Sand: Raiders of Sophie launched into early access today after a number of last-minute delays, so I finally got the chance to try out the first-person base-building extraction shooter.

My first thought after about two hours of play? It's like Sea of Thieves but on land, and if your vehicle gets destroyed you've gotta build a new one: you can't just wait a few seconds and respawn with a pristine new ride.

The walking bases, called tramplers, are the star of the game. Before you embark on a mission—you're in outer space, orbiting a desert planet on some sort of Victorian-era gaslamp space station, by the way—you need to prep yourself and your trampler. You can build one yourself by snapping together modules (I haven't played too much with this feature yet) or use a preexisting model.

Take a couple handheld weapons like a pistol, shotgun, or rifle, fill your pockets with ammo, then bring a crate containing heavy guns for your trampler, like 40mm and 80mm cannons.

Once you deploy to the planet, you need to run around your customizable walking base getting it ready for action: mount the guns in a few places on the exterior and load them up with ammo. Manually fire up the huge engine, then run to the steering emplacement and start throwing giant levers like you're Kenneth Branagh driving his spider-mech in Wild Wild West. Your big, noisy, smoke-spewling behemoth will begin slowly stomping across the dunes.

Even the smallest mechs are big enough that getting around on them takes time, having to clamber up ladders and dash through the different compartments to reach the guns, engine, steering, and storage areas. I've only played Sand solo, and there's definitely that same ultra-busy Sea of Thieves feel to it. I've got to pilot this huge mech, adjust how fast I'm going, and check the map, all while scanning the horizon for lootable locations and enemy tramplers (by spying ominous clouds of black smoke instead of distant sails).

I also have to leave my mobile base all the time, scurry nervously across the sand on foot when I want to do some looting, terrified the whole time that another mech is gonna stride up and start blowing mine to pieces. That's a very Sea of Thieves-like feeling.

When the shit goes down, I've gotta leave the wheel to man the turrets, some of which are located well on the other side of the vehicle. It's a mad rush to reload guns and aim turrets and repair damage and make sure the mech, which is still walking so it doesn't become a stationary target, isn't about to crash into something like a big rock or rusted ship. It's glorious chaos, especially for one person.

The sound design in Sand is excellent, too: the trampler makes fantastic mech noises, gears groaning and cables jangling as it lurches across the landscape. The mounted guns are deafening, really making you feel like you're firing a huge, deadly weapon. And you can hear battles taking place from well across the map, letting you know other players are somewhere in the neighborhood.

The PvE part comes in with ghoul-like NPCs who guard some lootable locations: I only ran into a few of them and they're not the most dynamic enemies, basically running toward me and shooting me on sight. More devastating are the automatons who (I think) come blasting down to the planet from orbit and begin stamping around after you. I ran into a trio of them, and while they're not as big as player-built tramplers, they still sock a punch with their artillery and take a decent amount of damage to bring down.

Like Sea of Thieves, Sand is harrowing and tense and it's definitely not a game meant for solo players: there's just a little too much to handle if you're playing on your own. There's one thoughtful feature, though: if you are playing Sand solo, you can join a server that is solos-only, so at least you won't get mobbed by larger crews. Even Sea of Thieves doesn't do that.

Once you've done some looting and stored your stuff in the cargo hold of your trampler, you can drive your trampler to an extraction point, where most of the combat takes place. You have to disembark and climb a tall tower to kick off the extraction sequence, wherein a ship takes a few minutes to come down from orbit to collect you. That's the cue for everyone in the area to stomp your way and try to blow you to hell first.

I've done three voyages so far, though two ended early due to launch-day server issues. My second mission was a fun one: my trampler got blown up by computer-controller walkers that swarmed me, and since I didn't die, I was able to run to an extraction point where another player was about to lift off. I stowed aboard his trampler, thinking it might let me sneakily extract along with him, but once he took off I simply died.

In my last mission, I looted some old ships I found in the desert, shot a few ghouls, bombarded a player attempting to extract (but failed to stop him), then extracted myself while a different player stomped over and took some cannon shots at me. Pretty fun, and I'm interested in crewing up with some friends and playing it more once the server issues have been resolved.

The developers of co-op RPG Fellowship had to publish its season 3 patch notes across five separate Steam news posts, which should tell you just how much is changing in its latest update. Along with tons of balance changes, the new season veers away from its MMO-inspired roots to lean harder into being an action RPG with loot and character builds—a decision that didn't immediately go over well.

The team at Chief Rebel are confident that season 3 will be a turning point for Fellowship as a co-op experience that emulates the thrill of running dungeons with your friends without the baggage of MMO busywork. And a lot had to change to make that happen.

For starters, the old loot system had to go. Community director Hamish Bode told PC Gamer during a recent demo of season 3 that too many players would collect the best gear and immediately stop thinking about it. In the new system, "there's always something cool that can happen," Bode said, like finding a pair of gloves that supercharges one of your abilities.

Bode was speaking my language as someone who has spent the last few weeks playing tons of Path of Exile 2. Fellowship won't be quite as deep as loot-heavy games like Diablo, but the revised item system is an attempt to give players interesting choices to make about how they want to build their characters. It also means there's a real chase for gear upgrades that will help you survive the jumps in difficulty for each dungeon tier.

Necklaces, for example, will now carry random defensive bonuses for every hero, giving you a reason to keep checking for an upgrade every time you find new ones. If you get lucky and find an item perfect for your playstyle, you can now boost all the stats on it through the new Tempering system. From what I saw, Chief Rebel was careful not to add unnecessary bloat that would make it feel like you're gambling for power. Loot has variables, but not so much that you'll be waiting days to see something useful.

Bode said the team is "hyper aware" that the last thing players want is for Fellowship to suddenly feel like a grind. "I don't think it's fun when the game just kind of feeds you everything and kind of plays itself for you," he said. "It's a really tricky balance, but we also have crafting systems so you can have more agency over how you want to progress. Even if you, for example, go for a few runs without finding anything, you can salvage those items and pump those resources into the things that are really good for you."

Bringing back the challenge

Season 3's long list of changes also includes things that are a direct response to players who found the last season way too easy. Bode said the team tried to help onboard new players by making the dungeons easier, but failed to account for the sheer power of its new heroes. "People who were running the new tank and the new healer—it's almost worth saying—broke the game a bit," Bode explained. "It's one of the reasons why we leaned so hard into larger scale testing for this season."

Bode said he personally prefers when games give you the elation you get when you finally kill a frustrating Dark Souls boss. "I prefer to have that because it shows people are wanting to progress through something," he said. "If you go too far the other way and people are like this is too easy and they become apathetic and check out, that's a much worse situation for a game to be in, in my opinion."

Season 3 aims to turn things around from the last season with more challenging dungeons, including a new pinnacle dungeon with three brutal bosses. Every week, you'll be able to run a pinnacle dungeon and receive rewards from any other dungeon in the chest at the end. Completing it will also grant you a Bloodstone, which you can use to greatly enhance your gear.

All of this sounds really promising for a game that fills an important niche you can't find anywhere else. I ran two dungeons alongside Bode as the new melee damage hero Gunde and remembered why I still believe in Fellowship. Gunde joins its list of heroes who feel inspired by archetypes I know from WoW but are wrapped around a core mechanic to manage.

Gunde is a berserker who cleaves through packs of enemies with his twin axes, leaving them bleeding: I spent the first dungeon lining up his AoE attacks to keep enemies maimed and the second watching them melt when followed up with a finisher move that does loads of extra damage to bleeding enemies. Gunde isn't the kind of character I'd usually pick in an RPG, but I won't say I didn't enjoy slicing enemies up instead of casting spells for a change.

Fellowship is still less than a year into early access and already feels like a dramatically better game than it did at the start—and I thought it was pretty good back then. Season 3 is the first time I can sense a vision for the game that won't just appeal to people who need something to do at the end of a WoW season, and I'm extremely curious to see where it goes from here.

Season 3 starts today and you can get the game on Steam for $15, or almost half its normal price ($25) until June 29.

Every long-running series benefits from an occasional change of genre. Yakuza dabbling in RPG-style combat works well. Dragon Quest going Dynasty Warriors for a bit is nothing but refreshing. Sonic racing about in a car makes a fun change of pace. Now it's R-Type's turn, the legendary arcade shmup series putting on a strategy hat and stuffing its UI with statistics and material costs.

On the PSP, where the two Tactics games exclusively appeared in the late 2010s, this unexpected shift in style easily stood out thanks to the handheld's relative lack of sci-fi strategy competition. In contrast 2026's PC gamers are utterly spoiled for choice: XCOM, Battletech, Xenonauts 2, and plenty more only a few clicks away—if they're not already installed. What does this release have to offer the kind of person already up to their eyeballs in metal death machines and alien menaces?

A lot.

Specifically, giant monsters with specific weak points waiting at the end of tight passageways. Force units—those glowing orange blobs that can attach to either end of compatible ships—reimagined as versatile mobile enhancements for compatible ships, able to offer a slew of different shot types or even head off independently and ram enemies so hard they're pushed a hex backwards. One stage is dominated by a giant space cannon, and it's on me to lure my enemies into its line of fire without decimating my own forces in the same blast. Weak walls can be shot to pieces, creating new routes and offensive opportunities.

The graphics responsible for showing me these wonders have been rebuilt from scratch, making another run through the original look as fresh as a phallic alien bursting straight out of someone's chest. Neon-coloured energy particles light up smooth metal surfaces, broken structures cast complex shadows on easily missed background scenery, organic horrors glisten in the starlight, and minor spaceships are so detailed it's possible to catch sight of tiny seats inside beautifully rendered cockpits.

Tactics' shmup heritage leaves an indelible mark on every aspect of the game, every feature directly drawing from a design template and visual language most strategy games never touch.

This unusual approach never overshadows the newfound tactical side of the game, which has more than enough depth to satisfy even the most spreadsheet-adoring strategy head. Ships now have fuel and ammo reserves to consider, the threat of being left defenceless and unable to move very real. A range of support craft prevent these new features from becoming a simple case of saving the big guns for the tougher enemies, with mid-flight resupplies and repairs an essential part of the flow of battle, temporarily retreating back to the safety of a mobile transport a sensible way to spend a turn, and slight detours to liberate a strategically placed facility (giving damaged units somewhere else to recover as I press on) well worth my time.

Terrain plays a much bigger role than expected in a game where almost everything can fly and many levels are set in the vast expanse of space. The side-scrolling nature of it all, mimicking the games it's based on, gives this tactical game an uneasy momentum: I have to push forwards, even though I know that's where all the danger is. Vertical drops are deliberately awkward to navigate. Sometimes I'm not facing the right way and there's little I can do about it because shmup law states I face one direction and that's the end of it.

Small maps and cramped spaces create a cautious, claustrophobic mood, forcing me to decide who's going to go first through a narrow tunnel and take the brunt of whatever might be lurking in the dark, or pick an unfavourable position that leaves a ship as open to friendly fire as it does the enemy's because it's the last spot available. Gaseous substances, ice blocks, and asteroid fields can slow ships down or need clearing out first, and at times I even have to consider the direction a waterfall flows in, rising upwards more difficult while I'm flying underneath them. Sometimes whole planets get in the way.

Even when I'm well prepared and on high alert, that sense of vulnerability never quite goes away. A nasty battleship-shaped surprise is always just around the corner, and the game isn't afraid of seizing any opportunity it can get to destroy one of my precious ships, or of letting me thoughtlessly stumble upon a screen-sized nightmare with more mouths than eyes.

The unforgiving nature of combat is constantly reflected in the brief commander's logs between each mission, campaigns painted not as brave expeditions undertaken by confident, well-supported armadas, but desperate fights to survive. In the first game I'm far from the best Earth has to offer, nothing more than the leader of a small scraped-together group wondering what the heck their superiors are up to and not receiving any meaningful answers.

In the sequel the peace I fought so hard for has soured into all-out civil war. The storytelling here takes a different tone to the sober political machinations in the likes of Tactics Ogre and Final Fantasy Tactics; there's a pervasive melancholy to it that still feels unique, as if I'm constantly marching towards my own funeral rather than on the cusp of a noble last stand.

Even the terrain descriptions make venturing into dangerous territory feel uneasy, simple labels like "Bydo Corpse?" and "Incubation Facility?" reinforcing the idea that my group's completely out of their depth to the point of not being entirely sure what they're looking at, never mind why they're fighting them.

R-Type Tactics doesn't just stand up to modern PC strategy games, it deserves to proudly stand amongst them. This is a polished PC release—mouse compatible and already working beautifully on Steam Deck (officially "Unknown", however)—that feels like it's finally found the right home. What format could be a better fit for a game full of lengthy battles that expect players to weigh up accuracy percentages, range, charge states, fuel consumption, and consider potential counterattacks?

There's never been so many missions to work through either: Well over 100 of them, split across three unlockable campaigns. The second set, brilliantly subtitled Operation Bitter Chocolate, have never been available in English before now, and the additional post-Chocolate "Cosmos" missions are completely brand new.

Here's hoping PC gamers embrace its unusual charms and send this strange spinoff into orbit.

I've just finished reviewing the Steam Machine, Valve's TV-friendly gaming PC for the masses. I think that was the initial idea, at least. Unfortunately, Valve's magic box has, thanks to the memory crisis, ended up with a price tag that simply doesn't add up.

For those who haven't heard, the base-level, 512 GB, non-Steam Controller-including Steam Machine retails for $1,049. Add a controller into the mix, and it comes in at $1,128. Back when we first took a whirl at predicting Steam Machine pricing, our average guess was around $525 for the base model.

Oh, how wrong we were. To be fair to myself, Valve, and my hardware team colleagues, this was back in November of last year. The pre-RAMpocalypse times, as we now call them. Before the AI server market swallowed memory module manufacturing capacity, and consumer electronics began to climb rapidly in price.

We adjusted our guesses more recently, and actually came kind of close, for the most part.

Still, the final pricing has me all hot and bothered, even if it's not far off what we eventually predicted. Because the Steam Machine, thanks to some lower-spec internal components now sold for high prices, represents poor value—and I feel like it deserves more than that.

And I haven't even got to the 2 TB model I reviewed yet, which is $1,349 without a controller, and a wallet-trembling $1,428 with one. That's a huge sum of money for a machine that struggles against budget gaming PCs, some of which come from the previous generation.

