Deadlock is one of the most delightful things happening in videogame art direction. It's a festival of phenomenal vibes: a striking setting, an all-timer aesthetic that bleeds into every scrap of environmental art and UI element, and—crucially—a roster of instantly charming occult character designs.

That roster, however, is missing something—a few somethings, in fact. While Deadlock's heroes cover a broad spectrum of the spooky and supernatural, it's got some glaring gaps where foundational elements of cryptozoology and occult lore are sorely overlooked. But don't fret, Valve designers: I've done your next round of ideation for you. I've prepared some promising character concepts that, I think we'll all agree, will realize the Cursed Apple's untapped potential. Let's begin:

The Summer Mummy (from Heathcliff)

Deadlock's already got draculas. It's got werewolves. It's got a Frankenstein. When you're already this deep in monster mash territory, a mummy's a layup. It's Spooky Stuff 101. The problem, however, is that it's not enough to be just a mummy in New York. New York is where they make cool people. If you're going to hang with the Cursed Apple's finest, you're going to need style.

Enter the Summer Mummy, a character first introduced in Heathcliff—the comic strip about the orange cat who isn't Garfield—on August 17, 2023. The Summer Mummy is much like your typical bandaged revenant, except chill and fun. He wears floral boardshorts. He has sunglasses. He eats ice cream (the Summer Mummy gets the sand flavor). He's an instant crowd pleaser, and it's an incredible cross-promotional opportunity. Everyone's trying to tap the lucrative Heathcliff brand.

A minotaur who plays baseball professionally

Just to be clear: No, I didn't come up with this one because "bullpen" is a baseball thing. I just thought a minotaur in an old-timey baseball uniform would look sick. I only realized the bullpen bit afterwards—but as far as I'm concerned, that was me getting a thumbs up from an angel for my very good work.

What was the labyrinth if not the most mythological bullpen of them all? The minotaur might've been warming up his pitching arm down there. Gotta pass the time somehow. Oh! He could throw a curveball that follows a nonsense, labyrinthine path through the air. Call it a Daedalian Knuckleball or something. Give him a bull rush ability called "charge the mound." Stuff writes itself. Put my check in the mail.

The Loch Ness Monster's precocious preteen child

There's a lot to love about this one: First, Nessie is already confirmed Deadlock canon, having arrived on Earth through the Bermuda Triangle astral gate. Second, there's never a bad time for more Scottish accents. Third, they could be buddies with Rem, Deadlock's adorable sleepspace creature.

But what really makes Nessie Jr. (legally, that name might be taken) a winner is the microtransaction potential: Give this kid a character lunchbox, and once Deadlock starts rolling out purchasable skins, people will pay whatever you ask just to see different fictional licensed properties slapped on there. It's infinite money.

Three gnomes in a trench coat

I'll confess: I don't have a lot to flesh this entry out with. Mostly, I just think it would be neat for all of them to have little guns under there. Maybe they're in the mob? A gnome mafia. The Cosa Gnomestra. I don't know. Do your best.

A haunted suit of armor (who is a boxer)

Everyone loves an animated suit of armor. Much like with the Summer Mummy, however, there's some aesthetic work that needs to be done to bring the image in line with Deadlock's aesthetic theme. And much like with the Summer Mummy, I've identified a shorts-centric solution—boxing shorts, in this case. And boxing gloves. A plate armor prize fighter who could play like the third-person MOBA-shooter equivalent of Little Mac.

Now, you might ask, does Deadlock need yet another prize fighter when it already has Lash and Bebop? And to that I'd say: Neither of them has cartoonishly big shorts, do they? It's like you're not even paying attention.

Big spider

There was, admittedly, already an unreleased spider-themed hero during Deadlock's Hero Labs days, but frankly, why half-ass it? Just go full spider. Let it walk on all the surfaces. Give it eight weapons for each of its eight limbs. Is it really a videogame if there isn't a large enemy spider in there somewhere?

Big spider (sexy)

I can't take credit for this one:

Humpty Dumpty

We all know the deal: on wall, great fall, horses and men prove inadequate at reconstructive surgery, etc. But I'm imagining this is the Humpty Dumpty that's had to go on living knowing the world failed him in his darkest moment—a sort of Punished "Venom" Dumpty situation. He's fighting in the Ritual not to restore his own broken form, but to create a world for other shattered eggs like himself. It's the kind of grim antihero that audiences crave.

And he could, like, roll around to attack sometimes, maybe. That's fun.

The rest of the monkey that the Monkey's Paw came off of

That thing had to come from somewhere, right? If the Paw can grant wishes, imagine what all the other parts of the enchanted monkey must be capable of. Surely, it must have been severed from the limb of a sort of simian arch-sorcerer, who possessed a command over magicks so profound as to reconfigure the flow of fate itself.

What I'm saying is he could shoot energy balls from his stump like it was a Mega Man arm cannon and it would rule. And maybe he does street magic in Times Square. For walking around money.

North Pole elf labor rights activist

I think we've all known it for a long time: There's something untoward about the whole Santa Claus operation. We're meant to believe that an entire society is content with knowing no life beyond the ceaseless churn of toy production under the rule of a treat-crazed overlord? Really?

I don't buy it—and that's exactly why there's a hero who's ventured to New York to foster awareness and support for the plight of their fellows still trapped toiling at the Kringle company town up north. They could create a bunch of nutcracker soldiers as their ult, but they'd be nutcracker soldiers of the revolution.

One of the deer from Staten Island, but it was turned into a sapient anthropoid by some sort of cursed amulet and is struggling to adjust to city life on account of antlers making it hard to get into buildings

Label sorta says it all, really.

Bigfoot (he is running for mayor)

It just makes sense. He's a compelling figure. He's all-American. He's privacy conscious and likely has a sensible platform regarding municipal walkability. He's been around long enough that he probably knows a few spells, and he's big enough that he could handle a Lewis gun like an airsoft rifle.

He'd have my vote, is what I'm saying. And the best part is: You'd be able to listen to the other heroes grill Bigfoot about his political stances. That's videogames to me.

I really don't know how to build up to this one. Grand Theft Auto 5 is Doom now, okay? I put in a mod that imports DOOM2.wad into GTA 5 and now that's what the game is. There are demons. The game is first person. I have a minigun and a BFG. That's the truth of the matter and we're all just going to have to find some way to live with it.

The mod is Doom 2 in GTA 5 Hell On Earth (D2IGTA5HOE), and it does all those things I said. Hit F9 and the game you are playing shifts from GTA 5—usually a third-person open-world acting game—to Doom 2, an FPS from 1994. You need to provide your own .wad—everybody be cool. No one call the cops.

The world remains, mind you. You don't warp to Doom 2's levels. Instead, you roam Los Santos with an arsenal of weapons from id's seminal shooter (gross). You can take on taxis with your super shotgun, fight cops with a plasma cannon. It's two great tastes that taste incomprehensible together. Hit F10 and the game goes into Hell On Earth mode—authentic Doom 2 enemies start manifesting in the street.

One issue, of course, is that F10 is also my button for activating flossing and Superman mode, so I can't play Doom 2 GTA 5 Edition without a full quarter of my screen being taken up by a (still utterly Arabic) flossing UI screen and various Kryptonian powers sometimes activating. One of those is super speed when I sprint, though, which is at least appropriate for Doom Guy.

Anyway, here's a gif of me fighting demons and armed furries at an airport with Doom 2 weapons while a tornado closes in.

This morning, I happened across an article recently published by Google which is supposed to convince us that "AI is unlocking a new golden age of games." I understand why Google would use an AI-generated image in an article about how great AI is, but I've got to wonder why it chose the one above: A bunch of people with messed up faces (zoom in for surprises!) worshipping a golden controller as if it were God.

It's both trying too hard and not trying nearly hard enough. Consider me unconvinced about that golden age.

That article, which is from August, was linked in a new post from Google about a project from author Neal Stephenson and designer Karen Laur that's "using AI to bring Jane Austen to Fortnite." I hear the kids are absolutely rioting with excitement.

Minecraft has a new boss: Maria Angelidou-Smith, who is joining Microsoft from Reddit, where she spent not quite a year as the platform's chief product officer.

"We wanted someone who has built products for communities at enormous scale, who is deeply technical, and who understands how creators, product, technology, and monetization come together," Xbox CEO Asha Sharma said. "Maria brings a rare combination of those experiences. She spent nearly a decade at Meta, where she led Facebook Groups used by more than 1.8 billion people each month, as well as Events, Creators, Search, Profile, and Monetization.

"She later led product and technology at Personio and served as Chief Product Officer at Reddit, another of the world’s largest community platforms. She has built products used by billions of people and led product and engineering organizations through significant growth and change."

Angelidou-Smith also has "a respect for what makes Minecraft special," Sharma said. "Her first priority will be learning from the teams and communities who know Minecraft best."

The System Shock TV show announced in 2021 is no longer moving ahead. "The company we were working with, they had also licensed the rights to a number of other video game properties," Nightdive Studios chief Stephen Kick told FRVR. "I don’t believe that company is still around [in that form]. So that won’t be happening through Binge."

Kick said "preliminary scripts" for the show were written, and that he'd had conversations with the screenwriters, "but that’s really as far as the whole thing went before it basically became vapour." Still, he expressed hope that an adaptation might still happen, someday: "I would love to see System Shock adapted to either television or streaming or a movie. I think that would be the perfect vessel for that. And there are so many unique and creative ways that you could approach it."

Binge did indeed have licenses to make shows based on other games, including Driver and Hunt: Showdown; the Driver show was confirmed cancelled in 2024. and while the fate of the Hunt: Showdown series isn't officially known, it's probably safe to say that it's not happening either. The Binge website doesn't appear to have been meaningfully updated since it went live, while its most recent social media post, on X, was an April 2024 advertisement for a Web3 gaming convention being held in Dubai.

One of the most beloved horror games (demos?) of all time is finally free from the shackles of the PS4. Hideo Kojima's P.T. has been natively ported to PC by programmer Lorean Xavier, who made the project public this week. Not an emulator nor a remake, the native PC client does not contain any copyrighted materials—it requires a dumped copy of P.T. to function—but instead translates the original code into something that'll run on Windows and Linux.

That distinction not only sidesteps potential corporate scrutiny, but also allows Xavier to add modern graphical features and mod support to the PC version. It's an impressive effort that, according to the creator, has been in the works since 2024.

"I wanted to make the version of P.T. that my younger self always wished existed," Xavier, 21, told PC Gamer over email. "My attachment to the game goes all the way back to my childhood. I remember watching videos of it on my phone, wishing I could experience it myself. I didn't have a PS4, so playing the original was never really an option for me. I never imagined back then that I'd eventually be the one bringing it to PC."

The window to play P.T. "legitimately" was famously brief. Kojima surprise-dropped P.T. on the PlayStation Network in 2014 as a "playable teaser" for the Silent Hills reboot he was making with Guillermo Del Toro. When Kojima and Konami had a falling out, Silent Hills was canceled and P.T. got caught in the breakup, being delisted in early 2015. The horror classic has persisted only through emulation and preserved PS4 hard drives—until now.

"The idea that something so influential could eventually become practically unplayable never sat right with me," Xavier added.

"There have been several PC remakes over the years, and I appreciate that people tried to preserve the experience, but none of them ever really satisfied me," Xavier said. "Something always felt off, whether it was the lighting, the atmosphere, the interactions, or the way certain events played out. They could resemble P.T. visually, but they never truly felt like the original to me.

"And that's exactly why I wanted to do this differently. I didn't want to make another interpretation of P.T. or recreate it approximately in another engine. I wanted the actual experience, with its original assets, sounds, animations, and behavior, running natively on PC."

While the project is "not a modified version or fork of [PS4 emulator] shadPS4," the emulated version was an "extremely valuable" reference to compare the original game's behavior to the port.

We're in weird and wild times for the recompilation scene as gen AI has accelerated the creation of console-to-PC ports, often with janky, hastily-vibecoded results that make good preservation more difficult. Xavier is open about using AI in his workflow, but believes it's no replacement for "actually knowing what you're doing."

"I think there's an important distinction between using AI as a development tool and blindly relying on it to create an entire project you don't understand. In my case, I use AI to help with debugging, identifying issues, testing code, and working through problems when I get stuck. It can be incredibly useful for accelerating that process, especially when you're working alone on something this complicated.

"But I'm still the one responsible for the architecture, the implementation decisions, writing and reviewing the code, and understanding how the different systems fit together. My years of experience with reverse engineering and P.T. are what allow me to direct that process in the first place."

In terms of faithfulness, the port has the seal of approval from at least one person who would know: Lance McDonald, the Australian creator who datamined P.T. and discovered many of its secrets back in the day, is impressed by what he reckons is a "1:1 port of the entire codebase."

You can check out the "PT-PC" project for yourself on GitHub.

Despite what the GDP tells me, the economy in the real world doesn't feel like it's doing too hot for the average joe. But during the recent years' descent into compounding supply crises and mass layoffs affecting thousands of workers at once, I've noticed another trend: Sure does seem like there are a lot of vampire games in the mix lately.

I started to sense an uptick after Arkane's ill-fated Redfall in 2023. There was Vampire Survivors and V Rising—and Nighthawks, Moonlight Peaks, Blood of Dawnwalker, and more. Given current circumstances, you might think I'm just primed to notice nightmarish aristocrats bleeding us alive to sustain themselves. But after too many hours of spreadsheet data entry, I'm convinced devs really have been dabbling more heavily in Draculas as the economy feels increasingly dire.

Vampire games on Steam are a recession indicator. And I have the charts to prove it.

Datawalker

At first glance, assessing whether Steam's vampire offerings can serve as a bellwether for economic sentiment could seem like a simple task. Steam has a Vampires tag, after all. The release dates are right there. Easy, right?

Wrong.

The Vampires tag is—perhaps fittingly—a horror. Devs and users freely slapping the label on anything with even one Dracula would be bad enough, but the advent of Vampire Survivors created a categorization disaster. Before Steam added a discrete bullet heaven genre, its countless imitators were content to use the Vampires tag as a makeshift discoverability solution. It's a mess in there.

Not only that, but I wanted a more complete picture of Steam vampire activity than release dates alone can provide. When games on Steam might have taken anywhere from seven months to seven years to develop, it would've been fruitful to know when games were first listed to gauge the level of collective vampire interest among Steam devs.

Steam itself doesn't provide that info. SteamDB, however, tracks whenever a game first appeared during its scraping of Valve's store data. That's a good substitute for listing time—but unlike Steam proper, SteamDB doesn't have a public API for pulling that information.

End result: I individually sorted through the 1,213 Steam games with the Vampires tag at time of writing, manually collecting their release dates and first appearance in the SteamDB archive after determining whether they were, in fact, vampire-ass vampire games.

My process for parsing that last bit was pretty straightforward. A vampire game is a game whose developer sat down with an obvious interest in making a game about vampire stuff:

• Game where you are a vampire, are concerned with vampires, or are generally surrounded by notions of vampirism? Vampire game.
• Game where there just happens to be, you know, a couple vampires somewhere? Not a vampire game.

I'll admit there's an amount of subjectivity involved in my methodology, and it likely wasn't flawless—I only just realized that Resident Evil Village didn't appear in the Vampires pool, despite its big vampire lady being responsible for ongoing sexual awakenings for at least a third of the internet. But, if anything, my figures provide a conservative estimate: I excluded games that just didn't have that vampire stink on them despite literally starring Dracula as the protagonist.

Tragically, this means Hotel Transylvania 3: Monsters Overboard didn't make the cut. Apologies to Adam Sandler.

Unholy ascension

The results of my very professional data collection are clear: For years, the number of vampire games released on Steam has been increasing. In 2016, only four vampire games launched on the platform. A decade later, 65 vampire games have been released on Steam so far in 2026—and more have scheduled launch dates before the year's end.

There's been a sharp increase in the last six years. In 2020, the highest number of vampire games that launched in a single quarter was six; in 2026, it was 24. Developers are listing more vampire projects on Steam, too. Nine first appeared in SteamDB's archive in 2016; last year, 99 entered the database.

It should be noted, of course, that the number of Steam releases in general has massively increased over the same period, from 9,634 game launches in 2020 to 21,263 in 2025. But it's not just the number of vampire games that's increased; it's the percentage.

The figure swings dramatically, but particularly over the last six years the percentage of vampire game launches has been trending steadily upwards, barring one particularly severe drop in mid-2025. The rate is still low—less than 1 in 100 games on Steam is a proper vampire game—but in some recent quarters, the percentage of vampire games was more than double what it was at the start of the decade.

I'd have liked to calculate similar percentages for how many vampire game listings have been popping up over the same period—but that would require manually recording the first SteamDB appearance dates for over 100,000 games. My bosses are already annoyed at the amount of time I've spent in spreadsheets this week.

Instead, I've calculated what I call the Vampire Menace Rating™, which divides the number of quarterly vampire game appearances on SteamDB by the quarterly total of game launches on Steam to provide a more relative image of how vampires are occupying the total mindshare. While the resulting chart's trend line has a slight climb, I wasn't sure what to make of it at first glance… until I compared it to Dracula's Castle from Castlevania. The implications, I think you'll agree, are chilling:

Okay, fine. The VMR™ might need some work. The increasing number and percentage of vampire games, however, is very real.

