. Triple Triad develops into a more complex and high-powered aside as better cards are filtered in by new opponents. 

As are new rules. ‘Elemental’ means that cards with a fire, ice, or earth symbol have their values increased if they’re placed on a matching tile on the grid, and ‘one’ means you can only win or lose one card at the end of the round, no matter the difference in score. Every region of the map has its own ruleset, and when you travel somewhere else, that ruleset comes with you for your next match—and those rules may even become a permanent fixture in that region. Unfortunately, one rule—random, which picks your cards for each game, so you surrender tactical control of your deck – is so atrociously unfair it almost breaks the game. But even then, it’s possible to abolish rules in each area, too. 

Triple Triad is pretty much my perfect minigame—it’s simple to play and collecting cards feels as satisfying as it would playing a real-life trading card game, were I able to get away with that as a grown-ass man.

If you love Triple Triad, you might want to check out the fan-made version that's giving the minigame a new lease of life.

When you enter a new region of Okami’s mythical vision of ancient Japan, the landscape is shrouded in a choking, otherworldly fog and patches of strange purple blight ravage the fields and forests. Where there were once trees, plants and wildlife, you find only death, decay, and roaming demons. This is the handiwork of the dreaded eight-headed serpent Orochi, whose creeping curse has seeped into the earth and poisoned it: a curse that you, the sun god Amaterasu, have arrived to lift. 

Playing Okami, you feel like the hero of some ancient fable passed down from generation to generation. The legend of the white wolf who vanquished a demon and brought peace and prosperity to a cursed world. Amaterasu, inhabiting the body of the aforementioned wolf, uses an artefact called the Celestial Brush to drive back the curse. With this she can control the forces of nature using techniques taught to her by fellow deities, such as making the sun suddenly rise or bringing dead trees back to life. 

What makes these powers extra magical is how you get to wield the Celestial Brush yourself, painting symbols with ink to trigger their various effects. Sumi-e, or ink wash painting, is a traditional form of Japanese art, which was often used to tell the kinds of stories you’re the star of in Okami. This is a wonderfully clever way of reinforcing the idea of being a part of, and creating, a mythology. And it’s also just really fun, painting a circle and watching the sun fill the sky with radiant light, knocking a cackling demon on its arse with a gust of heavenly wind, or blowing holes in things by conjuring up magical cherry bombs.

But the most satisfying use of the Celestial Brush has to be restoring cursed zones. Find a patch of sickly, purple-tinged grass, paint some ink over it, and watch it explode with vibrant green foliage. Do enough of these and great swathes of land will be restored, revealing bamboo forests, sparkling ponds and grateful wildlife. You can even feed the creatures you free from the curse and little love hearts will pop out of their heads when they see you. It’s wholesome, and I find it impossible to leave a region behind without brushing away every trace of Orochi’s plague. 

Swirl a circle around a dead, blackened tree and you’ll see cherry blossom burst from it. Dig up a withered clover and you can make it sparkling and green again – a cute reference to Clover, the studio that developed the original, non-HD Okami, and which sadly closed its doors in 2007. As Amaterasu runs, she leaves a trail of blooming, sprouting plants in her wake, as if the very ground she walks on is blessed by her presence. And, finally, if you restore one of the towering guardian trees, the entire region recovers from the curse and is suddenly filled with life and colour.

Change for good

The longer you play Okami, and the more regions you rid of the curse, the more satisfying it is to explore the world. There’s some backtracking in the game, and sprinting through areas you’ve rejuvenated is rewarding. You feel like you’re making a difference and leaving a trail of positivity behind you as you progress through the game. The people you meet, although they think you’re just a dumb, fluffy wolf and are unaware of your godly powers, actually mention that the world has changed for the better and their lives have improved. Okami understands that when you impact a game world, the folk who live there should notice. 

This restoration system is so inherently gratifying, I’m wondering why more games haven’t copied or riffed on it. A strange example of one that did was EA and Pandemic’s 2009 open world WW2 game, The Saboteur. Set in Paris, the city starts off grey and lifeless as the Nazis occupy it, but as you drive them away, colour and life comes back to the streets. But Okami’s version is still the best, and the 30 hours I spent restoring nature to Japan were a constant delight. It’s the closest thing we have to Zelda on PC: a big, beautiful, vibrant adventure set in a fascinating world, with a compelling story and rich characters. And I’m glad the HD version was finally released on PC, letting us experience all this joy in 4K. 

It’s no secret that Sam Lake is a Twin Peaks fan. The influence of Mark Frost and David Lynch’s cult series is felt in every game he writes, from the Pacific Northwestern folk horror of Alan Wake to Max Payne 2’s Address Unknown. This fictional TV series concerns a man being haunted by strange spirits including a backwards-talking pink flamingo. “Mirrors are more fun than television,” the bird says in a distorted, otherworldly voice. “She has dyed her hair red.” 

Address Unknown is the inspiration for A Linear Sequence of Scares, a brief but memorable level from the first act of Max Payne 2. Max visits contract killer Mona Sax, who’s hiding out in an apartment above an abandoned funhouse based on the show. Max comments that the place was shut down after the series was cancelled in the ’90s. But as he makes his way through it, the place is fully operational, complete with corny jump scares and cardboard recreations of scenes from the show. 

The show itself is a wonderfully creepy Lynch send-up, and can be watched on television sets scattered throughout the game. It’s never played straight, however. Remedy sometimes takes its stories a little too seriously, but Max Payne 2 is self-aware: particularly in the way the events on the TV shows Max catches snippets of reflect his own story. “When entertainment turns to a surreal reflection of your life, you’re a lucky man if you can laugh at the joke,” Max monologues as he enters the funhouse. “Luck and I weren’t on speaking terms. Or maybe the place was just too lame to be funny.”

The funhouse represents the city of Noir York, where Address Unknown takes place. The streets are made from plywood and cardboard, with parts folding away to reveal trippy tunnels swirling with psychedelic patterns, representing the show’s hero slipping into madness. “A funhouse is a linear sequence of scares,” Max says. “Take it or leave it, it’s the only choice given.” A sly nod, perhaps, to the fact that Max Payne is, for all its clever setpieces and narrative quirks, still a totally linear action game. “It makes you think about free will,” he continues. “Have our choices been made for us?” 

Later, Max escapes into the inner workings of the funhouse, where the animatronic characters who populate it are stored. Remedy was obviously proud of its advanced physics system, and one of the rooms here is full of props to knock over and shove around, including a ball placed near a tempting pyramid of paint cans. And it’s this area that leads Max to Mona’s hideout, where he finds her in the shower singing Late Goodbye, a song by Finnish band Poets of the Fall that is heard throughout the game.

Weirded out

While I love Max Payne 3, it couldn’t be more different from Remedy’s entries in the series. Rockstar’s game is a macho revenge story served straight-up, but the games written by Sam Lake feature elements of the surreal, of mythology and the occult. This isn’t always successful, of course, but the Address Unknown funhouse is the best expression of his knack for the weird and provocative, making Max Payne 2 more than just another action game.

A Linear Sequence of Scares is one of the most fondly remembered levels in Max Payne 2—which is odd considering you don’t fire a single shot in it. But maybe that’s why. It’s a rare moment of peace among all the cinematic, slow-motion bloodshed, giving you a chance to explore, rather than fight against the world. It’s also just really weird, even for a Remedy game, with a surreal, inscrutable atmosphere that’s undoubtedly inspired by David Lynch, but doesn’t feel like a lazy pastiche of his work. 

Quantum Break, by contrast, has the odd moment of humour, but otherwise it’s too straight-faced. I admire its ambition to tell mature stories, but you can still do that with a bit of dark comedy thrown into the mix. I honestly can’t remember a standout level from Quantum Break, but I’ll never forget my descent into the twisted depths of the Address Unknown funhouse.

I’m on the highway between Phoenix and Santa Fe, with 18 tonnes of furniture hitched to the back of my truck. This is not an exciting journey. In Holbrook I miss a turning—not ideal when a double trailer full of end tables makes reversing nigh impossible. I consider a manoeuvre, but my GPS updates with a new route. Sorted. 

I’m deep into Gallup before I notice that I’m driving 20mph over the speed limit, but there are no patrol cars around so it isn’t a problem. I’m running out of fuel as I near Albuquerque. I open the map and reroute the GPS to the nearest petrol station. Problem solved. On the radio, blue-collar men sing about the ways in which, metaphorically speaking, their lives resemble that of dogs. This is not a story of close calls or heroics. 

You could argue that American Truck Simulator is a boring game. You wouldn’t be wrong, but you would be missing the point. It is rarely eventful, at least outside of the unforced errors caused by a corner made at too high speed, a car clipped during a sloppy overtake or a trailer jackknifed as you turn too late at a tight intersection. But the tedium of long, uninterrupted stretches of road becomes almost entrancing—a distinct, soothing atmosphere that marks ATS as one of the most relaxing games around.

Crucially, ATS’s pace isn’t in service of a wider goal. Turn-based strategies, for instance, often feel slow and stately—the kind of games to be played over a Sunday afternoon with a pipe, slippers and a novelty stout. But the glacial rhythm of play is counterbalanced by stakes and peril. At various points throughout a campaign you’re required to think your way out of impending disaster. Even leisurely story-led adventures, like Firewatch and Gone Home, while tranquil in their moment-to-moment interactions, are pushing you forwards into escalating drama. 

American Truck Simulator asks nothing but that a shipment of cheese makes it to Winnemucca. You’re given a route, but your mind is free to wander. You can revel in the landscapes, in the in-game radio, or the improbability of a world in which ancient, crushed zooplankton is poured into giant machines designed to haul dairy over a large distance. 

You can have peril if you want it, but I find it ruins the experience. Euro Truck Simulator 2 became less enjoyable the moment I took on employees. Suddenly, I was handed the pressures of a small business owner, studying the performance of my inexperienced hires, and worrying about getting office supplies to Dortmund in time to make a loan repayment. When I started ATS, I decided it was all about me—no business, no pressure, just the evocative vistas of rural America. 

There are currently four states in American Truck Simulator and they all beautifully convey the sheer size of the country. As in Euro Truck Simulator 2, the landmass is truncated, but it doesn’t matter. We’re conditioned by open world games to shift our perception of scale, often through time manipulation. American Truck Simulator’s day-night cycle feels longer than most—long enough for an overnight drive to feel like a serious undertaking. You get an inherent understanding of how far you’ve travelled when you hitch a trailer in the evening and arrive as the sun is rising.

I prefer driving at night because it enhances the atmosphere—turning something familiar and workmanlike into something lonely and romantic. Daytime deliveries are a job. I sit in traffi c, surrounded by NPCs, waiting to get to somewhere. At night, all you see are the passing lights of sporadic cars—isolated islands of activity in a vast, barren nothingness. A small town takes on added signifi cance when its lights pierce the dark. 

American Truck Simulator is remarkable because it offers just the right amount of interaction to keep you present but not overwhelmed. Though it may have been designed to fulfi l the needs of an audience obsessed with realism, it doubles as meditative self-care for people who need to quiet the growing noise of life in 2018. There are no stresses on the road to Fresno. Just 20 tonnes of accessories, a rumbling engine, and a country music singer explaining why he’s back in the doghouse, oh yeah.

When FIFA 17’s story mode was announced, the response was mostly mockery. Will there be Renegade and Paragon options for post-match interviews? (Yes). Will it end with a 'suicide match' consisting of all the characters you've met so far? (Sadly, no). Yet when I actually gave it a try it ended up being one of the most unusual and innovative stories I’ve ever played.

Let’s set the tone: the game begins with you, Alex Hunter, as a ten-year-old boy playing football in the park. After winning or losing the match, Alex goes back to his tiny, pokey terraced house and distracts himself playing keepie ups while his parents argue downstairs. This is not the kind of scene I’ve ever encountered in a videogame before. It’s more akin to Eastenders than Mass Effect.

There’s a reason for this: the story is set across a full season of Premier League football and Alex can sign for any team in the division. Because of this, there’s no way FIFA can tell a traditional underdog sports story, after all I might be playing for an awful team and lose a lot. Instead, they’re forced to make a story about human drama. Mostly about Alex’s relationship with his best friend Gareth. They both sign for the same team (whichever one you choose), but Gareth is initially more successful, and the fame and media adulation slowly go to his head, leading him to demand a transfer (and also subtweet Alex on the in-game Twitter).

Gareth isn't the only NPC injected into a real football roster, there’s also two veterans, Gallo and Bernard, who mentor you in whatever team you sign up for. Then there's Danny, a fellow youngster playing for whichever lower league team Alex gets loaned out to. When you first encounter him at your tryout session he's a swaggering prick who is convinced he's headed for the big time. He pops up again once Alex gets loaned out, but not making it to the top level has humbled Danny, and he slowly comes to replace the distant Gareth as Alex’s new closest friend. He's still self aggrandising, but now it feels like a joke you're in on, rather than a one-dimensional cocksure swagger. It's not easy to create a likeable character with these traits, and yet somehow Danny became a personal favourite of mine.

At other times the cracks in the real-world/fiction artifice begin to show. Since none of FIFA's recreations of real-life football managers are voiced, you only ever talk to their assistant, while a silent Arsene Wenger looks on approvingly in the background. At a certain point in the plot your team will make a big money transfer for a player in your position, which can result in the bizarre spectacle of James Rodriguez moving from Real Madrid over to Middlesbrough.

There’s also little nuggets of procedural narrative lurking around. When I was near the top of the table, players suddenly started talking about a title challenge. Picking a team that had qualified for the Champions League got me a talk from the Assistant Manager about how different European football is. If I’d done poorly, would that story have instead pivoted to a desperate relegation battle?

Season Finale

I was lucky, my season ended in the most perfect possible way, with Alex playing in the final of the FA Cup against Gareth. This finale is semi-planned, Gareth’s team will always make it through to the final, and Alex doesn't play in the first few rounds, ensuring his team can progress. Yet there was still the very real possibility I could’ve lost the whole thing, ruining the fairytale.

Next year’s FIFA is confirmed to carry on Alex's story, and I can only hope they continue this weird experiment. Perhaps they could lean even more on the fictional side, I would honestly be happy if Alex played for a fictional team staffed entirely by NPCs. Yet regardless of which direction they go in, it's worth going back to FIFA 17 and sampling Alex's first story. Yes, for the first time ever, an out-of-date FIFA game is actually worth buying.

This was written shortly before the release of FIFA 18, and originally published in PC Gamer 310—hence the conclusion of this piece. Find out what Tom thought of the new Journey mode in his review. 

When Cole arrives at Haven to warn you about the Red Templars marching your way, he yells, "I can’t come in unless you open!"

He's talking to the door. And he talks to his shoelaces, and Sera's bow, and the face cards during the game of Wicked Grace you play with your companions. Because in the Fade—the realm of spirits and demons that parallels Thedas in the Dragon Age series—these inanimate objects would speak. Or, at least, they would tell him things. 

Spirits are reflections of a feeling, not born into a physical form—and in the Fade, Cole's true name is Compassion. It's why Cole can hear the tree from which Sera's bow was carved, and the lovers who kissed beneath its boughs. Because in the Fade, they're connected, and the divisions he experiences as a human—physical, social, and emotional—are incomprehensible to him. 

Cole is one of the potential companions for your Inquisitor in Dragon Age: Inquisition. While Dragon Age 2 gave us an example of a spirit's existence with Justice and his possession of the mage Anders, Cole is a fully independent spirit. His origin, more fully described in the tie-in novel Dragon Age: Asunder, explains that he isn't possessing a human body, but has instead managed to manifest a physical form. While it's slyly hinted that this isn’t the first time it’s happened in Thedas, it's strange enough to make Cole a unique companion in the Inquisition.

While his thought patterns and turns of phrase are at once poetic and inelegant ("Cole, the wooden duck I found on my bed... was that you?"/ "No, I am not a wooden duck"), from breathlessly describing another companion's emotions in alliterative whispers to struggling to comprehend a knock-knock joke, his fumbles through the physical world are both endearing and relatable.