Gaming benchmarks

Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora (1440p Ultra)Cyberpunk 2077 (1440p RT Medium)Cyberpunk 2077 (Quality upscaling, 1440p RT Medium)Baldur's Gate 3 (1440p Ultra)Black Myth: Wukong (1440p Very High)Black Myth: Wukong (Quality upscaling, 1440p Very High)Metro Exodus: Enhanced Edition (1440p Ultra)

Avg FPS

1% Low FPS

Steam Machine

21

17

AtomMan G1 Pro | RTX 5060 | AMD Ryzen 9 8945HX

44

38

Lenovo Legion Tower 5i | RTX 4060 | Intel Core i5 14400F

33

25

Custom PC #11 (issue 413) | Arc B570 | Intel Core Ultra 7 265K

28

24

015304560

Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora (1440p Ultra) Data

Product	Value
Steam Machine	21 Avg FPS, 17 1% Low FPS
AtomMan G1 Pro | RTX 5060 | AMD Ryzen 9 8945HX	44 Avg FPS, 38 1% Low FPS
Lenovo Legion Tower 5i | RTX 4060 | Intel Core i5 14400F	33 Avg FPS, 25 1% Low FPS
Custom PC #11 (issue 413) | Arc B570 | Intel Core Ultra 7 265K	28 Avg FPS, 24 1% Low FPS

Avg FPS

1% Low FPS

Steam Machine

16

12

AtomMan G1 Pro | RTX 5060 | AMD Ryzen 9 8945HX

32

26

Lenovo Legion Tower 5i | RTX 4060 | Intel Core i5 14400F

24

19

Custom PC #11 (issue 413) | Arc B570 | Intel Core Ultra 7 265K

26

23

010203040

Cyberpunk 2077 (1440p RT Medium) Data

Product	Value
Steam Machine	16 Avg FPS, 12 1% Low FPS
AtomMan G1 Pro | RTX 5060 | AMD Ryzen 9 8945HX	32 Avg FPS, 26 1% Low FPS
Lenovo Legion Tower 5i | RTX 4060 | Intel Core i5 14400F	24 Avg FPS, 19 1% Low FPS
Custom PC #11 (issue 413) | Arc B570 | Intel Core Ultra 7 265K	26 Avg FPS, 23 1% Low FPS

Avg FPS

1% Low FPS

Steam Machine

28

20

AtomMan G1 Pro | RTX 5060 | AMD Ryzen 9 8945HX

86

69

Lenovo Legion Tower 5i | RTX 4060 | Intel Core i5 14400F

60

49

Custom PC #11 (issue 413) | Arc B570 | Intel Core Ultra 7 265K

81

74

0255075100

Cyberpunk 2077 (Quality upscaling, 1440p RT Medium) Data

Product	Value
Steam Machine	28 Avg FPS, 20 1% Low FPS
AtomMan G1 Pro | RTX 5060 | AMD Ryzen 9 8945HX	86 Avg FPS, 69 1% Low FPS
Lenovo Legion Tower 5i | RTX 4060 | Intel Core i5 14400F	60 Avg FPS, 49 1% Low FPS
Custom PC #11 (issue 413) | Arc B570 | Intel Core Ultra 7 265K	81 Avg FPS, 74 1% Low FPS

Avg FPS

1% Low FPS

Steam Machine

46

26

AtomMan G1 Pro | RTX 5060 | AMD Ryzen 9 8945HX

59

42

Lenovo Legion Tower 5i | RTX 4060 | Intel Core i5 14400F

60

40

Custom PC #11 (issue 413) | Arc B570 | Intel Core Ultra 7 265K

57

24

015304560

Baldur's Gate 3 (1440p Ultra) Data

Product	Value
Steam Machine	46 Avg FPS, 26 1% Low FPS
AtomMan G1 Pro | RTX 5060 | AMD Ryzen 9 8945HX	59 Avg FPS, 42 1% Low FPS
Lenovo Legion Tower 5i | RTX 4060 | Intel Core i5 14400F	60 Avg FPS, 40 1% Low FPS
Custom PC #11 (issue 413) | Arc B570 | Intel Core Ultra 7 265K	57 Avg FPS, 24 1% Low FPS

Avg FPS

1% Low FPS

Steam Machine

20

16

AtomMan G1 Pro | RTX 5060 | AMD Ryzen 9 8945HX

26

20

Lenovo Legion Tower 5i | RTX 4060 | Intel Core i5 14400F

23

17

Custom PC #11 (issue 413) | Arc B570 | Intel Core Ultra 7 265K

17

13

07.51522.530

Black Myth: Wukong (1440p Very High) Data

Product	Value
Steam Machine	20 Avg FPS, 16 1% Low FPS
AtomMan G1 Pro | RTX 5060 | AMD Ryzen 9 8945HX	26 Avg FPS, 20 1% Low FPS
Lenovo Legion Tower 5i | RTX 4060 | Intel Core i5 14400F	23 Avg FPS, 17 1% Low FPS
Custom PC #11 (issue 413) | Arc B570 | Intel Core Ultra 7 265K	17 Avg FPS, 13 1% Low FPS

Avg FPS

1% Low FPS

Steam Machine

31

26

AtomMan G1 Pro | RTX 5060 | AMD Ryzen 9 8945HX

37

33

Lenovo Legion Tower 5i | RTX 4060 | Intel Core i5 14400F

48

42

Custom PC #11 (issue 413) | Arc B570 | Intel Core Ultra 7 265K

27

17

015304560

Black Myth: Wukong (Quality upscaling, 1440p Very High) Data

Product	Value
Steam Machine	31 Avg FPS, 26 1% Low FPS
AtomMan G1 Pro | RTX 5060 | AMD Ryzen 9 8945HX	37 Avg FPS, 33 1% Low FPS
Lenovo Legion Tower 5i | RTX 4060 | Intel Core i5 14400F	48 Avg FPS, 42 1% Low FPS
Custom PC #11 (issue 413) | Arc B570 | Intel Core Ultra 7 265K	27 Avg FPS, 17 1% Low FPS

Avg FPS

1% Low FPS

Steam Machine

45

30

AtomMan G1 Pro | RTX 5060 | AMD Ryzen 9 8945HX

52

36

Lenovo Legion Tower 5i | RTX 4060 | Intel Core i5 14400F

53

36

Custom PC #11 (issue 413) | Arc B570 | Intel Core Ultra 7 265K

50

31

015304560

Metro Exodus: Enhanced Edition (1440p Ultra) Data

Product	Value
Steam Machine	45 Avg FPS, 30 1% Low FPS
AtomMan G1 Pro | RTX 5060 | AMD Ryzen 9 8945HX	52 Avg FPS, 36 1% Low FPS
Lenovo Legion Tower 5i | RTX 4060 | Intel Core i5 14400F	53 Avg FPS, 36 1% Low FPS
Custom PC #11 (issue 413) | Arc B570 | Intel Core Ultra 7 265K	50 Avg FPS, 31 1% Low FPS

It's not like the Steam Machine makes up for its shortcomings with a completely smooth user experience, either. It feels, at the time of writing, a little half-baked. I still found myself hunting through the settings menus to configure it properly on my home TV. I still had to enable compatibility game settings to get past some Linux… quirks.

It's got crunch, in places where, for the money, I'd hoped it would be more refined. It's virtually a premium product now, after all. But it doesn't quite feel like it in terms of the overall user experience. And it doesn't run demanding games like it, either.

In many ways, this isn't Valve's fault. The Steam Machine's diminutive, RDNA 3-graphics powered specs sheet clearly indicates that it should have been affordable, and was designed with a lesser price in mind. It should have been a lightweight, somewhat-entry-level machine that lives underneath your TV, capable of running indie games with little issue, and demanding ones if you were prepared to make significant compromises. For reasonable money.

I'd be pretty keen on it then, even with its flaws. Something deep within my heart wanted another Steam Deck-like PC gaming hardware moment. A budget machine with just enough go (and just enough convenience) to make it attractive. Another entry point into this expensive hobby of ours. A people's champion.

But no, it's got RAM modules. And an SSD. And therefore, it needs to be much pricier now than it was supposed to be when it was first specced out, if Valve is to make any money on it at all.

As a hardware reviewer, my job is to provide consumer advice. There's no point in recommending that you, the reader, buy something simply because it's interesting—without taking into account the value you get for your money. And at this price, the value proposition simply doesn't add up.

In some sense, I don't think my take on all this really matters. The Steam Machine will sell, I'd put good money on that. There are enough well-heeled enthusiasts out there to swallow up whatever launch stock Valve has on offer, even if it ends up being more of an executive-level desk toy than the great equaliser the rest of us might have hoped for.

It won't be a catastrophic failure for Valve, of that I'm fairly certain. But, given all of the above, the Steam Machine has, to my mind, become a damning representation of where we are in regards to PC gaming hardware in 2026.

We now live in a world where we're paying serious sums for meagre specs. And given that the memory crisis is expected to rumble on (and perhaps even worsen) into 2027 and beyond, this may be just the beginning of our woes.

I hate that. I hate that the AI-demand behemoth is pricing out average gamers from reasonably priced hardware, and reasonable hardware upgrades. I hate that I'm forced to give an interesting, if flawed, machine a lower score because it simply doesn't make any value-based sense—whereas for the right price, it just might.

Valve has worked really hard on the Steam Machine, and that's obvious to see. Even if it does feel underpowered, and a little rough around the software edges. But when all's said and done, I simply wouldn't spend this much money on one. And that, as much I wish it wasn't the case, is the truth.

Now that Destiny 2's massive final update is here, it's more or less set in stone forever. Destiny is calcified—no more FOMO, no need to re-grind gear, and the end of a seasonal treadmill.

That should make me sad, and it does, more so because it's over rather than that it's easing off the gas. I've always loved playing it, so seasonal updates were a good excuse to keep looting and shooting. But there's no avoiding that, at times, playing Destiny was a chore of Bungie's own design.

With the threat of a Power cap increase or power-creep removed, you're now free to do whatever you want, whenever you want. You don't need to race through quests to be 'raid ready', or complete seasonal tasks and grind specific god rolls before they vanish into oblivion. And honestly, it's bliss.

Ironically, this is basically how Destiny used to be. The first game was built around major expansions, which would see the player count naturally rise and fall in accordance. And this is how Destiny 2 began as well. However, at some point, we all became fed up with the idea that we'd run out of new things to do and play something else for a little while.

Enter the live service-ification of Destiny, giving rise to unceasing seasonal updates and yearly expansions to keep the good times flowing. As fun as this era was, it's clear that it was practically impossible to sustain for Bungie. Live service games are expensive, and Bungie was one of the very few attempting it from a predominantly PvE angle, where content tends to be very one-and-done compared to infinitely queueing multiplayer matches in Call of Duty, for example. Plus, forcing every story arc to fit a weekly cadence like a TV show wasn't ideal either.

It didn't work for Bungie, and I'd argue it didn't really work for us, either. From my observations, the community is oddly happier with the game in its current state, in spite of it being the end. Of course, people are enjoying the new content, but mostly, I think we're enjoying being able to play Destiny without the pressure. It's nice, isn't it?

Plus, I'm older now and have less time to dedicate to one, let alone multiple live service games. It's an existential threat to a game like Destiny, where the most die-hard fans who picked up the first game in their 20s would be in their late 30s or 40s by the earliest time Destiny 3 could arrive. I figure Bungie will have a hard time getting everyone on board for a return to the seasonal treadmill, or convincing a new generation away from their already-established live service mainstays.

So, in the theoretical situation where we eventually get a Destiny 3, my big question would be what form it would take.

Maybe an MMO-like subscription model would better support a sequel designed from the ground up to be the live service MMO Destiny 2 aspired to be. But perhaps not, since there are very few MMOs left standing these days, and maintaining this would be an expensive venture. And that 'from the ground up' bit is an important note, as Destiny 2's dated infrastructure has constantly shot Bungie in the foot, most obviously in the form of the Destiny Content Vault that removed a whole chunk of game.

Maybe Bungie opts for smaller/spinoff games to more economically tell stories in the same universe, akin to Halo 3 ODST and Halo Reach. I miss the days of focused shooter campaigns and some tacked-on multiplayer, and I love Destiny's world, so I'm not opposed to this at all. However, it would feel like a bit of a gut-punch, downsizing one of the biggest franchises in gaming.

Despite the inherent risk, I'd argue it's best we return to a full-fledged expansion schedule and sequels, and come to peace with the fact that it's alright to put a game down once you've had enough to return when something's piqued your interest. More time to develop large expansions, more time for game-changing sequels. That's effectively how Borderlands works.

Whatever the approach, it's clear that change is required. Destiny 2 died for a multitude of reasons, but new-player onboarding, removing content, and the maligned Portal system are among the largest. These issues can't return. But hopefully the universe of Destiny can.

This article contains spoilers for Critical Role Campaign 4, episode 30.

I've been rather enjoying Campaign 4 of Critical Role—a 13-player, three-table epic that plans to reinvent the West Marches type of game for a modern actual play show. It's almost daedalian in scope, pure and utter hubris. It shouldn't work. And yet, 30 episodes in, it absolutely has.

The first four-episode overture was impressive. As I wrote back then, Brennan Lee Mulligan set up and spun 13 individual plates with the ease of someone who has been doing this his whole life—because he has, wielding a documented history with LARP, TTRPGs, and improv comedy with experience and ease.

But the recent arc, where all three parties have come back to the main city of Dol-Makjar, seemed to me a higher task. It's one thing to juggle three tables of players when the story's just finding its feet, it's another to bring those three groups back together and tie off their stories in what essentially constitutes the actual-play equivalent of a first-season finale.

The Hallowed Round; playing host to the history of the rungjani and their failed, but inspiring rebellion, turned into a ritual to heal a scar on the face of the world. Wicander Halovar somehow duping the shrewd matriarch of her house, a prodigal son returning with his fingers crossed behind his back, bearing witness to the judgement of the Tachonis patriarch in front of his equally power-hungry peers.

And, most importantly, an ill-fated expedition into the house of Tachonis itself while papa's away—the focal point of my effusive praise, and something I'm going to spoil, including the ending of episode 30. You have been warned.

No pulled punches

One promise of the 13-player campaign that hadn't (until this point) really taken flight was the idea that any character could die, something oft-repeated by Mulligan but never really practised.

The idea is this: With a thicker-set cast comes more opportunities to be lethal and uncompromising in character design. It also fits with the Game of Thrones-esque plot afoot, the revving-up narratives of institutions grasping tight to their power. Sometimes the hammer comes down.