Blood forensics

Alright, so the number and percentage of vampire games on Steam has been trending upwards over the last six years. But can we really call that a recession indicator when we're still regularly hearing that the US stock market is breaking records and GDP is still embiggening? Sure, I might have a worsening sense of existential dread, but isn't everything good if the number is still going up?

If you happen to be—for example—one of those benefitting from the circular investments of infinite money into the emerging AI apparatus, you're probably delighted by the macroeconomic trends. But over those same six years, an accompanying set of signals indicate that, just as Nosferatus have skulked onto Steam, the average person in the US hasn't been thriving.

US Census Bureau data shows median household income rose between 2020 and 2025, even when adjusted for inflation—but only by about 4.6%. Costs, however, have risen faster. From the start of 2020 to now, the Consumer Price Index for all urban consumers—representing the costs of goods and services for roughly 88% of the US population—has increased by 27-29%, depending on whether you include the more volatile prices of food and energy.

Likewise, the Producer Price Index for wholesale trade industries has climbed over the same timespan, meaning retailers are paying more for the goods they stock their shelves with—a cost increase that's passed onto the consumer.

Unsurprisingly, there are indicators that the average American is struggling with those increased costs. After an initial dip at the start of the decade, the delinquency rate on credit card loans across all US banks has been trending upwards, signalling that American borrowers have been less capable of keeping up with payments.

At the same time, the US personal savings rate—essentially, the amount of income remaining after taxes and expenses—has been trending downwards over the last six years, meaning Americans have less money left over to save towards future prospects.

In short, things are costing more than our wages can keep up with, we're increasingly incapable of meeting regular financial obligations, and we've got increasingly less money to stash away as a safety net. Is it any wonder, then, that we see vampire games on the rise when so many of us are anxious about being bled dry?

At least we now have an exciting new metric for economic soothsaying. Now, I guess we just… wait to see what happens vis-à-vis the vampires. Happy Halloween?

To any actual economists out there: You're welcome. And I'm sorry.

Let's get one thing out of the way: I think we, as a society, as a people, are generally fine with furries at this point. The phenomenon of ragging on furry subculture has been, gladly, consigned to the dustbin of history. It's a 2010 disease from which we have convalesced. Let nothing I write from here on be taken as a slight against them.

That being said, it is very funny to give someone in a fursuit a gun and a military objective.

I have installed, well, two mods actually. The first, preliminary mod is Gang and Turf Mod, which adds a sort of gang war system in the vein of GTA: San Andreas. Different factions will wage war over areas of Los Santos, from the heart of downtown up to the podunk rural hamlets in the north.

Then I installed the main course: Furry Gang for Gang and Turf Mod, which festoons the city streets with murderers in wolf outfits who are here to take their corners with blood and gunpowder. There are other gangs—gangs installed by default with the base mod—but I honestly didn't pay much attention to them. Some of them were in suits? They truly all got steamrolled by the marauding bands of fursuited raiders.

Like an embedded reporter in a war, I followed one band of armed furries into battle. Dodging cars, they dispatched most of their foes pretty quickly, but then a tornado manifested and started whipping them into the sky. At one point, I punched one of them, mostly out of overstimulation. Then I got eaten by the tornado too. Then I teleported somewhere else. Nearby, on a ridge, was a single furry in a purple suit, immobile and gazing, planning some future conquest.

All of these things happened.

Welcome back to another special community tournament edition of FOV 90, the only FPS column that I'm aware of.

Last week, we started the work of determining the greatest FPS mode of all time through spirited democracy. In Round 1, 16 classic and modern modes were pitted against each other in 1v1 matchups. The seeding, which I chose myself, was completely uncontroversial and everyone liked it—especially the part where I made them choose between Conquest and Domination.

Over 7,000 votes were tallied over five days, and the results are in.

🥁drum roooooooooolllllllllllllll🥁

Round 1 Results

• Team Deathmatch (75%) wins over FFA/Deathmatch (25%)
• Battle Royale (52%) wins over Extraction (48%)
• Conquest (68%) wins over Domination (32%)
• Bomb Defusal (85%) wins over Hostage (15%)
• Payload (52%) wins over Gun Game (48%)
• Infection (61%) wins over Prop Hunt (39%)
• Capture the Flag (91%) wins over VIP (9%)
• Attack & Defend (52%) wins over King of the Hill (48%)

I think we can all agree a few of those winners were predictable—I can see Team Deathmatch or Capture the Flag going all the way at this rate—but several matchups surprised me. Battle royale just barely edges out Extraction while Gun Game is brought down by Payload. The voting body showed up for both serious and playful modes, which makes me happy. I also enjoyed watching you all share your votes and memories in the comments.

And here's how PC Gamer's staff reacted to the results:

Yes, I'm a monster. But alas, it's time to bury our dead and move on. Round 2 is on!

The Bracket

Round 2 - Vote!

Read up on the matchups below and vote for your favorite. Round 2 voting closes on Monday, October 12 at 11:59 PM PDT. The more votes we get, the more interesting the results, so tell your friends! Next week we'll be back to share the results and begin Round 3.

Team Deathmatch vs Battle Royale

AKA: Team Slayer (Halo) // It's always called BR

Intimate team-based action, or large-scale slaughter?

Conquest vs Bomb Defusal

AKA: Warfare (Hell Let Loose) // Bomb (Rainbow Six Siege), Plant/Defuse (Valorant)

The consensus king of competitive, or all-out warfare?

Payload vs Infection

AKA: It's always Payload and Infection, because they're perfect names

Both unusual, asymmetrical formats that rely on staying together to get anything done. This will be a painful vote for me.

Capture the Flag vs Attack & Defend

AKA: It's always CTF // 2CP (Overwatch), Breakthrough (Battlefield)

Attack & Defend was a surprise winner of Round 1, but CTF is coming off a 91% majority win. Will this be an upset?

Houses that look like something I'd build in a survival game, part 3. Guess who unlocked pillars you guys? The porch roof kept collapsing on my head because once again I'd built a giant unstable box to live in, but four big-ass pillars out front will keep that sucker up nicely. Can you guess how many pillars I used inside? Like, 23 of 'em. Think they're evenly spaced? THINK AGAIN.

This month, PC Gamer delivers world-exclusive access to World of Warcraft: Forever, the exciting new evolution of classic WoW that is kicking off a new MMO golden age. Not only do we play Forever extensively, but PC Gamer also speaks directly to many of the key devs at Blizzard who have made it a reality. And, we're pleased to say that, finally, the old WoW magic is back!

This issue also boasts one of the fattest preview sections of the year, with PC Gamer going hands-on with a wide variety of hot incoming games, including Total War: Warhammer 40,000, Rainbow Six Tactics, Stronghold 4, 1666: Amsterdam, Lego Skylines, Afterworld, Sanctuary: Shattered Sun, and Bodycam.

Meanwhile, the PC Gamer reviews machine passes judgement on The Blood of Dawnwalker, Metal Gear Solid IV: Guns of the Patriots, Star Wars Zero Company, Fields of Mistria, Onimusha: Way of the Sword, and Sovereign Tower, among others.

All that plus a group test on top PC case fans, a reinstall of legendary neo noir action game, Max Payne 2: The Fall of Max Payne, the commencement of a brand new diary where we play as a corporate serial killer in Starfield, a look at an ambitious new mod for Stardew Valley that lets you play it in 3D and VR, a developer-led deepdive into the conception of Forbidden Solitaire, a love letter to playing games with gyro aim, a fresh dispatch from The Spy, an editorial face off fight debating whether PC gaming belongs in the living room, an authoritative review of the Ryzen 7 7700X3D processor, a special report on GTA 6's glitzy Netflix reveal, and much more, too. Enjoy the issue!

Cover feature: World of Warcraft: Forever

Written by: Heather Newman

Magazine exclusive: Until October 26th, 2026

What's in this month's cover story: PC Gamer not only gets exclusive hands-on access to Blizzard's stunning reboot of classic WoW, but also speaks to numerous of its key developers about the epic journey they have been on to bring it to life. And, yes, we're calling it already: a new golden age of MMOs is about to begin. The old World of Warcraft magic is back!

Additional content in this month's issue

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The Japanese Sword Museum in Tokyo, set along the bank of the Sumida river, enshrines behind glass a collection of remarkable blades spanning hundreds of years of craftsmanship. Books about the longer uchigatana and shorter wakizashi, some of them written by the museum's very donors, celebrate the swordsmiths who hammered them out of steel. But flip through one, and there's a good chance you won't spot the name Muramasa, despite his swords playing a prominent role in some of Japan's most famous battles.

Centuries of mythology building up around the idea that your swords were cursed will tend to do that to a guy.

Vanillaware's Muramasa: Revenant Blades, at least, isn't afraid to lean into the legacy. The 2D action game is so in love with swords it's got 108 of them, and it turns the superstition that Muramasa's swords had to taste blood once unsheathed into a simple but enticing mechanic: Each comes with a unique skill, which can be equipped on another sword only after it's had its fill of bloodshed.

"There's definitely this reputation that the swords of Muramasa are cursed, but what that means is they have power," says director Wataru Nakanishi. "In this game Muramasa is an important character and will create these very powerful swords, but in turn [the protagonists] must collect souls for him, so they have this cooperative relationship based around this dark situation."

In a way Revenant Blades is lifting a curse of its own: 17 years after the game was first released on the Nintendo Wii as Muramasa: The Demon Blade, it's somehow the first release from Vanillaware to make it to PC. The Japanese studio followed Muramasa with more nuanced games, like 2019's acclaimed 13 Sentinels: Aegis Rim and 2024 tactics RPG Unicorn Overlord, but after playing Muramasa on PC I can see why the studio started here. I remember a hack-and-slash with art so lavish seeming novel back in 2009, and somehow that's just as true today.

The painterly art has a timeless quality to it, though that's something of an illusion. "It was a lot of work, and it was very difficult," Nakanishi said, laughing. "We had some of the assets, but not others. For those we had to pull them from the game, and then artists individually by hand had to touch them up and recreate them to make something appropriate for the HD release. But you know, through that arduous hand-drawn process, we were able to create this warm and colorful art that we think people will be happy to see."

Revenant Blades is also not the simplistic game I remember. The skill system for all 108 blades is new, allowing me to equip three ground and three air abilities to a trio of blades I could have equipped (and swap between) at any one time. That made for a dizzying number of special moves to keep in mind, though executing them is as simple as tapping a button and a direction.

On the harder difficulty enemies now come streaming onto the screen in daunting numbers, and with more health to compensate for your improved arsenal. I learned the hard way not to play too defensively: Blocking a few attacks would wear down my sword until it snapped, leaving me open to a quick death. Survival demands fluid strings of combos, flitting between swords to keep them from breaking, chaining a launcher skill into a rapid series of slashes that can pummel a whole gang of ninja at once.

Or toads. I walked underneath a waterfall, not realizing I was underleveled for that bit of Muramasa's freely explorable map, and got absolutely embarrassed by a family of poison-spitting toads. Way scarier than the guys with shurikens and bombs.

In the original game enemies scaled with you as you leveled up, but Vanillaware scrapped that for Revenant Blades. Enemies in different areas now have fixed levels; you'll be able to steamroll the ones that are weaker than you, but depending on the path you take you might run into fights that send you scampering away unless you're really good.

Because you could previously only use a single skill that was locked to the single katana you had in-hand at any given moment, Nakanishi says players naturally gravitated to the most powerful late-game blades. "It kind of limited the scope of the gameplay," he says, but now that you can equip skills independently, "players have access to so many more skills and playstyles."

"Using the skills Celestial Slash and Flame Barrage, you can knock people into the air with fire, then jump up and use the aerial skill to knock them back to the ground. That kind of combination wasn't really something you could do with the more limited skill system."

In addition to possessed princess Momohime who I played as for the hour-long demo, Revenant Blades piles on a range of playable characters first added in a 2013 Vita re-release, each with their own stories. It's now a deceptively beefy game, and the skill system feels like the key it needed to unlock its full potential. I can't imagine a better fit for the Steam Deck OLED, where its vivid backgrounds will threaten to tear the eyes away from the action for the three seconds it'll take to wind up dead.

If Muramasa: Revenant Blades is the hit on PC it deserves to be, perhaps it will manage to dispel the myth that PC ports are as taboo in the halls of Vanillaware as the swordsmith's weapons have become over the centuries. Could more follow in its wake?

"We currently don't have any specific plans of that nature, but we would love to see Muramasa be successful enough that people start to ask about that kind of thing," Nakanishi says.

It's hard to imagine now, but a little over 20 years ago the gaming world was absolutely scandalized by Hot Coffee, a mod to activate abandoned code in Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas that enabled CJ to have interactive sex with his girlfriend.

The game was re-rated as "Adults Only" by the ESRB in 2005, forcing it off retail shelves—this was a time when retail shelf space mattered—and it was banned outright in Australia. Even the US Federal Trade Commission got involved, complaining that Rockstar and Take-Two Interactive "did not tell consumers that the game discs contained potentially viewable nude female characters and a potentially playable sex mini-game."

22 years later, with Grand Theft Auto 6 on the verge of console release, it all seems rather quaint. From the ESRB's newly posted rating, here's what we've got to look forward to in GTA 6:

• Blood and Gore
• Intense Violence
• Mature Humor
• Nudity
• Strong Language
• Strong Sexual Content
• Use of Drugs and Alcohol

All of which adds up to an M rating—that is, "generally suitable for ages 17 and up." PEGI, the European game rating agency, came down a little harder, rating it 18+ in a since-deleted listing that also noted the presence of "detailed decapitation" and "frequent and prominent" drug use.

How did we get from there to here? Well, we grew up—literally. The Entertainment Software Association said in 2025 that the average gamer in the US is 36 years old and has been playing for 18 years: That's police, politicians, and parents who all came up playing games (including GTA) and view them as no more remarkable than a spicy episode of Miami Vice.

The societal collapse that some alarmists anticipated, meanwhile, failed to materialize—well, it failed to materialize as a result of games, anyway. But a sudden uptick in violent crime and killings, sparked by "murder trainers" like GTA, Call of Duty, and Halo? It never happened. If anything, we've seen the opposite: As gaming has become increasingly mainstream, and the number of gamers has gone up, violent crime has seen a decline over the last two decades.

You could argue, I suppose, that the mainstreaming of Grand Theft Auto represents social desensitization—a loosening of the standards and decorum that made certain kinds of mature content much more taboo. But after years spent bearing witness to the moralizing hand-wringing that gave us the Satanic Panic, the Parents Music Resource Center, the bloody-minded determination to keep the Comics Code Authority alive despite its complete irrelevance, and of course the creation of the ESRB, I'm more inclined to think that what we're really doing is slowly figuring out what actually matters, and acting accordingly.

Plus ça change...

An infamous voice of criticism from this distant generation has not softened his position, however. With GTA now a mass-market entertainment franchise, no more frightening than a typical Marvel movie, I reached out to former attorney Jack Thompson; 20 years ago he was notorious among gamers for his determined, often theatrical efforts to link violent videogames to real-world violence and have them stringently regulated as a result, and I was curious how he felt about Florida's embrace of the GTA marketing machine, and the changed world we live in.

Thompson was such a high-profile presence on the videogame scene of the late 1990s and early 2000s that he was portrayed by Bill Paxton in The Gamechangers, a BBC Two docudrama about his long-running feud with Rockstar co-founder Sam Houser.

Thompson, who lives in Florida, is clearly unhappy with various GTA 6 promotional partnerships being enacted across the state. "If you don't understand that government promotion of commercial interests is fascism then we have very little to talk about," Thompson told me. "Ask the County Sheriff what she thinks about this unholy corporatist alliance."

I had in fact asked the sheriff, and the sheriff's department told me that it is not concerned by "promotional decisions [made] by private businesses or organizations." I relayed this to Thompson, who accused me of drinking the "fascist Kool-Aid," likened me to Joseph Goebbels, and told me to stop bothering him. He elaborated on that, very slightly, in a subsequent email: "The problem is your work proves you are not an honest journalist."

I feel a bit bad about that. I thought that with nearly 20 years of water under the bridge, Thompson may have softened, or at least reached a place where he could reflect soberly on the way the world has changed. That clearly hasn't happened.

Maybe that's understandable, because—and this isn't meant to be triumphal, I'm not spiking the ball, it's simple fact—after a life and career spent warring against it, Grand Theft Auto won. Netflix airs its special, the NBA wears its uniform, Walmart sells it, middle-aged cops and politicos buy it, and the state of Florida wraps itself in it. And here we are—we're fine. To me, that's a good outcome, but to someone who bet everything on the irresistibly corrosive impact of GTA? The absence of chaos and catastrophe—that everything is fine, at least in the sense that violent videogames didn't herald the end times—might just be a little disappointing.

Between midnight and 8:00 am this morning I received 56 emails. By the end of today that number will be well over a hundred, by the end of October I'll have about 4,000 more, and my total for 2026 will be in the neighborhood of 50,000 (work and personal combined.)

Fifty. Thousand. Emails. In a year! That's with (and I just counted) the 284 email filters I've set up to keep out at least some of the garbage, nearly 200 blocked addresses, and our publisher's own hypervigilant email security system in place—which diverted 27 emails to spam today alone. That makes it incredibly difficult to stay on top of the actual useful emails we want to see when we open our inboxes.