He doesn't understand that Orlesians are wearing masks because, internally, the masks are their own faces. He didn't think Cullen’s armor could come off because Cullen, traumatised and under enormous pressure, never drops his emotional guard. And while Cassandra corrects Cole when he calls her grandmother's locket “Anthony's", Cole understands that the small portrait of her dead brother has more emotional resonance to her than a grandmother she never knew. Cole becomes a medium for characters' emotions, helping them through their difficulties.

But while he understands other peoples' struggles, he has trouble finding and articulating his own. His personal quest comes down to a decision to determine his future as a spirit and a human; Cole confronts the man who murdered him (it's complicated), and can either understand, forgive, and forget the hurt that caused him, or accept his own emotions. In other words, he can return to being a spirit, shedding his attachments, memories, and pain and living as Compassion, or he can choose to become more human by accepting his own emotions.

It’s a pivotal moment, not just to Cole's storyline, but to understanding how struggle and pain make us real. While he lives for others, Cole's compassion does not have to come at the expense of his own emotional wellbeing. He can continue being a reflection of others' feelings, or learn how to grow himself. It's through this choice that we can see how a part of our humanity is a vulnerability to emotional and physical pain, and how asking for help is just as important as giving it freely. 

As with all Dragon Age companions, Cole exists as an entry point for us to understand some critical aspect of the world of Thedas. While the Fade, spirits, and demons are explored in the series, Cole is the first spirit we can befriend. His manner might bewilder those around him—us included—but his story arc sheds light on both the Fade's inner workings as well as the ways we, as humans, process our emotions. But ultimately he makes us rethink things that are taken for granted. Speech, memory, compassion, even making someone else happy—Cole approaches each with a level of clarity that we might find confusing at first. But as with any companion in Dragon Age, we're richer for learning from his differences.

I've been getting into GTA Online's Overtime Shootout, which launched this week. It's nearly identical to Super Monkey Ball's excellent minigame Monkey Target, where you take it in turns to launch off of a ramp, hover towards a numbered target using a parachute-equipped car and try to get the highest score possible for your team with a careful landing. It's a more chilled version of GTA Online's existing competitive Overtime Rumble, and playing it has offered some of my most immediately satisfying moments of GTA yet.

It also only requires about one minute of your attention out of every ten, if you're in a full server where everyone has to take a turn. And I love that. Right now, a lot of people are playing Overtime Shootout for the reason I am: it's paying out double experience and money. 

I'm usually switched off by grinding in games, but the commitment-to-payout ratio here is decent, plus Overtime Shootout is great fun when you're actually playing. Even if you just have one shot a game, you can earn $20,000 or $10,000 at the end, regardless of the result. It's the easiest way to earn good money in GTA, at least until the end of today.

By only demanding such a small fraction of my time, GTA Online is solving another problem: a lot of the TV I enjoy doesn't require my full attention either. Some shows do—The Handmaid's Tale and The Leftovers, for example—but Netflix's Iron Fist? Well, it's a bit pants. I want to watch it before Marvel's The Defenders starts next week so I know what's going on, but I don't want to exclusively watch it. 

Overtime Shootout and Iron Fist are therefore a curious match made in heaven: one minute of parachuting in a car is followed by nine minutes of a deeply boring man fighting ninjas in a warehouse. Repeat, until bedtime. Perfect.

Unsurprisingly, I'm far from alone in enjoying TV on my second screen, and I expect more of you do this now than ever. PC Gamer's Phil Savage only survived reviewing boring MMOs like Firefall by rewatching The West Wing on his second monitor. I asked people on Twitter if they enjoyed games while watching something on a second monitor, and they explained that they do this with various games: WoW, Hearthstone, Elite Dangerous, Stardew Valley, Rimworld, Darkest Dungeon (because they'd heard all the dialogue before) and some strategy games. Anything that's repetitive by necessity seems to be a good match. 

Second screen entertainment is one of the modern ways in which we enjoy PC gaming. When games command your full attention with detailed worlds, systems and story, that's great, but it's also nice to get the most out of your precious spare time by multitasking. 

Certainly, it's all the Netflix adventures of Danny Rand deserve. 

Skyrim, located in the icy northern reaches of Tamriel, is an unforgiving land of freezing blizzards, ruthless bandits, and fire-breathing dragons. But nestled among all this danger, warmed by fires crackling in stone hearths, are the taverns. These cosy, calming sanctuaries offer weary adventurers respite from the cold and chaos, if only for a few minutes. The hardy, resourceful people who call Skyrim home have mastered the art of comfort and hospitality, as anyone surviving in a place as cold and brutal as this would have to. 

And as you step into one of their inns, stone walls lit by the orange glow of the fire, tables stacked with cold mead and hunks of red meat, you feel like you can rest easy. Like you’ve come home. No mudcrabs or skeevers are going to scutter out of the bushes and attack you here. No fur-clad bandits are going to try and shake you down for gold with their bows and arrows. And, best of all, those pesky ancient dragons are too big to fit through the door. 

The perpetual howl and chill of the wind is replaced by the soothing music of a strumming bard, the murmur of the other patrons and the clinking of glasses. It couldn’t be more different from the white, wild outside, and it’s the perfect place for a tired, hungry adventurer to grab a cold drink, a warm meal and a soft bed for the night. You could always just sleep on some grotty old bedroll outside, of course, but the Dragonborn deserves better.

Entering a tavern in Skyrim perfectly recreates the feeling of escaping into a homely country pub after a long walk on a cold, windy day. That instant sense of tranquility and peace. You know you’ll have to go back out there eventually, but for now it’s just you, the fire and a pint of ale. Your troubles seem like they’re miles away, although the concerns of the average person in today’s world certainly can’t compare to the Dragonborn’s quest to save Tamriel from an ancient, evil dragon which wants to devour the world. 

You’re spoiled for choice when it comes to taverns in Skyrim, and their atmospheres reflects their locations. In the city of Riften, a hangout for criminals and other ne’er-do-wells, you’ll find The Ragged Flagon and the Bee and Barb, which are the kind of establishments where you’d get a dagger in the ribs for so much as looking at someone’s pint. While the Imperial capital of Solitude boasts The Winking Skeever, a luxurious, spacious watering hole with a fine selection of quality booze and grub. And as well as these city inns, there are plenty of smaller ones dotted around the countryside, including the Four Shields Tavern.

As well as offering food, drink, and beds, taverns in Skyrim are also great places to meet reliable mercenaries. You’ll often see these warriors sitting in the corner, like Strider in Lord of the Rings, waiting for an adventurer with enough coin to hire them. In The Drunken Huntsman in Whiterun, for example, you’ll find Jenassa, a Dunmer ranger who’s handy with a bow and arrow and doesn’t seem to mind if the Dragonborn slaughters innocent people. But you’ll need 800 gold pieces to retain her dubious services.

Taverns are also rife with gossip, which can lead to some interesting quests. Talk to the bartender and you’ll hear clues about various goings on in the world, including the Imperial boy Aventus Aretino attempting to summon the Dark Brotherhood: a rumour that ultimately sees you joining its ranks. Or you might hear about a shrine to the Daedric Prince Azura, which leads to you obtaining a powerful Daedric artefact. It’s a good thing the proprietors of Skyrim’s inns are so unashamedly nosy. 

The tavern is an important part of any fantasy world, whether it’s the Prancing Pony from Lord of the Rings or Game of Thrones’ Inn at the Crossroads, and Skyrim is no different. Wherever you drink and whatever your poison, these are fine places to spend your coin

What's your most memorable game-related 'spitting the dummy' moment? We've all had them, those blood-boiling occasions where you've thrown a hissy fit, tossed your toys out of the pram or had kittens—where you've abandoned a game before seeing it through to completion for the sake of your sanity. 

From a personal perspective, one particular example that stands to mind involves Final Fantasy 7's Materia Keeper. Stationed atop Mount Nibel's winding walkways, this tenacious, fire-absorbing, 8,400 HP-boasting scorpion-like creature proved so much of an insurmountable challenge for my clearly well underpowered squad of Cloud, Red 13 and Aeris at the time, that I walked away from Squaresoft's brilliant Japanese roleplayer entirely. I missed the latter's death, the former's showdown with Sephiroth, flying to space, saving the planet—the lot. 

It took me four years thereafter to set foot in Midgar again. And I'm so very glad that I did. 

I've since had a few more pretty spectacular instances of videogame abandonment—not least Dark Souls via its bastard-hard corridor-stomping Taurus Demon, Fallout: New Vegas as a result of its initially underwhelming Mojave Wasteland setting, and The Elder Scrolls 4: Oblivion because, well, it wasn't Morrowind. As far as excuses go, I'm well aware these are pitiful, however I don't for a second regret my decision to ditch their fanciful grounds. You see, if I hadn't, there's a good chance I wouldn't have returned to them at all.

It's worth noting that I'm not the type of player who particularly enjoys arbitrarily replaying games. A few special ones have drawn me back in with their charm and/or brilliance over the years, but once I've watched the credits roll—be that after first or second or third return—that's normally it for me. One particular exception to this rule, I've recently found, is Tango Gameworks', Shinji Mikami-directed The Evil Within. 

As a long-standing fan of the survival horror genre, not least Mikami's work on the Resident Evil series, I was certain I'd love The Evil Within pre-release. All of its trailers, screens and teasers suggested this was A Thing I'd Like, but when I finally got my hands on the graphic, uber-violent and supernaturally-leaning scare 'em up I was grossly underwhelmed. I couldn't fathom why, but something just did not click with me and so The Evil Within was resigned to my 'completed games that I'll almost certainly never return to' vault. Or so I thought. 

On a whim after watching The Evil Within 2's typically unsettling E3 reveal trailer, I decided to venture back into Sebastian Castellanos' multi-chaptered nightmare, ahead of the former's October 13 arrival. Unlike some people I've spoken to who struggled with the original game, I'd seen it through to the end the first time round: I'd bested the chainsaw-wielding barn-dwelling brute, and set the Ring-esque multi-limbed lady alight. Having spent the last few weeks retracing my steps across Krimson City and its parallel otherworld, I'm, somewhat surprisingly, absolutely loving it. 

And I don't really know why. During my first playthrough I played with the game's awkward preset letterbox mode turned on; I'm doing the same now. During my first playthrough I eschewed stealth in favour of offensive tactics; the same applies here. During my first playthrough I struggled with the game's clunky controls and archaic aiming system; this is most certainly the case today. 

Have you ever watched a movie, found yourself disinterested, but then upon rewatching some ways down the line have found that your opinion has completely changed? That's the best I can do to describe my unlikely rekindled and endearing relationship with The Evil Within. 

Having now arrived at the game's seventh chapter, I'm just about halfway through The Evil Within's nightmare-driven universe. To be as excited by it in the same way I would a game that's fresh and new is a novel feeling indeed—but is nevertheless one which makes me wonder: is it worth returning to games I've perhaps harshly written off the past? I can't say for sure, but I'd be lying if I said I wasn't curious.

"The oldest and strongest emotion of mankind is fear, and the oldest and strongest kind of fear is fear of the unknown," so reads the opening line of HP Lovecraft's enduring 1927 essay 'Supernatural Horror in Literature'. And what makes this idea of so-called unknown fear that bit scarier? When said unknown is hell-bent on tearing your head off at every turn. 

This week I finally finished Tarsier Studios' Little Nightmares and while thoroughly enjoying its mix of mechanical puzzle solving and frenzied platforming, its horrifying ensemble of antagonists left a lasting impression on me. I've played many a survival horror game over the years and despite growing up during Resident Evil's B-movie-driven heydey, I tended towards the likes of Clock Tower, Silent Hill and latterly Forbidden Siren for their abstract and intangible slants on survival horror. 

Don't get me wrong: Resi 2's T-00, aka Mr X, and its successor's eponymous Nemesis scared the shit out of me as a youngster, but there was something truly awful about the Silent Hill series' Lying Figures, Mandarins, Bubblehead Nurses and towering Closers. Even against their exaggerated, nightmare-inducing features, there was a sense of humanity about these characters that I didn't get from Resident Evil's generic zombies—despite the latter having obviously evolved from actual human beings—and their unpredictable movesets and mannerisms only served to underscore what made them scary. 

With survival horror's shift towards action-oriented fare in recent years, I've struggled to rediscover the same terror the classics instilled in me—to the point where I'd chalked it up to maturing as a player and as a person. 

Much to my surprise, Little Nightmares restored that same sense of fear in me. Or, more accurately, Little Nightmares' enemies did.

Which might sound unusual for an indie puzzle platformer that stars a young protagonist clambering around a giant-sized world. On paper, that might conjure imagery of traditional and whimsical sidescrollers, or even the likes of Playdead's Limbo and Inside which, while sombre in tone and serious in nature, are more unsettling that outrightly scary. But when set inside The Maw—a weird, dank, and mysterious vessel that goes out of its way to make you feel unwelcome at every turn—that's filled with traps and horrible adversaries, that droll notion quickly changes.  

Speaking to the latter, Little Nightmares' cleaver-sporting Twin Chefs are as terrifying as anything the aforementioned ethereal classics conjure, with their cumbersome yet dogged movements, drooping features and insta-fatal attacks. The Janitor's extended reach reminded me of Silent Hill 3's Leonard Wolf as he appears in the abandoned town's twisted Otherworld. Despite being blind, this foe has a heightened sense of hearing and recalling one particular set piece involving creaking floorboards and a last-ditch sprint into a floor vent gives me shivers as I'm writing this. 

The faceless Leeches are almost ghostly as they lie in wait, and the Guests are just plain nasty. While the latter are arguably the least threatening of Little Nightmares' horrid repertoire, the fact that their purpose is never properly explained lends them a cultist persona within The Maw, and galvanises the sinister nature of the setting itself. 

Without spoiling the plot of Little Nightmares, The Lady, the game's ultimate antagonist, is for me just as awful as Bobby Barrows or Mary or God or Inferno. I'd even argue The Maw itself is up there with Silent Hill's Otherworld, or Forbidden Siren's Hanuda—and the vulnerability of Six as a protagonist reflects the struggles of James Sunderland, Jennifer Simpson, Hanuda's sightjackers, or whichever everyday hero(es) stepped up to the plate in your favourite horror games.   

It's taken me some time to find a horror game capable of disturbing me in the same the way the games of yesteryear did. Little Nightmares is an unlikely candidate to take up that mantle, but I can assure you it's no less worthy than the most established survival horror games of today.

When asked by a friend recently to recall the best bits of Fallout 4 recently, two moments came to mind. One was stepping into the heavily irradiated wastes of the Glowing Sea and finding the eerie chassis of a passenger plane destroyed in the epicentre of a nuclear blast. The other was The Silver Shroud quest, where you assume the role of a Dick Tracy/The Shadow-esque pulp hero. It reframes Fallout 4’s systems to fit the exciting life of an in-universe radio serial vigilante—it’s essentially another layer of roleplay within a roleplaying game. This successfully gets you to invest in the game in a different way, even though you’re largely doing the same things you do in every Fallout quest: going to a place, fetching a thing, and killing a bunch of guys. This time, though, you’re doing it in a trilby. 

You start by tuning into The Silver Shroud radio station, where old episodes of the serial are playing on a loop. In these broadcasts, the Shroud stalks the shadows and delivers justice to bastards with a shiny silver machine gun, and it’s performed with the hammy gusto of something broadcast in the first half of the 20th century. Like many players, I understand this frame of reference through secondhand pop culture influences, since relatively few people who remember listening to American radio in the ’30s are likely with us now.  

The serial leads you to Kent Connolly in the uncouth town of Goodneighbor, who runs the station. He’s a ghoul, sincerely trying to make the town a better place by offering people a slice of yesteryear fiction. “Sometimes you just got to escape a little to make it through the day.” 

Since your character has been cryogenically frozen, you remember listening to the broadcasts live before the war and connect with Connolly over the show. Kent wants The Silver Shroud to come to life, to confront the escalating crime in Goodneighbor and offer people hope. He’s fashioned the character’s machine gun himself, and asks you to retrieve the costume from Hubris Comics in downtown Boston. Kent then asks you to don the outfit and assume the role, since your own comic book-y Fallout origin makes you a good fit. 