But 30 episodes in, and not a dropped body in sight (well, apart from Occtis, but he got better). Not for lack of trying, mind—there have been plenty of close calls, including one at the very tip-top of episode 30 itself. But the doom of one Teor Pridesire within the Tachonis Manor finally scratches the very last itch I had: Legitimate consequences for poor play.

Up until this point, a winning streak of good luck had protected the cast against destruction, and there have been some truly miraculous turnarounds. Not just Bolaire narrowly dodging a disintegrate spell that would've certainly killed them, but also—well, pick any one of Azune Nayar's natural 20s.

While I've never assumed Mulligan would pull his punches when the time came, he has been absolutely given a lot of good dice-rolls to justify softening his blows. It's one thing to know, in theory, that anybody can die and that encounters are not tailor-balanced to the party—it's another to throw that lever yourself.

The tragedy of Teor's wrong turn, and the dice rolls that led to it, ran the show's erstwhile paladin headfirst into an encounter which, as Mulligan outright states, was designed for the possibility of six fully-healed party members.

And to his credit, Mr. Mulligan wound up that haymaker and threw it as hard as he could. Both justifying the existence of the Desperate Measures mechanic—which lets players mark off death saving throw failures for powerful boons, and nearly had Teor vanquish a great evil before he went down—and establishing, properly, the stakes for the campaign going forward.

I'll miss the Pridesire brothers, but this fate was an important vital brick in the construction of this campaign. Without the looming threat of death—resulting from bad choices, inopportune rolls, or a mixture of both—nothing about the oppressive weight of the Sundered Houses works. You can't have a world flooded with institutional big bads if none of them are actually scary.

Episode 30, even more so than the frankly impressive full-house episodes that came before it, confirms for me that this whole campaign could be a masterpiece. I ended the Overture overstimulated, but frankly grateful its cast would be splitting into three more manageable groups—now I'll be counting down the days until the parties converge again.

Every Monday morning I scroll through the previous week's new games on Steam. I've always enjoyed doing this. It can surface niche gems I might otherwise not have found, and it's also useful for detecting new trends in their infancy.

But if I'm perfectly honest, the reason I've always loved to browse through Steam's raw and unfiltered new release list is because it's fun: Steam is hilarious and bizarre. For every earnestly developed roguelite deckbuilder or metroidvania there's something like, I dunno, Fuck's Quest 2, or Milk inside a bag of milk inside a bag of milk. Lost in the murkier corners of Steam, untouched by recommendation algorithms, are some of the strangest, most distinctive pieces of software you're likely to ever see, most of which won't ever make the front page.

Most people don't see these games. What we see on Steam's front page is overwhelmingly determined by what Steam already knows about our gaming habits, or what's trending in our region, or what's discounted. Which is increasingly for the best, because in 2026—and I hate to complain about this—Steam bulges with more useless, tasteless, low-effort churn than ever before. It increasingly feels like a waste of time scratching beneath the guardrailed, algorithmic surface.

As I pointed out last week, AI-generated games are rife on Steam. You can usually tell straight away because the capsule art is obviously AI-generated, with that tell-tale uncanny AI sheen. Despite how ostensibly low effort these artefacts are, there's a uniformity among them that you may charitably call an aesthetic.

Take Store Simulator Pettikkada and Chiggas - Survival of the Mitiest as examples. That the capsule art is AI generated for both is basically unquestionable the moment you see it. Pettikkada has that familiar near-photographic illustrated realism that smacks vaguely of Grand Theft Auto loading screen art, while Chiggas adopts the wide-eyed Pixar tack, a style so ubiquitous in popular culture that it's basically become a generative AI default setting. Click through to the store pages themselves and the screenshots reveal an audacious disjuncture between capsule art and the game you actually get.

I do acknowledge that this contrast has been a feature of box art since the beginning of the medium. Atari 2600 box art never looked like the Atari 2600 game on the cartridge, for example. Doom didn't look like this. But key art created with generative AI has that certain grotesquely generic patina which immediately tells you that clicking through will be pointless and perhaps harmful to your senses.

These games are all by different developers:

In the distant olden days before generative AI, a game's Steam capsule art and the general professionalism or care afforded to it, could signal straight away whether a game was likely a 99 cent asset flip or a possible unsung indie gem. Now there's greater ambiguity. Chiggas could very well have the same production values as The Smurfs - Dreams, until we click through to the page itself and discover its cheap, rudimentary in-game screenshots.

I think most people would agree that a game's Steam capsule art is a hugely important determinant for whether they click through to a store page or not. Capsule art tells us what kind of game we're probably going to see when we click, but it also captures the spirit of the thing: the atmosphere of the game, its art style, its genre, whether it'll make us laugh, rage, shudder in terror, zone out, and so forth.

The capsule art for the games above do none of those things. Like most generative AI, these images are not designed to persuade or entice: they exist to fill space. They're steely, clinical, affectless, chillingly inhuman, and most offensively: they're freaking ugly. They immediately signpost waste.

And there's more and more of this churn with every passing week, gradually undermining the pleasures of curious Steam users who like to dig deeper for unsung gems. In 2026, your new favorite game may remain eternally ignored, wedged between a vape store simulator and Total Simp Death.

Will Valve ever allow us to reliably filter out AI-generated churn? It's hard to imagine no one in Bellevue has noticed how ugly the store has become. Surely it's only a matter of time?

Top Steam games by revenue (June 9 - 16)

Steam releases its top sellers charts on Wednesdays, so the below chart doesn't factor in some late week releases that might have been big, though it wasn't a big week for splashy blockbusters.

The obvious outlier here is Meccha Chameleon. It's a multiplayer hide-and-seek game starring white, featureless bodies who must blend in with their environment using paint brushes. Since releasing on June 10, the $6 game has sold 7 million copies. Elie Gould wrote about it last week.

Interestingly, its Japanese creator Lemorion has been very prolific: it has released six games since late 2024. None of them have achieved anywhere near the success of Meccha Chameleon, not even this free-to-play Penguin-themed take on Exit 8. Meccha Chameleon's immediate predecessor, Link Penguins, released only two months ago and is also an online multiplayer game.

Destiny 2 continues to see a resurgence since the announcement of its sunsetting. EA FC 26 is currently 80%, hence its return to the chart.

Last week's Steam deep cuts

Steam review of the week

"Slop 👍"

BigFloppa332, with poetic succinctness, on Slop Fighter.

It's not very often I get to see my love of rock music and my love of videogame music intersect in interesting ways. But almost every single time I do, one game can be found at the core—Final Fantasy 14.

Part of that is certainly thanks to The Primals, the MMO's official in-house rock band. It's led by FF14 composer Masayoshi Soken, accompanied by localisation lead Michael-Christopher Koji Fox and non-developers Eikichi Iawi, Tetsuya Tachibana, and GUNN.

Sporting a raw sound with distorted, screeching guitars and high-energy vocals from Soken and Fox, The Primals manages to strike this incredibly interesting balance of being right in the heart of nerdom while also putting out the kind of music that wouldn't sound amiss at your local rock show or festival.

It's no surprise, then, that The Primals felt right at home at Download, the UK's biggest rock and metal festival. It was the band's first non-Fan Festival appearance outside of Asia, and despite a short timeslot it was an absolute corker. I had the opportunity to sit down with Soken, Fox, and GUNN the day after their high-octane set, and it immediately struck me just how jazzed all three seemed to be—even after a night to sleep off the post-performance high.

I thought part of that might have been the release of all the nerves building up to the main performance, but it turns out the band didn't have much time for that. "[Download] took us around [the festival site] before we started, and the buggy that was supposed to take us back didn't come," Fox said.

"So we didn't get back until like, 10 minutes before we were supposed to go to the stage. Normally you sit around and you get nervous because you're thinking about it, but because all this was happening I didn't have time to get nervous. And by the time you get on the stage, it's like 'go, go, go'. And of course, once you see people, you take all of that power and go."

Scions and sinners

The Primals is rocking with a pretty decent discography at this point, but curating it to appeal to both fans and potential newcomers (some of whom may have never even played Final Fantasy 14) was important when it came to putting together the five-song setlist.

"Not everyone knew [Final Fantasy] 14, so we approached it from that perspective," Soken told me. "We wanted to make the most of the time we had, so we knew that we couldn't just rely on the songs that get a really good reaction at Fan Fest." Making sure The Primals could show their musical talent to "get everyone on board and make sure they're having a good time" led to a tight selection of some of the band's biggest, most energetic tracks. A choice which, as Fox tells me, actually proved a challenge in execution.

"[The Primals concerts] have the ups and the downs—you have the heavy songs, then you go into the slower songs, more electronic stuff. This time we focused on the heavy, on the power, on the 'go, go, go,' and our drummer was probably this close to dying," he said. "Even though it was 25 minutes—our shortest set ever—I think that's the most tired we've been after a set because it was just 'go, go, go, go, go' all the way to the end, 100% of the way."

Soken leaned forward, telling me: "Shouting. I just shouted the whole time."

Fox joked about the exhaustion he felt by the time the band's final track, Under the Weight, came around. "I was like, am I gonna pass out on stage? But if I pass out on stage, that'd be pretty fucking cool. I was like, I wanted some oxygen!"

While my favourite moment was hearing Absolute Tyranny—one of the game's more recent tracks from this January's last batch of Arcadion raids—the two tracks Not Afraid and Under the Weight were perhaps the most fitting energy for Download Festival, and the ones that The Primals plucked out as the one that had the biggest chance of reeling in new listeners.

A sound reborn

Seeing a videogame band giving it their all on a stage surrounded by tens of thousands of rock fans sprawled across half a dozen stages really drove home just how much closer the two worlds have become over the years, something which the band wholeheartedly agrees with.

"10, 15 years ago, when we were starting out with this kind of thing, there was game music and there was rock music. And there was a divide in between the two," GUNN said. "But in the past few years, I really feel like they've come a lot closer together, and in fact, sort of within that same bubble now."

But as Koji points out, videogame music has always banged—the technology just wasn't always there to fully realise it. "You look back at the music in games 20 years ago and go 'Oh, that's game music,' but it's only because that's how it was sold. You go back and listen to some of those soundtracks from Mega Man. They hit hard. You've got some rocking beats, bass lines that are just crazy.

"But it was because the technology limited it, so you got the bleeps and the bloops, and it was 'Oh, that's just game music'. But you go back and listen to that now and you're like, 'Oh, I see what they were trying to do. If only they had the technology they have now.'"

Now that The Primals has tackled one of the UK's biggest festivals, what's next for them? First of all, a new album, Soken tells me—which should be plush with rearrangements of music from Dawntrail's stellar Arcadion raid series.

But doing this also seems to have given the band the desire to take their music all over the world. "We've never had any opportunity to go and meet our fans in Australia. I want to make contact with The Primals fans in areas and regions where we haven't been able to get in touch with yet. So the next goal: Primals world tour."

Bryce Clark, game director on Poppy Playtime, grew up playing DOS games on his family PC. His favourite childhood game was the 1994 fantasy RTS Dominus, which had unfortunate ramifications for his father. "It was nearly impossible to get working," Clark recalls. "My poor dad ended up spending so many hours on the hard line trying to call tech support. 'Why is this videogame not working for my son?' It was a lot about troubleshooting way back."

A game developer for 20 years, Clark has worked at studios like 343 Industries and Blizzard. He joined Mob Entertainment in 2023 as its lead technical artist, and last year became Game Director for Poppy Playtime: Chapter 5, which released in February.

"Our goals were to find ways to improve the gameplay flow," Clark says. "What are the ways we can try and make chases more compelling? What can we do to make the puzzles harder in places where you do not have to complete them and easier in places where you do… and just generally trying to find ways to better integrate the narrative into the gameplay experience."

Clark took a break from mascot horror to show me around the digital toy factory of his PC. And, as you will soon discover, there are a lot of toys in Clark's factory, so many that he struggled to pick just one for most of the questions posed.

What game are you currently playing?

I'm a bit of an oddball in that I'm always playing somewhere between three and six games at a time. I'm a bit obsessive with learning the market, learning different genres. I love trying new and unique things as well.

I'll try to be brief about them, but most recently I've been playing a few. One's called Aethus, which is an inspiringly well-executed solo developer project that's focussed around base building, crafting, mining. But it carries, to me, a lot of Subnautica energy with the way the narrative is playing out, the exploration works with the oxygen system, delving into the depths of—instead of [an] ocean, it's caverns—learning the greater mystery.

But also, [I was] trying out most recently on Steam Strange Antiquities, the sequel to Strange Horticulture. Great mix of narrative, discovery, puzzle, mystery. Have a lot of fun with that one.

The super niche one I'm exploring right now is Prosperous Universe, which is, I would say, it's a real-time economic MMO set in an 'interstellar corporations' kind of setting, and all the players are companies that are producing products and shipping, and they're working together to complete production lines, and it's a whole system of politics and economics.

But it's run in real time, so you'll put an order in at one of your production facilities, and in like eight hours it'll be done. I treat it like an incremental game, because it fits into the gaps in my life.

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

Most recently I played a little $5 experience called Librarian: Tidy Up the Arcane Library! This is a game about being in an arcane library, and 3,000 books that are stacked in this library have been scattered all over thanks to some nefarious little imp … so it's all about categorising them in the correct places.

It captures that PowerWash Simulator energy, where there's a soothing element to this rote process, but also [there's] something I find fascinating about representing a gigantic problem. Like, here's this incredible mess of 3,000 books, get it done, and you have to develop your own process for tackling that problem.

I think the most compelling [game] as an art piece, was Cairn, which is one of the most soulful climbing games I've played in recent years. Beautifully well executed, fantastic, thoughtful story, some of the best climbing mechanics I've seen that represent how actual climbing can feel in practice.

I'm still working through Forza Horizon 6. I'm no stranger to the less niche products out there, and Forza [6] has just been a phenomenal entry to the series. I'm not even that big of a car or racing person, but I've just been having a great time.

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

I have a 2016 game and a 2017 game installed right now, and these are No Man's Sky and The Hunter: Call of The Wild. I occasionally boot up older games, but these two have been hard for me to keep uninstalled.

I find that a lot of what draws me into games is the learning and discovery and the novelty, and at a certain point, once I feel like I've fully understood what the game has to offer and where the game is going, I'm not always very compelled to actually finish it … I'm like 'okay, I'm done here', which is a bad habit. I've been trying to get better at it.

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

Well, I have about 20 games that are over 250 hours each, just on Steam. I have about 23,000 hours on my Steam account in 18 years, so I actually have quite a lot of games with a lot of time in them. That's not including secondary platforms or consoles and all that.