Email has become a waking nightmare, so that ugly red number on your phone or desktop showing you how many unread emails you have? Despite my headline up there, it really shouldn't be a source of stress and shame. It's not your fault email turned out this way.

So let's air it out. All of us! This week I asked my coworkers how many unread emails they have, and you can see their answers (and explanations) below. We welcome you to try to top us in the comments.

"I am an embodied sack of anxiety and if my unread mail gets over 300 I may permanently transition to a different state of matter" — Lauren Morton, Lead SEO Editor

"Those emails just keep coming. They never stop. They will never stop. I am powerless." — Jacob Ridley, Managing Editor, Hardware

📩 PC GAMER'S UNREAD EMAIL HALL OF FAME 📩

What's your unread email count? We'd love if you popped into the comments below and gave us an exact number!

(Please don't email us about it.)

If you want to make money in World of Warcraft, well… I cannot rightly say that we at PC Gamer are any good at it, based on the evidence given to us—but we are at least inventing new ways of money-making. And isn't invention the mother of necessity? Or was it the other way around? Who cares, we've got pockets to line.

I wrangled two of my erstwhile co-workers, Fraser Brown and Joshua Wolens, to see which of us was the best at making money in World of Warcraft: Forever's beta. Which felt like a fair testing ground, given both how populated it is and how un-inflated its new, fledgling economy would be. Here were the rules:

• We started as level 1 horde characters.
• We each had a nest-egg of 20 silver to get us started.
• Starting from our spawning points into Azeroth, we had to make as much gold as we could in two hours.
• There were some additional rules about auction house postings that didn't become relevant.
• No really. I spent a lot of time thinking about them and their implications for the challenge. None of us bothered.
• I'm definitely not mad about it.

Each of us entered with a different strategy. Well, two of us did (more on that later) to try and make the most bank. I, the Orc of Wisdom, would weaponise my 15+ years of roleplay experience to trade knowledge with the masses. Josh, the Majestic Celebrity, would try to wield his status as a games journalist and very famous person to his benefit—hamstrung only by the fact he had never actually played much World of Warcraft.

There was also Fraser, as Boeuf Beef, who did a secret third thing. I'll let him enlighten you about his masterful machinations myself.

This is a story of wisdom, courage, and bull-headed bravery—and, more importantly, it's a story of how those virtues could be mercilessly weaponised to siphon as much money from the economy as possible.

I've been roleplaying in MMOs for about 16 years—it is, in fact, what got me into writing—so rather than simply beg the masses for hand-outs, I would use it. I am, first and foremost, an entertainer.

I assembled a document full of snippets of wisdom—some reworded adages and sayings, others my original work—and decided to leverage them around WoW: Forever's new campfire feature. For those not in the know, anyone with a cooking skill can set down a campfire, around which may be set various fixtures. Sit around the fire for a minute, and you'll get buffs.

This made for a pretty cheap initial investment of seven silver and 66 copper: Enough to train my cooking skill as well as some simple wood and tinder. All of which was available on the jog up to Razor Hill, which was very pretty. An auspicious sign, I thought, for my journey.

With the ability to make campfires in hand, I parked myself somewhere people would be forced to interact with me by game mechanics alone: The top of a zeppelin tower. Being the only convenient route to the Undercity, home to the new Ruins of Lordaeron dungeon everyone was keen to try, passengers would be forced to stand around while I gave them my spiel.

Originally, I was going to set a static price for my wisdom—but at the last minute, I decided to change my tact to simply requesting whatever people could spare. I am, after all, a humble old orc simply looking for a hot meal and a place to stay. Durotar nights get so very cold.

And, listen—I'm guilty of my fair share of cynicism of the MMO populace, but the two hours I spent up here were nothing short of delightful as the WoW community played ball. Here's a short-list of the characters I encountered:

• A druid, who could not give me money, but did give me meat.
• An absolute mensch who gave me one entire gold piece.
• An elf who was very mean to me, but hit my ramblings about the vigors of youth with "And the daftness of age is clear upon your face", which is unfortunately a solid dunk.
• An undead named Glenda, perhaps my one true love, who replenished the fire for me when it ran out.
• A tauren who gave me 5 silver, then whispered to me that he didn't want wisdom, he just wanted to tip me for my good roleplay.
• An orc rogue who straight-up mugged me (note: threateningly opened a trade window). She got so into the RP that she panicked when the zeppelin was leaving and managed to fall off the tower instead.
• A cat burning themselves on my fire. TheOrc OfWisdom said this was concerning, to which someone else quipped: "Don't worry. They've got nine lives."
• An undead who told me I couldn't park here, and that it was "time to move". Then then proceeded to bust it down. TheOrc OfWisdom took a break to bust it down with them.

I had a lovely old time—and one that was very profitable. My final score—minus my initial silver stipend—can be found at the bottom of this article.

I don't know what WoW is. I don't know what my abilities are. I don't know where this zeppelin is taking me and I don't know what the buttons in my hotbar do. I don't know what any of this shit is and I'm fucking scared.

What I do know: I'm incredibly important. My name is on something like 68 million articles on PC Gamer dot com, making me a rough hybrid of Scarlett Johansson and George Herbert Walker Bush in fame and significance. Play to your strengths, they always told me, so off I went to ignore circa 99% of WoW's actual mechanics in favour of simply impressing my incredible renown on other players and asking them for money.

My other strength is slander, so at the same time as I harangued people about my own importance, I also let them know that my two opponents were dreadful. Just utter bastards.

This worked alarmingly well. Did you know you can just ask people for money and get it? I might try this out in real life. Just a few minutes in, my very first beg netted me some silver pieces and well-wishes.

The issue was not the effectiveness of my tactics but my complete unfamiliarity with the videogame 'World of Warcraft'. I quickly realised that I had genuinely no idea what the relative value of these coins were. Is a silver piece nothing? Is it a billion dollars? Am I the richest man in MMO history already?

Likewise, simple mechanics hamstrung me. Did you know to actually get into The Undercity there's a whole elevator system? I didn't! So instead I just sort of roamed around the top part for a while, unsure what kind of zone I was even in. This was, on reflection, not a lucrative use of my time.

The highlights of my adventure? I'll be honest, I mostly just had a pleasant time ambling from town to town and asking people to give money to the world's most important man (me). This did backfire once, though.

In dialogue with one player, Zippie Skadoo, I referred to him as a "good man" (or maybe "good friend," I forget). It turns out this was not acceptable. Zippie Skadoo quickly educated me that he was, in fact, bad to the bone, on the verge of going berserk, and might be inclined to assault me.

So that could have gone better.

Elsewise? I reckon I could have won this thing had I not wasted time in A) The Undercity and B) taking a boat or something to another continent and getting repeatedly killed by panthers for a bit.

Lessons for next time, I suppose, when Majestic Celebrity once again graces… Azeroth(?) with his presence.

I've been playing WoW off and on since 2004. So you'd think I'd find this challenge a doddle. Nope! This was, and I am not prone to exaggeration, the worst two hours of… if not my entire life, at least this month.

OK, so, I didn't have a plan. Or rather, my plan was to tell everyone I had an amazing plan, in the hope that an amazing plan would just pop into my brain. It did not. What actually happened was I rushed headfirst into insanity. It's a good thing the video accompanying this is short, because I really don't want the world to see the extent of my madness.

At one point, I just started making animal noises.

After failing to prepare a plan, I decided to simply skin a bunch of critters and make money that way. Perhaps selling them to generous players. Easy, right? Obviously not, or I'd still have my sanity. I have listened back to my full recording and plucked out some choice quotes.

• "I'm flagging and it's only been half an hour."
• "What am I doing with my life?"
• "I feel time just slipping away."
• "My screams of anguish have woken both my dogs."
• "I am so angry."
• "I am filled with rage."
• "I am filled with rage. I am filled with rage."
• "This is my supervillain origin story."
• "This is Hell. This is Hell."
• "I have lost my mind."

So, yeah, I had a great fucking time. And then I had to listen to my two-hour descent into madness. Which, let me tell you, was not fun! I got to relive the experience of wasting time and money when I should have been making money.

At one point, I spent about 20 minutes trying to complete a single quest, which I should add only promised a reward of two silver. I never really dipped into WoW Classic, so I forgot how unforgiving OG WoW was. I'm not used to being a weak baby who will die as soon as a large bird or boisterous pig-man so much as looks at me. And I was already tired and annoyed by this point. I could have moved on. But I was determined to complete this stupid bloody quest. And I did it! I got my two silver.

Why was I even taking quests on!? I should have just stuck to murdering and skinning critters.

Anyway! I had a horrible time, made less than 10 silver, and because I'm not a very nice man, the knowledge that Josh and Harvey had a lovely time only makes me feel worse.

The final scores...

At the end of our two-hour stint, we'd made a combined two gold, 49 silver, and 20 copper, after subtracting our 20 silver stipends. Which isn't exactly that much for a combined six hours of work, but given we were all starting at level one? I'm not that upset.

It's somewhat telling that Josh managed to produce roughly the same result by simply telling folks that he was trying to beat "two bastards" in a competition. Still, I chalk this up to WoW's community being refreshingly funny and willing to play ball: I had a lot of folks whispering to me during my wise vigil with kind words, which honestly brightened up my time as TheOrc OfWisdom considerably.

What did we learn? I think, unfortunately, that begging in an MMO is surprisingly effective, provided you're insightful or "famous" enough. Maybe stick to selling copper bars, or something.

On Tuesday I published PC Gamer's first murder investigation, about a dead body found on a golf course in Golden Tee '99. It includes at least one (1) twist and up to two (2) shocking reveals. But I know what you sickos are here for: you just wanna see the dead body. Here I am, golfing my way to it in MAME.

The diary of my time with Grand Theft Auto 5 so far consists, in the main, of struggles with cars. The perfidious automobile, the horseless carriage, has run rampant in Los Santos for weeks now, causing all manner of chaos as I attempt to live my life and do backflips and what-have-you.

Time to put them in their place. To do so, I have utilised Toy Cars – Make any car tiny, whose nature is right there in the name. The pitch is that you can transform any car you drive into its Micro Machines equivalent, shrinking them down to fit in a child's hand, keeping "your original vehicle visible, sounding, and behaving like itself while using a hidden RC-sized chassis underneath to provide miniature collision, suspension, and road physics."

This is not quite how it goes for me.

As ever, this is not the mod's fault. It seems to work well. After teleporting my way into a car (they are mostly too airborne to hijack normally), I drive around a bit and tap F7—the magic car-shrinking key. This is where it all goes to pot, you see.

The shrinking bit? Works great. My car—a taxi—instantly transmogrifies, becoming a Lilliputian replica of itself. Then it all goes off the rails. Somehow, for reasons that will forever be beyond me, I think the game stops registering the car as having a driver. If it's not a player-character vehicle, it suddenly becomes subject to the laws (or lack of laws) that govern every other car in the game: it careens off like a scared horse, bouncing off walls, ducking under low arches.

It is entirely beyond my control and I cannot get out. If I hit F—the traditional button for exiting a car—a notification pops up that there are no deer nearby. This is saddening news but not immediately relevant to my being taken hostage by a car.

Fortunately, I can return the car back to scale with another tap of the F7 key, but I am somewhat sad. For a moment there, I thought I could live the Borrower life I always dreamt of. Maybe some other time.

I could never get into any of those come-back-once-a-day-for-a-new-challenge games. You know, your Wordles and Wordle-likes. I figured it was because I'm too changeable; I can never stick to a routine for any length of time before it all gets upended.

I was wrong. It was actually because I hadn't discovered British Voter Quiz, which gives you a brief outline of the demographics and beliefs of a random (real but anonymous) member of the British public and then asks you to guess how they voted in the 2024 election.

It never makes sense and is usually alarming, which is probably on the national crest. I got 2/5 in today's challenge. Tomorrow I will likely do worse.

The grapple hook is a legit game changer

Yeeeeeeeeehooooooooooo!

Yeah yeah, sure, Arc Raiders is getting some new guns, but the real star of my session was the grapple hook. Embark made an honest-to-god grapple hook: Not the kind that zips you straight to where you aim it (that already exists), but a simulated rope that's quite rare in videogames.

The grapple hook is only a green tier gadget, but very versatile. A single hook lets you:

• Climb straight up to the top of most buildings
• Swing from rooftop to rooftop like Spider-Man
• Safely descend from tall buildings
• Annoy the crap out of flying Arc bots

What makes the grapple hook so useful is that it sticks to just about anything. Wherever the hook lands becomes a pivot point that you can either climb toward, descend, or swing against. You can also redeploy the hook midair, without a cooldown or use limit, meaning you can chain swings together.

Above: Scaling a building with the grapple hook is about as fast as climbing a ladder, which is surprising.

It's a level of pendulum-based freedom that videogames rarely afford—let alone in a multiplayer environment—and makes the hook immediately fun to play with. The first match I had one, I ended up ignoring most of Pendola Pass' new locations and instead tried to see how long I could stay in the air with just the hook. I broke my ankles more than once, but in a short time I felt like the hook had tripled my movement options in Arc Raiders, and that's exciting. I really want to see how it performs on the other maps. Frozen Trail also adds a launcher that tethers two objects together and a grenade that yanks Arc bots to the ground, but I didn't test those thoroughly.

I'm delighted by Arc Raiders' embracing of physics-based tools and impressed that Embark isn't afraid to let these emergent gameplay ingredients be a little jank. You can tell while using the grapple hook why other videogames are so restrictive with similar mechanics: Sometimes you'll climb all the way up the rope only to not grab the ledge at the top, or the rope itself gets tangled between a protruding balcony, or you slide off the giant Emperor bot in Pendola Pass that Embark clearly doesn't want you to climb. It takes trial and error to use it well, and it's way more interesting than it is frustrating.

The skill tree rework is big… on paper

Arc Raiders' reworked skill tree is a mix of old and new abilities, with certain branches on the tree forcing you to pick one ability over others. Such as:

Conditioning 10

Vault Spring: Lets you jump at the end of a vault
OR
Vaults On Vaults On Vaults: Vaulting no longer costs stamina.

Mobility 30

Sprinting on Fumes: Stamina never fully drains while sprinting.
OR
Wall Run: Sprinting at a wall allows you to run up it for a few steps.
OR
In The Flow: Chaining together mobility moves while sprinting increases the speed, and reduces the stamina cost.

We were given a pile of XP points to dump into the skill tree. I focused on Mobility and Conditioning, and while it was nice to sprint for a long time without stopping, I can't say the new abilities led to me playing Arc Raiders any differently than before. The majority of the nodes on the tree are still incremental stat boosts that make the basics easier. It's a meaningful progression track in the long-term, but not instantly transformative so far.

To be fair, that may be exactly how it should be. Loot and crafting is the focus of Arc Raiders, and if the skill tree offered dramatic upgrades that make you a bigger threat, like better shields, it'd undermine other systems like the research tables and blueprints. This is an improvement, but I'm not clamoring for any one skill.

Pendola Pass is beautiful, but familiar

I've played 80 hours of Marathon since the last time I booted Arc Raiders, and that game's tremendous maps left an impression on me. Each one not only looks and feels different, but has unique, gameplay-specific hooks that makes my destination a huge decision from the jump. Arc Raiders does this in smaller ways, but I've yet to discover the big hook of Pendola Pass.

If it's snow, then sure: The white blanket is visually unique, flash freezes are sort of a threat (though I didn't even encounter one by accident) and raiders appear to leave trails one could follow.

If it's the new Bully Arc enemy, it's certainly an annoying new threat, though I plan to stay out of its way 90% of the time like I do the Leaper. When it comes to the stuff I do most in this game—plundering research facilities, stores, and residential districts—Pendola Pass feels like retreading chunks of existing maps.

Pendola Pass is welcome variety, but so far, it makes me wish Embark would take more Stella Montis-sized chances with its maps. Perhaps the real draw is getting inside the Emperor itself—I didn't manage it during the preview period, but it's apparently possible.

Friends, we are doing important work—the work of determining, through democracy and science (maybe), what RTS unit deserves to be held aloft and named the greatest RTS unit of all time. It's a lot of responsibility.

Last week, the war began. 16 units entered, 8 units survived. There were close battles. Dawn of War's unstable Psyker and Battle for Middle-earth's Rohirrim were neck and neck for most of the voting period, swapping positions with every blow traded. But in the end, those long-haired horse boys won. Then there were the ass-kickings. Right from the word go, Warcraft's Peon raked in the votes, leaving Rise of Legends' majestic Glass Dragon battered a bruised.

We salute the losers—they were good, but not good enough. And now the victors must return to the battlefield to duke it out again. It's time for the quarterfinals, baby!

The quarterfinals bracket

Things are getting tense. We're going to have to make some difficult decisions. Will our collective love for funny little green guys keep the Peon from being obliterated by the mighty Mammoth Tank? Will the Mirage Tank's ability to pretend to be a tree help it survive against Darth Vader's personal Star Destroyer? This is all up to you.