The quest then has you patrolling the streets of the town, murdering thugs and assassins at Kent’s suggestion, while bellowing trash talk at them in The Shroud’s exaggerated voice. Your character clearly gets into the role, which is oddly sweet. Meanwhile, residents around the town react to your new getup in amusing ways. “You look like one of the wankers from those posters,” says Whitechapel Charlie, the British Mister Handy bartender working at The Third Rail. Unfortunately, Kent ends up crossing the wrong people, and at the quest’s climax you must track down his kidnapper, Sinjin—and save Kent from execution, if you can, or if you want to.

The nuts and bolts of The Silver Shroud are extremely similar to the game’s other quests, but it demonstrates how context is everything in an RPG. In my experience of the genre, the difference between a good and a bad quest can just be in the writing and the feedback you get from the world. Here, Bethesda really makes you feel like you’re stepping into the shoes of The Shroud, having previously spent hours as an ordinary survivor of the wastes. Some NPCs on the streets mock your getup scathingly, but that persona is also powerful enough to scare some of your enemies into thinking this fictional character has actually come to life. It’s magnificent. 

Meanwhile, Kent’s own sincere intentions to improve his hometown make you feel like you’re doing a genuinely good guy a favour, in a world where there aren’t too many decent people around. It’s a convincing simulation of becoming a superhero, and believing in it is the successful combination of a campy costume, daft voice acting and some of Bethesda’s best writing.

Let me start off with a disclaimer: I played Playerunknown's Battlegrounds for the very first time yesterday evening. I'm still at that 'terrified of everything stage', which Michael Johnson—the author of our best (and worst) guns guide—assures me is normal. To this end I've spent the first few hours of my time on the island confused, scared and getting my hat/level one motorcycle helmet handed to me at almost every turn.

And yet I've loved every minute of it. Despite the hype, I went into PUBG with a degree of trepidation. I'd seen facets of the interwebs compare it to DayZ and while I enjoyed both its Arma 2 mod and standalone variations once upon a time, I wasn't sure I wanted to return to a similarly lawless playground having left both scenes behind quite some time ago. 

Such a popular game is of course hard to ignore and, like Andy, I was pleasantly surprised to see my cynicism trumped by a suitably frantic and fun survival MMO. Unlike Andy, though, I'm at my best when in the thick of it. Well, best is probably a stretch—rather I enjoy the game most when I'm being stalked and/or carelessly unloading my gun's magazine into a brick wall because I'm shite-scared of my own shadow. 

To be fair, my fear isn't rooted in my stark inadequacies as a hunter/survivor. Nor it is it based on how good the opposition invariably is. My terror is based in something far less organic: doors. Let me explain. 

Okay, for those unfamiliar with the setup: each round of PUBG kicks off with up to 100 players being deployed from above. After parachuting into various corners of the map unarmed, you then race to loot whichever buildings are closest, picking up whichever weapons/armour/clothes are at hand before venturing off into the wilderness to lay waste to whoever crosses your path. Last man or woman standing wins. 

Due to the map's impressive sprawl, however, you'll spend stretches of time on your lonesome before happening upon a single hostile neighbour. Was that someone up ahead? No just a tuft of grass. Is that a… no, a burnout car. Wow, that hedge looks like a… BANG. Dead. It was. Shit. 

From what I've played so far, PUBG does a fine job of balancing these spells of isolation with flashes of confrontation—an ever-enclosing playing area helps maintain this as combatants steadily die off, for example—which is in turn underscored by an ever-present, and ever-burgeoning, sense of anxiety. 

Enter the game's seemingly innocuous doors. When each game kicks off, all functioning doors are closed. If you discover an open door on your travels, this can only mean one thing: that someone's been here before you. 

Now, you could obviously avoid these dwellings entirely. But what if there's some decent loot that whoever was last here has overlooked? You step inside. Panic sets in—what if they're in the house right now? You hear footsteps. Your panic escalates. You run upstairs, no one there. You check each room, empty. It's quiet now. You double back, head for the stairs, and despite the fact the mohawk-sporting topless man stood before you has his mouth covered by a gas mask, you know very well he's smiling. 

The shotgun pointed at your head almost feels like a formality—especially when you've accidentally equipped yourself with a smoke bomb instead of the UMP9 you'd kept fully loaded till now. I clearly don't work well under stress. 

I've faced several permutations of the above scenario now, to the point where I'm starting to get fly for it. I chatted with a few players on the PC Gamer Discord after a few games last night who informed me they make a point of closing every door behind them so as to throw other players off their scent during each game. As such, I've now taken to leaving certain doors open and closing others so as to confuse my foes. 

With this in mind, a very similar situation to the above played out where I was instead the hunter. I shut the front door as my counterpart nipped upstairs, whereby, upon returning to the ground floor, she momentarily paused as if to acknowledge something was off. I came at her with a sickle and finished off the job there and then. It was glorious. 

Another occasion saw me camped out in an elongated cabin-like shack with just one door of entry/exit. I shut myself in and positioned myself so that when someone entered, I'd be hidden behind the door. One player did enter. Sucker, I thought to myself, only to realise I was pressed tight against the wall and couldn't move. In a typically frenzied panic, I started firing shotgun rounds at the ceiling, walls and floor. My house guest shot me in the head without breaking stride. It was a disaster. 

And so I guess much of my passion for doors in PUBG is tied to tricking players and successfully setting traps. I'm not yet skilled enough to take on others in head-on gun fights and while that'll inevitably come, I've thoroughly enjoyed surviving in a world where all and nothing is fair. 

Perhaps that closed door up ahead is simply somewhere no one's been to yet, but then again, maybe people like me await your arrival on the other side. Maybe the door lying wide open means the house's been ransacked already, but what if there's a gun or vest or health pack that's been missed? There are few games that have the power to instil anxiety in players and it not come across cheap. Playerunknown's Battlegrounds, even in its earliest of states, is one of them—and it's all the better for it.

Warning: The following article contains nostalgia. It is also filled with links to nostalgia-evoking YouTube clips. You have been warned.   

I am an only child. And when I tell people I'm an only child, they often respond in the same way—firstly by telling me I must have been spoiled by my parents growing up, and secondly by assuming I must've been lonely as a kid. 

Both statements are true to an extent, however while recent studies suggest children who grow up without siblings are likely to have different brain structures than those who do, I can really only attest to one thing with any degree of certainty: being an only child is what first turned me over to videogames. 

In the absence of brothers or sisters to play/bicker with or share my toys/parents' affection with I turned to my dad's Atari ST for company—our first so-called 'family' computer that ostensibly stood in for similarly-aged blood relatives during my formative years. My mother and father had me later in their lives, which meant at five years old my youngest cousin above me was 21 and thus had little interest in playing Lemmings, Pushover or Bomb Jack with me in the face of going out clubbing and socialising.

His loss, I reckon, and anyway companionship then may have prevented me from meeting Sly Spy—Data East’s 2D run-gunning platformer and shameless Bond rip-off that quickly became my hero as a child. I might never have taken to Microplay and Maelstrom's post-apocalyptic action role-player Midwinter; and there's a good chance I wouldn't have had the free time to pretend to know what I was doing in games like Populous, and Sid Meier's first ever Civilization instalment in 1991. 

If I'd missed the likes of Ghouls 'N Ghosts and Turrican, perhaps I wouldn't truly appreciate what modern platformers owe to the classics—or how even these games owe just as much to Metroid's ever-enduring influence. And if I'd sidestepped Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom I'd probably be convinced a different game is the best movie-to-videogame translation of all time, which of course would be blatantly untrue. 

While I continued to enjoy PC gaming as I got older, I can't guarantee I'd ever have discovered it had it not been for the ST. The popularity of consoles during the mid-late '90s and early 2000s was hard to ignore, and much of my school friends at the time revelled in the SNES and/or the Mega Drive/Genesis, before graduating to PlayStation and its successor further down the line.

Yet games like Joust, Speedball 2, Xenon, Ikari Warriors, Stunt Car Racer, Shufflepuck Cafe, International Karate+, Elite, Kick Off and Kick Off 2, Space Harrier, Mercenary 2 and Mercenary 3, Golden Axe, Hunter, Dungeon Master, Carrier Command, Missile Command, and all of those mentioned above and more played such an integral part in my early understanding of videogames—and I experienced them all for the first time on my faithful ST. 

Granted playing on my lonesome has meant I'm far less enthused by the mention of local co-op in modern games, however the thought of out-playing my dad at Marble Madness—which was incidentally designed by an 18-year old Mark Cerny—and gleefully watching him fumble with the joystick controls still makes me laugh.   

Without the Atari ST, perhaps these experiences would all have come later. Perhaps if I'd had siblings I'd have similar co-op driven memories of Bubble Bobble, Rainbow Islands or Pang. Or maybe I'd have started with Sonic or Mario and discovered PC gaming further down the line. But would this mean missing all of the great games mentioned above? I can't say, and I often wonder if folk born in this century ever venture back into the '90s to play the original Red Alert, Broken Sword, Diablo, and/or Fallout or the likes.  

That's almost certainly down to the individual and, in any event, my own journey started with the Atari ST and I'm grateful for it. Even if the mere sight of this still has the power to unearth old nightmares:

When I was young, I had too few games but too much spare time. Now I’m an adult, I have the opposite problem, and I’m sure you do as well. That changing relationship with games means I now see them as things to be ticked off as quickly as possible, rather than to be got into as deeply as I used to. Having just five or six games as a younger man meant I would endlessly pore over them, repeating skirmishes in Red Alert, or missions in X-Wing. Everyone has done something similar, I’m sure, whether it was installing endless Doom WADs or conquering every last piece of land in Total War, long after the victory conditions were met. 

Age of Empires II’s map editor was the king of time wasters for anyone with just a few games in their collection. I remember the first time I discovered its potential. I opened it up and put about 30 William Wallaces on screen and sent them to battle against ten or so enemy Robin Hoods (I needed to win, of course—my self-esteem was very precious at that age). This was the dumbest representation of history imaginable: dozens of real-life figures from different eras fighting on a flat, plain grass field at the whim of a bored 12-year-old, delighted that he can defy the game’s somewhat stingy unit cap by creating the worst scenarios this RTS had ever seen.

That’s how messing around with a level or map editor starts. From there, you get better at it, and begin to create semi-decent levels. You learn about elevating the terrain, how to lay out a base, and how to balance the difficulty so you have to strategise with your finite resources. Obviously you know your own tricks, so there’s little to surprise you, but the editor is so simple you can create maps almost as sophisticated as those in the game’s campaigns. You can also create unusual Skirmish setups with up to eight players, scaling the resource gathering up or down depending on how long you want the scenario to drag on for. Alternatively, you could put a hot desert next to thick ice, and watch one hundred elephants have a fight on top of it. 

There’s a lot of excitement in the potential chaos of it, and there’s real catharsis in watching all these pieces collide when you click the Test option in the scenario creator menu. It’s not really real-time strategy anymore, not when I’m in charge. It’s a pit of death that’s about as historically nuanced as that episode of Futurama where Genghis Khan and Evil Lincoln riot in Zapp Brannigan’s Holoshed. 

You don’t even have to control your own side if you’ve put all your units next to their enemies, as I did for the screenshots in this piece—they’ll just scrap automatically. As pointless and anti-strategy as the whole thing is, it fulfils a wish in the stupid part of my brain.

Then there’s the option to download the community’s own campaigns. It helps that sites like Age of Kings Heaven have curated the best custom maps since the game’s launch in 1999, but it’s way easier now with Age of Empires II HD’s Steam Workshop support. You can add entire campaigns instantly, as well as new units and refreshed AI. 

Age of Empires II’s enduring success is a fascinating thing. In the past 30 days before I started writing this, the game averaged over 7,700 players per day according to Steam Charts, compared to just 1,600 for Age of Empires III and a mere 900 for Age of Mythology’s HD edition. This is no doubt helped by the fact that Age of Empires II is still receiving expansions from the team at Forgotten Empires almost two decades later, with the most recent being Rise of the Rajas in December. Clearly there’s something about this entry that stands apart from Ensemble’s other games, which are all superficially similar. As well as adding new campaigns, units and factions, the new expansions also throw additional objects into the scenario editor. 

Clearly other people are making more interesting levels out of Age of Empires II than I am, then, but I’m content with merely defiling history on a grand scale. Which in a way befits a man who only got a C in the subject at A-level.

I can still remember the first time I set foot in Skyrim. Everything seemed so big—its map, its trees, its mountains, its townships—and I spent my first couple of hours aimlessly wandering around its world. Having completed not one quest beyond the game's de rigueur introductory exchange, my under-powered hero was often left pegging it across the plains from far stronger foes and, of course, I revelled in the occasions where I rode my luck and came out on top. 

One particular battle of note saw me going toe-to-toe with a tenacious bandit. It was a tiresome affair as we fought back and forth, exchanging trivial single blows from Windhelm all the way up to Winterhold. By the time I'd run out of potions of minor healing, I threw caution to the wind and went in for the kill/valiant defeat. At the time I remember being amazed by how good close-quarters combat felt—how important each weighty jab felt, and how satisfying it was to see the beleaguered bandit finally fall before me. 

It was then that I was equally amazed by something else: this bandit was carrying gold, two minor stamina potions, a secondary sheathed weapon and an apple. And as if that haul wasn't surprising enough, my character—who could barely swing a sword at this point—was able to determine the fallen enemy's concealed inventory instantly. Sure, the shield and the sword and the fur armour were readily recognisable, but how the hell did my hero know this dude had a piece of fruit tucked away in his pocket just by looking at him?  

Despite Skyrim, BioShock and Dishonored being among my all-time favourite videogames, one thing that inherently annoys me in their self-acknowledged quests for seamless realism and 'immersion' is how unbelievable instantaneous looting is. Even with x-ray vision, it would take decidedly longer to ascertain what's on our foe's person than the respective lightning-fast evaluations of the Dragonborn, Jack and Corvo. 

Hinterland's survival exploration game The Long Dark does things a little differently. In a game where weapons are a curious luxury—and where your ability to use them is almost nonexistent—scavenging and looting is not only central to its makeup, but is also key to whether or not you make it through the night alive. A simple 'Searching' meter dictates how quickly you're able to case containers, shelving units, supply crates, corpses and more—and its speed in doing so reflects how quickly, or slowly, you might expect to sift through an old drawer or a frozen, lifeless body's pockets in reality.  

At first you'll shrug off the searches that wield nothing, as you quickly move onto the next stuffing your pockets with whichever treasures you happen upon. But before long, when you're starving, dehydrated, injured, sick, freezing, or, as is often the case, all of the above, a single search can be the difference between life and death. Suddenly, an instantaneous search doesn't seem so bad, as that once innocuous 'Searching' bar takes on a whole new level of urgency and importance: whereby the closer it gets to completion without spoils, the further your heart generally sinks.

And yet, conversely, that extra wait can result in flashes of unparalleled joy. During one venture into the icy wilderness, I'd become slightly over-encumbered and, of course, stumbled upon a pack of blood-thirsty wolves. I spotted an ice lodge up ahead and decided to try to circumnavigate the mob by going wide into the encroaching trees. Or so I thought. Before I knew it I was being hunted down at speed and the forest in front of me that I'd attempted to use for cover did nothing but impede my beeline for safety. I wound up on the deck with a ravenous wolf gnawing at me. After shaking the beast off I was gravely injured, bleeding out and carrying entirely more than my weakened body could handle. 

I tried ditching a few bedrolls to lighten the load, but it was clear my priority was sourcing medicine and fast. I hobbled along to the lodge leaving a trail of blood at my back, only to discover I had a wolf bite on my head of all places that had a 50 percent chance of becoming infected. Carrying just one dose of antibiotics, I was equipped to stave off the infection, but without any bandages I wasn't going to last much longer. 