My top games are Rocket League at 745 hours, Ark: Survival Evolved at 651 hours, 7 Days to Die at 538, and it just kind of keeps going. There's a lot of competitive stuff in there. There's also a lot of survival craft and exploration games.

We used to say the first 500 hours of Rocket League are learning how to hit the ball, and the next 500 hours are learning when not to hit the ball. There's just so much that goes into it. I love the purity of the game experience. But as a competitive game, of course, it's super engaging. There's always somebody out there that's going to be better than you. You can always get better at Rocket League. The skill ceiling is so far up that you can always get better at it. It's hard to feel like you've mastered Rocket League when there's something yet more crazy you can learn.

What game will you never, ever uninstall?

There are two experiences that I keep coming back to … because they're my comfort game[s]. When everything else is challenging in life, one of these games will bring me some peace and joy, and it's between The Hunter: Call of the Wild and Subnautica.

The Hunter: Call of the Wild is a funny one to talk about … it seems like an odd one to some folks, and I'm not actually in support of modern sport hunting … for me it's a gorgeous walking simulator. It's getting a little long in the tooth now, years down the road, but still, you're going to these beautifully rendered environments, these park locations, and you get to just hike, and I let myself be immersed in the environment and listen to the sounds.

When I do stumble on some quarry to hunt, the experience transitions from calm, peaceful, immersive exploration to now you're stalking, now you're hunting, now you're like 'Okay, how do I get the position to get the right shot.' And then there's this moment of skill expression that all comes down to your bullet choice, your position of how you fire.

Subnautica carries a similar energy … that combination of tension with also the calm exploration that I just find very soothing, so I always come back to that.

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

I'm torn between Snagit and WinDirStat. Snagit is an enhanced screenshot and video recording tool. It just overrides your print screen button, gives you some enhanced lineup features for sampling a section of your screen, and all that's fine. But what I really love about it is that when you take a screenshot, it'll pop up in the editor, and it's a real lightweight fast launch, and it has markups so I can write on it or I can draw text on it.

WinDirStat is a super lightweight, no-nonsense tool for inspecting what's eating up all your hard drive space. It'll go through and analyse basically your entire folder structure and categorise it based on how much memory it's taking off your disk …. For me, when I'm having to juggle a bunch of different games and art tools, disk space can be super important and valuable.

Generally, how tidy is your desktop screen?

I used to be one of these people that had so much on the desktop because I'd have categorised caches of desktop shortcuts. But I think over the years, as some of the operating system features for Windows [has] caught up to other places, most of the time I just search fore the apps that I need now, and all my notes are in one place.

All my daily use applications I have pinned on my taskbar, and I can just launch them straight to the taskbar, and then anything else I just search through the search bar now. So these days I have almost nothing on my desktop, which is very different from what I used to be.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Follow Heartland's development here.

From the archives: This story originally ran in PC Gamer (UK) #279.

Crysis 2 gets a lot wrong. Its AI is criminally stupid. Its story is a convoluted mess. Its characters are hackneyed archetypes. Worst of all, its narrower environments and more limited nanosuit restrict the potential for emergent play, which was the essence of the original game. As far as sequels go, many of Crytek's design decisions for Crysis 2 are utterly baffling.

Yet for all its mistakes, Crysis 2 gets one thing right: destruction. From its low-key beginning to its apocalyptic final act, this grim fairytale of New York is a master-class in disaster fiction. If you embrace this theme of obliteration rather than fighting it, Crysis 2 is at times even more enjoyable than the original.

The game puts you in the boots of US marine and personality vacuum Alcatraz. Within five minutes he’s seen half his platoon massacred by the alien menace known as the Ceph, been shot half to pieces himself, and been given the task of saving New York by Prophet, the nanosuited squad leader from Crysis 1.

Crytek recognised that the most interesting aspect of the first game was the nanosuit, and so built Crysis 2's story almost entirely around it. The nanosuit is the game's real hero, synthesising a cure for the alien virus as the story progresses.

Alcatraz is merely a bag of leaky meat who provides the suit with locomotive abilities to get from objective to objective. Our FPS protagonists are often defined by their suits and little else (Half-Life and Halo are two notable examples) so why not give the suit some of the credit for once?

It's a fun idea, but Crysis 2 fails to walk its talk. During play it actually reduces the suit's functionality from that of the first game. It decreases the number of active abilities from four to two, armour mode and cloak, while speed and strength become passive abilities with little impact on how you play.

There are no walls to punch through, and chucking objects and enemies about is fiddly and unsatisfying. You can Power Kick cars and certain objects, which feels good. But having played the game three times, I’ve never once used this successfully in combat.

Cloaking, meanwhile, is almost too effective, letting you waltz past enemies as they forget about you the moment line of sight is broken. It's always tempting to exploit Crysis 2's artificial idiocy, but I’d strongly advise against it, simply because a pure stealth approach isn’t the way to get the most out of the game.

Instead, use Cloak to navigate your way to the nearest mounted machine gun. Tear it off its mounts. Then activate armour mode, identify a target, and let rip. Feel the kick of the HMG judder up your mouse arm as it spits bullets the size of table knives, listen to the stomp of your feet as the nanosuit’s hardened shell collides with the tarmac. Marvel as CELL troopers and Ceph alike crumble in the face of your merciless onslaught.

This is what Crysis 2 is really about: glorious devastation, using your cloak to place yourself in a position of supremacy, and then ripping through the enemy ranks before they have time to blink. It simply takes a while to make this fact obvious.

Yet there are glimmers of a love for breaking things in the first few hours. Early on a beleaguered alien spacecraft smashes into a skyscraper, tearing a huge hole in its upper floors. A couple of levels later, a whole section of the FDR highway collapses before your eyes, leaving a thick cloud of dust that you can use to quietly pick off mercenaries investigating the cause. Yet these are merely scripted vignettes interspersed between long stretches of small-arms combat, as you evade and engage groups of CELL mercenaries on your mission to meet up with a hacker known as Gould.

It's only when you regroup with the marines, around a third of the way through the game, that Crysis 2 kicks into its highest gear. The familiar grid-like streets of Manhattan are transformed into canyon-like gouges in the earth, as the city is slowly torn apart by the alien's root-like virus dispersal pipelines. Your arsenal become more powerful and your enemies larger and more numerous.

Additionally, your role in the game turns much more defensive, as you assist the army with the evacuation of the city. A standoff against a thunderous assault by the Ceph concludes with you bringing down one of their mighty gunships, while the best level in the game —'Unsafe Haven'—sees you fighting through the Ceph battle-lines in order to prime and detonate demolition charges on a multi-storey building, bringing it crashing down across the Ceph’s artillery trajectory.

It's this gradual escalation that makes Crysis 2 so satisfying for me. The city's destruction becomes an inversely-proportional progression tracker. As the fight becomes more and more desperate, the city becomes less and less recognisable. It's reminiscent of Half-Life 2's 'AntiCitizen One' and 'Follow Freeman' chapters, but drawn out over a longer period. Also, rather than being on the assault, you're on the back foot, simply trying to buy time as you attempt to get the city's populace to safety. Crysis 2 excels at making the Ceph feel like a genuine threat, always capable of matching and exceeding Alcatraz’s own superhuman capabilities.

Unfortunately, while the mid-to-late section is excellent, the final mission is a massive anticlimax. Once again it lets you breeze past most of the enemies, and the ending is a big dollop of nonsense that leaves you mystified and disappointed.

Although I like the slower start, and admire it for not frontloading its action, that failure to build to a satisfying climax damages the game considerably.

In the end, Crysis 2's limitation on emergent play proved to be an error in judgement, one that Crytek tried (and failed) to rectify in the undercooked Crysis 3. But there are still moments of greatness in there. Crysis 2 gets a lot wrong, but we shouldn’t let that obscure the things it got right.

The ongoing Neverwinter Nights mod campaign, Swordflight, feels like the CRPG equivalent of fans circulating the tapes, a forbidden, perfect bootleg of the greatest hardcore set ever performed. It's one of the most cleverly-designed, bracingly difficult RPG campaigns I've ever played, and it's a hobby project one guy has been cranking away at since 2008.

Swordflight is a series of discrete playable chunks or "modules" for Neverwinter Nights, BioWare's awkward middle child between Baldur's Gate 2 and Knights of the Old Republic (that we still can't help but love). NwN's Aurora Toolset is one of those legendary mod platforms that balanced ease of use with power and flexibility, resulting in a flowering of fanmade projects.

Think the Doom or Thief mod communities: Not everything is a gem, but so many people took to Aurora and so many projects were made that the best of the best still encompasses several full games' worth of RPG goodness. The Alazander modules, Aielund Saga, and Swordflight are among that best of the best.

Swordflight's first module came out in 2008, and its most recent released in 2022, with at least one more chapter on the way to finish the story. It's a zero-to-hero D&D epic like very few I've ever played: There are low-level adventures like The Temple of Elemental Evil and plenty of level 1-20 campaigns, but very few games or series of games that capture the feeling of coming back to the same character and dungeon master over a span of years.

Swordflight, the original Baldur's Gate duology, and arguably Owlcat's 100-hour campaigns like Kingmaker fit the bill. Many RPG designers rightly fear D&D's early levels, wanting to juice you up to level 3+ as quickly as possible to get you to that midgame sweet spot and past early game one-hit kill, missing your attacks doldrums, but Swordflight creator Rogueknight333 embraced that design challenge.

He felt no need to rush players through Neverwinter Nights' 40-level adaptation of D&D 3E rules, but instead has luxuriated at every possible stage of character development. Swordflight's first chapter, for example, is easily a 10+ hour experience, but you need a fairly optimized character and completionist play to reach level five by the end of it.

Making guys

To date, I've only played the first two of five finished chapters, but multiple times each. That 60 hours or so of roleplaying has hit me with one of the worst cases of reroll-itis I've ever caught, tied with Owlcat's Pathfinder: Wrath of the Righteous. Neverwinter Nights has a particularly excellent version of D&D's class system⁠—its 11 base and 12 prestige classes presaged Baldur's Gate 3's smorgasbord of 48 subclasses and Wrath of the Righteous' triple-digit madness.

That's already led me to plenty of hemming, hawing, buildcrafting, and rerolling in other Neverwinter Nights campaigns, but Swordflight squeezes even more juice with its gnarly difficulty. Like Wrath of the Righteous, part of the rerolling appeal is wanting to make a guy strong enough to rise up to the challenge.

Swordflight made me look at Neverwinter Nights, a game I'd played for hundreds of hours before even touching the mod campaign, in a whole new light. Rogueknight333 increased the duration of all potions and other magical buffs while making it all but impossible to rest anywhere but an inn with the door locked. Creative restriction of how often you can rest is a big part of difficulty balancing in any D&D-derived game, and most just let you take a nap to get all your spells and health back whenever you want.

Swordflight's restriction makes it a game about planning, resource management, getting maximum value out of every tool at your disposal, and mounting little expeditions from your safe zones.There are potions I never would have given the time of day to in base NwN that become precious commodities in Swordflight⁠—shout out to Barkskin⁠—and you basically never want to go into a fight unbuffed.

Spellcasters have to be super-disciplined with their limited spell slots, but Swordflight makes up the difference with a generous and creative economy of consumable magic items. The aforementioned potions, but also wands, rods, and assorted geegaws. More than pure wizards or warriors, Swordflight rewards adaptability, being a fantasy boy scout with a tool for every occasion, and having a build that can effectively use as many magic items as possible.

Rogue and bard multiclasses are killer in my experience, but you also have to be able to tank or solo incredibly challenging combat encounters. Swordflight carcinization, in my experience, bends all builds toward some flavor of JRPG protagonist "jack of all trades spellsword who also hits like a truck," but even in this niche, there's a ton of variety. I've rocked:

• Fighter / Bard / Red Dragon Disciple
• Fighter / Rogue / Weapon Master
• Rogue / Paladin / Shadowdancer

And I'm feeling the urge to make yet another Swordflight guy, this time maybe a Rogue / Fighter / Shadowdancer with a greatsword to Hulk smash sneak attack helplessly knocked down opponents.

Something that's always struck me is that these deep systems were always there in Neverwinter Nights, waiting like a sculpture in a chunk of marble, but no one ever took advantage of them. It took the unique perspective of this non-professional designer to tease it out, and that's just cool to me.

[Paladin]: "Cool special Paladin dialogue goes here"

Another draw to constant rerolling is how much Swordflight takes your race, class, alignment, and prior choices into account at seemingly every turn. In the starting area of chapter one, people will comment on your class, there are dozens of special alignment and skill interactions, and one jerk has unique racist dialogue for every possible character creation choice⁠—at least he's equal opportunity, I guess.

In Neverwinter Nights, every character race is almost always suboptimal compared to human, given our extra feat at level one. Swordflight's difficulty further encourages powergaming, but its high degree of written reactivity makes it so much more meaningful than usual to go with your heart and pick something fun. The fact that my customary half-orc is at least a little bit disadvantaged, requiring a mechanical sacrifice on my part, lends the choice even more meaning and value to me here. It's like rooting for the White Sox: You gotta really love being an orc to stick it out in Swordflight.

Chapter two introduces special side quests by class, some better than others. Fighters get to clear some jerk's basement of golems, while rogues get a full Thieves' Guild questline. That last one gets to one of the weirder bits I love about Swordflight, part of the reason I often refer to it as RPG "outsider art:" Author Rogueknight333's very specific, exacting standard of ethics and how he applies them.

Every single object stolen earns you an alignment shift toward evil. Even just unlocking an owned chest or disarming its trap: Evil. Killing wild animals unprovoked? Now that's a point toward chaos, a distinction I'd definitely argue with. Swordflight chapters one and two both take place in Calimshan, a slave society in the Forgotten Realms, and I chafe against how Swordflight defines "law," "good," "evil," and "chaos" in such a context.

But it's so good at letting you roleplay and own your choices, I love encountering these disconnects with my far-removed dungeon master. It feels like I'm in conversation with the game and its creator, and this unfamiliar moral code makes for something truly substantial to push on and roleplay against. This is one of the only games where I'm ever comfortable being "Chaotic Evil," for a given value of both chaos and evil.

Swordflight's prose and dialogue can be stiff and voluminous, but it tells an interesting yarn with some clever twists and mechanical flourishes. Chief among them: You're not actually the protagonist here. The true hero is endearingly annoying, YA novel lead girl wannabe Zarala Galhadr, while your created character sits at the intersection of Obi-Wan Kenobi and Gurney Halleck. Your own, personal development on D&D's moral spectrum is mirrored by your ward and tracked across Swordflight's chapters.