All four of my personal picks made it to the quarterfinals (thank you, thank you), but now I'm nervous. Now that we're down to eight competitors, I've got a pick in each fight. I could win it all! Or I could lose everything. Harrowing stuff. I'm particularly worried about the Dolphin vs Priest battle. Our sleek, squeaky pal utterly dominated the Sonic Tank in the last round, but the Priest was incredibly popular—only the Peon had a more clear-cut battle.

It would be inappropriate for me to try and influence your vote, but just let me ask you this: do you really want to see a heroic, noble creature of the sea getting crushed by organised religion? Let your conscience guide you.

As before, you'll be able to vote on each battle below until the end of Sunday (BST). Otherwise, there are no rules. Chaos reigns! Vote based on vibes, aesthetic, hyper-specific grudges or just who you think would win in a fight. Right, let's get back to the war!

Peon vs Mammoth Tank

Peon (Warcraft 3)

The real heroes of Warcraft, Peons are mistreated, disrespected and undervalued by orcish society, but they are the most critical cog in the Horde's war machine. They get called "dogs" and "cowards", and yeah, they might enjoy the occasional nap—but they work hard! They deserve a rest!

Orcs are classist dickheads. Without Peons, you'd have no great halls, no barracks, no trained warriors. Peons avoid conflict not because they are cowards, but because they know they are too important to die in battle—that the future of their people hinges on them building a new gold mine or chopping down some trees.

And if it comes down to it, they'll fight, either directly (which they are, frankly, terrible at) or by holing up in a burrow. They can do it all! Zug zug, my friends. Zug zug. —Fraser Brown, Online Editor

Mammoth Tank

God bless these great, trundling beasts—implacable Soviet strength wrought in steel and pig iron.

Mammoth Tanks are unfathomably costly and painfully slow, but whatever. I'm convinced just one of them could probably win the entire RA1 Soviet campaign by itself. Akh-knowledged. —Joshua Wolens, News Writer

Rohirrim vs Pride of Hiigara

Rohirrim (Lord of the Rings: Battle for Middle-earth)

The Ride of the Rohirrim is a very influential movie moment for a young lad. I, for example, decided that the only faction I could play in Lord of the Rings: Battle for Middle-earth was Rohan. And the only unit I would enjoy playing were the Rohirrim.

I'd get my long-haired horse boys fresh out of the stable, hand them forged blades (made the tips of their spears glow), as much heavy armour as I could afford, then arrange them into a neatly-formed flying V formation. My entire operation was focused on powering through as fast as possible until I could get my horde of superpowered spearmen on horseback. Every playthrough—every damn playthrough.

These Rohirrim were basically a cheat code. They could easily trample Sauron's armies under hoof. Just line them up, set them off, and watch carnage ensue. I'm rewatching the Ride of the Rohirrim as I write this and it makes me want to boot the game right back up again—goosebumps. —Jacob Ridley, Managing Editor, Hardware

Pride of Hiigara (Homeworld 2)

While other ships are spitting out missiles and other little projectiles, the Homeworld Mothership is spitting out capital ships. It is both a unit and your base—an impossibly huge mobile factory that can carry your whole fleet inside of it. Its direct offensive capabilities are extremely limited, but like I said: It can spit out capital ships.

I've picked the Kushan/Hiigaran version specifically because of its iconic design, which for me is right up there with the Enterprise D and Star Destroyers. While it's largely stationary in the original Homeworld (at least in the campaign), it's fully mobile in Homeworld 2, giving it an extra dose of utility. —Fraser Brown, Online Editor

Mirage Tank vs Super Star Destroyer

Mirage Tank (Command and Conquer: Red Alert 3)

Most tanks are performative. They're like those folks who film themselves in the gym, flexing their muscles, grunting and getting in everyone's way. But not the Mirage Tank—it's sneaky. You wouldn't even notice it in the gym. You'd just be left to wonder, "Who put this tree in the gym?" And then it cuts right through you with its spectrum dispersion cannon.

It was already one of the coolest units ever created in Red Alert 2, but Red Alert 3's version introduces more disguises and enhances the unit's DPS capabilities. It can be a sneaky assassin on its own, but a group of them can make short work of an enemy base. —Fraser Brown, Online Editor

Executor Super Star Destroyer (Star Wars: Empire at War)

My colleagues have, for some reason, chosen to prioritize things like "funny voice lines" and "subtext" while proposing their favorite RTS units. Sorry, gang: you're about to get crushed by 19 kilometers of steel and turbolasers.

This enormous Death Triangle is the ultimate wish fulfilment vessel in Empire at War, one of my favorite Star Wars games. It's not a top-tier RTS, but it is top-tier Star Wars fantasy in game form, letting you move around a bunch of little toy ships and play out the "what if" of throwing Rogue Squadron's ace pilots up against a Star Destroyer. They've got a real chance in that fight, but not against the Executor, Darth Vader's personal ride.

The damn thing is practically the size of Manhattan, and you can really feel that scale in the game. It makes regular Star Destroys look like Doritos by comparison. It's swimming with so many turbolaser batteries it can bully an entire Rebel fleet by itself. Don't even try that A-Wing trick against it—that sort of nonsense only works in the movies. —Wes Fenlon, Senior Editor

Dolphin vs Priest

Dolphin (Command and Conquer: Red Alert 2)

The Dolphin—what a superstar. You could be forgiven for treating these sleek, squeaky critters like nothing more than scouts, with their lack of armour and impressive speed. But you'd be wrong. They are killers.

In a group, Dolphins are unstoppable gods of war, able to deftly take out buildings and vessels with their sonic blasts. They should be feared and respected. Sure, the Soviets think they have naval superiority, but once the Allies start churning out Dolphins, it's game over, man. —Fraser Brown, Online Editor

Priest (Age of Empires)

"Wololo." I win. —Jody Macgregor, Weekend Editor

A lot of the 3D games I consider touchstones of thoughtful player movement are a decade or more old: Mirror's Edge, of course, Titanfall 2, Dishonored 2, Doom Eternal or ARMA 3. That's by no means a comprehensive list, but these are the games that come to mind when I think about in-game movement that feels incredibly considered. And if ARMA 3 feels out of place in that list, its sim-style tactical physicality is memorable to anyone who plays it even briefly (me).

These each set the ceiling high for what you could achieve with their controls, if you were prepared to learn them. Each offered a power fantasy of some kind to be mastered, whether you're wall-running onto a mech or peeking out across a field to line up a perfect shot.

In recent years, though, I feel like it's increasingly common to find developers who want to capture granular, basic movements from real life that have no power fantasy element whatsoever. Things that would've sounded so boring if they were back-of-the-box features during the age of Quake 2 and Half-Life. I'm talking about walking slowly. Steadily moving up a cliff face. Mantling awkwardly over surfaces. Getting defeated by a slightly high rock and taking the long way around. Falling on your arse if you tumble down a small hill.

They're about finding the fun in something as simple as balancing the packages you're carrying in Death Stranding, or escaping the mud in Snowrunner. 'Boring' games with a simulation aspect are as old as PC gaming itself, but this newer crop are tapping into something more universal and compelling that strikes a chord with players. Some of these games have ended up being GOTY frontrunners.

It was 2025's Baby Steps that got me thinking about this in more detail. The idea that just the act of walking without falling over into physics hell could be the entire game was maybe not revolutionary by itself, but the high-end execution was an important distinction. There's something about Baby Steps that I find uniquely pure: it breaks down a fundamental and often just functional part of any other game—putting one foot in front of another, then slowly repeating it—into its constituent parts, then rebuilds it. Every step matters. Every part of every step.

It's a beloved and award-winning game. I didn't finish it, but did throw two expletive-filled afternoons at it, and I respect the heck out of what it tries to accomplish.

The irony is, even though Baby Steps is not a power fantasy by most people's criteria, it was inspired by a game that clearly is one. Well, inspired by a particularly gruelling custom map for it, anyway: The Mirror's Edge mod Stratocubulus got you to rethink everything about Faith's moveset in the game and experiment with the level geometry in order to solve it. "It was the stuff that was ambiguous as to whether or not you could do it, stuff that you could puzzle over and push you into trying new ways of moving," said designer Gabe Cuzillo at GDC 2026, as captured by Wes. "That was really the experience we're interested in."

Some of this year's best games are distinguished because of how they use movement, too. There's Cairn, which turns climbing a mountain into a series of precise navigation puzzles with a resource management layer. There's Control Resonant, which marries a familiar superhero-style moveset to brain-bending switches in gravity. There's Vholume, which initially seems like a more stripped back version of Mirror's Edge parkour, except it's hiding incredible depth in its level layouts and mechanics.

Doom: The Dark Ages' Revelations DLC added the chain spear, giving it some of Eternal's arena acrobatics, while Cicadamata's queasy FOV manipulation and towering triple jumps make it a singular proposition as a game about navigating a combat arena.

Then, of course, you have Big Walk, which is an entire game of trotting across a large map from A to B. The fantasy element is taking that journey with friends, but the actual walking part is not that easy. Just mantling over a knee-high surface can be challenging.

I don't think these games are deliberately part of a trend, but I do have a couple of theories on why we're seeing so much experimentation with movement. One is that this is the natural outcome of how long 3D games have been around now. There truly is a game for everything these days, whether it's a man walking around in a babygrow or the nightmare fuel sitting in the bottom rungs of Steam.

My second theory is that it's a reaction to control being taken from players with the rise of big-budget blockbusters in the late 2000s and 2010s. These things ebb and flow: Much like how action games have been curving towards hardcore combat inspired by FromSoftware games, players (and designers) are now drawn to a similar level of stimulation and craft in their character movement, whether they're about boring old walking or turning the player into Spider-Man.

Stripped back

Years ago I listened to an episode of Irrational Games' podcast where one of the developers pointed out that a reason Grand Theft Auto 3 was revolutionary was that it condensed what could've been a complex sequence of actions into a single button press: opening the door to a car, removing the driver, climbing into the car, turning the key and taking the steering wheel. GTA turned that into "Triangle." I don't know if I agreed with that theory—GTA 1 did it first in 1997—but I can see why a designer might think about it that way.

In general, the rise of big-budget multiplatform games started pushing PC games more towards console norms in terms of interface and how they played, in the name of offering an identical experience across all platforms. For movement, this marked a trend towards third-person games like Assassin's Creed, a series where very little input is needed to make your character climb across a series of rooftops.

That influence still extends to games like Ghost of Tsushima or Wolverine, where movement is trivial because you're only allowed to interact with certain parts of the game world. A jump doesn't exactly feel like a jump. Likewise, Uncharted—a series I love—sanded all the sharp edges off Tomb Raider's '90s platforming. Friction was stripped back in order to get millions of people to play. It worked.

I personally feel that type of design is falling out of fashion. The reason games like Cairn, Baby Steps or Big Walk connect now is that they don't trivialise movement in this way. This is why I think these games could only exist now, with a very long history of 3D movement behind us.

There's something subversive about designers taking a step back and asking, 'well, what is movement, actually?' What do you have to accomplish to put one foot in front of the other? What happens to your body's positioning when you place the weight behind your left arm against a cliff face? Those are more interesting questions to ask than I ever thought they could be. There may be a whole universe of games inside those limitations.

Next up: let's take another step back and get even more granular about human movement. How about an incredibly hardcore 15-hour game just about the act of breathing, culminating with the objective to tie your shoelaces while holding in a gut? I'd find these motions even more relatable than Nate's trials in Baby Steps. I can see the GOTY nominations already.

Wait, who's putting words in Sebulba's mouth? I was shocked to see a post today from Duncan Fyfe, author of the incredible "Oral History of Tim Curry’s Escape to the One Place Uncorrupted by Capitalism," saying that he was lead writer on Star Wars Galactic Racer alongside Chris Remo, one of the hosts of the best gaming podcast ever (RIP Idle Thumbs). Fyfe also wrote the wonderfully funny history podcast Something True. Those are some smart guys. I wonder which typed "poodoo" in a Google Doc first?

Really pleased to finally say that Chris Remo and I were the lead writers on Star Wars: Galactic Racer. The team at Fuse are the absolute best in their field, and it really shows. It was a great project to work on and is an even better game to play. Sebulba forever

— @duncanfyfe.net (@duncanfyfe.net.bsky.social) 2026-10-06T22:47:14.118Z

Final Fantasy music is presumably so profitable for Square Enix that there are always new ways to slice the pie, whether we're talking piano covers, guitar versions, or expensive anniversary vinyl releases of its classic RPG soundtracks.

Final Fantasy 10 is getting one of the latter next month to mark its 25th anniversary. And as someone who once spent a lot of my meagre convenience store salary importing the CD collection from Play Asia back in the day, it's undeniably a gorgeous sight:

Elsewhere, Square Enix continues to find more inventive ways to squeeze dollars out of its vast music catalogue, including some which push the music into different genres entirely. Final Fantasy 10: House Grooves—the second of its kind following a similar outing for FF9—is exactly what it sounds like. Can Final Fantasy 10's often mournful or moody score become dance music?

The answer is: kind of. You never quite shake the sense that an unholy Seymour-Guado-and-his-mother-style union has taken place with this album.

Some of the remixes sound like music I'd expect to hear in the bar of the W hotel during GDC circa 2014. I'd say that definitely applies to the rendition of 'To Zanarkand', the famous piano opening to the game. I get big 'making small talk with the concierge' energy from that one. Still, I do think the two styles ultimately gel in that case, even if the end result evokes vastly different feelings as piece of music.

'Phantoms', a track players may remember from the icy Macalania sections of the game, is my favourite remix on there. I'd already heard this atmospheric track sampled in vapourwave and chillwave playlists from the mid-'10s, so the fit made sense there.

Then there are other times where the two styles don't totally mesh. Take 'Wandering', perhaps the saddest track in the game, which plays after the evil cosmic whale Sin turns up early in the game and murders loads of soldiers on a beach. You can't really turn that one into a 'bop'—so it just ends up sounding like two totally separate pieces of music playing over the top of each other. I still enjoy listening to it, however, because my taste in music is dogshit.

The reason I suspect the entire album exists is to turn the game's most dancefloor-friendly boss theme into a legit club banger. Give it up for 'Fight with Seymour', which also slaps the Blitzball theme hook in there for good measure. Still, I wouldn't play this at a party, unless only my most accepting dweeb friends were the ones on the guest list.

No one's going to be spinning Final Fantasy 10: House Grooves on Boiler Room any time soon, but considering it's reheated nostalgia, I am very satisfied. It's an unhealthy level of pandering by Square Enix to the FF10 sickos like me, yet here I am, ready to play these house 'grooves' for the 20th time.

"Golden Tee '99, hole seven, Aspen Lake: There's a dead body about 180 yards out, a little bit to the right in the woods there," says Keith of Keith's Arcade, a YouTube channel not typically devoted to cold case homicides. But as they say in golf, you've got to play it as it lies, and in November 2012 Keith stumbled upon a body lying motionless just off the green of the otherwise picturesque, forested course in northern Colorado. It was his responsibility to tell the world what he'd found.

"There you go. There you go," Keith repeats, clearly in shock. "Dead body in the woods, about 180 yards from the tee off point. Hole seven, Aspen Lake, Golden Tee '99. Thanks for watching."

Under the pixelated body is a pool of blood, suggesting this unidentified man lying facedown in the grass met a violent end. A golf club stretches out from his hand—but was he really a golfer? Or was it placed there to make it look like a tragic accident, an injury sustained during what is well-known to be a dangerous game? Were there clouds suddenly darkening over the course beside Aspen Lake, or were those just scanlines?

Golfers, famously, take their lives into their own hands every time they get in one of those little carts (no seatbelts!!) and drive it, like, 200 yards. Perhaps that's why this death went uninvestigated for so long—it's even conspicuously absent from the Colorado Bureau of Investigation's cold case files, at least according to my comprehensive independent examination (typing the word "golf" into the database, getting zero results and immediately giving up).

To solve a case this cold, I knew there was only one place to go: straight to the source.

Bogey in the rough

Just one problem. Like any other professional true crime investigator (better known as a "podcaster"), I stumbled upon this case with little clue of who to get in touch with first and a keen awareness of the fact that even if I did, jumping right to the solution would ruin all the suspense. So I started by getting the email of a friend-of-a-friend, whose earliest credit on Mobygames happened to be Golden Tee '99.

"I vaguely remember that this was a thing, but unfortunately I don't know how it got in," artist Stephen Alexander—who went on to work on BioShock and BioShock Infinite—told me last year. "If I had to guess it would have been put there by Jim Zielinski (the course designer). He did pretty much all art placements in that version of the game since it was almost all gameplay relevant. Outside of that I really don't know. I was credited on '99, but I think I just did the logo animation (if even that)? I had started pretty recently and was working on some other 3D stuff that was being started up at the time."

A promising lead! Armed with a suspect, I did what any aspiring podcaster would do in this situation: Sit on the information for a month, then track down what might be Jim Zielinski's email, fire off a single message at 5:52 pm, and then completely drop the story as soon as no response was forthcoming.

The third caddie

Everyone in the professional investigating-fake-dead-bodies-in-30-year-old-golf-games sphere has something that drives them. A tragedy in their past. An unwavering, ironclad sense of justice. A Turfman 800.