After a quick scour of the room, I spotted a locker, two drawers, a plastic container and a first aid box. Rejoice! Over to the first aid housing. Searching… a flare! Okay! Not the most useful item, but back to the search. More antibiotics. Search over. Shite. Onto the container. Nothing. The first drawer. A chocolate bar and a pair of worn gloves. The last drawer. I'm done for. Searching… Another chocolate bar. The search drags on. A bandage. A F****ING BANDAGE! I'm saved!

And of course by 'saved', I actually mean 'able to treat my wounds, sleep, and leave the cabin only to be mauled to death by the pack of wolves who'd camped outside my door overnight'—but let's not split hairs, eh? 

That urgency, that forced and uncomfortable searching pause, and that moment of elation when a game that's otherwise brutally unforgiving throws you a bone is nothing short of marvellous. I've of course had umpteen useless searches end my life in The Long Dark as I fight against the clock, but the anticipation of each scramble is a thing of beauty—which can equally relate to discovering food when you're starving, firewood when you're freezing, or, if you're especially lucky, a firearm when you want to get your own back on that blasted wolf pack.

A few weeks back, The Long Dark launched a mysterious counter which we're almost sure is tied to its much-anticipated and as yet absent Story Mode. That timer expires tomorrow—stay tuned for our coverage once we know more.  

If I were to ask you: what is your favourite thing about Dark Souls—what would you say? I reckon a fair few of you would mention its difficulty. Some of you might point to its meticulous and attentive level design; or perhaps even its indistinct and often ambiguous lore. My favourite thing about Dark Souls is its NPCs—not because I enjoy its collection of incongruous characters as adversaries or companions but because, in almost every instance, they serve to underscore all of the above.

As a result of weekend weddings, work and other games, I only managed to wrap up Dark Souls 3's The Ringed City DLC this week—the second and final expansion within its third outing, and supposed swansong of the series as a whole. Upon completion, I decided to return to some of my favourite areas to poke around for goodies that I was too underpowered to hunt for upon first visiting. I first headed for the Smouldering Lake's Demon Ruins and waded around in its lava pools. I then doubled back into the Catacombs of Carthus and eventually wound up in the Profaned Capital—which is where I made an interesting discovery. 

After consulting Google, I realised I was far from the first to do so, however next to the bonfire atop the circular tower situated near the entrance of the area—the one surrounded by ladders and guarded either side by Headless Gargoyle Lancers—lies a deceased Laddersmith Gilligan, the ladder man from Dark Souls 2. Given the Souls series operates in cycles, it seems Gilligan has met his maker in this interpretation of the world despite having lived a somewhat prosperous life in Earthen Peak and latterly Majula beforehand.

It's not clear how long Gilligan's been lying dead in the Profaned Capital, but it's completely possible—if not likely—that you'll pass him by without notice. Which  serves to bolster how brutally unforgiving this world is—that, despite how much of a slog it is for you battling scores of hideous opponents en route to toppling end-of-stage bosses and Lords of Cinder, every living soul in this universe is constantly under threat. Gilligan was hardly a central character in Dark Souls 2, however his inconsequential 'appearance' in number three proves that this world soldiers on regardless and that everyone, including you, is but a drop in its sprawling, poisoned, abyss-ridden ocean. 

Despite other characters crossing over throughout the series—Patches is but one character that springs to mind—the first Dark Souls perhaps provides the best examples of unfortunate NPCs that highlight the barbarity of the Souls world. 

Sorcery student Griggs of Vinheim, for example, is rescued from incarceration early on in the Undead Burg and sells you spells and sorceries as he awaits the arrival of master sorcerer Big Hat Logan at Firelink Shrine. He is delighted when you eventually rescue Logan from Sen's Fortress, however is later distraught when Logan leaves discreetly for the Grand Archives. Griggs sets off for Sen's Fortress—presumably because that's where you found Logan earlier—only to expire and turn hollow. 

A similar story is tied to pyromancer Laurentius of the Great Swamp, who you also rescue from captivity in The Depths. Like Griggs, he seeks the services of a more adept magician: Quelaana of Izalith. He later travels to Blighttown where he too dies and turns hollow.

Furthering this notion that Dark Souls' world carries on regardless, there's no real reason for the player to return to either Sen's Fortress or this area of Blighttown at this stage in the game, thus happening upon these particular fallen characters is mostly circumstantial. Similar to the many deaths you'll undoubtedly have suffered by this point, they too have failed in their quest in two of the most punishing arenas the game has to offer.   

The aforementioned Big Hat Logan travels to the archives to learn even more about the dark arts beyond his current capabilities, however is consumed by too much knowledge and loses his mind—ultimately found running around semi-naked spare his iconic oversized hat. 

Siegmeyer of Catarina's demise is more involved, however he too meets his maker despite his best efforts. While its possible to save Solaire of Astora—the man responsible for the series' most acclaimed gesture—a couple of missteps on the player's part towards the game's end can see him also succumbing to insanity in his pursuit of the sun.  

As outlined above, the player is forced to jump through a series of hoops to reach even the worst outcomes here, all of which makes each NPC death—often by your reluctant hand—even harder to accept. Nevertheless, each passing serves to accentuate the savage world in which these characters live which is what makes each of their stories worth discovering in turn. 

There are of course many similar tales sewn throughout the series, but while it's its enemies, bosses and onerous geography that make Souls games challenging—it's its fallen heroes that underline your success. 

The remastering of old games is a popular trend which shows little sign of slowing down. This week, LucasArts and Double Fine's Full Throttle became the latest classic to be reworked in shiny HD with overhauled music and sound. As a long-serving fan of the point-and-click adventure genre this is great news, yet I can't deny nostalgia drives much of what I find appealing about these particular remakes. Sure, these games are great, but having played them to death in my formative years I often find everything comes flooding back minutes after booting them up.

What I long for instead are games that echo the time-honored greats with a modern spin—pitching taxing puzzles at players alongside whimsical characters, vibrant worlds, and sometimes genius/other times wholly incongruous mix-and-match item swapping and combining. What I long for is games like Memoranda.  

I first got wind of Bit Byterz's Memoranda back in October 2015 when it was running a Kickstarter campaign. Inspired by the surrealist stories of Japanese author Haruki Murakami, the stylish point-and-clicker promised a suitably twee tale about a protagonist who'd forgotten her name, that lived in a quaint town where modern technology complemented archaic handcrafts.

It surpassed its crowdfunding target by several thousand Canadian dollars and by December last year was on the precipice of launch with a cool new trailer and a January due date. And then Christmas came, then new year, then some big post-holiday releases and poor Memoranda completely dropped off my radar. 

Last week, I nipped back into Night School Studio's wonderful narrative adventure Oxenfree, and after inadvertently playing it through to completion for a third time, Memoranda suddenly popped back into my head. I then spent large pockets of my Easter break reveling in its gorgeous world, conversing with its cast of strange but interesting townsfolk and cursing its at times ultra-difficult puzzle work—whereby I'd rage for several consecutive minutes before finally sussing out what was required of me and then being met with an enormous sense of well being. 

You see, beyond its beautiful art style, engaging characters and well-determined voice acting, I think Memoranda's greatest achievement is its refusal to pander to its players. Modern games are filled with tutorials, in-game maps and pointers, however solving Memoranda's puzzles requires you pay meticulous attention to what its characters tell you, to the relationship seemingly innocuous items could have to specific people, and to information that's fastidiously placed around town. Each puzzle has a cryptic hint system for those struggling, but even then these clues regularly require a fair bit of head-scratching.

It's never unfair—you're almost always overlooking something right in front of your nose—but Memoranda nevertheless does a fantastic job of recreating the challenge classic adventure games has since become renowned for. Whereas the games of yesteryear predated even GameFAQs never mind instantaneous access to online walkthroughs, what's arguably even more challenging here is resisting the urge to quickly Google how the hell you work out the code on the keypad that was sewn inside the weird art collector's teddy bear that you could only uncover after messing around with a punch and judy-like contraption. 

And I'd urge you not to take the easy way out unless you absolutely have to: solving Memoranda's puzzles on my own has filled me with a level of joy that I've not felt from a videogame in a very long time. 

Despite being far from finished, Memoranda's increasingly bizarre story has me totally unsure of what'll happen next. Which, against its enduring peers, makes me confident this one is on the right track.

From the intro to the dying moments of the main quest, the Imperial City dominates Oblivion, and it’s little wonder. This grand place can be seen for miles across the map. It’s the jewel of the empire. No matter where I wander, or in whose house I lurk, stuffing outsized magical weapons into jewellery boxes, I always make my way back there. It’s my safe haven.

Constructed by the long-dead Ayleids, and boasting the characteristic white stone and smooth lines of their striking architecture, the city is a circular hub, split into concentric districts. Each of them oozes wealth, only the outlying waterfront area and occasional beggar’s bedroll lying forlornly in odd corners hints at the city’s poorer undercurrent. Nothing is perfect, even this iconic place.

As a game city it has its flaws. It’s woefully underpopulated, something especially noticeable now, more than ten years after Oblivion’s release. The emptiness risks being jarring, but I find it conspires with everything else to lend the city a restful, even fading feel. It adds to the melancholic feeling of time marching away, echoing an empire in its last days.

The sedate pace of life and the regal architecture encourage quiet meandering rather than breakneck adventure. So much so that, at times, I feel guilty about being the most raucous thing in sight. I bounce in vast circuits of Green Emperor Way in order to build my Acrobatics skill, while simultaneously conjuring a dagger to increase my paltry Conjuration ability. And when the door of the Mystic Emporium decides to lock itself in daylight hours, I find myself committing the tamest, most mellow crime in the world of breaking and entering, just so I can legally buy gear. I always feel on the verge of being expelled for shattering the peace.

It may just be that I’ve succumbed to all the harp music, but even I eventually slow down. The whole city is infused with an atmosphere of serenity, which is the perfect foundation for the contrasting chaos of the final battle, in which the city is attacked and the last of the Septim bloodline spectacularly immortalised in stone.

Nostalgia plays a huge role in why I love the city—it was my first port of call and supported my idle wanderings for a long time. With little money and a lightweight (read: flimsy) character, I spent much of my time in the Imperial Market district, gleefully looting crates and barrels for cloth, silverware, and whatever else I could sell for a few gold. Those early days, scraping by and gathering enough cash to buy arrows or upgrade a piece of armour, were formative and the bedrock of my fond memories of a superb game.

The same nostalgia shields the place from harsher criticism, especially as far as the scarcity of quests goes. Despite the various guild missions, there isn’t much to do. Nevertheless, I enjoy what few quests do exist, especially the early challenge of investigating crooked merchant Thoronir. Vanilla, yes, but who cares when you want an easy life and a free house?

The city’s rich, well-decorated interiors and architectural flourishes are just too much of a draw for the snob in me. Desiring somewhere plush and relaxing to lay my head, I always shun the crappy waterfront for richer pickings among the city’s elite. With a few lockpicks and even fewer morals, a lavish home in the posh part of the city can be yours. Thanks to the aforementioned quest, you get the chance to bump off a grave-robbing pal of Thoronir and keep his swish house for yourself.

The beauty of Oblivion’s sandbox world is that there’s a nook for everyone—a place to return to, whether out of a desire to recapture the magic of earlier memories, to fill your hard drive with near-identical screenshots, or just to play Sim Cyrodiil in one of the houses. Maybe even to discover an answer to that age-old question: just how many magical battle-axes can you fit into one jewellery box?

In a game where you can do everything—even throw shoes on rooftops—sometimes the most enjoyable thing is to have somewhere peaceful in which to do nothing.

There's a feeling I get whenever I fire up a Souls game for the first time that no other videogame gives me. It's a lovely gut-wrenching blend of excitement, fear and anxiety wrought by the thought of exploring new fantastical and awe-inspiring locales—all the while knowing I'll be stalked by whichever grotesque entourage of monstrosities Hidetaka Miyazaki has dreamt up this time along the way. Last night I started Dark Souls 3's second and final offering of DLC and welcomed the lead butterflies back with open arms. 

The Ringed City—which can only be accessed when you've offed the base game's four Lords of Cinder and have successfully powered through its previous Ashes of Ariandel add-on—is thought to be the Souls series' last ever outing. Given Ariandel somewhat failed to live up to the post-launch standards set by previous series instalments, much rests on this one's shoulders as far as closing the series is concerned. 

I've only clocked a couple of hours so far, and while I've enjoyed butting heads with its new monsters—I spent an inordinate amount of time outrunning the lightning-firing angels, seriously—and its first major Demon Prince boss, the true star of the show up to this point has been its Dreg Heap and Earthen Peak Ruins settings themselves.

Setting in the Dark Souls series has been discussed almost as much as its brutally-unforgiving difficulty, its huge variety of equipment loadouts, and its fascinating open-ended lore. The original Dark Souls is a masterpiece in level design, creating a sprawling interconnected world where even the most incompatible of environments are weaved together with wonderful precision—and the absence of fast-travel teleportation until the latter stages of the game lends this fluent puzzle credibility.  

Players are often forced to weigh up the pros and cons of venturing in certain directions against both their Soul Level and the enemies housed in certain areas, which only highlights how important its layout, and an understanding of such, is. 

As deftly outlined by YouTube fellow Hamish Black in his series Writing On Games, part of what makes the original Dark Souls' setting so important is its ability to portray both physical in-game ascent and descent in its earlier stages as themes. Ascension, says Black, is rewarding while descending into its depths stands to illuminate how unforgiving it can be. Black even suggests the way in which the ringing of the first bell compares with game's descent into Blighttown can make or break you—that it can determine whether or not you are a Dark Souls player at all.

This claim is stretching a little too far for me, but I do agree that the way the original Souls leverages ascent and, crucially, descent as concepts and mechanics is fantastic, so much so I'm not sure Dark Souls 2 could ever have bettered it. 

It didn't in my eyes, and an over-reliance on fast-travel and maps which just did not fit well together resulted in a world that feels jarring. Each arena is well designed in its own right, however too often feels detached from what preceded it. The game's Earthen Peak, for example, leads you upwards through a labyrinth of windmills and tunnels that overlook the Harvest Valley below—but when you reach the Iron Keep beyond, it's surrounding by rivers of molten lava.

Dark Souls 3, with Miyazaki back in charge, goes a long way to restoring this sense of cartographic wonder—with destinations that compliment its lore and again play with the ascent/decent idea—dragging players seamlessly from the Profaned Capital to Anor Londo; from Farron Keep to Archdragon Peak and everywhere else along the way.  

Within a universe that operates in cycles, where history is bound to repeat and reinterpret itself, what I've played so far of The Ringed City is a masterstroke in underscoring the end of the line. We're thrust into the "mangled remnants from every age and every land", as it steers us ever-downward into a world folding in on itself. Looking at it, nothing makes sense but, as it depicts remnants of individual past worlds all forced together, why should it? 

Now, we've gone beyond anything we've ever known. And where the Kiln of the First Flame was once recognised as the end of the line, it instead marks the peak of where we are now. The MC Escher-like backdrops of the Dreg Heap depict worlds long-forgotten as we make our way towards the lowest point of the Souls universe, and their impossible architecture and perspective serve to accentuate how absurd and futile each passing journey towards linking the flame really is. 

This is the ultimate descent and, despite only being accessible once you've finished everything else, this DLC is as unforgiving as it gets. Even beyond the angels which spew incessant showers of lightning or curse magic from above, the swamp-dwelling and brutally-strong Harald Legion Knights, or the three-tiered Demon boss fights, the world itself is designed in such a way that it's an absolute slog shuttling successfully between its bonfires. This may be the Souls series' last outing but it's going down swinging. And despite its difficulty, it's blooming gorgeous. 

I may only two or so hours in, but I've fallen in love with The Dreg Heap already and am bound for The Ringed City next. I guess this is my last chance to Git Gud, as they say, but, if history really is doomed to repeat itself in the Souls world, I reckon I've got a few more trips to the bonfire left in me yet.

After just under one week with Nier: Automata I've come to a realisation: I have no idea what it is. 