There's so much more I could gush about, but I should try getting a character past chapter two first. RPG blogger Lilura1 is how I first heard about Swordflight, and she has a number of resources and guides dedicated to the series, as well as an interview with creator Rogueknight333.

Neverwinter Nights Enhanced Edition is compatible with Swordflight and every fanmade module I've tested, and can frequently be found on sale on GOG and Steam⁠—I might buy this game yet again in the upcoming Steam Summer Sale to see how it plays on Steam Deck. Swordflight itself, meanwhile, can be downloaded for free from the Neverwinter Vault, and you can support Rogueknight333 on Patreon.

Microsoft has spent the past few years laying off thousands of workers from its collection of game studios, which ballooned under former Xbox CEO Phil Spencer. Now it's set to cut more jobs and close more studios as part of new CEO Asha Sharma's "Xbox reset."

That years-long Xbox cost-cutting campaign has led to more game cancellations than we know about, ending huge projects that, at least on the surface, were exciting.

Were these "hard decisions" genuinely the pragmatic ones? The 2020s certainly have been marked by some massive flops, and it's possible that some of these projects were money pits. A couple of them were especially risky propositions: big, hard-to-make online games.

But as Microsoft doubles down on console exclusives and tries to hurry along heavy-hitters like The Elder Scrolls 6, I've got to wonder if it was wise to toss so much in-progress work, some of which was highly praised internally.

It's the risky games that are the most exciting, and while Gears of War: E-Day looks impressive in ways, it's not exactly an electrifying proposition this far removed from the 2010s. Given how profitable Microsoft is as a whole—it's making billions even as it dumps money into AI—was it really pragmatic not to let some of its best cooks cook?

Here are five of the big games Microsoft recently crossed off the upcoming list.

'Odyssey,' Blizzard's survival game | Cancelled in 2024

We first heard that Blizzard was making a survival game in 2022. Codenamed Odyssey, it had been in development for almost five years at that point, and Blizzard devs on and off the project were hyped about it.

Former Blizzard president Mike Ybarra said that he'd "played many hours" of the game and was "incredibly excited about the team's vision and the brand-new world it presents for players to immerse themselves in together."

"All I can say is it's gonna absolutely rock," said novelist and Blizzard writer Christie Golden. "Hella beautiful too. I cannot wait!"

Microsoft acquired Activision Blizzard in 2023 and cancelled Odyssey in 2024. Ybarra left the company at the same time.

According to a Bloomberg report, development of Odyssey had started in Unreal Engine, but struggled under a mandate to switch to "an internal engine that the company had originally developed for mobile games." Odyssey was not close to release when it was cancelled, the publication reported.

Maybe it was a classic case of development hell, but a survival game with Blizzard's polish, storytelling, and art direction sounds like a good idea to me, and unlike some genres, co-op survival hasn't calcified. Even in a quite unfinished early access state and after lots of corporate drama, Subnautica 2 sold over 4 million copies this year.

Everwild | Cancelled in 2025

We never got a complete picture of what Everwild was going to be. Rare is best known these days for Sea of Thieves, in which players battle it out on the high seas in search of treasure. Everwild, by contrast, appeared to be a game about being kind to animals.

Everwild had been development for a long time when it was cancelled, and was reportedly rebooted once, which probably didn't help convince Microsoft that it should continue to fund a game that contained no exploding barrels or grimacing men.

But the pitch for Sea of Thieves probably raised eyebrows, too. A casual game to play with your friends, but it's PvP and players can grief each other? No progression beyond cosmetics? And you want to spend how much time making the water look awesome?

Rare's creativity shines in the trailer above: I don't know what's going on with the giant amphibian that carries fish (or its young?) around in its mouth, but the vibe is great.

Everwild was cancelled in 2025 during one of Microsoft's mass layoff waves.

Perfect Dark | Cancelled in 2025

The 2025 cuts also claimed a reboot of classic Rare first-person shooter Perfect Dark and one of the studios that was making it, The Initiative. ("Several unannounced projects" were also vaporized that day.)

The gameplay video above is the last we saw of the FPS. An immersive sim-ish shooter campaign with sci-fi gadgets is perhaps not a cutting-edge concept in 2026, but you can say the same about Gears of War: E-Day and the Halo campaign remake. Perfect Dark is a beloved classic, and the response to the gameplay reveal was positive.

Take-Two reportedly tried to take the game off of Microsoft's hands, but couldn't reach a deal. The GTA publisher clearly believed it had potential, though, because it snatched up the former leads on the game to found a new studio.

Contraband | Cancelled in 2025

Contraband was a collaboration between Microsoft and Just Cause developer Avalanche Studios Group. It was going to be a co-op smuggling game set in the '70s, but Avalanche announced in 2025 that active development of the game had ceased. It could theoretically still happen without Microsoft, but it doesn't seem likely.

We never found out much about Contraband, which was announced in 2021 with the gameplay-less teaser above, but an open world co-op crime game from the Just Cause developer sounds like a good time.

Project Blackbird | Cancelled in 2025

ZeniMax Online Studios, the developer behind Elder Scrolls Online, had quietly been working on a new MMO—codenamed Project Blackbird—for over six years before Microsoft cancelled it alongside the other games it tossed out in 2025. Phil Spencer reportedly liked the game a lot, but that wasn't enough to save it.

ZeniMax Online Studios founder Matt Firor resigned as a result of the cancellation, and said earlier this year that he'd been waiting his entire career to make a game like Project Blackbird. In a separate interview in April, Firor said that Blackbird would've been "fantastic" and that Microsoft missed an opportunity by not following through.

The reason it got the axe, Firor says, is that public companies like predictable, consistent revenue growth, and an MMO with lots of front-loaded development costs represents "a very large bet."

"It's just: Big business is big business," he said. "Microsoft is Microsoft, right? And a giant successful videogame on the Microsoft level was frankly not that stimulating to them."

Some of the laid-off Blackbird team went on to form a new studio with a wry name, Sackbird, and are now at work on a new project.

"After years in AAA, we wanted the freedom to take smart risks without waiting for a greenlight or chasing quarterly targets," Sackbird COO David Worley said when the studio was announced. "We're fully employee-owned and funded, which means we only answer to people who are passionate about games."

If you've never endured a corporate cybersecurity training session, here's the gist: every USB stick is a gift from god. If you find one, errant in the street, it's your solemn duty to slam that thing into the nearest available port with such enthusiasm it fractures your wrist. If that USB stick is labelled "From North Korea"? Even moreso, probably. It's travelled a ways to get here.

I have been playing with RedStar OS 3.0, a homegrown national Linux distro of the Democratic People's Republic of Korea (though plenty of machines in the country stick to various versions of Windows). In what security experts are calling "A really good idea, Josh," I have been tinkering with it in a virtual machine—or several—on my PC. It's all very normal and fine and not worth bothering the IT department about.

You might be thinking "Haven't you done this before?" in which case I salute your memory. Yes, I have mucked about with RedStar OS, all the way back in December 2022, when I investigated which pariah state OS is best for gaming.

What led me back? Two things. The first, I am not running vanilla RedStar OS this time. I'm running RedStar OS 3.5 (or trying to—more on that later), a, uh, fan mod of base RedStar that claims to hack out the spyware, more easily switches the OS to root, quickly turns most of the GUI English, and—notionally—adds "a new 64bit kernel, new compiler, new 64bit libraries, and a lot more."

Which is quite a big deal, really; RedStar 3.0 is long in the tooth. It's based on Fedora 15 (for reference, Fedora's most recent release is 44) from 2011, and in its default mode runs using a 2.6 version of the Linux kernel. RedStar 3.5 promises to cram a 5.something kernel in there, alongside various other more recent gubbins, which I thought might ease the process of playing games on the thing. Or, indeed, using it.

Which leads me to my second reason to return to RedStar: I know what all that means, now. When I first touched RedStar back in 2022, Linux was mostly a mystery to me. Now? I'm a loyal openSUSE Tumbleweed user, familiar with at least the basics of running a Linux system. I felt that these two factors, combined, would make my return to RedStar OS much, much smoother sailing than it was four years ago.

A horrible nightmare from which there is no escape

The first riddle with which RedStar OS presents you is running it. Back in 2022, this was agony—a process of booting and rebooting a virtual machine until it inexplicably didn't crash at launch.

This time? A little easier. Installation proceeded smoothly using Virtual Machine Manager. Alarmingly easy, really. The VM booted from the .iso, the installer ran fine—presenting me with three possible timezones to choose from in the DPRK, Japan, or Russia—and the VM seamlessly rebooted into a full RedStar OS session. Briefly.

Issue one: I could not login. I really wanted to login. I'd set up a user account during the install process and everything. But during the boot process RedStar would, invariably, crash as soon as it got to its login manager, glitching out into a green/blue mess that did little except remind me of the proud nation of Sierra Leone.

But it's fine, right? I'm a Linux guy now. If the GUI login manager was crashing, I knew I could probably force the machine to kick me to the tty—the purest form of the command line, completely free of modern graphical nonsense—by holding Shift, Alt, and randomly pawing at function keys.

This… worked? This worked! RedStar booted me to the CLI like it had never even heard of a graphical user interface. Then, uh… then what? What was the plan from there, Josh?

It wasn't completely stupid. My original plan was to login via the tty then get back into the graphical desktop environment—basically taking a detour around the suicidal login manager—using the 'startx' command. Except that didn't work. Startx told me in no uncertain terms that I could sod off with that sort of low trickery, leaving me logged in but graphics-less.

This was a problem because I was not, at this point, actually using RedStar OS's modified version. The modifications that hack out the spyware run after you successfully login the first time, meaning I was A) not even as far as I managed to get back in 2022 and B) potentially faxing the entire contents of my SSD to an office in Pyongyang.

RedStar OS has a documented feature of rapaciously watermarking media files that are in any way exposed to it—documents, images, audio and the like The reason for this, presumably, is to easily trace media within the DPRK itself. If someone has media they shouldn't have, you can trace it to the machine that originally produced it, and possibly any other machines it touched along the way.

Which, hey, my computer already has the eyes of my own government and probably yours (if you are from the US) on it, so the notion of the Kim family knowing I have an .mkv of War and Peace in my Downloads folder doesn't concern me overmuch. Maybe you can put so much spyware on your machine that they all get in each other's way, like the diseases in Mr Burns' body.

But it didn't thrill me, either, and I was anyway eager to see what a modified RedStar ran like, regardless of whether the unmodified version was stitching a Josh Wolens nametag into my Steam version of Desperados. This led me on quite a long and winding road which concluded with me attempting to hack myself root access in the CLI before I realised I had comprehensively lost my mind.

I turned to the official RedStar OS 3.5 Discord, where after some searching I found out that my problem was the QEMU-based virtualisation of my VM software, upon encountering which it seems RedStar's login manager immediately executes itself.

I tried again, this time with VirtualBox.

Into the fire

The good news: it worked! Whatever Ellison-based blood magic Oracle injected into its VM software made RedStar's login software very happy, and it was a mere jiffy before I was sat happily in the glow of its familiar green desktop.

The bad news: it worked! My travails with RedStar did not end after the login screen. Mercifully, the first stage of the 3.5 modifications—the ones that strip out the spyware and grant you the root access necessary to start getting real weird with the system—kicked off faultlessly. The 3.5 iso is, on top of being the installation media for base RedStar 3.0, also the host for the mod files, and all you have to do to make them work is disconnect and reconnect your VM's disc drive.

But the second stage? Harder. This is the one that's meant to comprehensively remodel the OS, adding in the 64-bit kernel and libraries that might, possibly, have made my quest to play a game on the damn thing a little bit easier.

I tried. I really did. The second-stage mods take a long time—we're talking hours, and the three separate times I tried to get them working (which probably cost me six hours, all told) all crashed at the same point, leaving me with a spyware-free but still deeply archaic OS.

Making matters harder is the fact that RedStar essentially can't connect to the 2026 internet. In its default form, it's designed exclusively to work with the DPRK's nationwide intranet, the Kwangmyong, and trying to point it at addresses outside of that confuses the hell out of it. An advantage of the first-stage 3.5 mods is that they automatically scrub its usual IP tables, making it able to chat to the global internet.

But it can only do that via certain internet-facing terminal commands (like 'wget') and its built-in Naenara—Korean for 'our country'—browser, which is based on an ancient version of Firefox. Do you want to use Google? Buddy, you're in luck, because that's the only website that Naenara can load in 2026. Anything else throws an error.

My aged and inert OS was at least in English, thanks to the mods, but it was otherwise dead in the water. Even the built-in yum package manager—which I could perhaps have used to install extra stuff to grease my way to playable videogames—only spoke to a single, very limited software repository, which was in Korean, strangely enough.

I still made a valiant effort. I downloaded an ancient version of Tux Racer, wrote its files to an .iso, and loaded into my RedStar VM, but the damn thing's Makefile—which should have prepped a playable version of the game—refused to play ball, even after I installed a thick wedge of new libraries with yum (not entirely sure where those even came from, I must admit, and prefer not to think about it).

All I was left with was RedStar's default library of apps: a songbook/music notation program, a reskin of GIMP called Hwansang, and various others, including a version of Korean chess, which is the closest I got to running games on this thing.

Things got bad enough that I even turned to Google Gemini—I know, I know—to see if a data centre the size of Houston could help me out. The data centre the size of Houston could not, and seemed to have remarkably little data on running videogames on North Korean operating systems. So much for the future.

Without a break

My attempts to finagle RedStar 3.5 into working ended as a damp squib, I'm sorry to say, and as much I'd like to conclude this piece with something climactic. I am deeply, profoundly in love with the idea of a version of RedStar OS that has been aggressively retrofitted to more-or-less function on modern machines, and I will be keeping my eye on the RedStar OS 3.5 project as it goes on. Come hell or high water, we're gonna get The Witcher 3 running on this thing somehow.

As for its current version? Well, I think Linux is good enough to replace Windows now, but against all expectations I do not think a 2011 version of North Korea's domestic OS is the version of Linux to do it. I'll say this, though: back in 2022, my struggles with RedStar were as much due to my own unfamiliarity with Linux as they were due to the peccadilloes of the operating system itself.

Today, I'm pretty comfortable saying that absolutely nothing is my fault. In general, but also as regards RedStar. I've come a long way since 2022, and Linux has come a long way since 2011. It might have eaten an entire day of my life, but I'm glad RedStar reminded me of that.