For me, it's procrastination. Faced with some other task I really didn't want to do in March 2026, I reopened the case and found another lead. Software engineer Tino Kalafatis has little online presence, but with a bit of searching I uncovered that he has, like Zielinski, worked at Golden Tee creator Incredible Technologies since the 1980s. This time my email found its target.

An ace gumshoe himself, Tino did what had previously proven slightly difficult for this reporter: he asked Jim.

…who, I should be very clear, did not in fact murder a man on a Colorado golf course. But he did cheekily place a little pixelated body on hole seven of Aspen Lake in Golden Tee '99, as a goof.

"Yes this is legit. Back in the day we thought it would be fun to put some interesting things to look at off in the woods in case players made an errant shot. The dead guy was my idea, and it's actually a digitized photo of me laying in the grass outside our office. We digitized the photo and put it into the game," said the man himself, as relayed over email by Kalafatis.

Turns out this was never a fake murder investigation at all. It was a fake suicide investigation all along.

As he's described on the Incredible Technologies golf-focused blog LiveWire, Zielinski is "a guy who loves golf, who strives to create golf games for other people who love golf, and he’s damn good at it." Before co-creating Golden Tee, he was the arcade company's "first and only QA employee," before bonding with programmer Larry Hogdson over "their shared love of the gentlemen's game" and taking on course design for a fledgling golf simulator. That project didn't pan out, but it eventually led to the creation of Golden Tee. They've been making golf games ever since.

You may still be reeling from the twist that Golden Tee's course mastermind once put a photograph of his own "dead" body in the woods of hole seven of Aspen Lake in Golden Tee '99. But it turns out this wasn't an isolated incident. Bodies have also been spotted in Golden Tee 2010 and whichever one this is. The sport remains dangerous, no matter how much more sophisticated golf game technology grows with each passing year.

Cover-up!?!?

Last year, after stumbling across Keith of Keith's Arcade's video about the dead body in the woods, about 180 yards from the tee off point on hole seven of Aspen Lake in Golden Tee '99, I went looking for it myself in the recently released Golden Tee Arcade Classics collection on Steam.

There I made a chilling discovery: The body, which we now know was the digitized flesh of Jim Zielinski, placed by the physical flesh of Jim Zielinski, was right where it should be… but the blood wasn't.

Was this a flaw in the emulation used to present these arcade games on PC? Or an attempt to make golf look less cutthroat? Who took the blood, and what did they do with it?

These hard-hitting questions, put to compilation developer Digital Eclipse, have so far gone unanswered. Complicating the situation, if you play Golden Tee '99 on the Internet Archive—where it runs in arcade emulator MAME—the pool of blood is there. So what's different about the Arcade Classics version? Even Zielinski isn't sure, though he offered his own theory.

"There may have been two versions, the original one with blood, and then one where we got rid of the blood puddle," he said. "For a lot of the early Golden Tee 3D golf courses, I also placed a digitized version of myself directly behind the first tee, so my friends and family could easily find me in the game. They just had to start a game, turn around 180 degrees, and I'd be standing there."

I asked if the original photo used to add Jim to the game was still around somewhere, but he said it's sadly been lost to time. By cross-referencing the Arcade Database, however, I was able to determine that Incredible Technologies did release two revisions of Golden Tee '99: v1.00 and v1.00S. S for… hole seven? S for sanitized? S for sans blood?

Bound by my duty, I found a ROM of Golden Tee '99 v1.00S online and loaded it into MAME. I started noticing more stuff on each course that I swear wasn't there before. There were more spectators, more not-so-hidden bits of eye candy that oozed Zielinskism. A woman in a polka dot bathing suit sunbathing behind a log cabin. A guy on a lawnmower. A cheery group in a bright yellow raft paddling alongside the fairway. I hadn't seen these versions of the Aspen Lake front nine before. And when I got to hole seven, about 180 yards out, a little bit to the right in the woods, there was Jim, sure enough. And there was Jim's blood.

Toss that theory into the sand trap, then.

Perhaps that S actually stood for something a little more sinister—something Digital Eclipse was simply trying to distract me from with that missing blood. Keep me focused on the body, not on what else was going on around the course. But it didn't work, because on my way to hole seven I found something to blow this whole case wide open. Something lurking in the woods, just behind the green. Something that suspiciously disappeared when I tried to get too close.

S… FOR SASQUATCH!?!?

I've taken this investigation as far as it can go. Time to bring in the experts.

At Fate's End, a narrative action-adventure game that got PC Gamer's Wes Fenlon so excited at GDC earlier this year, will not be out in 2026 as expected, but will instead land in 2027. "We've made so much progress on the game since its 2025 reveal but it needs a little more love and care to ensure its release is as smooth as possible," developer Thunder Lotus wrote. "We'll let y'all know a more precise date once we have all our ducks in a row."

Ah, but there is some good news with the bad. A demo is now available on Steam, promising "a great first taste of everything the game has to offer: a deep immersive world, cool characters, a compelling mystery for you to solve, and lots of exciting combat." And we've got a new trailer, too.

Warhammer Survivors launches on November 10, 2026 and its Steam demo is available now, as revealed by a new release date trailer showing the expected dozens of playable Warhammer heroes slaughtering the expected thousands of enemy fodder with boltguns, enchanted hammers, and at least one Leman Russ battle tank. Our Fraser Brown has already spent 10 hours with the demo, and is entirely smitten with its prerequisite goblin slaying. And Tyranid slaying. And Skaven slaying.

A shift in the fabric of reality: I launch Grand Theft Auto 5 and, following the now-customary hitch-and-stutter loading screen that can last anywhere from 10 seconds to five minutes, Franklin spawns into his familiar void apartment. Within seconds, he begins plummeting, screaming.

All of this is fine and normal.

But something new: Franklin carries a duffel bag with him into the abyss now, and I am unsure as to why. My guess is that it is a byproduct of my newly installed mod, ScamV, which "turns Los Santos into your digital playground." Let the possibilities unfurl ahead of you—"Take on the role of a cyber-criminal, exploit vulnerabilities, use cloned cards, and build your underground fortune."

Mostly, though, it has given me a bag. Don't get me wrong, I am sure that all of these things would be present in a regular installation of ScamV, but unfortunately ScamV in my world is forced to compete with an armageddon of other mods: the flying cars, new interiors, deleted exteriors, credit ratings and so on.

So mostly it is a bag. But wait, there is also this—the possibility of walking into a bank, any bank, and interacting with the teller by paying in fake cheques. "You don't have any fake cheques," the game tells me when I attempt this. It does not tell me where or how to obtain them. Kafka-esque. Five stars.

A new map-viewing tool of the WoW: Forever client has just dropped, and this thing is so gosh darn nifty. It's not perfect, and it can take a while for textures to stream in, but as long as you have the files on your computer, this map viewer lets you zip around Azeroth with your mouse wheel like an omniscient god. Please enjoy me marvelling at this fact.

I didn't know I could have an entitled opinion about giant anime robots until I played a preview of Gundam Rogue Orbit, but it turns out I can. I'm mad because they gave me a Gundam with a whip sword straight out of Bloodborne (if Gundam hadn't actually gotten there first in the mid-'90s).

To be clear, I'm not mad at the whip sword itself. I'm ecstatic about the whip sword. It's exactly the kind of esoteric weapon that suggests Rogue Orbit has a real shot at being the kind of action game that I want out of Gundam—one with a bit more melee crunch and nuance than they tend to offer. But I can't help but look this gift sword in the mouth, because months after revealing the game, the Gundam team are still holding back hands-on with the bit I want to see most: a damn customization screen.

Why couldn't I look through a short list of weapons whitelisted for the demo build and have a chance to think: "Whip sword? Yes, I'll be having some of that." The fact that you can customize your mech in Rogue Orbit isn't secret: there's a screenshot of the menu on the freaking Steam page! Here's what it looks like:

That looks cool. I would've loved to spend at least a few seconds pondering stats like "close-range power" and "output" before deciding a 60-foot-tall robot using a whip to channel its inner Belmont while fighting aliens is far too dope to resist, numbies be damned.

Demos always have to strike a balance between showing too much and not enough, risking a confusing amount of up-front complexity or a slice so thin it misses some of the fatty goodness that adds flavor. I played about 30 minutes of Rogue Orbit, which was all action, accompanied by plenty of anime-tinged voiceover about the aliens(?) called "The Apocalypse" that made me think I will probably not pay much attention to anything that happens in this story.

On the edginess scale, though, Rogue Orbit's got nothing on the likes of "XXXG-01D2 Gundam Deathscythe Hell" from Gundam Wing: Endless Waltz—you can practically feel the impending turn of the millennium oozing from every letter in that cursed name. Rogue Orbit may not be the politically tinged deliberation on war I love from the best Gundam shows, but that's okay—it's doing something different, and the combo-heavy action immediately made me feel like the game was on to something.

Rogue Orbit skews a bit more action RPG than Devil May Cry—the combos are just a few repeated button presses, and much of your damage comes from throwing in active skills which each have their own cooldowns. Holding a trigger and tapping Square on a PlayStation pad made my Gundam swirl the whip sword around in a 360 degree frenzy, catching anyone nearby in a flurry of quick hits.

Another weapon, the Sword Lance, almost felt Monster Hunter-inspired, building up a unique meter every time I performed a heavy lunging attack mid-dodge. That meter could then be spent to spawn a "Beam Phalanx" of laser-spewing orbs.

Damage numbers, on by default, increase the sense that in the full game I'll be monitoring skill cooldowns a la Granblue Fantasy: Relink as much as I am focusing on attack timing or perfect dodges.

This is, nevertheless, the closest any Gundam game I've ever played has felt like FromSoftware's sublime Armored Core 6. A gentler, "have fun pressing buttons and watch shiny particles go everywhere" cousin, to be sure, but a cousin nonetheless.

It's sort of a cute full-circle moment: In the pre-Dark Souls days, FromSoftware developed several Gundam games for Bandai Namco around the same time it was putting out Armored Core: For Answer and Armored Core 5. The learner has become the master, and so on. If the current Gundam dev team looked at AC6 with envy and decided to replicate it for a slightly less hardcore audience, I think that was a wise move, and I also think, at least based on my early impressions, that they've pulled it off.

But it still feels like I haven't seen the most important bit. So much of the joy of Armored Core—of any proper mech game, really—is assembling a build before tackling a mission, trying to find that balance of speed and durability, raw damage and ammo capacity, range and up-close stopping power that fits the coming threat.

Demo practicality be damned—until I'm putting that whip sword in my Gundam's hand myself, I won't know for certain if this is the next great mech action game or not. The full game is out in March.

I thought Warhammer Survivors sounded like a neat spin-off—Vampire Survivors in a Warhammer skin, created by Boltgun developer Auroch Digital. Having spent 10 hours with its demo, however, I'm increasingly convinced that it deserves to be catagorised as a sequel.

A lot of care has clearly gone into the hero design, maps and all the horrible beasties trying to eviscerate you, and rather than simply replicate Vampire Survivors, Auroch Digital has included a bunch of novelties and new ideas, like followers and more overt boss battles.

Playing it on my Steam Deck has already had a terrible impact on my sleep routine, just like its predecessor. And with its launch just around the corner on November 10, I think I'm just going to have to accept that I'm going to be very tired for the rest of the year.

Ignore the section tag for this article, because while Deadlock may technically have the DNA of a MOBA or a third-person shooter, it is actually a horror game, and a bloody scary one at that.

How did I come to this hypothesis, you ask? Well, a few reasons come to mind, including one huge one that loves pizza. You see, I predominantly play Rem, and one of Rem's perks is that he can run around the maze of tunnels beneath the map, farming souls and just generally getting up to no good. Until recently I was largely left alone in said tunnels; I hardly ever play against a Calico and Mo and Krill rarely use them.

And then came Deadlock's latest major update City Never Sleeps, which brought six new heroes, the first of which being the Rat King. Ironically I actually voted for the Rat King, and that decision haunts me.

Picture this. I'm skedaddling around the tunnels minding my own business when, in the corner of my eye I see something staring at me from the end of one of the adjacent tunnels. It's the Rat King, he's seen me, and he's running my way.

I throw everything I have at the rat but that still isn't enough to defeat him. I decide my only option is to turn tail and run, the only problem with that is that when you're locked in combat the map closes down the exits and entrances to the tunnels, something I forgot until I ran head first into a grated exit. Needless to say I died in that cold dark tunnel, and there wasn't much I could've done about it.

I have been jumpscared by that bloody giant rat more times than I care to admit. Each time I enter the tunnels now my blood runs cold, marred by memories of him hunting me down and throwing Miguel, Jacques, or Abbie with an I at me.

But the horror isn't restricted to the tunnels. Just the other night I was walking through one of the new districts, Chinatown, and accidentally crossed paths with the enemy Abrams. At first I thought that he might not have seen me. I was wrong. I looked back just once to see him right behind me, before I knew it I'd been shoved into the wall and the enemy Seven appeared out of thin air to solo ult me for some ungodly reason.

Perhaps I'm too horror-coded for my own good, and thanks to this I managed to find myself in terrifying scenarios no matter what game I play. But I'm also of the mindset that any online multiplayer game is inherently scary simply because of the fact that people are unpredictable and are almost always out for blood.

I have technically solved a lot of crimes from the comfort of my gaming chair, but it's surprisingly rare for games to actually engage with the mechanics of a criminal investigation. You'll chat to folk, maybe use your 'detective vision', and then the culprit is found. Warhammer 40,000: Dark Heresy asks more from you.

As an agent of the Inquisition, solving crimes and putting away heretics is your business. You don't complete quests, you solve cases, log evidence, make accusations, torture and snoop—all in a universe where your word is law.

Owlcat's given us a quick breakdown of Dark Heresy's detective systems in the video above, but like my favourite inquisitor, Gregor Eisenhorn, I wanted to dig a little deeper and put some questions to Veronika Larionova, Owlcat's senior narrative designer.

Is the detective system exclusively based on things that we've seen in the books and other games, or are there brand new elements that Owlcat created from scratch?

What tools do inquisitors have at their disposal when it comes to their detective work?

How do NPC companions factor into the detective system?

Can you conclude an investigation whenever you want, based on thin evidence?

Is it possible to conclude an investigation successfully just through luck—like picking a culprit at random? And will the outcome be different if you got the right person but failed to collect all the evidence?

What sort of repercussions are there for getting it wrong?

Can the player benefit from purposefully pinning something on the wrong group or person?

Can we essentially play as Eisenhorn—not the character himself, of course, but exclusively making the kinds of choices that Eisenhorn would make?

Got myself a Pip-Boy! Sorry, for legal reasons, it's actually a "Rad-Lad." I recently bought my first ever smartwatch (a Garmin Vivoactive) and now my evenings are spent being completely inactive as I sit on the couch downloading cool watch faces and trying them out. This is a really impressive one called the Rad-Lad by MarekSoso that turns your watch into a Pip-Boy, complete with different tabs for time and date, body metrics, weather, and even a world map. You can even complete quests! It's pretty rad. All that's missing is VATS.

La Rochefoucauld once wrote, "What grace is to the body, good sense is to the mind." He wrote this some time before the release of Grand Theft Auto 5, and was likely referring to Mirror's Edge instead.

Regardless, it holds true today. And you know what? Whatever their qualities, the gentlemen of GTA 5 simply don't have much grace to them. They are lumpy, ambling figures, and move like young children unused to their bulk. I have rectified this using Back Flip Mod—a mod for back flip. "Simple backflip for Single Player," it says, with an alarmingly cavalier attitude to capitalisation and style-guide coherence.

But it's true. Now, with a tap of page down (enormous shoutout to the author for choosing page down, by the way: one of few keys left on my keyboard not already colonised by another mod) the lads of Los Santos will, whimsically, backflip in place. Then they'll get very pleased with themselves for pulling it off.

"There's a chance the backflip fails and your character ragdolls," notes the mod's author, which is delicious. Of course, in my testing so far, failures happen not mid-backflip but more at the conception of the backflip idea.

That is to say, you hit the backflip button and—if the dice roll deems it to be a failure—your character collapses immediately, without even moving. In fairness, many of my own ideas and impulses fail in precisely the same way.

What's great about the PS2 back catalogue is that it's too vast to have an encyclopedic knowledge of everything in there. The defining 20 or so games on the platform—God of War, Gran Turismo 3, Final Fantasy 10 and so forth—are very well known, and maybe Millennial players can recall a weirdo game or two like Mr Mosquito or Global Defence Force. One look at the games in the Japan-only Simple 2000 series, however, shows you just how deep the library goes. When's Demolition Girl getting a HD remaster, eh?

Still, we're in an era where it's not hard to rediscover the key games of that generation, partly because many platform highlights have found their way to Steam in various forms. Intriguingly, we've also reached a point where developers who grew up with this generation are designing great new games inspired by the classics.

Below you'll find six modern games that are inspired by what's known as the 'sixth generation' of consoles, plus six ports of Dreamcast/PS2/GameCube/Xbox-era favourites. I've kept the latter to games that didn't get a PC release at the time (so GTA: San Andreas would be ineligible, for example). All of the games in both lists are discounted in the Steam Autumn Sale.