That may sound like hyperbole, but Nier is honestly like no other game I've ever played. I've loved it, hated it, fell out with it, made up with it, and have been interminably puzzled by it in what's become a relatively steady cycle over the past six days. Every time I think I've sussed it out, it's thrown something new at me and while I've only finished it a couple of times myself—this is a game designed to be played and enjoyed several times after the first run—I've also realised it's exactly the type of game I've been, unwittingly, searching for recently. 

I wouldn't go as far to say I've become burnt out on specific genres, but when I look back at some of the games I've played over the past year or so, the ones I've spent the most time with have demanded vast amounts of my time and concentration. XCOM 2, for example, Total War: Warhammer, Cities: Skylines and Football Manager 2017—a mix of strategy and simulation games with relatively open outcomes that require distinct levels of dedication and perseverance. 

Further afield, Dishonored 2 is a game whose all-stealth playthroughs beg absolute focus, while switching off for a split second in Dark Souls 3 is equivocal to signing your own death warrant. Even the resolutely formulaic Resident Evil 7 requires a systematic, methodical approach to its puzzles and battles should you wish to make it out of the Baker estate intact. 

Nier: Automata's sense of surprise is perhaps its most endearing and important feature, and while I'll avoid specifics here (look out for Andy's in the not too distant future for something more focussed), the game's ability to chop and change at the drop of the hat creates a level of mindless, uninterrupted enjoyment that I've not had from a game in a long time. It's also worth noting that I've never played 2010's loosely-tied Nier, but I understand it too to be a bit weird. 

Anyway, developed by Platinum Games, there are moments where Nier: Automata feels like a game beneath this banner—particularly during its industrially-scarred 45-minute opening, where you guide protagonist android 2B around a sea-built rig hacking and slashing her way through hordes of robots and towering blade-armed bosses. Here, the influence of Vanquish, Metal Gear Rising: Revengeance, and Bayonetta is worn on its sleeve, with players leveraging a mess of light and strong attacks, air-dodging, ground-pounding, and lock-on laser-like bullets from accompanying aerial drone Pod. 

But in a flash, you'll break from an overbearing enclosed combat arena and find yourself powering down a catwalk, platforming back and forth, to and from ledges and up and down stairwells. You'll collect powerups and materials but, at this stage, will have little idea what to do with them. In the next zone, the camera will shoot skyward, presenting you with a birds-eye-view bullet hell effort—and at times you'll be faced with Neo Geo-styled aerial shooting, and a smidgen of Space Harrier-like boss fights. 

I made an arse of my first run and fell to the end-of-stage boss only to discover I had to start again entirely in the absence of an auto save feature (NB—the game does warn you of this at the start, however you're also unable to save at all until after this particular boss; my bad, I guess). 

And that's just the opening hour. After that, Nier transforms its framework entirely as it becomes, in essence, an open-world RPG. A sophisticated limited-slot chip loadout system dictates 2B's stats and combat style, which can in turn boost your melee and ranged attacks, speed, the chance of acquiring loot from fallen enemies—all told, experimenting is key. Again, I'm on my third playthrough now and have hardly scratched the surface as far as possible combinations go. 

Nier is far from perfect—while many of its maps are beautifully designed and aesthetically gorgeous, they're often frustratingly littered with invisible walls and/or confusing camera angles. Frame rates aren't something which bother me too much, but my GTX 980 has on occasion coughed and spluttered on medium settings.

So what is Nier: Automata? It's something I've loved and have been ticked off with in equal measure. It's an engaging open-world RPG, hack-and-slashing, action platformer that's also a bullet hell sidescroller and aerial shmup. It boasts a stat customisation system which I'd love to see furthered in future games, and at times boasts cinematic sequences that're as epic as animated action movies. Determining what Nier is complicated, but I've savoured its mindless enjoyment and will continue to do so for more playthroughs to come.  

Dawn of War 3 isn't out yet so I have been addressing my need to slay Orks in Dawn of War 2: Retribution skirmishes. I set myself a mission to destroy the Ork AI on 'expert' difficulty with every faction, starting with the Space Marines and finishing with the Eldar. I enjoyed this so much I started fighting every faction in turn with the Eldar, and now my home PC is a source of unending war against Dawn of War 2: Retribution's artificial intelligence.

AI opponents are rarely designed to stand up to this sort of relentless assault. In skirmish RTS games the AI is a non-judgemental opponent that gives me space to learn different factions and better understand the flow of the game. But as I work through the difficulty levels and start to win consistently, I learn the system's foibles. I see how the AI likes to send individual units to cap resource points behind the front line. I know that in particular circumstances I can goad the AI into the embrace of my base's turrets, where I can suppress and destroy units with ease. The mask cracks, but I'm not disappointed. I feel as though I'm slowly mapping out the designer's work and solving it like a puzzle.

Having said that, the slightly wonky tutorial bot can take me right to the line in some matchups on higher difficulties. Here I appreciate the other great thing about battling the computer. When I fight the AI I don't have to think about my user profile, levels, rankings, loadouts, badges, or any of the trappings of the modern online service game format.

Multiplayer competition can feel like a rat race. Strangers enter a lobby, compete for their own statistical advancement, and then separate. No bonds are formed, there is no time to form rapport, and the banter is terrible. Fast modern internet connections can sustain multiple players in high-fidelity playgrounds, but they are increasingly designed to foster hollow transactional interactions—spend time, earn points, then head into another session full of different strangers and repeat. 

The humble RTS AI doesn't do banter. It doesn't swear and disconnect when things are going badly for it. It takes a beating in noble silence and tries its very best right up to the end. The Orks keep marching enthusiastically on my base as the victory counter ticks over believing, in a very Orkish way, that they can still win as long as they keep hitting the big thing at the other end of the map.

RTS AI can be dumb, but in reassuringly consistent way. And it's a great punching bag in co-op. Sometimes RTS AI cheats by giving bonus resources to the CPU army, particularly on harder difficulties, which creates a fun last stand scenario that isn't so high pressured that you can't chat over the game. It's a silent opponent that facilitates a good time, one that you can load up in a moment's notice. Artificial RTS opponents are great. To show my appreciation, I will continue to destroy them over and over again forever.

In an interview with Edge magazine back in May 2013, Irish comedian and videogame enthusiast Dara O'Briain—who often works videogame-related material into his stand up routines—spoke of how few games tackle comedy nowadays. Citing Portal as his then most recent example of comedy-done-well, he suggested writing is key to delivering credible humour and that while "you probably don't want a comedy game, there's no reason why you shouldn't bounce [comedy] off it." 

O'Briain speaks of how, from his point of view four years ago, the industry had a tendency towards the 'dream sequence' concept where animators have the chance to flex their imaginative muscles. While he enjoyed games such as Dear Esther and Journey, there was little amusing happening from a contemporary perspective. "If you do something funny," he said, "like 'the cake is a lie', then people will thank you for it forever—Valve will never quite live down how great that was."

Portal is a great example of comedy in games—GLaDOS is easily one of the smartest and funniest videogame characters of all time—as is The Stanley Parable by virtue of its wonderful and equally deceptive omnipresent narrator. Grand Theft Auto's relentlessly satirical tongue-and-cheek swipes at the modern age often oscillate between funny and cringeworthy; and any one of LucasArts' classics is littered with jokes and puns. Yet no game has tickled my funny bone in quite the same way Revolution Software's Broken Sword did—both when I first played in 1996, and when I revisited it and its 1997 The Smoking Mirror sequel last year.

"The sergeant was a scrawny man in his 50s who resembled a constipated chicken," is the first gag from protagonist George Stobbart that prepubescent me would've found hilarious. Stobbart's sense of humour is often observational, much of which is projected via his methodological thought processes and internal monologues. 

Granted I found wisecracks like the above less funny upon returning as an adult, however did find the game's more sophisticated, slightly more mature humour more appealing in turn. I realised few games have struck such a perfect balance between comedy and intuitive mechanics since—something which is most prevalent when Stobbart's witticisms are received by the game's (and subsequent series') desultory and equally sharp-witted cast of NPCs.  

"He was a pear-shaped guy with a fine display of multiple chins." 

"The fish was wet and slimy, and decidedly dead." 

"I felt a slight twinge of conscience as I prepared to give the dog a dunking. It soon passed." 

"He had the eyes of a cocker spaniel set in a face like a deflated soufflé." 

These are but a few of Stobbart's one-liners which still amuse today. And it gets better when in conversation with others (thanks to IMDB): 

Stobbart: Let's just say I'm working in the interests of truth and justice.
Todryk (a local tailor): Ah, Thank God, I thought you were the police.

Stobbart: You speak very good English for a French girl.
Nicole Collard (a journalist): Thanks. You speak very good English for an American. 

Moue (a police officer): [pointing a gun at George] Freeze! Hold it... right there!
Stobbart: Woah! Don't shoot! I'm innocent! I'm an American!
Moue: Can't make up your mind, huh? 

Stobbart: How did you and Rosso arrive at the scene so quickly? Was it a tip-off?
Moue: Inspector Rosso's sources are a mystery to me, m'sieur. Some say, he has made a pact with the devil.
Stobbart: What do you think?
Moue: I think, he IS the devil. 

Stobbart: Look Sergeant, the Inspector gave me his card.
Moue: Yes, m'sieur. He wants you to advise him if you have any information concerning this case.
Stobbart: Well, I'd be glad to talk with him, but I don't want him working his psycho-weirdness on me.
Moue: Ah! Non, monsieur, you are confusing the science of parapsychology with witchcraft.
Stobbart: Oh yeah? What's the difference?
Moue: We don't do sacrifices. 

While writing about Broken Sword's origins last year, I caught up with series mastermind Charles Cecil and asked him specifically about humour and he and his team's ability to deliver funny jokes. This quote didn't make it into the final article, however speaks directly to where much of the humour came from: the late writer Dave Cummins.  

"Really a lot of the first four games—Lure of the Temptress, Beneath a Steel Sky and the first two Broken Sword games—were a juxtaposition as myself as the lead designer and writer, and a writer named Dave Cummins," Cecil explained. "Dave had actually been a games tester at Activision with me, he’d worked for me in the test department, and he used to write beautifully. I remember one of his test reports on a particular adventure was so much better written than the adventure itself—it was extraordinarily ironic. 

"When Activision collapsed I offered him a job and I was writing the more serious stuff with a fairly obvious sense of humour, but he had a really dry acerbic wit. A lot of those lines for George came straight from his head. Dave passed away a number of years ago but I’m keen to give him full credit for a lot of the dialogue in those early games." 

Some of Cummins' writing was vetoed along the way, admits Cecil, but "those very clever, witty lines very much came from the mind of Dave."

The Broken Sword series celebrated its 20th year anniversary in 2016, and the fact that its humour and ability to deliver genuinely funny comedy some two decades on is still being spoken about today is testament to Cummins, Cecil and Revolution's writing prowess. George Stobbart is certainly the funniest videogame character I've ever met, and it'll take someone pretty special to come along for that to change. 

As my taxi's wipers cleaned off the blood that was smeared across my windshield, I wondered how many people I'd actually saved by deactivating the bomb. 

Moments earlier, I was hurtling down a busy Chinatown thoroughfare in pursuit of a stolen ambulance thought to be armed with explosives. I took out lamp posts in my wake, as well as traffic lights, roadside crates, trash cans, and, unfortunately, pedestrians. By ramming the wayward vehicle from behind, I was able to carry out a controlled blast which to my knowledge prevented the entire city from being wiped out. But it wasn't until I drove back the way I came that I was able to appreciate the destruction I'd caused.     

It was around this time 20 years ago that I first played Die Hard Trilogy. Pretty much all of my mates were raving about the PlayStation version at the time, so I was delighted to receive Probe Entertainment's three game-boasting ode to the movie series on PC as an early birthday present in '97. 

But I was a bit underwhelmed. The first game was glitchy, the second was a lacklustre on-rails shooter, and the third involved acting out the frantic bomb defusal routine noted above time and time and time again. One thing I found truly remarkable, though, was how many innocent people I could kill on the streets of NYC or within D.C.'s Dulles Airport with absolutely zero repercussions. 

In videogames, filling the shoes of law breaking, trigger-happy and otherwise destructive 'heroes' is hardly a new concept, but I've always admired the games which tie proper consequence to such maverick behaviour. The Grand Theft Auto series, for example, sets the authorities on players for falling foul of the rules and while these pursuits can and often do escalate into chaotic shootouts, many games leverage less forgiving checks and balances against GTA's tiered wanted system. 

My first experience of this was with SimCity 2000. After elevating myself to business tycoon status by way of Theme Park's 'HORZA' money cheat, I learned of the city-builder's similar cash-generating 'FUND' passcode. But I hadn't realised the windfall took the form of a loan—a 25 percent loan, at that—and that by abusing this perceived financial leg-up, I'd prompt a devastating earthquake on my wonderful town and its unwitting civilians.  

This was the game's way of punishing cheaters which of course made me think twice about using it again. Even on the occasions where I either a) avoided the earthquake or b) survived it, the crippling debt I found myself thereafter in ultimately proved untenable.   

At the time I was under the impression SimCity 2000 was simply a cruel game, and as such wound up finding myself in a similar situation just a couple of years later. In LucasArts' heaven-and-hell city-builder Afterlife, typing '$@!' in the main game screen landed you a surplus ten million pennies (I genuinely didn't need to Google this which likely speaks volumes of my character) to spend as you see fit. 

But, again, abusing this trick was not recommended as it would invite an all-black Deathstar-like ship which rained piercing yellow lasers upon your constructions—a sure way to put you off overdoing the cheats.  

Fast forward two decades and I'm still amazed by Skyrim's stealthy Bounty Collectors who have on more than one occasion chased me across the plains of Whiterun Hold for pickpocketing too many locals in Windhelm. Likewise, the way Guild Wars deals with cheating is fantastic: by putting offenders to death by the blade of executioner Dhuum—a process which sees cheaters banned from servers too. 

And who could forget perhaps the fiercest justice bringers of all: Spelunky's shopkeepers. Those of you who've sought to swipe any of their wares while cave-diving will know the shotgun-wielding tellers do not take anything lying down, to the point where they track your every move en route to the game's ultimate Hell arena—and even adorn their walls with 'WANTED' posters starring your mugshot. 

Be it in-game stealing, murdering, or all-round lawbreaking—or even real-life cheating—there's something to be said for accountability in games as it forces you to really consider your actions. If you do the crime, do the time, as the old adage goes, and if you're able to fight the law and win, well, more power to you. 

But I bet you'll regret stumbling upon Spelunky's secret Black Market level after that last shoplifting spree. Rather you than me! 

As I lie crouched in the long grass next to a gathering of Sir, You Are Being Hunted's hostile robot pursuers, I'm transported back to my childhood. I'm back in the Glasgow housing scheme I spent the majority of my youth running around in, all the while hiding from gangs of tougher lads from neighbouring areas because I'm a shitbag, a fraidy cat, a chicken—similar to how I am now, neck-deep in reeds in one of Sir's procedurally-generated pastoral landscapes.  

But this time it's different. This time it's all for the sake of bringing down a relentless automaton army, and I've got my tactics down to a tee. Ever read Sun Tzu's The Art of War? I did once, and while I struggle to see any credible correlation between the late military strategist's battle text and modern day entrepreneurialism, taken literally it's helping here. There's water at my back, a hillside flanking my left, and fences to my right. I'm all set for victory. 

Until I stand in a bear trap. And not just any bear trap. My own fucking bear trap. 

In an instant the gig is up, mechanical gunfire is rained upon me and, needless to say, my maker is very promptly met. I'll chalk this one up to yet another misadventure in my enduring relationship with videogame traps, and while I'd love to tell you I'll learn from my mistakes I almost certainly won't. I've been here before, you see, on several occasions. 

The first time I remember inadvertently blowing myself up with a self-set bomb was when playing Spy vs Spy on my dad's Atari ST in the early '90s. I was so taken with the idea of 'secretly' planting bombs in drawers for my splitscreen opponent to haphazardly stumble upon, that I'd often fill too many areas with traps and wind up catching myself out. 