Inside me, there are two people. The first, a rational adult, understands the legalities of private servers, and how typically incompatible they are with… well, existence. I can't say that certain servers, like TurtleWoW, played it safe either—while you do need to pay developers, opening up a cash shop for a game you're running off a stolen IP isn't smart.

The second has a grim understanding of the state of the genre by virtue of writing this very column. Not only have I personally observed that MMOs are an aging genre with very little in the way of newcomers, but I'm also not the only person who has identified a problem—I spoke to Raph Koster (Ultima Online, Star Wars Galaxies) earlier this month about the miserly state of things. Jack Emmert of City of Heroes fame also thinks there are huge problems. It's not just me getting nostalgic and misty-eyed.

Regardless of the cause, one thing is true: New MMOs aren't surviving, or they're being shut down. There are a couple indie outliers like Project Gorgon that're doing just fine for themselves, but we aren't getting the big hitters anymore.

And while I might not mourn servers like TurtleWoW or Project Ascension quite like I might, say, wince in sympathy for poor Matt Frior—who made Project Blackbird for years only for it to be slain in the cradle by Microsoft—I still feel a little sad to see Blizzard folding in on them, even if they're well within their rights to do so.

Because it's not like Blizzard isn't taking pointers, right? Of course, Ion Hazzikostas isn't gonna walk out one day and say "yeah, we were inspired by the private server we shut down". But there's absolutely a pattern. Blizzard will muscle in on a private server, and then a year or two later, come out with their own version of what that server was doing.

The original example is, of course, Nostralius, which Blizzard came for in 2016. The server reached a major height of popularity as a version of oldschool World of Warcraft maintained by passionate fans, something Blizzard had previously rebuffed with the now-infamous quote: "You think you do, but you don't."

Two years after Nostralius shuts down, Blizzard opens up World of Warcraft Classic, an experiment so successful it's still working through expansions today, both in the OG Classic and in Anniversary servers that are doing the whole time loop again.

I also don't think it's a coincidence that a lot of these servers were offering Classic-adjacent experiences with clever twists around the time Blizzard put out its Season of Discovery servers or Remix events, either. Or, indeed, that Blizzard has a mysterious "Project Camelot" on the horizon in the wake of these C&Ds.

I'm not accusing Blizzard of copying homework, mind. These versions of WoW are very much distinct from the dying servers—whether that be Project Ascension's ability draft or TurtleWoW cooking up entirely new classes. But they were made in an environment where there was concrete proof that an appetite for interesting, experimental takes on the good old days are incredibly popular.

To be clear: I'm certainly not in the business of defending Microsoft, and I don't think Blizzard needs defending when it comes to what it's done. Stating that Blizzard has a right to shut these servers down is an outlining of the facts, rather than what I purposefully believe should be the case in a utopian society. The law and what I want are two different things.

But the facts are: We do live in a capitalist society with copyright laws. Blizzard is legally obliged to snub these things to protect its IP. There are alternatives, such as NCSoft's treatment of the City of Heroes server Homecoming—but that was achieved under years of meticulous and very, very careful manoeuvring by the private server's devs, who never once accepted donations beyond what they required to run the server.

They certainly didn't open a cash shop. Again, TurtleWoW did itself absolutely no favours, even if I think what it was doing was rad in a vacuum.

So why am I still sad? Well, two reasons.

Well, in isolation, I think these private servers are often just doing cool stuff. I think it's neat that Project Ascension had an ability draft version of WoW. I think it's neat that TurtleWoW was cooking up entirely different classes and zones—just as I thought it was neat that Homecoming made new archetypes and story arcs.

While the scale of passion projects to actual illegal business varies from server to server, the MMO genre is a space that's in dire need of innovation. And if Blizzard has been taking notes, it's these servers we have to thank for a lot of the precious scraps of invention the company has been allowed to make.

Not necessarily because the devs have been nicking ideas. As a matter of fact, I think they're plenty creative—but they're bound to the laws of capital in a way these private server mavericks just aren't, and they can't just disagree with management because… well, it's their career. A private server getting popular, however, means developers can point at their playercounts when pitching to the people with money.

I am willing to bet that we probably wouldn't have WoW Remix or SoD without some of the servers that're getting shut down. We certainly wouldn't have had Classic without Nostralius.

But I'm also sad because, in a healthier videogame industry, with fewer layoffs and studio closures, might some of these private server devs have found positions within actual studios? In a world where companies aren't obligated by copyright law to send cease and desist to fan projects, could these private servers tick along just fine?

And more to the point—in a world where the MMO genre wasn't suffering from companies hounding after the next quarter (and, to be fair, ballooning development costs)—would these servers even exist in the first place?

It's a pipe dream, I know. But I think private servers are a symptom of a wider illness, not a disease—and I have watched genuine creativity and effort be poured into them by people I can't rightly blame for being unable to find legitimate work in this utter hellscape of an industry. It's a sorry state of affairs, one I doubt will change in my lifetime—but I'll quietly wish it would.

There's part of me that feels like I've somewhat fallen for the sunk cost fallacy of VR. I've always liked VR headsets, but don't think I've quite got the same value out of them as I did with the very first one I owned in lockdown at the start of 2020. That is, until now.

After buying myself a Meta Quest 3, I thought, "This time, I'll recapture that feeling". I thought the years since really being a big VR would deliver me a trove of awesome games, and there are certainly some standout offerings like Asgard's Wrath and Batman: Arkham Shadow (both of which were helped by Meta, which has seemingly jumped ship from VR gaming), but nothing quite willed me to strap the headset on my face every single day.

That was, until the start of 2026, when I thought I'd fully try committing to VR exercising as an experiment and commitment to my future health. One thing I can say right off the bat is that I became less adventurous after the first month. Where I tried a decent few apps and exercises in January, I basically stuck to my FitXR subscription and used that almost exclusively. Any other VR exercises I did were just a welcome consequence of playing VR normally.

Even now, I coudn't call FitXR the best way to VR exercise, simply because I haven't tried enough other ways to know. In the same way that I picked my local gym when I signed up and called it a day, with exercising, I'm looking for convenience. I'm looking for something to slot into my day, a quick fifteen minutes at lunch, or ten minutes to wake myself up.

And wake me up, it does. I find VR's immersiveness not only engaging, but I willingly pushed far beyond where I would in a normal exercise. I found myself panting and sweaty after half-hour sessions, and I would previously struggle much more to get there with simple callisthenics or walking. A gym is always an option, but I think the public, social element of it has always made me a touch too self-conscious to fully go for it. I don't mind an exercise so tough it leaves me on the floor, in the comfort of my own home. And that's before mentioning the trek home after the gym.

The convenience of VR is its biggest selling point to me. If I have a spare ten minutes, I can simply throw it on and go for a little while. More formal exercise requires a level of preplanning that ends up eating up more of my time than I often plan for.

It does have its defined downsides, though. Despite paying hundreds for my Meta Quest 3, I'm still paying around $10 a month for my subscription, and though it's cheaper than a gym, I don't get any of the equipment that a gym membership affords me. As well as this, there's nothing quite as distinctly uncomfortable as a sweaty faceplate.

I find a wipe-down and air out, and maybe a spare faceplate does the job, but it's still a bit messier than I would otherwise like. But I knew going in that I'd have to push through uncomfortability. And I've done a lot of that over the last half a year.

I've woken up with sore legs because I've decided to take on a course with a lot of jumping, or found my arms sore because I wanted to push it with a hard HIIT exercise. And I've managed to find some joy in that. I've found myself liking a little burn in my leg because it feels like a sign of how much exercise I've done.

I set myself a few rules before I went into this whole experiment, to make sure I had some consistency. My ground rules were pretty simple a few months ago. Apple has an exercise function, where you can make 'rings' and you fill those rings by doing a pre-structured amount of exercise. It has a red ring for movement, a green ring for exercise, and a blue ring for standing.

I tend to finish the red and blue ones naturally, but the green one, at 30 minutes a day, is something I consciously have to fill. And that is what VR is for. But if, somehow, I manage to fill that on a normal day, I promised myself I would still exercise. I simply couldn't let the headset get dusty because I happened to take a few flights of stairs at work, or felt like going for a hike. These ground rules have pretty much stayed the same ever since.

I have missed days. I have forgotten about it, found myself away from the headset for a few days, or simply been too lazy. But I've been holding myself accountable with my own health, and know that I'm a little too cheap to pay the subscription and let it go to waste.

Since the start of January, I've lost around 35 pounds, and though I think a part of that is the VR exercising, another big part is that I simply don't want all my effort to go to waste. I don't want to strap the headset on my head nearly every day and not feel healthier. So I started eating better this year. I started tracking my progress. And I've tried to be as honest with myself as possible when I'm making progress and why.

Recently, I haven't made as much progress. I took things pretty lax around my birthday, I found it harder to will myself to exercise in the British summer heat, and hay fever has sapped my energy, but most importantly, I just became a tad complacent with it. But in a sense, that's the joy here. I hold myself accountable, and the shame of returning to the gym after an absence doesn't really exist. I simply got back onto the VR horse without a second thought.

And this is all before mentioning that I have fun exercising now. I make a regular habit of activating the passthrough mode on my headset, popping something on the TV and doing some combat exercises while watching anime or listening to a podcast. Yes, I know it's dorky to watch a shounen battle scene whilst pretending to punch the air with a big screen slapped onto my eyeballs, but I can be as much of a nerd in my headset as I like, and I can feel better while doing so.

Effectively, the VR headset exercises almost every day have been a way to remind me of how conscious losing weight and getting healthier has to be for me. I have to stay aware of it, and need to keep pushing if I want to reach my goals. And my goals right now are simply to feel better. They are to be able to do long hikes, to go for a run, to exercise and feel like I'm putting in less effort than before. VR has given me a fun, stress-free avenue to improve my life little by little, and I'll continue doing it for as long as it stays that way.

Path of Exile 2 has taken the throne. Not only is it a worthy sequel, its latest update earns it the right to have "next-generation action RPG" in its official description. I've played obscene amounts of these types of games and have never seen one quite so ambitious. Certainly not one that is still in early access and doesn't even have a finished campaign yet.

Even if developer Grinding Gear Games says it will be finished by the end of the year, PoE 2 is already one of the best action RPGs I've ever played and absolutely worth the price of admission (before it goes free-to-play for 1.0). It's one of the only games that has figured out how to follow-up its campaign with an endgame loot grind that barely feels like a grind at all.

The result is an experience that blends the eerie worldbuilding and irresistible loot chase of Diablo 2 with the challenging combat of Elden Ring. PoE 2 is a game where a giant gorilla can smash you into pieces with a stone pillar and a game where that same gorilla can drop an item that transforms your entire character. In fact, one of its many classes specializes in taming monsters, and I bet you can guess how cathartic it is to watch that giant gorilla smash someone else apart for a change.

PoE 2 is full of ideas stretched further than any other game in the genre has pulled off. The only roadblock is its staggering complexity. Ask anyone if they remember the first time they witnessed the might of its sprawling skill tree and you'll know if that sounds like a rabbit hole you want to dive into. As someone who still has much to learn, I think it's absolutely worth the plunge.

PoE 2's excellent campaign is the sole reason it's actually playable for normal people compared to PoE 1. While the Return of the Ancients update didn't add a new chapter of the story, it did clean up some of its worst parts. Experienced players will notice how much faster it is to navigate some of the most labyrinthine levels, which makes replaying the campaign every season seem much easier.

New players just benefit from tighter pacing and the heaps of items you get from the latest league, or season mechanic. These side activities are the focus of each league and eventually get added permanently to the game. This time, there are stone shards scattered throughout Wraeclast that drop valuable items after defeating a few waves of monsters.

Bonus loot like that is essential for helping you survive the campaign's most brutal bosses, like the man who goes full Bloodborne and turns into a mutated wolf. We're already well past the early days of PoE 2 when the campaign was so stingy that you could play for 10 hours before getting your first necklace. Now, you'll have power spikes that let you trivialize certain sections before the enemies catch back up and start drawing blood again. Unlike other action RPGs, like Diablo 4, PoE 2's campaign feels like a journey rather than homework to finish before the real game begins.

Before, when PoE 2 presented you an endless endgame world map filled with little nodes representing levels to clear, your only goal was to see what you could find. Unless you frequented Reddit or YouTube, you'd have no idea what you're supposed to be doing. And now, that's no longer a problem.

The new version of the map surrounds your starting position with each major endgame activity, letting each one lure you in its direction. In the south you might see a patch of land warped by the bright green cracks of the hordes of Abyss monsters crawling out of their domain deep below the earth, or a pale garden of twitching purple hands where Breach monsters have invaded.

As you explore each of these areas, you'll run into characters who explain what's going on and direct you to a main hub for their associated mechanic. I met the ghost of a woman who opened a hole in the ground leading to an unsettling boss fight in the pitch black domain of a god. Later, I met a man standing next to a shattered mirror who spoke in riddles until I broke his curse and learned about the psychic damage (and piles of loot) Delirium encounters can bring you.

By filling the world with strange points-of-interest, PoE 2's endgame has abandoned the monotonous grind for a series of compelling investigations into its bizarre world. And the best part is there's a satisfying sense of completion as you finish each thread and clear out the map—which also means you have a solid stopping point if you're not interested in grinding until the next league.

PoE 2 is now packed with juicy secrets and powerful loot to find, creating an endgame experience that barely feels like an endgame at all.

I have played my fair share of platformers—although, the last one I played was Hollow Knight: Silksong, and thanks to the ass-kicking I received in that game I haven't been able to look another one in the eyes since. But you know what helps subdue the fear of getting stomped on? Ducks in hats.

Dodo Duckie has just that. It's a cute platformer where you play as a duck called Dodo who's trying to rescue his kidnapped chicken friends from some greedy aliens. But the catch with this platformer is that you have to play in different dimensions—I'm not talking about a multiverse—I mean 3D and 2D, which you can cycle between with the help of a very stylish magical propeller hat, courtesy of Capie the capybara.

You can flip between 2D and 3D whenever you want. Exploring the world in 2D allows you to traverse greater distances, jumping from one terrain to another, while 3D lets you discover more secrets hidden in the map and let you line yourself up for your next jump.

There's also plenty of puzzles scattered throughout the map in which you'll need to utilise both 2D and 3D perspectives to complete. Sometimes—to get from one area to another—you need to use a stone cube and place it on a weighted slab. The catch is that you can only pick the cube up while in 3D and you can only jump in 2D, so there's some juggling dimensions to do to figure the puzzle out.