PS2-inspired

Promise Mascot Agency

Promise Mascot Agency (40% off at $15/£13) is an open world game built around a novel management simulation layer. You send Japanese mascots off to various events while exploring an island that may or may not be cursed. It's actually one of the better open world games of recent years because every sidequest offers something meaningful, like additional mascots to manage or upgrades for your truck (culminating in flight capabilities, as pictured). It's also deeply PS2-pilled in its overall presentation, with its creators citing everything from Disaster Report to Persona 4 as its influences. "6 and 7 out of 10 PS2 games are what I live for," director Oli Clarke Smith told RPG Site. It shows in the marvellously unique finished product.

Hi-Fi Rush

Hi-Fi Rush (55% off at £12.14/$13.49) is at the intersection of several great PS2-era phenomena: innovative rhythm action games, cel-shaded visuals and Devil May Cry-style 3D hack-and-slash combat. Tango Gameworks weaves in many other influences besides, including the way director Edgar Wright matches music to visuals in films like Shaun of the Dead and Baby Driver. It's not exactly at DMC or Bayonetta's level when it comes to hardcore combat credentials, but it's presented in an appealing and often breathtaking anime wrapping, and playing to the beat sets it apart. It captures the flavour of the PS2 era without being exactly like any single game.

Denshattack!

A leading candidate for my top 10 games of 2026, Denshattack! (25% off at $15/£12) draws inspiration from Tony Hawk's Pro Skater, but perhaps more crucially, blue skies Dreamcast classics like Crazy Taxi and Jet Set Radio. It's a speedrunning game of stunt jumping, grinding and rapidly boosting your train through regions of a corporate-owned version of Japan. Except the vision of it just keeps expanding, until you're eventually using said train to battle enormous robots and smash massive baseballs at bosses. Again, it's not exactly like any one of its inspirations—this is a special game because the developers draw something original from those sources.

Sifu

Capcom's God Hand is one of my favourite PS2 games. It was a true cult classic, riffing on Fist of the North Star with ludicrous cutscenes, but having one of the best third-person combat systems ever (and getting an infamous IGN 3/10 review for its trouble). There aren't many games that have been able to capture the physicality of its hand-to-hand brawls or customisable combos, but developer Sloclap has specifically called the game out as an influence on 2022's wonderfully brutal Sifu (75% off $10/£8). It's tonally a far more serious proposition, but its enthralling and beautifully animated fistfights did reawaken my God Hand muscle memory.

Kunitsu-Gami: Path of the Goddess

Outside of its well-known franchises, Capcom made a lot of random stuff for the PS2, like Chaos Legion, Auto Modellista, Gregory Horror Show and Clock Tower 3 (if you know what all of those games are, we are the same person). Kunitsu-Gami (25% off at £30/£25) feels like a lost stablemate to those: you recruit villagers to help you defend against hordes of demons that come at night, which are dead set on attacking the maiden you're charged with protecting. You also have a suite of hack-and-slash abilities to use, so it's an inventive hybrid of action and strategy. While there's no way it would've looked this handsome as a PS2 game, it's exactly the sort of thing you'd have expected from the publisher behind Killer7 and P.N.03. We gave it 86%.

Clair Obscur: Expedition 33

"Oh, these guys really like Final Fantasy 10," I thought when I first played Expedition 33 (20% off at $40/£34). To be fair, you feel it more in the world-building and story than the actual bones of its turn-based combat, which feel more like they're drawn from Lost Odyssey on Xbox 360 and Sekiro. The world-ending threat is so similar in Clair Obscur and FF10: the Paintress erases adults of a certain age on an endless cycle, and Final Fantasy 10's giant destructive whale Sin always comes back even if it's destroyed. The melancholy denizens trying to get on with life in a doomed but beautiful world is something crucial that the games have in common, too.

And now, some actual PS2 games

Metal Gear Solid 3: Snake Eater

A few years ago, you couldn't even play MGS3 on PC without an emulator—and now you have two decent ways to play it. The original version comes in the Metal Gear Solid: Master Collection Vol. 1 (50% off at $30/£25). Delta, the remake, is also 30% off. Take your pick, but I personally think the PS2 aesthetic holds up. MGS3 was the less hyped of the two PS2 Metal Gears, mostly because Sons of Liberty was used as an early tech showcase for the platform. But Snake Eater is a more complete game with superior boss battles and the best story in the series.

Final Fantasy 10/10-2 HD Remaster

RPG purists may argue Final Fantasy 12 is a better game—it certainly has stronger localisation and voice acting, and aims for mature storytelling over anime nonsense. It's the easy-to-parse combat and progression systems that keep me coming back to Final Fantasy 10 (60% off at $12/£8), not to mention how distinctive the world of Spira is. The soundtrack is loaded with bops, and might be the part of the game that's endured the most for me. If you like PS2-era Japanese RPGs, you're actually spoiled for choice on Steam: Phantom Brave, Tales of Symphonia, Grandia 2, Kingdom Hearts (if you don't mind stretching the definition) and more are also on sale.

Rez Infinite

I always think of Rez as a Dreamcast-first game, but it was actually released simultaneously in Japan on both PS2 and Sega's final console. Still, it feels Sega to its core. This Panzer Dragoon-style rhythm shooter where you're fighting evil viruses in a computer network has a beautiful Y2K aesthetic, and Rez Infinite (70% off at $8/£6) brought it to modern platforms with a well-received expansion to the original game. It's not a long experience, so the price here is spot-on.

Shin Megami Tensei 3 Nocturne HD Remaster

It goes without saying that Persona 3 Reload and Persona 4 Golden are easy recommendations from the Atlus RPG stable, since both games started their lives on PS2. Persona 4 Revival seems like it'll keep to the same standard, too. The publisher's other games were always a bit weirder and more impenetrable, though, like Nocturne (70% off at $15/£13), an atmospheric and hardcore monster battling game from the mainline Shin Megami Tensei series. Known as Lucifer's Call in the UK, it was my first exposure to Atlus. I never finished it and lost my save when my launch model PS3 died, but 20 years after I first played Nocturne, the specific dour feeling of its post-apocalyptic Tokyo still sticks in my memory. An acquired taste, but the people who love this game really love it.

Onimusha 2: Samurai's Destiny

"I wonder what PC Gamer gave one of my favourite games of all time," I asked myself this morning. Turns out the answer was 65%. Oof! I love Onimusha 2: Samurai's Destiny (50% off at $15/£12.49), because it offers a branching path at numerous points in the story based on how friendly you are with the four different warrior companions in the game. Samurai's Destiny is at the midpoint between old school Resident Evil's fixed camera survival horror and Devil May Cry's hack-and-slash combat (except more methodical and less acrobatic). A great Steam Deck game, as you might expect.

It's a small thing, but being able to save and quit when I'm playing against the AI is a definite improvement in Warhammer: Blood Bowl. Though matches didn't take a huge amount of time in Blood Bowl 3, there were still nights where I'd find myself with 40 minutes before I should really go to bed thinking I can squeeze another game in, and then realizing too late I absolutely cannot.

A bigger change in Warhammer: Blood Bowl, though one that also makes it easier to squeeze in another match, is Rumble Mode. Based on the tabletop format called Sevens, it's a shrunk-down seven-a-side version of Blood Bowl played on a smaller pitch, inspired by 40K in 40 Minutes and Rugby Sevens. Each half has six turns instead of eight and rerolls cost twice as much, making failure much more common—and since a failed action results in a turnover in Blood Bowl, that speeds up play as well.

Rumble Mode isn't exactly the same as Sevens, though I'm playing the beta so details are subject to change. It doesn't have the Desperate Measures inducements, for instance, and you don't have to make one of your linemen a veteran (who is slower, but can reroll a few specific actions). But it still plays faster, and shakes up the tactics in interesting ways.

There's no line of scrimmage for a start. Instead of having to put three players on the frontline where they'll be biffing or being biffed from the outset, there's a no man's land between both teams. That means fragile teams aren't potentially down three players on turn one, which would be even more disastrous with only seven on the pitch.

The smaller pitch makes slow players less of a liability, and the expensiveness of rerolls means skills that let you reroll, like Dodge, get even better. My beloved Halfling team finally has a place to thrive, especially since their Halfling Master Chef can steal precious rerolls from opponents.

You can learn to play Rumble Mode easily since the first chapter of the campaign, carried over from Blood Bowl 3, now defaults to it. The three beginner games you play as default Ussingen Rookies have become seven-a-side, which makes the second match against Chaos Chosen a bit more challenging—getting the assists you need on those Strength 4 Chosen felt trickier to me.

From there you can opt to play the rest of the campaign in either Rumble Mode or as traditional matches, and Rumble Mode is also available in Eternal League, competitions, friendlies, and basically everywhere. It'll be interesting to see how popular it ends up being.

I don't know if I'm hallucinating, but the AI seems better at handling the reduced scope of these smaller matches. Improving the infamously dopey AI is an aim of Warhammer: Blood Bowl, and while I've only had a few days with this beta it does seem a little better. It still throws the occasional ill-advised block—the skink who took on a mummy must have been feeling real lucky that day—but at least it picks the best block die when it has a choice. I even saw it attempt a pass instead of defaulting to a cage around the ball carrier no matter which team it's playing.

I'll need more time with the playtest version to compare, but my first impression is that the AI is slightly less bad, even if it sometimes attempts a risky play before doing something safe like standing up a prone player. Which, admittedly, I'm guilty of in the heat of the moment too.

As well as Rumble Mode, Warhammer: Blood Bowl incorporates the tabletop game's third season rules update. I'm a big fan of the way it punishes stalling, with bored audience members throwing rocks at players who could score but elect not to, and rewards you with a bonus 10 grand at the end of a match if you don't stall.

The new Secure the Ball action lets you pick up the ball on a 2+ if you sacrifice the rest of that player's activation to do it, while the passing rules have been updated to get rid of Wildly Inaccurate results as well as deflections, both changes that encourage actually playing the ball instead of just lining up two teams and hitting each other until the bell rings.

The way Most Valuable Players are selected is different too—instead of a completely random player on your team earning bonus Star Player Points, only the six players you nominate (four in Rumble Mode) can potentially earn MVP. It means you're not punished for having spares on your bench by having them soak up Star Player Points you'd rather see go to someone more useful.

It's still the same Blood Bowl, but with some interesting tweaks. Changes that affect the balance or play out over the course of a tournament, like the Hatred trait players can gain after being injured, will take more time to judge, but I'm positive about the rules update so far.

Other positives in Warhammer: Blood Bowl are a landing page with tiles that can be personalized so you can leap right into whichever mode or ongoing competition you've put a pin in, and a player advancement screen that highlights which three skills other players tend to buy in this situation, with percentages for each. Is everyone else picking Guard for their mummies? Yeah, pretty much. It'll save me alt-tabbing out to see what the internet recommends when I'm playing a new team.

The beta doesn't include either of the new teams coming to Warhammer: Blood Bowl, so I haven't had a chance to try the Tomb Kings or Bretonnians. It also doesn't have the shop or season pass, so how that'll be implemented—and if there are changes to how teams are monetized—remains to be seen.

Warhammer: Blood Bowl's playtest will be available to the public from October 7 on Steam. The full release is scheduled to be out by the end of the year.

I somehow missed that Dark Souls turned 15 two weeks ago. Honestly, what do you even say about it that hasn't been said already? I guess that's why I'm relegating this to a quick post on the PC Gamer Hyperfeed™ rather than a 3-hour YouTube video called something like "The Haunting Ambiguity of Dark Souls 1." The game is undeniably hauntingly ambiguous, though, no word of a lie.

I bounced off Demon's Souls when I first tried it (many such cases), and it took watching a ton of video guides for me to crack this sucker at the beginning of 2014. I was playing the world historically bad Games for Windows Live port on my giant hot laptop in college. I have many fond memories of dragging that thing and its power brick to dorm common spaces or my friends' rooms to feel like I was being social while I ignored everyone and kept dying to Manus over and over.

FromSoft's devs have only grown in power and artistry since, but each new game is so unique in atmosphere and mechanical experimentation that it remains worthwhile to revisit the studio's earlier works. I've played DS1 so many times, though, that I might need to wait another 15 years to forget enough so it can floor me again.

It feels like the last few years have seen a huge upsurge in videogame concerts, at least over here on British soil anyway. Undertale, The Legend of Zelda, Stardew Valley, The Witcher 3, Sonic, Metaphor: ReFantazio, Final Fantasy. The list goes on and on!

It's been a heartwarming sight—despite my saltiness at half of them happening in London, a city that is both too far away for a casual evening and also far too London for me to willingly set foot in it more than twice a year—but I still yearn to see more of my favourite songs in a live setting.

So it got me thinking, what would my ultimate videogame concert actually look like? Well, I'd probably be chucking in a whole lot of Square Enix nonsense a la Distant Worlds—give me Final Fantasy 10, FF12, FF14, and a little bit of FF13 on the side—but I would also kill to hear some Kingdom Hearts stuff with a live orchestra.

Then I'd probably take a pivot away from JRPGs entirely to hear some songs from my childhood. I continue to be utterly obsessed with the soundtrack from Rare's Kameo: Elements of Power 20 years after I first played it, and it's the kind of music that absolutely deserves the full orchestral treatment. And to wrap it all up? Chuck in a DJ set full of remixes from some classic Tekken games. Is that a major tonal shift? Yes, but it's my dream videogame concert, not yours. Get your own!

No, seriously, what would your dream concert look like? Is there a concert that already exists which you're desperately yearning to come to a city near you, or would you concoct some messed-up megamix even more cursed than my own? Leave a comment and be sure to let me know.

Tonda Ros was first drawn to PC gaming at seven years old, after playing the action-adventure classic, Beast. "It's kind of like an open, nonlinear Sokoban that's action-based and not puzzle-based," says Ros, the creator of 2025's Blue Prince. "I think it was the next year where we had a 386 PC in the house, and that's when the floodgates opened … when I played Tank Wars and the original SimCity and Star Control."

Establishing a career as a cinematographer and visual artist, in 2016, Ros began working on Blue Prince. Inspired by games like Myst, board games like Jewels in the Attic and puzzle books like Maze: Solve the World's Most Challenging Puzzle, Blue Prince was painstakingly created across the best part of a decade. When it released last year, it quickly established itself as a modern puzzling classic.

After taking a break following Blue Prince's launch, Ros is currently working on tech support for the puzzler, while also experimenting with new projects. "I think the next game will have to be a smaller game, logistically," he says. But he stepped out of his game development lab to show me around the ever-shifting parlour of his Steam library.

What game are you currently playing?

I'm currently playing Cairn, by The Game Bakers, which is just a gorgeous rock-climbing simulator/adventure game with some survival elements. What's remarkable about the game is how much it feels like rock climbing, and how simple and intuitive the controls are.

I didn't even have to do a tutorial to understand, because that's just how simple and intuitive the controls are—where you control each limb in sequential order. It's just one of the most well-executed control schemes that I've ever seen. And it's not a control scheme that I had seen before.

I think what's really interesting to me is how similar the controls are, conceptually, to last year's Baby Steps, because these are both games where you're controlling individual limbs [and] climb up a mountainous terrain. But one is incredibly intuitive and smooth and frictionless—in the way the controls are executed at least. And then of course Baby Steps goes to the opposite side of the metric.

I love both games, and I think it's cool to see such similar design work conceptually, but with just slight tweaks in the game feel, they're completely different and unique experiences.

What was the previous game you played, and is it still installed?

That would be Big Walk, which is funny because that's also a game about climbing and walking. But yes, I just finished—two weeks ago—Big Walk with my group of friends, and that was an amazing experience.

I have been waiting for that game since it was announced at The Game Awards many years ago, and it's fascinating, because it's the first social proximity chat game I've ever played. I had been waiting for Big Walk for so long that every time other ones came up, I was like, "Yeah, I'd like to play this, but I'm waiting for Big Walk."

It's fascinating because they started development before this whole social chat scene kicked in. It reminds me a lot of Blue Prince, because I started Blue Prince's development before there were any deckbuilders. So you kind of get a sense that this is something that was created in parallel to those design trends, and you see the different decisions that they made, in the same way that I don't think Blue Prince really feels like a deck builder, though you could probably tell we share similar tabletop designs.

I played it with [seven] people. We had been prepped to play this for years … we played it on Thursdays and Sundays, Thursday was a shorter session and then Sunday was a little bit longer. And it was fun because seven people really allowed us to get lost in groups, where two people would be in a conversation and get distracted and fall away, and we wouldn't see them again for four hours. And that was exciting to me.

I don't want to spoil Big Walk for anyone that plays, but the ending just blew me away. I will say that it literally shook me. I think for a lot of times, I'm playing as a game designer, and you can't help but have a little design hat on where you're like "Oh, I would have done this differently" or "I think I could see ways that they could have improved this."

And when I played the last act of Big Walk, I was in awe, because there is no way I could have come to a fraction as good of an ending to that game, as the way they did. So hats off to House House, well deserved success.

What is the oldest game (by release date) currently installed on your PC?

I had thought it would be this, and I'm happy to report it's Myst, 1993. I have Cyan's entire catalogue installed. Myst will always be on my PC. It might not always be the oldest, but Myst is not one that's going anywhere.

There were many, many years where I just liked hanging out in that world, just to listen to the atmosphere while I was working. Hearing the wind and the oceans lap at the shore of Myst island. It has a serene quality. And it has a very deep familiarity because of how many years of my life were spent in that game as a kid, and especially [because] it was my first exposure to an immersive graphical world.