I spent years thereafter tracking games which offered similar levels of trap-based autonomy. Plenty of games throw traps at players as forms of obstacles, where they exist simply to be avoided or deactivated, but there's something magical about the ones which leave the responsibility with the player—be that in attack, defence, or, you know, reckless self-harm.  

BioShock's plasmid system is a wonderful example of intuitive trap setting, whereby players can adopt a mix-and-match approach to the disposal of enemy splicers. Sure, taking them on head-first with melee and/or conventional weapons is the most obvious route to surviving Rapture, however the thrill of setting bad guys alight before sending a lightning bolt into the pool of water he or she is dousing the flames in is second to none. I once asked the game's lead designer Paul Hellquist why he thought setting virtual traps was such an enjoyable endeavour, to which he replied: "It makes the player feel smart."

And, for me at least, that's exactly right. No matter how crude my plans ultimately play out, successfully snaring an unwitting opponent by way of a well-placed trap is an absolute joy. The first time I took down a Super Mutant in Fallout 3 involved me taunting the beast with some pithy pistol rounds, before leading it down a Vault 87 corridor towards a nearby succession of mines. I stood too close and was also offed in the blast radius, however was also delighted to thwart such a tough adversary—as bittersweet as this particular 'victory' was. Perhaps I'm not as smart as I think.  

I performed this trick several times recently with Resident Evil 7's remote bombs, however perhaps the best instance of trap setting befalls Dishonored and its vermin-ridden Dunwall. By leveraging a combo of Corvo's Possession power and a spring razor, the masked protagonist can attach the trap to a rat, possess said rat, and lead set rat into a group of enemy sentries—breaking the possession at the last minute, just as the razor activates to devastating effect. Chain-linking this trait in Dishonored 2 yields some equally impressive effects, as does a number of the sequel's newly introduced powers.

Furthermore, contrary to well-thought out virtual trap laying, games like Orcs Must Die prove there is just as much fun to be had in mindless set ups—where the sole purpose of the game is using traps to simply thwart your enemies. It must be said that orcs get a pretty hard time across all game genres, but there is a lot of fun to be had in dropping them into tar pits or squishing them with spiked contraptions nevertheless. 

Between being made to feel in smart and being offered choice, laying traps in games is an activity I'll never tire of. Be it in successfully defeating an irradiated monster, eliminating the white mouse with a well-place drawer bomb, or by standing in my own friggin bear traps—I'll continue to challenge game obstacles by thinking outside the box or die trying. Die and die and die trying.

As an exaggerated snapshot of life in the 2010s, it was inevitable Watch Dogs 2 would include an Uber-like taxi company. In this alternate reality it’s called Driver San Francisco—a nod to Driver creator Ubisoft Reflections, who designed the game’s vehicle handling—and allows Marcus to make some extra money on the side as a taxi driver. Grand Theft Auto had taxi missions years ago, but there wasn’t much to them besides driving from A to B against the clock. In Watch Dogs 2 they’re more bespoke, with stories and a few surprises, and this elevates them above the usual open-world filler.

Uber is famously controversial, with stories emerging of drivers being attacked by traditional taxi drivers who feel their livelihoods are being threatened. I don’t know how accurate or widespread these stories are, but they’re common enough that Watch Dogs 2 directly references them in its ‘Just Earning a Living’ Driver mission. You pick up a guy called Roman who’s asking a lot of questions about your job, and being slightly passive aggressive about it. Then when you arrive at his chosen destination you’re ambushed by a group of armed men. It doesn’t actually say they’re disgruntled taxi drivers, but it doesn’t have to. This is a good example of how the game’s taxi missions often have unexpected, and sometimes violent, outcomes.

But others are more light-hearted. In one mission a paranoid conspiracy nut asks you follow a drone buzzing over Silicon Valley, which involves a challenging section of fast-paced off-road driving. In another a baseball coach hires you to search the local dive bars near the stadium for a star player who’s gone missing on the day of the big game. These little micro-stories are simple and throwaway, but they give the taxi missions some added personality. You’ll rush a bride to the church to get married, hunt for a stolen car, search for a programmer’s missing robot, and more. They’re little comical snippets of life in the city you don’t otherwise get a taste of in the main game, which helps flesh out the setting in an entertaining, interactive way.

Special passengers like these are referred to as VIPs, which means their journey will have dialogue, set-pieces, and often multiple objectives. But once you’ve finished all 16 of them and reached the highest Driver SF rank, you don’t have to hang up your driving gloves. Open the app and you’ll find an endless selection of randomly generated taxi missions. They’ll have certain rules like never dropping below a certain speed or taking as little damage as possible, but they’re pretty easy, making them a great way to explore the game’s beautiful, detailed recreation of the San Francisco Bay Area. As far as open worlds go, I think Watch Dogs 2 is second only to Grand Theft Auto V in terms of atmosphere, attention to detail, and world-building.

Open-world games are guilty of filler missions more than any other genre. Developers stuff their worlds with pointless tasks designed to artificially extend the game’s length or make it seem bigger than it actually is. However, Watch Dogs 2 is different—for the most part, Ubisoft makes every distraction and side mission worthwhile by giving it a hand-crafted charm. The ScoutX app, which tasks you with taking selfies next to famous landmarks and points of interest, is a great way of exploring and getting to know the city—and I love how your DedSec pals leave comments under the photos when you post them. Compare this to running around catching fluttering bits of paper or collecting feathers in Assassin’s Creed and it’s clear which one respects your time more.

And even when you’re just doing randomly generated taxi missions, the city is so stunning that there’s value in that too. It’s relaxing in the same way as something like Euro Truck Simulator, and I’ve spent a good hour just driving around and taking in the atmosphere. The Golden Gate Bridge, which is often shrouded in fog, is a remarkable sight. And although the city feels pretty small, especially compared to Grand Theft Auto V’s sprawling Los Santos, it captures the look and feel of San Francisco perfectly. I don’t think I’d enjoy being an Uber driver in real life—especially when people start spilling out of pubs and clubs and puking on your upholstery—but it’s certainly fun pretending to be one in Watch Dogs 2.

Here's the thing: I don't gamble in real life. Glasgow, where I live, is full of bookmakers and casinos, and while I don't take issue with anyone who does throw money at roulette or horses or sport—so long as it's lawful—it's just something that's never interested me. I've worked in pubs where Racing UK was as much a regular as old Jimmy who drank a pint of Guinness and a half measure of whisky, and I've had a season ticket at my favourite football/soccer team for almost 20 years; yet parting with my cash against someone else's odds has never struck my fancy. In videogames, though, it's a different story. 

Perhaps it's the notion of spending someone else's money—albeit a videogame avatar controlled by me—that I find so alluring, or the fact that I know there's no real risk in bankrupting my virtual earnings besides the chore of regenerating my money pot in whichever way the game in question allows. 

My first in-game casino visit occurred in 1992's Mercenary 3: The Dion Crisis for the Atari ST. A game well ahead of its time, Novagen's Software's open-world exploration adventure offered multiple endings as the eponymous mercenary set about bringing down the game's corrupt antagonist PC BIL. One such way of toppling the unscrupulous politician's regime involved bankrupting his debt-laden empire—a feat which could be achieved by winning large sums of cash at Uncle's Casino and Bosher's Bar. 

A well-positioned magnet could swing the odds in your favour, however hitting the jackpot by virtue of one-armed bandits and Wheel of Fortune machines was an absolute joy—particularly when it meant usurping BIL. 

Years later, I fell in love with Fallout 2's mining town Redding, as it offered a wealth of gambling opportunities in arcade machines, roulette, and the rather unsavoury Molerat Mambo. Bioshock's infamous Fort Frolic zone housed Pharaoh's Fortune, wherein slot machines cost an asynchronous ten dollars a pop; and Grand Theft Auto San Andreas' Las Venturas mirrored real life Vegas as a desert city brimming with casinos such as The Camel's Toe and Caligula's Palace. 

Away from these games' central narratives, I thrived in bankrolling frivolous expeditions to in-game casinos and bars where I'd spend hours on end frittering away my in-game budget or delighting in the occasions where I won big. But why? Why did I care whether or not I won or lost or broke even—especially when I didn't give a toss about gambling in real life. Why do I find betting fake money in virtual casinos so darn enjoyable?

Psychology professor Graham Scott of the University of the West of Scotland suggests anonymity and a lack of empathy could be what drives my weird misplaced passion. 

"When you consider theft," says Scott, "there's a higher number of people who commit fraud and identity theft online than offline. One of the reasons behind this pertains to the fact the online world offers a degree of isolation. In turn, the consequences of your actions are less obvious and don't seem as important. 

"In videogames you're far less likely to care about how your actions directly affect others—which can in this case relate to gambling with money that isn't real. Whereas in the real world gambling has consequences—it can often land you in debt, which in turn can affect the individual and his or her family and friends—doing so within a virtual environment is the equivalent of having a digitised 'get out of jail free' card, I suppose.

"I often refer to Grand Theft Auto which is a good example of a game that lets you do things you could do in real life, but, because most of us are well-natured law-abiding people, choose not to. Stealing cars, fighting your neighbours, and, as you say, gambling are all possible in Grand Theft Auto but are often acts which help players to complete missions. In essence, you control a character with a personality who is following a pre-set script. 

"It's worth noting that while most adults can distinguish between reality and fantasy that repeated exposure to these behaviours could desensitise and normalise them. That's always worth watching out for."

Now, I'm fairly certain I won't allow my in-game habits to spill into my real life, however it's nevertheless nice to know there's some scientific grounding in my gamified behaviour. Which is of course totally justifies my in-game ludomania. 

If you need me, I'll be at Mercenary 3's Boshers Bar which, incidentally, isn't nearly as glamorous as it may sound:

I'd never heard of panic rooms until I watched the titular 2002 Jodie Foster and Kristen Stewart-starring thriller of the same name. Growing up Glasgow, any bother I'd encountered at this point in my life took place outwith my home, and often involved gangs of youths bigger and stronger than I gratuitously chasing me and my mates around the streets because, well, they were bigger and stronger than us. At home things were suitably quiet, and my parents' need to splash out on a panic room in suburbia was eclipsed by the cost of raising an awkward teen with a seemingly never-ending appetite.

I had no reason to know what a panic room was, then, until I watched Foster and Stewart in action. Except I did know what a panic room was. Because I'd been unwittingly visiting them for years. 

My first stay came off the back of a hard-fought three-on-one situation, where a trio of undead T-Virus-infected bogeymen cornered me at the foot of a stairwell. I unloaded my 15-round S.T.A.R.S. issue baretta twice over, before their corpses finally slouched to the deck and large pools of crimson oozed over the floor. Gun raised and heart pounding, I hung a sharp right and entered the box room ahead. I was met with this: 

That ever-so-sweet melody would go on to define my stay at the Spencer Mansion—the main setting of the original Resident Evil (and it's 2002/2015 remake). I love horror games, but at the same time I'm a bit of shit bag and thus my earliest memories of the Resident Evil series don't always revolve around zombies and Lickers and Tyrants, but often instead involve me limping around their grounds with little ammo and even less health—bumbling from room to room in search of an ever-elusive typewriter. 

Save rooms were my Resi-slanted panic rooms, and I found as much joy in entering a room to the above theme as I did stumbling across ammo or taking down a mid-zone boss. With that door closed nothing could get me, and I was able to revel in the scant reprieve the four walls offered before soldiering out into the wilderness once more. 

In Resident Evil 2, I spent the best part of 20 minutes hiding in the save room immediately following that wall-shattering run-in with this guy. After almost crawling there—Claire all the while clutching her rib cage and nursing a terrible limp—I stood back from my computer, caught my breath, went to the toilet, made a cup of tea, and then waited another five minutes or so before resuming. RE2 afforded me a few of these moments, thus this melody is forever etched into my brain: 

As I mentioned in our list of Resident Evil games ranked from worst to best list, the third series entry, Nemesis, was the first to give enemies the ability to travel through closed doors after you'd activated the area-loading door opening animation. The first time I thought I'd lost Nemesis only for it to burst through a closed gate and continue its brutal hunt nearly gave me a heart attack—therefore the sanctuary of the save room became more important here than ever. The S.T.A.R.S.-despising monster could chase me anywhere on the map, yet the save room was immune to its relentless pursuit. 

At the time, I remember thinking RE 3's save room theme was a little more sinister against its forerunners, but, in light of the above, I don't think I was overly fussed with its composition when it came down to it.

I've visited many Resident Evil save rooms since—some more than others—and have now sunk a few hours into the latest series entry, Resident Evil 7. As you'll have undoubtedly spotted elsewhere, its first-person makeup and decision to part ways with its familiar series-serving cast has taken it in a bold and new direction. 

After some uncertain first steps, I'm now engrossed in a game which does feel fresh but also feels very Resident Evil-like. Locating keys strewn around an incongruously designed map, scouring every nook and cranny for health tonics and ammo supplies, and battling strange, hostile and ungodly creatures feels familiar but is no less enjoyable than before. 

I've had my fair share of panicked moments already, but they've been nothing the sound of entering a room to the following melody hasn't helped soothe. 

If you're playing a first-person game in 2017 your character probably has hands. Let's not take this for granted; in Half-Life 2 we picked up cups and threw them at combine soldiers using magic. Hands in first-person games are great. They can gesture, hesitate, declare intent, swear, punch—all the videogame things. They affect the world and communicate at the same time. I want to see Gordon Freeman's fat wiggling fingers wrap themselves tightly around the cup, and then splay outwards upon release, perhaps curling again to form a thumbs-up as the mug clatters off the soldier's stupid face.

Hands in games keep getting better. Last night I was playing Resident Evil 7, a game that repeatedly tries to murder your hands. They are stabbed, smashed, chopped up with such violence that it's a relief to watch Ethan pour soothing healing juice all over them. Resi 7 wants you to love those hands. When you go near a wall they go up and press up against the surface as if to say 'careful, dear player'. The block button sends them up in defensive claws. 'I've got this,' they say, 'we can catch that chainsaw for you.' Thanks hands, you're the best. 

Of course they never feel like my hands, but this is the other fascinating thing about hands in games. Sensibly, you don't generally get the chance to see other people's hands up close for extended periods. They're amazing, precise, fantastically articulate tools, and I love the way animators bring them to life. Resi 7's engine is really good at modeling the way light interacts with different surfaces. Ethan's hands seem luminous and alive when they pass through the torch light. Thin and pale, they show how hands can capture an entire game's aesthetic. Compare Resi's realism to Henry's big cartoon hands in Firewatch.

I don't find myself embodied in a 1:1 sense by hands in first-person games. I feel like a tourist, borrowing someone else's arms. There are drawbacks. The way Half-Life 2, Amnesia and pals give you telekinetic powers provides a more direct connection to the game world, and elaborate hand animations effectively put a little cutscene between you and the object you're trying to manipulate. Alien: Isolation strikes a good balance. The complicated locks and terminals of the  Sevastopol demand some small manual actions from you, so it feels like you're doing the work rather than someone reaching around to do it for you.

Hands are good at being silent actors too. Use the insect swarm plasmid in Bioshock and your shuddering, convulsing palm communicates the deep discomfort that only comes from having an arm full of angry bees. Think of the scene when Booker reaches out to catch Elizabeth as they tumble through the sky-city—a truly heroic hand moment. Let's put ours together, and applaud the artists and animators putting so much effort into digitising our hams. Also, check out our round-up of the loveliest hand animations in PC gaming, complete with gifs of course.

Big complicated strategy games live or die on their UI. Too much information puts off new players, not enough information handicaps players, and the line between 'too much' and 'not enough' changes from person to person.

It's particularly tricky for 4X grand strategy games, because they tend to offer little in the way of immediate reward; your opening experience tends to be a wrestling match with the UI. You have to wander blindly through dozens of menus to learn how a dozen different resources and icons interact. Normally the first fun thing you get to do is scout new areas. Even if significance of your discoveries aren't initially obvious, uncovering a map and widening your playspace feels good.