It can sound a little complicated, but dealing with both dimensions is welcomingly straightforward. Even just over the course of the short demo I was switching between the two instinctively whenever it was warranted. The platforming itself is also quite forgiving, meaning you can focus on changing perspectives, solving puzzles, and taking pictures with all the cute capybaras found across the world—it's certainly a welcome break from the horrors of Silksong.

FLAG STOLEN. FLAG DROPPED. FLAG STOLEN. FLAG DROPPED.

So sang the anthem of capture the flag, a cornerstone mode of the multiplayer FPS that has persisted for over three decades. The mode is almost as old as the genre itself, but it was first popularized by the Threewave CTF mod for Quake by Dave "Zoid" Kirsch. It was impossible to be an FPS fan of the '90s or '00s without a version of these words burning a permanent hole in your brain. Though the frequent updates from the announcer could be tedious, hearing them now elicits nothing but joy.

Two teams. Two flags. Two bases on opposite ends of a map. It's a dynamic game of close shaves, stalwart defenses, and upsets. There is no image more powerful in multiplayer gaming than a flag dropped mere feet from its destination—proof of a late hero who braved enemy lines and almost made it home.

I try not to throw around "perfect" lightly, but CTF really earns the superlative. Every FPS mode falls somewhere on a spectrum of casual and competitive. Way over on the casual end is team deathmatch, a timeless classic that I also consider perfect. On the other end is bomb mode—the apex of sweaty, tactical, and endlessly repeatable objective play.

CTF is special because it does both, and it does them extremely well. At times, heisting the enemy flag is a gripping team effort that rewards coordination, stealth, map knowledge, and pure skill. Other times, the objective blurs into the background of a lobby that's more interested in blowing each other up.

It's normal and natural for not everyone among a lobby to be locked in on the objective, and CTF is happy to accommodate. There are other great objective modes that work with minimal participation—king of the hill and Battlefield's conquest come to mind—but they tend to work because the goal is as simple as standing in certain spots for a while. You can participate in conquest by accident, but playing CTF takes intention. It's a playstyle all its own, and in fact, the best flag carriers can harness a disorganized lobby. All it takes is a small splinter group, or even just one fearless individual, to sneak into a base and get out with the flag before anyone notices.

It's a format that's only as sweaty as the people playing it—it's poker night, it's pickup basketball. It's social, it's competitive, but only so serious. Doesn't that embody what the FPS genre used to do so well? Before matchmaking made strangers of us all, the multiplayer FPS was a place. Servers were hangout spots with friends, regulars, and established house rules.

Where did CTF go?

CTF was the perfect pastime. So it's a shame that the mode has become a rarity. Look around at the popular shooters of today and you won't find many flags, but it's understandable why: CTF was born from the arena shooter, a genre that's been effectively dead for a long time. The mode's waning presence coincided with the rise of multiplayer service games built around single modes with purpose-built maps. Hero shooters, extraction shooters, and battle royales don't offer the variety that was once expected of a Quake, Tribes, or Halo.

Similarly, Counter-Strike 2 and Rainbow Six Siege are so hyper-focused on bomb that alternate modes tend to die on the vine or not exist in the first place. Even Call of Duty, an enduring bastion of mode variety, doesn't always make room for CTF. The last time it appeared at all was as a late-season arrival in Modern Warfare 3 (2023). The last time it was included as a core launch mode was 2017.

You could build a whole game around CTF, but you won't get much love for trying to bring back a classic, as the developers of Last Flag and Highguard learned just this year. And it's been like this for a long time now. Tribes: Ascend, whose CTF mode stood out for its speed and difficulty, got its last update in 2016.

No, I reckon CTF needs to be one great option among many to truly thrive, and there just aren't many folks making shooters like that anymore. The one popular FPS where CTF is still prominent is Team Fortress 2, which swaps flags for intelligence briefcases. I think every day I've ever played TF2 has involved at least one embattled round of 2Fort—a legendary venue for CTF whose discreet tunnels and swiss-cheese interior were built with the mode in mind.

But when I think of CTF, I think of Halo. You can still play it through the Master Chief Collection or Halo Infinite as a core Arena mode, and I suggest you do, because I don't believe there has ever been a more successful marriage of game and mode. It's large, spacious maps make flag runs intense, and the measured movement speed of players means you usually have plenty of time to react to a stolen flag before it scores. I don't know if Halo was the first game to do this, but I also think it was genius to make the flag carrier have to actually carry the flag. Not only are teams encouraged to guard the vulnerable carrier, but the flag itself becomes a deadly and memorable last-ditch melee weapon.

Halo accommodates CTF at every scale and permutation. You can be a stealthy infiltrator who picks up active camo and disappears the flag along with it. You can barge in and Terminator your way into a possession. But the inclusion of vehicles is when Halo really shines. You'll never feel closer to total randos in a shooter than you will after joining a three-person Warthog crew, raiding the enemy base, and burning rubber with your buddy white-knuckling the flag in the passenger seat.

But hey, I'm turning 30 this year, so of course my ideal version came from the mid-2000s. For other perspectives, I suggest reading this fun r/gaming Reddit post in which dozens of people just start naming CTF games they dug. The thread has 98 comments, yet just 12 upvotes, which feels appropriate for our underappreciated mode. CTF doesn't enjoy the spotlight anymore, but for many, it never got better.

I should have known straight away that Rizz Dungeon: Skeleton Key to My Heart was from the same team behind Turnip Boy Commits Tax Evasion. Ridiculous name? Check. Deeply brainrotted humour? Double check. Ridiculously fun to play despite its relatively simple premise? Check, check, and check.

Rizz Dungeon (eurgh, I'm still getting used to the name) is chronically online girlypop deluxe—unironically using "chat" to address the room despite not being anywhere near a Twitch stream, silly little sleepovers, and constantly flirting with all the other girlies you cross paths with. It's as if a nightclub bathroom was actually a series of dungeons filled with cute monsters. I mean, sometimes it is like that, but you get my point.

Instead of being put in the shoes of some battle-hardened dungeon crawler, I'm instead piloting Taffy—a ditzy flirt who's much better at hitting on monsters than she is at fighting them. She can "rizz" her way through encounters, using pick-up lines and honing in on what each monster girl likes in order to recruit them and have them fight on her behalf. Make love not war, and all that.

Girldom is forever finicky, though, and I love Rizz Dungeon's little systems that all play off each other. Certain monster girls will sulk if they're not placed where they like to be in the party—lowering their stats—while some will either become jealous or empowered if they witness you hugging another monster girl in front of them.

Figuring out what each monster girl likes and how that directly interacts with and influences the others seems like it's going to be a ton of fun when it comes to maximising party synergy. I only got to play with it a teeny bit during the demo, but finding ways to give everyone a stat boost right from the get-go with choice placements and interactions was ridiculously satisfying.

And at the end of a long day dungeon crawling, you can initiate sleepovers with your recruited monster girls. Gossip away to build friendship or romance—you know, as all the girlies do. I did find some of these dialogue choices frustratingly obtuse in both the sleepovers and battle encounters—I fumbled the baddies on multiple occasions because the context clues weren't quite loud enough for me to pick up on, with the text "L rizz bozo" flashing across the screen, taunting me.

Although Rizz Dungeon's demo is just a small snippet of what's to come, I'm already obsessed with its take on what is usually a brutal and occasionally unforgiving genre. With its colourful pixel art and cutesy decorations, it's very much the opposite of what I've come to expect from dank and dark dungeon crawlers.

Rizz Dungeon: Skeleton Key to My Heart is currently slated to release on September 17.

Pasokon Retro is our regular look back at the early years of Japanese PC gaming, encompassing everything from specialist '80s computers to the happy days of Windows XP.

The contrasting blue/yellow tones often make it look like an optician's colour blindness test, the frame rate is what I would generously describe as "present", and the hardware it was designed for is now old enough to have a mid-life crisis. In spite of these admittedly tough-to-love qualities, the unexpected appearance of the thoroughly ancient action-adventure Relics on Steam today is definitely one of my PC gaming highlights of the year.

A lot of games are very good at showing me a strange land, but few are as capable of convincing me I’m actually standing in one as this one does. The slim manual spends more time talking about how mysterious everything is than it does saying anything useful. There's the briefest bit of vague introductory fluff about the cosmic struggle between two forces, and after a quick skim I start the game and appear as a humanoid shadow floating within… I honestly have no idea.

A crumbling wall to the left reveals the shining sunset behind as an effective approximation of waves crashing against rocks plays over my speakers. There's a hole in the floor. Everything I can see is all I know.

With all guidance deliberately withheld, I have no choice but to stumble about and see what happens, "spirit riding" from body to body as I go. I am a skeletal rabbit inspired by H.R. Giger. I am an armoured soldier with a gun. I am a sorcerer clad in gold. I am perpetually bewildered but never annoyed, because I can see there's a consistent if alien sort of logic at work here, a bigger story I'm glimpsing a tiny part of, told in fragmented notes guarded by potentially deadly statues and by powerful beings who disappear without warning or explanation.

Happily, most of these messages are in English (and have been since Relic's first release in the '80s), and the few that aren't are written in an English cypher I must puzzle out using an in-game key and good old-fashioned pen and paper.

Shifting from body to body doesn't just grant me new attacks or tougher forms but also offers a little abstracted insight into how everything I see interconnects, allies and enemies determined by an ambitious tangle of relationships and behaviours. So that nightmare bunny I started out as is viewed as an annoying pest by the soldiers, something to be eradicated if it doesn't "GO AWAY" when yelled at. Soldiers stop to greet each other with a relatively friendly "NO TROUBLE", as equals stuck in the same weird boat. If I possess one of their superiors a "SIR" will appear at the end of that greeting, as a sign of respect… or perhaps fear, after experiencing officers attacking soldiers who refuse to return to their positions when gruffly requested first hand.

The combat that can follow these encounters is as unexplained and intricate as everything else I'm pleasantly puzzled by. My health is always ???, vaguely represented by a beating organ that is neither quite a heart nor a brain. The number of beings I have to kill in cold blood to reach one of the game's multiple endings is zero, making violence an active choice on my part. And I'd rather not fight, because my opponents are so reactive and well animated (for the era, of course), that it does feel uncomfortably messy and brutal.

Heavy blows can cause either of us to stumble, to the point of getting caught off-balance and ending up on our hands and knees, attempting to crawl away or get back up. They can decide they'd rather not fight at all, and try to run away, and whether I chase them down or not is left up to my conscience. Sneakily attacking an enemy's knees from behind brings them down faster than hitting them from the front. That's positional attack damage in a decades old game whose everything is smaller than most modern screenshots—singular.

I'd expect that sort of mechanic in a modern FPS, not a game old enough to buy its own beers (or be sold on cassette tape).

The game only gets weirder and more impressive the longer it goes on. People shout at me in code before sprinting across a room lined with golden figures, ready to fight. There's a woman held in some kind of stasis pod, who I may or may not free from her imprisonment. Hell's covered in organic pulsating walls. I barely have time to register the five screen high statue of something as I drop down a hole, but whatever it is looks a bit like an exposed skull-like face with a single teal eye, and holds a sword as tall as a house. I have no idea why it exists—but I do know I can't stop thinking about it.

Under these strange circumstances the game’s, ahem, “interpretive” graphics help rather than hinder the mood, presenting another fascinating inkling of a truth I can’t quite grasp even though the object in question is right in front of my face.

Exposing myself to these barely comprehensible wonders/horrors inevitably leads to many, many deaths, forcing me to restart the technically quite short game (it can be comfortably cleared in under an hour if you know what you're doing) from the beginning every time—and run headfirst into another of the game's many clever tricks. Unless I'm very careful, no two runs are alike. Depending on a wide variety of silently noted factors directly linked to my curiosity and behaviour, what were once mortal enemies might appear on their hands and knees, seemingly willing to be possessed, or not appear at all. Sometimes key items just don't show up. Attacking people who need help or would give their assistance freely always has wider, unspoken consequences beyond altering who wants to hit me back.

And the brilliant thing is that my repeat runs and fatal mistakes are all part of the game's master plan. There is no such thing as a perfect, complete run here. It is by design impossible to learn everything I need to succeed in one deathless go and then head directly for the best ending—I'm expected to prod and poke and piece it all together, a code learned in one "life" used in the next cycle, a document I risked everything for one run completely ignored the next, a map jotted down and kept safe for later use.

Beautifully, the game ends exactly where it begins, the entire experience forming a flawless loop. I was already in the right place, I just wasn't the right person back then. I didn't know who I could be or what I could do. The journey was the important bit. The journey made it special.

The journey still makes it special. Don't be put off by Relics' looks or its language warning. Give it a try now that it's on Steam, and you may be shocked by what the developers pulled off with 4 MHz, a handful of colors and a couple hundred kilobytes.

I have been waiting to be let into Reshine's playtest for weeks now, each day more eager than the last. Because after stumbling across a short video of what it would be like to restore an old trinket in this cosy sim, I was convinced that this may be the best cleaning and restoration game I've ever come across.

Thankfully, I was let into the playtest yesterday, and after immediately jumping to download it I was greeted with an hour of pure bliss as I worked my way through tidying up three old yet beloved items.

Set in a cosy, slightly dusty attic studio, you've got your work bench and all the tools you need to restore antiques and beloved toys. The first project I started was a seriously rusted butcher knife in the shape of a fox, it was in such bad shape that I didn't actually know what it was meant to be at first.

But that didn't matter. I started by disassembling the knife, removing the nails from the handle so I could separate the wood from the metal. Then I got to work dusting, sanding, and polishing all the materials with the various tools present in the studio.

This part is perhaps the most satisfying. Like other cleaning simulators, you work slowly and methodically in Reshine to remove the grime, dust, and rust from each section. Some dust comes off with just a blast of air, but other marks are more ingrained and need a sharper, more precise tool. It's not a guessing game, though, Reshine always arms you with the right gadget for the task.

After cleaning it up I set about popping a base layer of paint on the wooden handle, then I chose a deep red for the overcoat—it's meant to be a fox's tail after all, so I thought it was the right colour for the occasion.

The next tasks I had in my workshop was refurbishing an old rotary telephone and a cute little wooden toy in the shape of an elephant. The elephant was pretty easy going, all it needed was a bit of sanding and a fresh coat of paint, but the telephone was a bit more complex.