The very first time I played Myst was at a friend's house, and I was going to check out their Super Nintendo because they had just gotten [one] around the same time, and then he was like "Do you want to play something else?" And he took me to his father's office, who had a PC on his desk, and he booted it up, and I was just absolutely stunlocked … and I remember the day I got back, I told my parents—I didn't ask for a Super Nintendo—I told them "We need to get a computer with a CD-ROM."

I'm glad that my game and Big Walk and these games are finding success … because unlike a lot of other genres that are oversaturated, the first-person puzzle game is really not oversaturated. It's crazy, because you have Outer Wilds and Obra Dinn and all these games finding success and [being] universally beloved, and the community is ravenous for new experiences … I hope it encourages more people to explore these areas.

What is the highest number of hours you have in any given game, according to Steam?

I'm only looking at Steam here, so thankfully I get to discount Battle.net, and I'm going to disqualify my own game. So the winner would be Mossmouth's magnificent UFO 50, clocking in at 691 hours. But I'm pretty sure a few hundred of those hours are because of Pilot Quest, which likely won't surprise anyone familiar with the game.

If you aren't familiar … UFO 50 is a collection of 50 games—so it's kind of a cheat in terms of the hours—that all belong to a fictional 1980s console called the LX. And if my hours of play are any indication, these are not 50 mini games. They're 50 games, full games that have a lot of depth, and they're as sizeable as any of the games from the '80s.

There are games across every genre. I remember when I first heard of it, I was like, "OK, that's a cool concept, [but] I don't really play a lot of retro nostalgia-driven games." But when I first saw a clip, the design work I was seeing was like, "Oh, they're doing some cool stuff." I think I saw a clip of one of the games called Mortol. It's like a puzzle platformer where, instead of lives, you have a spaceship full of little men, and each one sacrifices his life to progress everyone else. I just thought the design work was insane, and I spent an entire year playing the game, and I decided to give every title its due.

I think it's easily my favourite game of the last 20 years. I have golden in every cartridge, and I've cherry'd most cartridges. I speedrun a few of them, and one of the titles is Planet Zoldath, so hours can clock up when you're speedrunning.

My favourite is a game called Mini and Max, and it's a game about a little girl trapped in a closet, and the entire game takes place in this walk-in closet. But she learns through the help of her dog—who can talk to her, of course—that she can shrink herself down, or at least use her imagination to pretend she's shrinking herself down, and so the game takes place at a minuscule scale within the closet …. Without spoiling too much about this game, I have a massive, 100-page notebook for the game where I was just mapping out things to a micro scale.

My official recommendation, as someone who had an amazing experience … is boot it up and just start chronologically. Act like you're a kid who only gets one game a week, and just play that game until you want to give up on it, but maybe try to play it a little longer than your instincts.

What game will you never, ever uninstall?

I think it would have to be something that would be inconvenient to reinstall … there's a few borderline abandonware games that I remember having to jump through hoops to actually play again. One at the top of my mind is a game called Lighthouse: The Dark Being. I think it's by Sierra, and it's a first-person, point-and-click, post-Myst exploration game.

It's not the most amazing game in the genre. There were a lot of post-Myst point-and-click adventure games of various quality levels. But I was one I was fond of as a kid, and it's one that was technically difficult to play, at least when I tried to play it.

The work of Michael Brough, actually, his game Cinco Paus is not on Steam, and that's one of my all-time game experiences. I think you can download it from itch. These are games I used the executable files on, as opposed to using Steam. I'll say Cinco Paus too. I won't uninstall Cinco Paus.

What's a piece of non-gaming software installed on your PC that you simply couldn't live without?

Adobe Photoshop. It's the software I know the best, and the one I'm technically the most fluent in, having used it daily since 1999.

It's the one piece of software I've used across all my creative pursuits in my career. It's my canvas when I paint. I use it for motion graphics, for compositing work. It's the foundation of all my web design for all the websites I've made throughout the years. For game design, obviously, all the graphics in Blue Prince, and even for niche stuff like DVD menus, which was actually my first job when I moved to Hollywood.

I'm not into a lot of the changes over the last few years. Obviously, all the AI integration. I just want to stick on, essentially, because I developed all those skills. I'm really comfortable in the 2019 model, right before they moved to the subscription.

How tidy is your desktop screen?

For my workstation, it's a bit of a mess. I basically never see my desktop as my monitors are eternally occupied with various game dev software that I never shut down. Unity and Photoshop pretty much have 100% uptime. I don't shut my computer down when I go to sleep, so when I get back up, I resume exactly where I left off, just get right back into it. So that's always dominating my screen real-estate, so I don't have too much incentive to keep it clean.

However, on my dedicated Steam machine, which is a mini PC that I use to game on the couch, that desktop is kept really clean, because I don't want anything on that PC that's not software that I need to run games. On that desktop, it's just a shortcut to Steam, an executable file of Cinco Paus, and one Chrome shortcut to a random Kyle Bosman video playing his Happy Monday song, which I play every Monday for my pet bunny.

I have no idea why, but that bunny gets so excited when he hears the piano at the start of that song, and it's the only music he's ever responded to.

Can we see your pet bunny?

Silent Hill: Townfall is a suffocating experience, especially if you're like me and love tormenting yourself with stealth, limiting the use of any kind of weapon. I spent almost all of my first playthrough forgoing any pipe or plank, or even pistol in favour of my trusty CRTV and top-notch strategy. But my pacifist run stopped dead in its tracks when I got my hands on the shotgun.

Silent Hill: Townfall spoilers ahead

Every horror game fan will know the liberating power of getting your hands on a shotgun in a game where you've done nothing but cower and run from danger—finally, you get to be the danger. Turns out the horrors are trapped inside this game with you, not the other way around.

I may have embodied this a bit too much when I got my hands on the shotgun in Richard's section of Townfall. Tasked with making it to the top of a 10 story office building, you need to solve puzzles and clear the way all while fending off a new kind of Silent Hill monster: the widow.

These are bloodied creatures with shrouds of flesh covering their faces. They'll hide behind doors, under desks, or just anywhere that's a bit shadowy. They'll jump out at you, stab you with a knife, and then run off to yet another hiding place. It didn't really bother me at first, their attacks don't deal a massive amount of damage, so I just kind of decided to live and let live, for a short while at least.

Before I knew it I couldn't take a step without one of these widows hurling themselves out of the shadows and attacking me. The final straw was when they interrupted my loot hunting—a precious pastime that I hold very dear—so I decided to make use of the shotgun and the very large stock of ammo I'd built up.

Eventually I'd cleared out every floor. I actually went out of my way to ensure I could walk freely around the office building without being pestered. But then I looked closer at the piles of dead bodies lying at my feet. Uh oh, I have succumbed to my inner rage and have perpetrated the same cycle of anger and death that got us stuck in this situation in the first place, becoming the true monster of Silent Hill again. Whoopsie.

On further inspection these widows had the photos of their deceased loved ones stapled to their bodies. Precious people that my character had indirectly, but essentially killed due to his own greed and hubris. No wonder they're angry.

On reflection I did also notice that some of the monsters were perhaps hiding from me. And hunting them down with a shotgun probably wasn't the most empathetic thing to do to people who were simply enraged by the loss of a loved one. Dammit—this is why I keep getting the bad ending.

Apart from the fact that this section made me question all the morals I thought I had, it was one of my favourites because of how well Screen Burn was able to craft and convey who Richard was in such a short amount of time. Yes, he's clearly evil, like pantomime levels of evil. But I didn't really mind that because by the end of this section I was genuinely convinced that he thought he was doing the right thing for the good of the town as well as himself.

Complex characters like this who aren't built to be liked but appropriately examined do so well in Silent Hill because of the nature of the curse. Richard has enough turmoil, inner strife, rage, and regret to power like three different Silent Hills simultaneously. While I would've loved to see more about how his twisted mind would've warped St Amelia, this section is enough for me. Though, I don't think I'll be able to look at a shotgun in a horror game the same way again.

Steam's global top sellers are my Top of the Pops

• A new entry for an older game, Cyberpunk 2077 is number 5 thanks to a 70% discount.
• Who let the dogs out? Wardogs continues its slow slide, dropping to number 4.
• Former number 1 EA Sports FC 27 slips as well, dropping back to number 3.
• Counter-Strike 2 is number 2 and will stay there until morale improves.
• Steam's new number 1, soaring over 30 places, is AION 2: a Korean MMO with the same art style they've all had since Lineage.

The past is a foreign country, and they do things differently there. At least, this is how I explain PC Gamer of yore's selection of Metal Gear Solid 5 for Game of the Year 2015. Meaning no offence to MGS5—a game I spent several hundred hours obtaining every achievement in, just to have an excuse to play more—speaking personally? Nothing's knocking The Witcher 3 off the pedestal of 2015's greatest triumph.

And now CDPR has gone over the whole thing with a fine brush, tweaking and enhancing it to second-quarter-of-the-21st-century fidelity. You might say, 'Didn't that happen several years ago?' Poor reader, that was merely a "next-gen update." Now is the time of The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt – Remastered.

There is already discourse, to no one's great surprise. Are the graphical enhancements good? Are they bad? Do they wrench The Witcher 3's beating aesthetic heart from its chest and stomp it into the dirt? I'm not exaggerating; people really are talking like this. Ignore them. It looks excellent. In the course of play I've found myself stopping regularly just to survey a sunset skybox, or the way tender motes of light slip through Geralt's beard. Actually, I've not been doing that second one. Don't put in the article that I'm doing the second one.

There is a way in which certain game worlds become home. They become actual spaces, fixed in your mind like places from your past. That's The Witcher 3 to me: its battlefields; its main city; and clean, icy Skellige, which arrives towards the game's end like a therapy session after it has spent tens of hours oppressing you with the first two regions. Going back feels like, well, going back—walking streets that were yours as someone younger, looking at nondescript corners and patches of pavement and remembering the specific, personal myths and legends that played out there in now-dead ages.

And it looks excellent, of course. Better than it did before, which means just as good as you remember it. So not only is The Witcher 3 Remastered like going home, it's like going home and finding someone has, in your absence, been in and aired the place out, run a duster around, and reupholstered the furniture. There are some lovely little additions too—minor new features and mechanics to smooth your way through the world.

You can, for instance, now see all your myriad quest objectives on the world map, and you can flip between focused quests (and objectives) right there with a squeeze of a gamepad trigger. The HUD is less cluttered, and a new loot feed tells you what stuff you've picked up or been given, which is rather nice for the myriad quests that end with someone telling you 'Here, take this,' without ever telling you what 'this' is.

There have been changes to the game's combat, too. Some fiddling to sand down some of the old jank. This may be very noticeable to some people, but I confess it's not to me. If, 11 years ago, you fired up The Witcher 3 and bounced off in revulsion at how its swordplay and sign-slinging felt, I don't think you're going to experience a sudden conversion here. That's no bad thing. I'd be upset if The Witcher 3 no longer felt like The Witcher 3, but I do wonder if CDPR was perhaps overegging the pudding with its stated goal of making the game feel, mechanically, like it released in 2026.

The Witcher 3 Remastered is a lovely little present and, with a brand-new expansion called Songs of the Past currently pencilled in to arrive some time in 2027, an excellent excuse, especially now both of the other expansions are free.

Obviously, I need to generate a new, 100%-complete save to take into the new DLC. And hey, I obviously need to see every inch of the game's newly remastered world.

What an autumn treat: a series of warm, placid nights await me, curled up on a sofa and making my way through Geralt's Big Adventure again. It's like 2015 never really went away.

The Cursed Apple, wherein Valve’s latest MOBA Deadlock takes place, is ‘an urban fantasy setting’ in the same way that Limp Bizkit is ‘an American rock band.’ Sure, the label is accurate, but Deadlock is unmistakably, crucially, and specifically New York the same way Fred Durst is sort of like the living avatar of Jacksonville, Florida.

The latest batch of new heroes just unveiled as part of the City Never Sleeps embraces this aspect of the game and takes it to new heights. Almost all the new characters are the sights and sounds of New York City: old man playing chess in the park? That’s Solomon, a chessboard-wielding wizard. A grandma on a park bench, feeding pigeons? That’s Baba, a cheeky twist on Slavic folklore. What about those giant, slimy rats always gnawing on floor pizza? Enter the literal Rat King, who makes all of da rules.

Just look at this fan concept for a Chinese immigrant and construction worker reimagined as Sun Wukong (who natural law mandates must appear as a playable character in every MOBA). Deadlock’s online community is always abuzz with ruminations about what comes next the same way you can find with games like Heroes of the Storm or Smash Bros., but their enthusiasm isn’t for games they’ve already played or stories that have already been told. It’s for the winding alleyways and wild card denizens of the real-life NYC, pulled through a prism of macabre magic.

Maybe that sounds like a gimmick, but the game is never content to leave these characters without dimension. Vyper isn’t just a slithering sewer lizard with a firearm, she’s a chronic flirt and a dismal career criminal. Seven may be a cackling pulp serial villain, but mark his tender memories of friendly wight Kelvin and his affinity for the naive, almost childlike goo monster Viscous.

It's refreshing because a lot of MOBA heroes are basically action figures: emphatic, unsubtle, function-first designs where narrative is a secondary priority at best. It’s obvious why this is if you know the genre’s history—MOBA progenitor DotA's designs all came from Warcraft, and its successors haven't been able to fully get away from that. Sure, Dota 2’s Disruptor has a unique backstory, and he’s an oglodi rather than an orc, but no amount of reverse-engineering will erase the truth from my memory: he is Thrall, but red.

League isn't too far off from that, taking generic character concepts with rough DotA counterparts and retooling them for a standalone game—one with a narrative that wouldn’t be figured out for years. Heroes of the Storm's Smash Bros. grab bag of Blizzard favorites has its own charm, but it certainly isn't cohesive. Smite draws from a different well, but real-world mythology is even more archetypal and constrained by prior assumptions than Blizzard's fantasy cast.

That’s not to say you can’t tell a good story with ‘Thrall, but red.' Dota 2 actually has a lot of fun storytelling if you look for it. But Deadlock breaks new ground for MOBA-pilled lore fiends simply because it's not so beholden to its forebears.

Deadlock is the rare MOBA with both an original story to tell and the blank canvas necessary to tell it best. Valve has seized this opportunity with apparent relish, and you can see the results of that in the oodles of fan art pouring out for each of the newest six characters, only one of whom is even out at this point. Every time the community gets its hands on unique names for over 100 of the Rat King's unique rat citizens or Valve patches in "over 10,000 non-ping voice lines" in a single pre-release update, playtest enthusiasm renews all over again (it just hit a new all-time concurrent player count peak yesterday, according to SteamDB).

Deadlock's specific emphasis on New Yorkian archetypes also begs the question, what’s next? I need a ghostly muckraker journalist. A witch with a hot dog cart. A greedy, monstrous landlord who charges his enemies soul rent! I’m giddy for what’s to come the same way I am with a crossover fighting game, but there’s not that latent stench of knowing it all doubles as advertising for other products. For every bit it’s a pulpy fantasy world, Deadlock is a celebration of the real one outside. And where other MOBAs are sketching in familiar margins, it still feels fresh two years into its "private" playtest.

WoW: Forever's had me nostalgic for a bygone era of MMOs that seems to be enjoying a touch of a resurgence—the idea of a lived-in immersive world, versus the daily task theme park of modern MMO design. Not that I have anything against the latter, mind. Theme parks are neat and roller coasters are fun.

But I have, true to the point, been grouping up with strangers more often in a slower-burn world, partially for convenience, but also partially because the slower pace has me less hungry for rampant progress and time saving. I've gotta hike for six minutes to get to this quest anyway, why wouldn't I stop and help someone in trouble?

When I get all sappy and soft-hearted like this, I also think of The Remarkable Life of Ibelin, a documentary about a WoW player Mats Steen, who sadly died in 2014 of Duchenne muscular dystrophy—a man whose closest online friends travelled from across the world to attend his funeral.

Steen had a massive impact that I wouldn't presume to match, but in my 16 years playing MMOs (and roleplaying in them, like some kind of nerd), I've also met a lot of people who have changed my life. My first girlfriend, for instance—but I've also made a lot of friends who've become part of my social makeup, as much as any of my "real" pals.

I won't name them for privacy's sake, but one of these people—though I've only heard their voice for the better half of a decade we've known each other, for reasons I cannot share—has been a constant force of good in my life, and I hers. We've pulled each other out of some real mental swamps in the time we've known each other, and I've even met her sister in the real world through sheer accident.

Hopping from City of Heroes: Homecoming to Final Fantasy 14, we've told countless stories together in both MMOs. We know plenty about each other—she knows I write for this very website—but it's all been in the tiny, cosy window of Discord. It would not be going too far to call this person one of my best friends, and while I have a more regular balance of "real world" mates and digital friendships, the latter ones have never stopped being vital.

Ultimately, the friendships are what make these games—beyond any trick of design, art asset, raid, or loot system—special. As such, I'm carving out this week's Terminally Online to ask you all about the folks you've met in MMOs who've changed your life for the better: Please share in the comments below!