A good interface eases you into this scouting phase quickly, while still showing you essential information that stops you from making stupid mistakes. Stellaris—specifically Stellaris' galaxy map—does this brilliantly. You start in a solar system, micromanaging scouting vessels and learning the game's systems on a small local scale. Once you've grasped that, you discover that you can manage almost everything you need to on a galaxy-wide scale from a single screen. It looks like this:

This still looks like a lot of info, but it's beautiful to use. Ships in a system are represented by small green ship icons; you can select them directly or pick them out of the taskbar on the right. With a ship selected you right-click on any star or anomaly—represented by a yellow exclamation mark—to get a context-sensitive list of tasks the ship can perform there.

Once a task is underway, a completion bar appears in the right-hand task bar that describes exactly what the ship is up to, while also giving you an impression of how long the task will take. It sounds simple, but few strategy games make the process of moving pawns around to execute moves this clear and easy. It's a long way from Paradox' overwhelming strategy games, Crusader Kings 2 and the Europa Universalis series. Stellaris shows you exactly what you need to know using the familiar language of operating systems—right-click menus, loading bars, and so on.

Resource management is also excellent. Once you've scouted a system its resources are listed with an icon and a number under the node on the galaxy map. To exploit resources you need to build mining and research stations. If a resource point doesn't have a station attached, it appears in white on the galaxy map. Once you've built a station, the number turns green. It's a small but brilliant bit of design. You can glance at your entire empire and instantly know what you need to build where.

The game is also excellently tool-tipped. You can mouse over anything for an explanation, and hold the mouse-over for extended tooltips. Sometimes if a tooltip thinks you might want more specific information, it tells you what to point at to get that info. For example, ship upgrades come in small, medium and large varieties. Mouse over the weapon image and it tells you what the thing does, before directing you to mouse over the small, medium or large item icons to get specific stats for each variation. Beautiful.

These seem like tiny things, but they make a huge difference to the flow of a data-driven strategy game. I've only been playing Stellaris for a few hours and controlling my empire has become second-nature, and I'm not wrestling with menus set within menus. That means I have more time to think about strategy, and whether that faction of space turtles is about to turn on me or not.

A lot of 1970s science fiction has aged badly, but Alien hasn’t. This is down to several factors, including director Ridley Scott’s insistence on realism over flashy effects, and the practical, industrial designs of concept artist Ron Cobb. In the Alien universe, space travel is not glamorous or exciting; it’s completely matter-of-fact. The crew of the Nostromo aren’t in awe of the fact that they’re travelling between the stars. They just want to get paid and get home. And this is reflected in the stark, functional design of the Nostromo, which is more like an oil rig or a submarine than the fantastical ships we’re used to seeing in sci-fi cinema. 

In Alien: Isolation, The Creative Assembly used Scott’s 1979 film as the basis for the game’s bold art design. Fox gave the developers access to a colossal 3TB archive of production material, including unreleased photos of the sets, and from this they created their own world using the same utilitarian design philosophy. The result is a setting that doesn’t just look like Alien, but feels like an authentic part of its universe. Sevastopol, like the Nostromo, is the product of a society where all the wonder and adventure of space travel has been replaced by business. I’ve always loved that about the Alien series. Much sci-fi is optimistic, dreaming of a brighter future, but in this universe, space is just another way to turn a profit.

It’s remarkable that, even with the presence of chunky IBM-style keyboards, flickering CRT monitors, and reel-to-reel tape players, Isolation’s setting doesn’t feel like an archaic throwback to the 1970s. You completely buy into its retrofuturistic design, a result of how artfully understated everything is. You get the sense that this technology is a natural part of the setting, rather than something included to evoke a particular time period or aesthetic. It’s an attention to detail and a dedication to believable worldbuilding that sets both Alien and Alien: Isolation apart in their respective genres. 

In an interview in Paul Scanlon’s Book of Alien, Ron Cobb says: “I resent films that are so shallow they rely entirely on their visual effects. I’ve always felt that a lot of effort should be made to render each environment as convincingly as possible, but always in the background.” And that’s what Isolation, and the film, do so well. They invite you to credible sci-fi worlds that don’t rely on far-fetched technology and fancy special effects to convince you that you’re in the future. You believe you are because it seems real. The more grounded a setting is, even if it’s fantasy or science fiction, the easier it is to relate to it. That’s why something like prequel Prometheus, with its showy holographic computer interfaces, isn’t as convincing as Alien, despite major advances in effects technology.

Alien: Isolation also takes deeper inspiration from the film’s design. The cold claustrophobia of the Nostromo is a big part of Alien’s power as as horror film, but the lo-fitechnology plays a part here too. In a lot of sci-fi there’s some magical device or weapon that saves the day, but all the crew of the Nostromo have to fight the alien is a cattle prod, a primitive motion tracker, and some rusty old flamethrowers. This establishes that, even in this advanced spacefaring future, technology won’t save you; you have to rely on your wits. And the game echoes this brilliantly. The crude technology actually adds to the horror, because you never feel like there’s a miraculous technological solution to your problems. 

Alien: Isolation is proof that, when it comes to science fiction, less can be more. Videogame sci-fi is often shiny and ostentatious, as artists strive to show you just how incredibly futuristic they can make their worlds look. But Sevastopol is more convincing than any of them, because it keeps it in the background. Granted, the artists at The Creative Assembly had some incredible source material to work with. But rather than just recreate the film’s sets, they used that enormous archive of reference material as a starting point to craft their own distinctive extension of the film. Alien: Isolation is a passionate, faithful homage to the film, but it’s also a worthy addition to the universe and mythology in its own right.

I have a ritual for leaving my house. "Phone, wallet, keys," I say aloud each time I step over the threshold, physically tapping each item as I go. It sounds daft, but it's a learned routine that ensures I never set off without the three things I rely on most throughout the day. Phone in right-hand pocket—tap. Wallet in left-hand pocket—tap. Keys in jacket breast pocket—tap. Phone, wallet, keys. And I'm off out the door. 

This habitual infatuation keeps me right and it's something I've historically transferred to videogames. Don't get me wrong, the rest of my real life is hardly this organised, but, my goodness, are my digital incarnations regimentally systematised to the point of obsession. 

This fixation stems from the 1988 NES classic Mega Man 2. I recall playing it at a mate's house in the early '90s and although I fell in love with its challenging platforming and power-specific zones, its inventory system was a bloody mess. Whoever decided marking each arm-mounted weapon with a single letter within the pause menu was a good idea clearly does not undertake the phone, wallet, keys routine, as pulling up the correct firearm felt like a game of Russian Roulette each time I scrambled to face-off against an encroaching Blocky or Flybot. 

From thereon inventory management became a yardstick against which I judged my videogame enjoyment. Doom's inventory, for example, was obtrusive but I liked how I could view my arsenal of weapons at all times and could cycle each gun in and out at will. Similarly, The Secret of Monkey Island's item HUD commandeered roughly a third of the screen yet a clear view of what I could mix and match, and incongruously meld together, helped me best its at times outlandish puzzles that bit easier. Broken Sword's exhaustive trial and error system wasn't quite as intuitive, but its charming aesthetic made rifling through its options less of a chore; and Resident Evil's limited space management taught me the value of preservation and survival.

Perhaps the best inventory system I came across in my formative years, though, was the one found in Diablo 2. This was where my perceived obsession really kicked in as I had autonomy, not to mention responsibility, over each placement —more so than anything Chris Redfield and/or Jill Valentine had fumbled with before. Diablo 2's Tetris-like inventory screen was in essence a puzzle game in itself, and I lost hours to coordinating my best-suited depository alone, never mind roaming the hellish depths of Sanctuary. If I struggled to draw an item quickly in battle, I'd be straight back to the drawing board and wouldn't brave combat again until I'd set the perfect ensemble. 

For me, few games have matched this standard since. I liked Resident Evil 4's evolution of the original games' foundations, and I'm fond of Dark Souls' similarly limiting setup—although I suspect the latter is down to familiarity and the amount of hours I've sunk into Lordran. While I've not played an inordinate amount of Dota 2, I understand that it boasts just six activated item slots but that there are a ridiculously large number of possibilities that can be leveraged from idiosyncratic loadouts—something which can only uncovered after several hours of play. WoW, on the other hand, starts new players off with a distinctly small inventory space yet high-level players' menus can span the entire screen. 

Is there such a thing as too much choice? For me, inventory management comes down to efficiency. If I can't access the item I'm after almost instantly, my setup is no good. I'll spend hours tinkering with menus till I get them just right in my head—poring over the value of individual items, even contemplating superficial factors such as size and colour.   

Assigning bindings and hot keys of course makes the entire process more fluid, yet there's something about manual organisation that makes my own victories and achievements feel more deserved. I take great satisfaction from accessing a key, weapon or special item from an inventory at lightning speeds—faster than you can tap your pockets and say: 'phone, wallet, keys.'

Some of the best games I've ever played aren't games at all. That is to say: some of my fondest gaming memories have come courtesy of total conversion mods—modifications which take some of the best and most well-known classics and radically transform them into new and exciting things. I imagine most of you will have played at least one total conversion at some point in your gaming careers, but Chris' list of the best total conversion mods ever gathers a large number of my own favourites and may point some of you towards mods you haven't yet played. 

The benefits of total conversion mods are probably pretty obvious. First and foremost, they extend the time spent wandering our favourite game worlds; and quite often offer players the chance to visit new realms and arenas tied to the games in question. These scenarios tend to be dreamt up by hobbyist modders—people who, like you, are fans of the relevant series. The best total conversions therefore portray likely circumstances and credible characters which complement their source material. 

What I love most about total conversion mods is tied to that last part. As hobbyists, the folk behind these projects create them for free—at times designing worlds similar in scope and size to big budget games, fitting development time around full-time employment among other real life distractions. Many have went on to earn cash from their endeavours eventually, but the vast majority of developers start out driven by passion alone. Over the years I've chatted to a few of the devs responsible for some of my favourite total conversions and it's their stories which have been among the most interesting I've ever heard. 

Minh Le is a name some of you will know well. Le, who otherwise goes by the pseudonym Gooseman, is a freelance programmer, modeller and designer for Facepunch Studios' open-world survival game Rust—however also co-founded the one-time Half-Life mod Counter-Strike with Jesse Cliffe in 1999. 

As I'm sure most of you are aware, Counter-Strike has gone onto become pretty popular, however it wasn't until last year that I discovered Le and Cliffe spent the first three years of their respective Valve careers without actually meeting in person. When Valve approached the duo about acquiring the mod they'd crafted using the original Half-Life GoldSource engine, Le moved from Canada to Valve's Seattle HQ while Cliffe spent the next few years finishing school. It was only after this time that Le and Cliffe were ever in the same room together. 

Valve's GoldSource engine and its Half-Life 2 Source engine have been responsible for a number of other total conversion success stories. Garry's Mod celebrates ten years on Steam this year and has seen its community grow exponentially—not to mention its multitude of user-made game modes—in that time. Unlike Counter-Strike's more focused beginnings, Garry Newman designed the sandbox game which would eventually allow him to take up game development full-time as a result of messing around with the Source engine and a desire to see how far he could push it. 

Newman learned coding on the job and in a chat earlier this year told me that without Source Control pre-release, GMod game crashes meant he was forced to bin all previous work and start the entire game from scratch every time he encountered bug-related problems. Further crashes meant repeating this process and then hoping for the best in the next run.

Other total conversion stories of intrigue include Sven Co-op, another Half-Life mod which, although created in 1999, was continually developed and iterated on before finding its way onto Steam for free earlier this year. The prolific and super efficient work of Elder Scrolls enthusiasts and hobbyist modders SureAI has seen the likes of Nehrim and Enderal come to be—both hugely impressive Oblivion and Skyrim mods which are arguably as good, or at least equally as ambitious, as their source material. 

XCOM: Enemy Unknown's ultra-challenging Long War total conversion mod is another of my own personal favourites about which creator John Lumpkin told me back in July: “Last September, I went to the Firaxis offices when they were in the fairly late stages of polishing XCOM 2. I met Jake Solomon there and showed him what XCOM: Enemy Unknown modding looked like. He wondered aloud if I had closets full of chains and leather.”    

He doesn't, it turns out, but Lumpkin's story—not to mention those touched upon above—is but one of thousands of interesting anecdotes behind some of the most outstanding mods-cum-games I've ever played. Furthermore, the dedicated communities these mods have inspired make the mods themselves even more inspiring in my book. Again, Chris' 'best of' list is well worth checking out, and I'd love for you to share your own favourite total conversion stories in the comments below. 

I enter the apartment and close the door at my back. "Oh... it's you," Angela Orosco says calmly. A woman wearing a cream roll neck sweater and red trousers lies flat out on her side before me. Facing a mirrored cupboard, she grips a kitchen knife above her head. A gentle piano melody plays in the background. "Yeah… I'm James," my character says, as if unphased by this unorthodox meeting. 

The conversation lasts forever. Angela is unhinged, she seems confused and is often incoherent—but against the twisted aberrations that wander the hallways of this rundown apartment block, and the fact I'm chasing the shadow of my deceased wife, I'm not even sure what that means. Angela eventually leaves, I slip back into the corridor and take down another mannequin. My status bar blinks red, I'm on my way out. I fumble forward, I check and uncheck my map, I try jammed door after jammed door. 

And then… is that? It is. A red, wall-hung save point. Thank Christ for that. Now, where the hell can I find a health tonic?

When I first played Silent Hill 2 in the early 2000s, it wasn't James Sunderland's harrowing tale of love and loss and self-reflection that terrified me most; nor was it Pyramid Head and the wealth of grotesque adversaries that stalked the haphazard protagonist's expedition through Toluca Prison, the Lakeview Hotel and the Blue Creek Apartments—it was locating the next save point without meeting my maker. Sure, it was all of the above that accentuated this fear—not to mention our James' clumsy pedestrian fighting prowess—but the sense of dread that fuelled the uncertainty of reaching the next checkpoint alive galvanised Silent Hill 2's horror in my eyes.

Around that time I'd felt similar anxiety guiding a limping Leon Kennedy around the Raccoon Police Department HQ with not one first aid spray nor ink ribbon to my name. I became so obsessed with keeping Solid Snake's progress up to date in the original Metal Gear Solid that I felt more attached to Mei Ling than I did Meryl and Otacon combined; and I forced Chris Redfield to suffer a similar fate when I returned to the Spencer Mansion via the Resident Evil Remake last year. 

I'm hardly complaining—Lara Croft's glowing purple save crystals marked moments of great achievement during my first playthrough of Tomb Raider, and I've rarely slept as soundly as I have in JRPG inns over the years. 

Tangible save points are today few and far between, yet they're responsible for so many of my favourite outstanding gaming memories. Be it besting seemingly unconquerable bosses in classic Final Fantasy games, or returning to my Hollywood Hills pad in GTA 5—the traditional save point stands as a bastion of triumph, a beacon of hope and a reminder that: yes, you did overcome that to get here. Taking a minute or two to overwrite your previous save is the temporary respite you deserve. 

Arguably the greatest save point in modern gaming history is the Dark Souls bonfire. On the off-chance you're not aware, in Dark Souls souls are farmed from fallen enemies and act as the currency that allows for character progression. Levelling up can only be done at a bonfire, however once killed you lose whatever souls you were carrying prior to your demise. These can be redeemed in the immediate next life, but this means trekking from the last bonfire at which you rested to wherever you were struck down, marked by a pool of your previous incarnation's blood. If you die again before recovering said souls at said bloodstain, they're gone forever.

Against games which incorporate auto-save systems and redundant respawns, this probably seems harsh and that's because for the most part it is. But like the early Silent Hills, Resident Evils, Tomb Raiders, and Final Fantasies et al it also marks a challenge. From the slivers Capcom has teased of its incoming Resident Evil 7, the manual save system appears to be making a return by way of voice recorders. I'll be delighted if it does, because it'll go a ways to reintroducing the degree of dread contemporary horror outings have failed to instil in recent years. 

To this day Silent Hill 2 stands as one of my all-time favourite videogames. As I've grown older I've learned to appreciate the subtleties of its story, yet I couldn't have done so without being so terrified by its more obvious horrors as I was in my formative years. With that I realise that I probably could've done more to save Angela Orosco, but I was too busy trying to save myself.