After putting together a list of some of the big, well-known games currently on sale in the Steam Autumn Sale, I asked the PC Gamer team for some deeper cuts—games they're real sickos for, but that haven't gotten enough love. Here's what they brought to the table.

The ones where you have to read

Underappreciated shooters

Chillout corner

For the tacticians

There is a place, deep beneath the earth, where the narrative wranglers behind our favourite games come together. Writers who helped deliver the perfect ending for Destiny in The Final Shape, or make sense of Stellaris' irresistible mix of strategy and story. Who spun up the Tim Curry sass of Baldur's Gate 3 companion Astarion, and scribbled the funny ambient dialogue that shows up in Borderlands 4 compilation videos.

They all tangle in Fallen London, the marvellous and sprawling text-based RPG from the makers of Sunless Sea. And there, they do their bravest, smartest, most depraved and moving work.

You play Fallen London in your browser, but it helps to abandon your expectations about how slight, forgettable or exploitative browser games can be. Failbetter's RPG is a near-bottomless brunch of comic and cosmic horror—an interlaced network of choice-driven, literary stories that have been woven together over a decade and a half. It is a regularly updated and living world, riddled with intriguing mysteries and set against the backdrop of a sunken Victorian capital city.

Most Fallen London players are in pursuit of some overarching main quest that swallows up their resources as a gadabout-slash-magnate. These adventures, put together in episodic installments by Failbetter, take you far across the unterzee and eventually up to the cavern roof where the false-stars shift and glitter. They take months and years to see through; Fallen London is a game you might prod at in spare moments on your phone, but gradually becomes a slow-burn and deeply rewarding parallel existence.

In between these major plotlines, however, come Exceptional Stories. Reserved for subscribers, these are bite-sized, entry-level quests that show up every month, as regular as a ratwork watch. They're not typically written in-house, but rather handed off to freelance contributors, and this fact is crucial. It's the reason that Exceptional Stories feel like unpredictable entries in an anthology series. They're self-contained, often introducing new characters whose fates are decided by the story's end. And they reflect the tastes and personalities of their writers in unique ways.

Take Baudelaire Welch, for instance: the architect of Baldur's Gate 3's Dark Urge path, which makes your protagonist responsible for a string of murders they don't remember. Their contribution to Fallen London has been The Goblin Poet—a potently sinister story in which you follow a cult of BDSM bohemians through the mirror to the Reddest Keep, where they toil to capture the beauty of the Red-Handed Queen, using their own lifeblood as paint.

The Keep itself is viscerally horrible, its very floors made up of taxidermied beasts tied together in a carpet of rodent death. But it's the attitudes of the infatuated artists that lend the story its lasting unease. Their hapless adoration of the queen is conditional; the moment she reveals the slightest imperfection, they turn on her in misogynistic rage.

"The vision I presented to you—that is who I am," argues the queen. "Who is not a different person when they turn to bed for the night? When they are in their own company? It is no different than wearing a fine suit! All of you will age and wither: why must I be confined to one skin alone?" Yet the artists reject this argument; their impossible ideals of womanhood ultimately unravel the queen, and free them from a trap of their own making. It's hard to imagine such an uncomfortable conclusion to a mainstream RPG quest.

Then there's Tired of London, another missing person case among this year's Exceptional Stories from Paradox designer Giada Zavarise, which takes the player somewhere utterly different. Channelling the opening hours of Failbetter's most famous roguelike, Sunless Sea, it carries you north on a steamer to the Tomb-Colonies—where an ingénue seeks to escape the stifling obligations of nobility among the crumbling near-dead.

It climaxes with the kind of grand spectacle a text-driven game can offer without breaking the budget: a last cruise of the mummified living, designed to end in a split hull and a rush of water. "The captain removes the ship's wheel," Zavarise writes, "and throws it overboard." The ship lists and lurches into the black zee as the band plays.

Where Tired of London ends with a half-drowning, Nessa Cannon's tale begins with one—your own. In Old, New, Drowned & Blue, the Borderlands 4 writer offers a lethal love story, rooted in the deep-zee court of the Fathomking, who appreciates a good yarn as much as any Fallen London subscriber. Dishonored and Destiny scribbler Hazel Monforton, meanwhile, introduces a romanceable rodent with three heads in The Prince of All Rats—the kind of figure you couldn't imagine kicking about The Tower with Ikora Rey and company.

It's cool to see AAA writers let loose in a universe that can accommodate their wildest ideas, and empowered to tell a whole tale from start to finish. In this context, their individual voices come through more clearly—rather than becoming muffled in the mix of a much larger product.

But Fallen London's Exceptional Stories are a home for more esoteric indies, too, and have introduced me to some new favourites. My ears now prick up whenever I hear about the latest story drop from Heather Flowers, a devious designer who likes to muck about with probabilities—both in Fallen London's dice rolls and in her own projects, such as the heads-or-tails mindfuck of Unfair Flips.

You might remember the name Jim Rossignol from the byline of PC Gamer's classic Half-Life 2 review—or from the credits of Sir, You Are Being Hunted, the British riff on Stalker that lampooned the country's fondness for fox hunting and class warfare. His dark whimsy has proved a strong fit for Fallen London; in recent months, he's contributed stories about a painting that refuses to live in its frame, a malevolent building that follows you around the city, and a new aesthetic movement that treats illness as art. "Oh, let me look at you, my poor darling. Yes, it's just as I thought! You have the Lily-Tongue Sweats. Fascinating. Beautiful!"

There's also Anna Anthropy—a legend in the field of text-based interactive fiction, who wrote September's The Poetry of God. A clearly personal work, it concerns a disabled academic who handles dangerous sigils with the same matter-of-fact fearlessness as she does her wheelchair. Yet it's also something of a Cold War thriller, full of delicious turns of phrase. Grief and yearning are briefly revealed in the eyes of a revolutionary, "like darting things in a hidden pool".

At one point, you learn that a book-burning censor has been surveilling the academic, but keeping his distance. Here Anthropy writes as if peering down her glasses at the man with disdain: "Perhaps he fears that the small woman in the chair that he has been watching might turn and look back at him." It's the story of a powerful person, underestimated.

Before the year is out, Fallen London will serve up another handful of distinct short stories from all corners of the gaming medium. And there's a bank of them going back a decade at least, beginning with the nascent tales of Nighthawks writer Richard Cobbett. It only remains for the wider world to discover them. These stories are Exceptional in both senses of the word: deeply unusual, and bloody good. It simply doesn't get bloodier than the Reddest Keep.

What comes to mind when I say 'big brand competitive gaming mouse'? If you're anything like me, that particular Rorschach test will make you spit out the word 'expensive.' That response isn't wrong, either: just look at the big releases we've had this year.

There was the Logitech G Pro X2 Superstrike: $180. The Razer Viper V4 Pro: $160. The SteelSeries Rival Pro and Sensei Pro: each $180. And there's an X3 Superstrike now, too, which is $200. These are some very expensive mice.

In previous years, I would have taken a dimmer view of this. Especially given the impressively competitive rodents you can pick up from niche Chinese brands these days. The $89 Mchose K7 V2 Ultra+, for example, is a Razer Viper V3/V4 Pro clone that performs very well and is plenty comfy.

And to be honest, even if fancy big brand mice are top-tier build quality, it's still a heck of a lot of money to ask for. The Rival Pro, Sensei Pro, and Viper V4 Pro specifically are truly fantastic on the build quality front, with the latter being practically flawless and cheaper than the rest, but they're all still very expensive.

So why isn't my view quite as dim as it could be? Because all of these releases have pushed the competitive gaming mouse scene forward in a way that probably only big brands can—both in terms of being able to absorb risk and also get new tech into as many hands as possible with big marketing campaigns.

In the case of Logitech, we have probably the most radical tech of all three: haptic-inductive (analogue) clicks. Then there's Razer, which has changed the way the sensor reports its data to save battery. And SteelSeries offers a few new things: primarily ultra-wideband (UWB) wireless connectivity and some changes to how it does polling (there are hot-swappable batteries, too, but those aren't completely new).

Logitech's analogue clicks

Logitech's Haptic Inductive Trigger System (HITS) combines, well, haptics and induction, of course. The result is the ability to change how much you need to press down your mouse button before it actuates and registers a click, with the haptics there to ensure you get the feeling of a click wherever you set it to.

Logitech was the first to market with this tech. In fact, the company's head of engineering told me, "We knew we had a golden nugget in our hands... so we took all the shortcuts we could." Which probably goes some way towards explaining why an improved X3 Superstrike was released just seven months later—a fact that must surely sting some early X2 Superstrike buyers.

Since Logitech launched the X2 earlier in the year, we've seen that Keyhcron has been cooking up the "next gen mouse switch" which lets you choose between optical and magnetic within one switch, though its click feeling is static, meaning you won't be adjusting it to perfectly align with the actuation like with the Superstrike. We've also seen niche brand Finalmouse show off its TMR analogue clicks.

Razer's FrameSync

With the Viper V4 Pro, Razer introduced FrameSync—no, not Meta's FrameSync, something else. It essentially does for mice what VRR tech does for monitors, syncing up hardware with your system's polling. FrameSync ensures the mouse sensor's optical capture sync up with the microcontroller unit (MCU), ensuring it only captures the data when the MCU is polled by the PC and asks for it.

One benefit is potentially to latency and jitter, but a good sensor doesn't really struggle with those things anyway. The actual benefit is to battery life, for one simple reason: there are fewer sensor snapshots required. That's how the Viper V4 Pro manages up to 180 hours of battery life at 1 kHz polling, despite the very performant sensor.

As far as I'm aware, Razer is the only company offering this kind of tech (Motion Sync is different). And we've seen from independent testing that FrameSync is indeed doing what it says it does.

SteelSeries' UWB and "true" 8K

SteelSeries was the last to the 2026 'new competitive mouse tech' party, and its new technologies aren't quite as exciting as the ones mentioned previously, but are still great additions to the competitive mouse industry's toolkit. The new SteelSeries mice have hot-swappable batteries, and they're done well, but it's not the first company to have done so. It's the other technologies in there that are the newer ones.

SteelSeries is the first company, as far as I'm aware, to use ultra-wideband (UWB) in a mouse, apart from niche Japanese brand Elecom, which announced a similar mouse just a few weeks prior. The UWB promise is for more stable and reliable wireless connectivity. SteelSeries is also offering "true" 8K, as it claims its polling doesn't bundle up data packets but sends one packet for one receipt. Elecom makes similar claims about its mouse. SteelSeries also lets you have a lower sensor polling rate than click polling rate, but I think sensor polling is more important so I'm not too fussed about that feature.

None of these technologies on their own are quite as exciting as haptic clicks or synced sensors, but if other brands follow suit and add similar features to their mice, I certainly won't be complaining.

Big brands risk it, others follow

After learning about all that niche brands have to offer, such as Chinese ones that make 'clones' of well-known mice, I did wonder for a while whether big brands like Razer, Logitech, and SteelSeries can continue charging so much for theirs. After all, you really can get great-performing, comfy, well-built mice for much cheaper than these big companies charge for their own options.

Perhaps these big brands started wondering the same, and rather than charging less, instead decided to use their big bucks to take the risk of investing in developing new tech. I'm sure much of this was done selfishly—to have something new and shiny to offer that other brands don't—but the positive side-effect for us consumers is that these new technologies are sure to spread out across the industry.

We should remember that with all these gaming mice, the mouse makers themselves don't make all their internal components (though Logitech does design its own sensors). Sensors, switches, and the like, are usually made in collaboration with distinct manufacturers of those parts. Which means that the new mouse tech we've seen this year isn't likely to be wrapped up with just one brand forever, unless the companies have very deep hooks in patents and whatnot.

The fact that it's the big brands that have been taking on the risk of developing and implementing new tech also has the benefit of giving these technologies a stamp of legitimacy plus widespread marketing. Not everyone is a competitive mouse enthusiast, and most probably won't try a niche brand's mouse tech, however good it might be.

But taking the Superstrike as a paradigmatic example, Logitech is a big enough brand and has put enough marketing into its haptic-inductive click tech that people generally now accept that the technology is legitimate, useful, and marketable. Thus why other brands haven't been scared to follow suit. No doubt it helps to have some working models in the wild to see exactly how to make it work technically well, too.

All of this is to say that yes, top-tier competitive mice from big brands are ridiculously expensive these days. And yes, I'd still recommend picking up one of the many cheaper but still-quality options out there instead if you don't have a big budget. But I also have to hand it to the big brands for actually pushing the industry forwards in a way that's likely to stick. Rising tides to raise all boats, y'know?

This is how I knew Dicevaders got its claws into me: the first thing I did this morning was boot up my Steam Deck (which is next to my bed, of course), just so I could get another run in before logging on for work. This kind of compulsive behaviour hasn't been part of my daily routine since Titanium Court back in May, and before that, Blue Prince in 2025—so Dicevaders is in good company.

You play the captain of an alien invasion force hurtling through the stars in this roguelike deckbuilder, which is about activating units on a grid using three dice. Each column on the grid corresponds to a number on the dice. You draft your units in each column, roll the dice, then the outcome determines which columns of units will score. As you can see below:

Your units don't actually go anywhere or fight anything. They each have a strength stat which forms the base score of each turn. Let's say you roll a pair of threes and a six, as I did in the screenshot above. Your units placed in the third column will have their strength stat multiplied by two, while the unit in the sixth column will only score its basic strength stat because one dice only equals a 1x multiplier.

The goal is to hit a target damage number across four turns, which successfully triggers the invasion. If you don't hit the number, you start losing health on each further turn until it's game over. Of course, you can also buy a suite of artifacts which positively affect the score in many ways, from increasing multipliers to bolstering the permanent strength stats of your different units.

Written down, all of this sounds pretty familiar. And it is! But what's key to Dicevaders' appeal is how much scope it gives you to affect both the outcome of each dice roll and your current run. Sure, chance is a factor in how you play, yet there's an intensive resource management layer here that makes it feel fair.

For example, you have a currency called 'Budge', which is self-explanatory: you can spend one Budge point to move a dice roll either up or down one per turn (so, a four becomes a five or three), and you can do this for all three dice. You can also spend another currency called 'Chrono' to re-roll the dice completely. That gives you quite a bit of scope to avoid the dice roll landing on the columns with all your dud units.

Both of these resources are finite. The game isn't that stingy with them, however, and you have numerous ways to get more, which is what gives Dicevaders its feeling of fairness. In between each turn, you're given cash to spend on units, artifacts and both these vital currencies.

You can also freeze an item to buy it on the next turn if you're short on cash—again, all of this adds to the feeling that the developers want to give you the power to turn your luck around, rather than write off a run early.

The other resources you're managing, of course, are your units. As well as their strength stats, most of them have specific abilities, too: teleporting around the grid between turns, attacking three times per turn but only if they're placed on the bottom row, or randomly activating other units around the grid to add their points to the score total. There are many other variants.

Managing them is about positioning and getting their strength stats as high as possible to increase your base score. In a fun touch, you can sacrifice one unit between turns and give their strength stat to another. You'll fatten up a unit's strength with one of your artifacts, only to feed them to a different unit that has the special ability to attack six times if they're played in the sixth column. Suddenly, that unit is six times more useful, and you've opened up another spot on the grid to drop another unit in.

Or maybe you'll have a network of Swarmers that share one giant strength stat with adjacent units of the same type. Which is exactly what I had going on with these yellow lads below, meaning they'd do the same base damage whether I rolled a 3, 4 or 5 in Prism Tower-like fashion.

"Shit yeah!" I yelled after figuring this out, before realising my artifacts weren't scaling fast enough to keep reaching the score target. It becomes apparent that there is a staggering number of strategies you can employ to hit the high numbers in Dicevaders, and it's excellent at teaching itself as you go.

Just by following a few simple tutorial screens, I'm punting scores into the millions already—but by no means do I feel like I totally understand the shape of the game yet. It's hit that roguelike sweet spot.

Dicevaders seems to repackage some of the art and characters from last year's well-regarded Starvaders, which was also a roguelike deckbuilder with more of a shooter bent. I haven't played that, but this seems rather different—the alien invasion stuff is just a pleasantly cartoonish skin for a game about managing a grid of increasingly outrageous numbers.

I can't honestly say that Dicevaders feels completely new and fresh, or that it'll bust the cobwebs if you're burned out on the hundreds of games trying to be the next Balatro. I can't even say I fully understand why certain numbers are triggering the way they do about 20% of the time.

But it's the real deal in terms of high-level synergies and how much control it offers you over each situation. I don't feel like I'm pissing time into an abyss, either, which is always the risk with these games—it's complex and has a lot of moving parts, and there are too many unit types available for you to become entirely dependent on a single strategy. It keeps you changing things up.

Now if you'll excuse me, I'm going back to bed to play some more of it.

My experiment to see if gamers were as interested in milk as they are in necks has yielded conclusive proof that they are not. Those pageviews don't shown above don't lie. Gamers don't care about milk. Gamers only care about necks. I will focus more on neck-related content from now on. Please do not visit this website if you are looking for milk. Thank you.

Well, I was mostly joking when I took credit for Ace Combat's director finally getting to fly in a real jet. Turns out our interview really was the catalyst. If anyone else has a dream waiting to be realized, give me a shout. Apparently I have the magic touch.