There’s something about trying to wrestle a monitor from your desk with the express intention of hurling it out of a window, only to find said window has long been painted shut, that really makes you stop and think: what am I doing? Mirror’s Edge inspires many such moments. Moments of pure rage. But in among them, there’s something else. Something special that keeps you from drowning this game in acid. 

In a game of (often literal) highs and lows, Jacknife, Mirror’s Edge’s second chapter and its longest, remains a flawed gem for me. It has made me angrier than any level bar the last, but when I sit back and regard the game in its entirety, it’s always Jacknife that I come back to as the standout. 

While a good slice of the action of this game takes place on rooftops, Jacknife offers a blistering run through some truly memorable alternate locations. From the streets and the depths of the storm drains back up to the heights again, diversity is shovelled at you like coal into a fire.

I think that’s what appeals to me the most. As beautiful as the rooftops are, some breathing room is always a good thing. And what better way to contrast the sharp, primary look of the roofs and pristine offices than going down to the streets and underworld. Alleyways and cement trenches lead to grimy maintenance rooms, there’s a brief taste of the clean outside world, then you plunge into the maw of the storm drains. 

The chore of getting down there while a helicopter vomits bullets at you is infuriating when you’re exploring and pathfinding for the first time. If you’re masochistic enough to be speed-running the level it’s ten times worse. And that helicopter… seriously? Can those guys spell “waste of public resources”?

At first I was appalled at where I found myself. What the hell am I supposed to do here? Where are the rooftops? Where are the brilliant dashes of colour against the sea of white? What have they done? I despised it. I hated struggling to navigate the perilous gantries of the imposing underground chamber, with its glistening columns stretching to infinity, let alone avoiding the searching beams of the snipers on the upper levels. 

Struggling and feeling lost here feeds your resentment. But then, slowly, as muscle memory developed and my pathfinding improved (often thanks to some useful YouTube speed-run videos) I started to appreciate the location. Despite it being such a dank, lonely place, in which you’re made to feel so small, I began to enjoy the little touches. The lighting, the water, the scuffling and squeaking of my shoes as I wall-ran and short-cutted, and occasionally managed to double jump beams.

Gliding down a slope in a sheet of water cast in a Halloweeny green was one moment that became a favourite. Right up until I realised I’d have to scramble back out of another drain, amid platforms and pipes. And then, bliss, I was back up to the rooftops with their jumble of air-con units and architectural bric-a-brac. 

It isn’t just the paying out of such contrasting places that stands out. It’s the pace. Had I the chance to indulge my usual gaming habits and lollygag, meander, and generally faff about, the level may well have lost some of its charm. But taken as it is, at near breakneck pace, it transcends the string of locations to become a fluid, urgent tour, doused in panic. 

The level practically drags you along before suddenly thrusting you into the role of pursuer as you set off across the rooftops after the titular Jacknife. This switch from hunted to hunter is masterful and exhilarating, used again later in the boat chapter, but to lesser effect.

The more I examined this chapter, and the more I allowed myself to become immersed (largely through self-imposed repetition) the more the negativity fell away, leaving only a deep appreciation and respect for the level design. A design that undulates beautifully through changing locales, playing with pace and testing your abilities at every turn. 

Like the game itself, Jacknife isn’t for everyone, and it will stretch your patience to breaking point, especially with the numerous glitches. But love it or loathe it, it remains the most memorable chapter in a flawed but brilliant and original game. 

One of my fondest gaming memories is leaving Midgar for the first time. It's a moment that stands out not because I'd successfully navigated the Shinra headquarters beforehand, freed Red XIII, and persevered with that god-awful Road Rash-inspired motorbike sequence—it's not even because this is the point where Final Fantasy 7's story in essence takes flight. 

Leaving Midgar sticks out in my mind because it's the first time you see The Planet laid out before you. Gaia's world map might seem restrictive against today's standards but back then this was something, and no matter how quickly you wound up locking horns with Sephiroth in the Northern Cave—the game's ultimate arena—the white blips that lined the in-game map highlighted the amount of exploration that'd be required along the way.  

You may have enjoyed similar personal revelations before or after FF7's launch on the opposite side of the millennium, but no matter how this particular game has aged, the concept of the journey is as profound and remarkable now as it was then. "Know from whence you came. If you know whence you came, there are absolutely no limitations to where you can go," so goes the famous quote attributed to American novelist James Baldwin, and while the social critic and part-time poet passed away prior to release of Ultima 5 and Sega's Mega Drive/Genesis home console, his timeless words can be applied to videogames in a number of ways. 

The most obvious reflections of the journey concept in relation to games are possibility and discovery. Role-playing games like Final Fantasy 7 see you wandering expansive maps, fighting throngs of minions within the darkest dungeons, townships and keeps, taking on all-powerful bosses, and then starting the cycle again against slightly tougher enemies. In horror games, the journey often echoes refuge—those scant moments of safety where the onslaught of zombies and otherworldly creatures momentarily gives way.  

I was reminded of this towards the end of the Resident Evil Zero remaster earlier this year, during the segment where Rebecca Chambers is separated from co-protagonist Billy Coen. She shuttles between two distinctly dangerous areas via cable car and, unlike a similar scenario in Resident Evil 2, the journey is made without incident. 

In the original Half-Life, Gordon Freeman's train journey to Black Mesa is nondescript, however when the same situation is emulated in Half-Life 2, in light of the first game, the trip boasts a heavy sense of dread. Obvious parallels can be drawn between this and our introductions to both BioShock and BioShock Infinite. Other examples of the journey in games are of course more pleasant— such as when Dishonored 2 offers the chance to soak in its sun-bleached vistas en route to Kirn Jindosh's Clockwork Mansion; or when Grand Theft Auto 5 lets you hold conversations with taxi drivers in dialogue that would otherwise be glossed over. The player is offered full autonomy in these situations, which galvanises the idea of possibility, where the player could just as easily skip the taxi route, or have Emily or Corvo stare at their feet. 

In the Dark Souls series the journey often represents triumph, where traversing its brutally unforgiving landscapes allows you to appreciate how far you've come as a player. Almost everyone hates Blighttown, but would ringing that second bell have felt like such an achievement had it not been so painstakingly difficult getting there? 

The walking simulator genre is one entirely comprised of games built around exploration and for some people sandbox games represent nothing but the journey. Minecraft enthusiast Kurt J Mac has turned this passion into a career as he strives to reach the game's Bad Lands—an area which is said to exist so far from a player's original spawn location that if reached will cause the game to bug out and crash. At the time of writing Mac's Far Lands or Bust YouTube travelling series has seen his channel accrue 377,590 subscribers and 70,621,226 views over the past few years. 

While I'm aware the journey concept is integral to almost every game in that you start at X, complete Y, and finish at Z, I think it's important to appreciate how much time we spend tackling goals and ticking boxes in games—be that over hundreds of hours within deep and complex grand strategies, chunks of our lives alongside online pals in MMOs, or during modest five hour stints in the latest indies. To this end, idle reflection is to me equally as important as the task at hand. 

I played Metal Gear Solid 5: The Phantom Pain for about 30 hours in order to write my review. Over a year later, I've managed to put in another 60 hours on top of that, some of which had a purpose, but a lot of which could also be categorised as dicking around. Long after I'd cleared the final mission, 'The Truth', which I think everyone hated except me, I found myself going back to the occupied sprawls of Afghanistan and the Angola-Zaire border to perform hit-and-runs alongside my fictional dog, or to clear out outposts in record time by arcing grenades from atop hills and cliffs. Before I knew it, I'd played MGS 5 even more than GTA 5, and had long forgotten what Snake was even doing in Afghanistan. Something about deleting language and skeleton men? I dunno. Someone wore a bikini, it made no sense.

MGS 5 has a near endless nature to it that I love. While playing through the story lets players get to grips with the majority of basic weapons and upgrades available to Snake, the coolest toys are deliberately put out of reach within the game's vast upgrade trees, or gated behind objectives in specific side ops. This progression system gradually empowers the player like a great RPG does, expanding from a limited suite of useful weapons to a vast armoury of explosives, firearms and novelty costumes for Snake and his allies.

As a result, it's simply not the same game after 90 hours as it is after five or ten. Your understanding of how MGS 5's stealth and combat systems grows as your arsenal does. For the Ground Zeroes prologue and the first few missions of The Phantom Pain, I remember everything feeling a little overwhelming as I learned how navigating the world worked, and how the AI behaved. The game slowly builds up your confidence by letting you experiment with more and more toys to find your ideal loadout.

By my 90th hour with the game, I carry a robot hand—the Hand of Jehuty, from Hideo Kojima's own cult mech PS2 series, Zone of the Enders—that can drag a pursuing soldier from 20 feet away to Snake in a daze, so I can immediately knock them out. I own a Parasite Suit, which emulates the supernatural abilities of the game's irritating skull soldiers. My fulton recovery system, which once yanked soldiers into the sky for extraction, now opens a portal through time and space to deliver a goat back to my base. At this point, my Snake is basically a superhero. Not just because of these novel upgrades, but because the game essentially requires you to teach yourself how to use them effectively. 

The journey to unlocking all of this has been a slow burn, but also exciting. With no narrative thread to follow anymore, every side op is an opportunity for experimentation. I play The Phantom Pain like I play GTA—that attitude of, let's take all of these toys out for a spin and see what sort of trouble I can cause. You couldn't really play the previous Metal Gears in the same way, since the levels were narrow and linear by design. Few sandbox games are constructed to be played from as many angles as this, and I'd personally argue that none are as precise to control or as customisable. 

Metal Gear Solid 5 is designed to be living and endless. It's a truly generous single-player game that still challenges you to experiment with your strategies, and I think its best moments come well after the credits.

My introduction to the Ultima series was a late one. Having missed numbers one through eight for a number of reasons (namely age, and the fact my dad had a bizarre and exclusive penchant for pinball games—a genre which in turn commandeered our games library throughout my childhood), I decided to pick up the Ultima Collection in 1998 at the behest of some series worshipping mates. This would get me up to speed, I thought, and would also grant me a sneak peak at the then upcoming Ultima 9. With ten games to play with, this was sure to swallow my free time, but what I hadn't bargained for was how hard I'd fall for the Collection's seemingly novelty cloth maps.

They were beautiful and I became obsessed. I'd spend hours poring over each game's respective blueprint before every session, and then push myself to reach the far-flung corners of their digital incarnations. I'd invent imaginary treasure hunts and would spend entire evenings recreating my own crude interpretations of the game's vibrant, colourful cartography with crayons and felt pens and coloured pencils. I was an adventurer, an explorer, a keyboard trailblazer—and there was as much fun, if not more, to be had with a physical map than the actual games themselves. 

Later that same year, my friend lent me his big brother's copy of Grand Theft Auto and I discovered a whole new world of detail. The Manhattan-like homogenous grids of Liberty City, Vice, and San Andreas were masterful, and I'd delight in rallying between the Pay 'n' Spray in Brocklin, the bomb shop in North Hackenslash, the hospital in Eaglewood. The original GTA's 'open world' was ahead of its time, but its concrete playground felt far bigger as I traced each journey with my finger before and after each playthrough. The connection I made between what I had on paper and what I could see onscreen lent this boorishly visualised cityscape an extra layer of credibility. 

And then of course every game needed a physical map—even the ones that didn't have one. I made bird's eye view reconstructions of my Theme Parks, Theme Hospitals and SimCity 2000's which, given their topdown/isometric perspectives wasn't all too difficult to achieve. Crafting the likes of Tomb Raider's Atlantis, on the other hand, and thinking my use of protractors and steel rules and speed squares made one jot of difference towards their legibility, was a different story/mess entirely.   

As games became more sophisticated, in-game maps gradually begun to emulate my hand-crafted creations. Silent Hill 2's map is one which stands to mind. As fumbling protagonist James Sunderland makes his way around the titular otherworldly town, road blocks appear from nowhere, interminable holes form as if by magic, and busted locks—so many busted locks—prevent him from accessing certain areas. 

When James first happens upon maps for each zone in turn he starts with a clean slate, but as he discovers said insurmountable obstacles, he draws the obstructions on himself—much similar to how I penned my masterpieces in my formative years. Towards the end of Silent Hill 3, without spoiling its plot, one area's in-game map mirrors that of a child's crayon drawing. It's a real flash of charm in an otherwise horrendous setting.  

Like instruction manuals, physical maps are few and far between in today's games. I'm part of the problem—I rarely buy physical games anymore. But if I ever catch wind that one is bundled with a real life, hold-in-yer-hand map, then I'll almost certainly be first in line to buy it. I might even stop for crayons, pencils and steel rules on the way home. 

In the original Half-Life, as Gordon Freeman makes his way to work on that fateful day in the Black Mesa Research Facility, you find a break room. A scientist sits at a table drinking from a coffee cup, and another paces the room. Then you see it. A microwave with a container of some unidentifiable food within, begging to be interacted with. There’s no button prompt on the screen telling you to do so, but you just know that if you press the use key next to it something will happen. Something incredible. Something messy.

So you press it, and it beeps. Nothing. You press it again, and this time it beeps at a slightly higher pitch. A clue that you should keep pulling this thread, even though it looks like nothing is going to happen. So you hammer the use key until, suddenly, the dish explodes. The microwave is covered in yellow gunk and the pacing scientist rushes over. “My God!” he exclaims. “What are you doing?” He sadly observes the mess you’ve made, but Freeman says nothing. You walk away, no apology, no remorse. Classic Gordon.

Valve knows what we’re like. If we see something, we’re going to try and interact with it. Doubly so if it looks like it was never meant to be interacted with, or if it’s out of reach. And it’s great that games like Half-Life reward this very human curiosity. There are few things in videogames more satisfying than hitting the use key next to some prop, and something happening in response. When it doesn’t, it’s always a disappointment. It makes the game world feel somehow more lifeless, more artificial. Like you’re in some kind of cardboard film set rather than a real place. If I ever move near a hand dryer in a videogame bathroom and it doesn’t roar into life, my immersion shatters into a thousand twinkling pieces.

I feel for the developers, though. They have to dedicate time and resources to modelling, texturing, animating, and creating sound effects for the most mundane objects. But it’s work that’s always appreciated. In the latest Deus Ex game, Mankind Divided, Adam Jensen’s apartment is a funhouse of stuff to switch on and mess with, from the flushing toilet to the washer and dryer that start rumbling when you power them on. Eidos Montreal didn’t have to do any of this stuff, but it makes all the difference that they did.

Flushing toilets, incidentally, have become the go-to test of a game’s interactivity. There are even websites cataloguing all the games that feature them. Because it’s the internet, and of course there are. Be honest: the first time you encounter a toilet in a game, you try to flush it. You probably even do it without thinking, instinctively hitting the use button when you’re near one. And if nothing happens, and you don’t hear that familiar rush of water, you wonder if the game’s even worth your precious time.

In the years since Half-Life was released, the exploding microwave is still perhaps the best example of this kind of interaction. But there are others. Human Head’s 2006 shooter Prey opens in a brilliantly interactive bar, boasting a TV with channels you can switch, playable gambling and arcade machines, and a jukebox with tracks by Judas Priest, Blue Oyster Cult and other classic rock groups. It’s completely unnecessary, and doesn’t reflect the rest of the game, but it speaks volumes that people still mention it now. In fact, I can’t really remember anything about Prey except the bar scene.

Some games even make a feature out of switching things on. In Hitman, turning a radio on or getting a sink to overflow is a frequently invaluable way to lure a guard away from his post. But often you need a certain item to turn said thing on, such as a wrench or a screwdriver. IO Interactive has cleverly looked at how people love interacting with objects in games and designed a system around it.

Environment artists are doing incredible work these days, giving you increasingly detailed, atmospheric worlds to exist in. But no matter how complex the geometry is, how high-res the textures are, and how gorgeous the skybox is, it won’t matter if we approach that toilet, press the use key, and it doesn’t flush. As games get more expensive to develop and assets get more time—consuming to make, I hope developers never forget that, above all, people just love turning things on. The toilet must always flush.