Alongside having several little parts to dissect and clean individually, each needed various tools to get the job done. Alongside the sand blaster, polisher, and air blower, the phone also required a laser to get all the deep rust off. But all of that just meant I had more time to relax and clean up some old treasures.

The cosy attic location, the slow cleaning process, and the calming and soft music all make Reshine an incredibly rewarding and mindful game to play. I knew I'd love it from the first video I saw, and I was right. There's only three tasks available in the playtest right now, but I can't wait to head back up to the attic and get to work restoring more antiques.

At its State of Unreal event in Chicago, Epic Games officially unveiled Unreal Engine 5.8, and one of its key new features is Lumen Lite: a scalability setting that targets the use of ray-traced global illumination for the Nintendo Switch 2, with the goal of 60 fps. As the feature also works for PCs, I thought I'd dive in and check out just what the fuss is all about. Or if indeed any fuss ought to be made.

By default, the Unreal Engine editor gives developers a simplified way of checking out various graphics settings to see how they affect performance and visual quality. There are 11 separate options that can be tweaked, but the new Lumen Lite mode only affects global illumination (GI) and reflections, as these are the main things that Epic's ray tracing system affects.

In older versions of UE, switching to 'Medium' GI and reflections fully disables Lumen, but in the latest release, the same setting enables Lumen GI, though reflections are still screen-spaced, i.e. SSR. Ray-traced global illumination is normally the preserve of the 'High' or 'Epic' settings, so to make it more performant for low-end GPUs, Lumen Lite replaces a key stage in the lighting process with something quicker but lower in quality than the usual system.

I first caught a glimpse of this in action via Skydek's YouTube channel, earlier this year, and the end results looked really promising, as Lumen Light was giving up to 40% more performance for very little difference in visual quality. But watching the demo, set in a fairly simple environment and using software Lumen, I kept wondering how much of a difference it would make when hardware Lumen is used and in a graphics-heavy scenario.

To that end, I fired up Unreal Engine 5.6 and 5.8, and used Epic's Electric Dreams Environment demo to see Lumen Lite in action. Now, as I'm merely a UE hobbyist, I did nothing more than install all the assets for each UE build and check out the performance in the viewport.

This is very much a 'worst-case scenario' or, if you prefer, a 'Nick is rather lazy' scenario, as the displayed performance is not even remotely representative of how it would all be in an actual game, and I've just clicked a few buttons, rather than directly adjusting the code for the graphics settings and then building the full demo.

Anyway, let's set the scene, as so to speak, by seeing everything in action in Unreal Engine 5.8, using Epic scalability and materials. It's not the very highest setting you can use, but in the case of Lumen, it's for targeting consoles at 30 fps. I've used a Core Ultra 270K Plus with a GeForce RTX 4080 Super, so not console-like at all, but as you can see, it certainly looks great, albeit with a rather low frame rate.

Now, let's take a look at the same situation and settings, except with 'Medium' used for GI and reflections, i.e. Lumen Lite. The first thing you should notice is that the performance is roughly 25% better, and the overall lighting is pretty good. Only the screen space reflections spoil the picture somewhat, but that's what you get for not using ray tracing in those areas.

Before you get your pitchforks out over the fact that Epic says that Lumen Lite is "twice as fast as Lumen High quality", it's worth noting that only the GI and reflections processing is twice as fast. What we're seeing here is that everything else in the UE editor viewport demo is exceptionally heavy, which is why there's only a 25% uplift, rather than a 100% one.

I was keen to compare UE5.8 and Lumen Lite to UE5.6, as that iteration was notable for targeting more performance across the board, and since 'Medium' GI and reflections in this version just disable Lumen altogether, I'd expect to see a big difference in the frame rate for a notable loss in visual fidelity. Well, that's exactly what I got. In fact, it's quite remarkable just how bad it looks compared to using Lumen, with heavy flickering across almost all objects.

So I tried it all again, switching to 'High' GI but leaving reflections SSR-based by using the 'Medium' setting. Notice the immediate improvement in how it all looks? More importantly, can you see that the use of Lumen GI doesn't hurt the performance too much?

Of course, this is all on a high-end gaming PC, not a Switch 2 or a handheld device like the Steam Deck or ROG Ally. The former has more than enough resources to hand for the ray tracing part of the whole rendering chain to not be a problem, as demonstrated by the difference between Lumen Epic and Medium quality above.

But it did make me wonder whether Lumen Lite is a little bit unnecessary, and that a healthy dose of good old-fashioned optimization will be just as good. If I were a Switch 2 developer, I'd probably say, "No, Lumen Lite is very necessary and a great idea," because I only have to worry about two hardware configurations: docked and handheld mode.

When it comes to making PC games, it's a whole different kettle of fish, and while Lumen Lite might be useful as the default mode for 'Steam Deck' settings, every other hardware config really needs careful tweaking to account for the differences between the numerous models of AMD, Intel, and Nvidia GPUs that can support Lumen (software or hardware).

If a studio is going to dedicate the necessary time and resources to doing all of that, then they probably won't use Lumen Lite and instead will fine-tune things by hand, so to speak. However, now that we're in a period where many studios are being shut down and hardware costs are ballooning, any game devs using UE5.8 will probably just stick to the basics because of time and cost constraints.

Epic almost certainly added Lumen Lite on the basis of feedback from developers, looking for a quick and simple solution to ray-traced lighting on the least capable hardware. Well, they've got exactly what they asked for, and it is genuinely useful. I just fear that the 'one-click solution' is going to be heavily used instead of what we'd all like to see.

This month, PC Gamer gets world-exclusive access to Planet Zoo 2, the ridiculously ambitious and impressive new management sim from Frontier Developments. For our huge, authoritative cover feature, PC Gamer travelled to Frontier Developments' Cambridge headquarters, got up close and personal with the game for multiple hours, and then interviewed seven key devs about all aspects of the game. The result is your ultimate one-stop shop for Planet Zoo 2 information, including stunning, never-before-seen images. This isn't just shaping up to be the best animal management game ever, but the best management sim full stop when it launches in October this year.

There's another awesome feature in this issue of PC Gamer, too. The fountain of love for the FPS genre never runs dry here at PC Gamer. And, for good reason, too. The FPS was born on PC and, despite incursions by a few console-leaning series such as Call of Duty, still thrives first and foremost on PC, with a greater selection of top shooters available to play on it than on any other platform. As such, the PC Gamer team has come together to decide upon the FPS games that we recommend gamers should play today in 2026, ranging from immersive single-player adventures, to hyper competitive online milisims.

This issue comes loaded with a dynamite preview section, too. Leading the assault this month is the adrenaline-inducing action flight game Ace Combat 8: Wings of Theve. And, we're pleased to say that, after our dedicated hands-on time playing the game, this is truly looking like a thrilling experience, with hyper-detailed jet fighters dogfighting it out in some of the most luscious-looking skyboxes we've ever seen. If you've got the need for speed (and plenty of big explosions), then this is looking like a total treat. In addition, we also preview Heroes of Might and Magic: Olden Era, Assassin's Creed Black Flag Resynced, Tides of Annihilation, Frontier Legends, Subnautica 2, Warhammer 40,000: Boltgun 2, and Denshattack!.

Meanwhile, in terms of reviews, this issue features definitive judgments on Forza Horizon 6, Directive 8020, Zero Parades: For Dead Spies, 007 First Light, Mixtape, and Lego Batman: Legacy of the Dark Knight, among other games.

Cover feature: Planet Zoo 2

Written by: Robert Jones

Magazine exclusive: Until July 27th, 2026

What's in this month's cover story: For this issue's all-access, world-exclusive cover feature, PC Gamer travels to Frontier Developments' headquarters and interviews no less than seven key developers about its ambitious new animal management sim. If you like the idea of using an incredible suite of creative tools to build the zoo or wildlife reserve of your dreams, then this game is going to be like Christmas coming early.

Secondary feature

Additional content in this month's issue

Subscribe to PC Gamer magazine

How many issues are in an annual subscription?

• 13 issues a year, including a special holiday issue in late December.

What's the difference between the UK and US versions of the magazine?

• The UK edition of PC Gamer magazine has a slightly higher page count than the US edition, with extra content available.

Are PC Gamer subscriptions available outside the US/UK?

• Yes, we ship PC Gamer magazine to many countries around the world. For a full list of destinations, please visit Magazines Direct.

What form does the digital magazine come in?

• Digital editions of PC Gamer magazine are provided in PDF and EPUB format, readable through Pocketmags.

I've always loved starting a new Stellaris campaign. There's a special magic for me surrounding those initial years, as you explore the systems surrounding your home planet, discover anomalies, and just generally see the shape of the galaxy around you. Maybe your fleets run into a mysterious alien species, an abandoned mega structure, or a black hole that starts whispering to you.

For me, it's the most exciting time, before the sheer scale of the game overwhelms your ability to really focus on any individual solar system. I've always struggled with that aspect of Stellaris, balancing my desire to explore the universe with the demands of claiming territory and planets, chokepointing swathes of the galaxy against the equally hungry factions out there in the black on all sides.

So I've long wondered what it'd be like to play as a faction with no territory. Stellaris' Nomads expansion is pretty successful in that regard, giving you an Arkship for your spacefaring race (though sadly with just one visual variant), and a bunch of extremely fun origins to choose from. I picked and played through The Sacred Path, which saw my race of Arthropoid pilgrims tracking down sacred sites across the galaxy. But the Forever Cruise, which sees you pick a crew and a passenger race, also sounds very good.

You start off fixing your Arkship, but once that's done, you can go pretty much anywhere. Arkships are essentially a colony, shipyard, and battle fleet rolled into one, and they can ignore closed borders, meaning you carry what you need with you to explore. The main drawback with nomadic factions, I found, is the Waystation. Rather than holding territory, nomadic races build outposts that can harvest and stockpile resources.

When they're full, though, they need to be picked up by a logistics ship and delivered to your Arkship. So, theoretically, you can go wherever you want, but you'll make it increasingly difficult for your ships to ferry resources to you. There is an alternative, and that's harvesting resources with your Arkship directly from planets. The price is that planetary mining stations produce 75% fewer resources for a while, and the faction who owns the system really doesn't like it, so you'll want to pick unclaimed systems that don't have Waystations in them.

Yes, this does become increasingly difficult as the galaxy gets painted. The best way to survive as nomads seems to be to befriend a faction and agree a Wayline treaty with them so you can build inside their territory. Factions offer contracts to nomadic races, including remote research, transporting sightseers, or scanning systems, all of which are an incredibly easy way to acquire influence so you can construct more Waylines or form treaties.

Your nomadic faction also has a new resource combining Energy Credits and Minerals which is called Operational Reserves, but honestly, I'm really not sure why this was created because it's confusing as hell. Your reserve level (low, medium, high) confers various benefits or detriments to your Arkships. You can also choose the speed at which you consume your reserves to add further bonuses, but it doesn't really give you a proper breakdown so it's often hard to keep balanced.

For the most part, though, I had a lot of fun piloting my Arkship across the galaxy and slowly upgrading it into an unstoppable juggernaut, but the phrase "We're running out of sky" couldn't help but come to mind. As spheres of influence expand, it feels like you're almost obligated to befriend and support a faction, especially as completing contracts is so lucrative.

I do, however, really like the post-Nomads Stellaris galaxy. It's fun running into other nomadic factions and there are some great extra additions, too, whether it's new OST like Manduul Haan by Batzorig Vaanchig (which has a lovely bit of Mongolian throat singing you can listen to further up), or events like the Champion's Forge Live.

This TV station Arkship broadcasts a special free-for-all you can enter your fleets into, giving you a chance to square off against the rest of the galaxy to potentially win the grand prize, though sadly I didn't make the cut. Still, its additions like this that make Stellaris's galaxy so fun, and Nomads definitely contributes to that, even if playing as a nomadic faction isn't 100% what it should be right now.

RPG rulebooks sometimes open with an "example of play" where players with whitebread names like Arthur and Samantha go through a scripted scene and probably some combat to give you an idea what roleplaying is like. Tabletop roleplaying games are a weird hobby, and back in the day if you didn't have an existing group to join and were just going off the rulebooks like me, the only way to learn what they were like was by reading the adventures of Artie and Sam.

Now, you've got it easy. There are like 400 episodes of Critical Role online, not to mention Dimension 20, the Adventure Zone, Acquisitions Incorporated, and Dungeon Masters with Neil Newbon and Devora Wilde out of BG3. I would have killed for this many examples of how to play RPGs when I was a kid in a country town with no game shops around. All I had was ads in comics promising "The fantasy adventure of a lifetime!" Now I've got more hours of Matt Mercer saying "How do you want to do this?" than I'll ever have time to watch.

Which is why it's baffling that the YouTube algorithm and Reddit have spent several years vomiting headlines at me like "How to beat the Matt Mercer effect" and "The Mercer Effect is real and can be extremely toxic to your game."

The idea of "the Matt Mercer effect" is that not only are actual-play series like Critical Role a bad introduction to roleplaying, they give new players dangerously high expectations, which are ruining people's games. A generation of kids think every Dungeon Master will be as good at accents and creaky door noises as professional voice actor Matthew Mercer, goes the claim, and they will leave your table in a huff because you are just an ordinary human GM who can maybe do one Cockney goblin at a stretch.

I'm not saying nobody has ever complained their GM isn't doing a good enough job and maybe even used Matt Mercer as an example of how to be a better one. I'm saying the problem goes back way further than Critical Role, and is one that's been playing out for years before anyone was making a living as a professional Dungeon Master.

One of the most important tools in a GM's bag is session zero. It's the part before the game where you make sure everyone's on the same page about what kind of game you're about to play. It's where you talk about whether there will be more action or roleplaying, whether player-versus-player conflict is allowed, which house rules you'll be using, and so on. Are you down with adversarial play, or with romance, or with safety tools? Are you going to get narky because I'm neurodivergent and sometimes looking at my phone makes it easier for me to concentrate even if it looks like I'm distracted? These are the things you hash out in session zero so they don't come up when play begins.

But the game taking place in the back room of a game shop probably doesn't have time for that, and the game being run by your friend's brother who let you join in this week but only because his parents made him probably doesn't either.

Overwhelmingly, rants about the Mercer Effect end with the revelation that the person running the game was running it for a group that included strangers, usually at their local game store, without a session zero. And while it's nice that those pickup introductory sessions exist, that someone who is curious about roleplaying can test it out in the back room of a comics shop then buy a rulebook on the way out the door, it's almost always a terrible first experience.

Roleplaying is best eased into with friends. It's a trust exercise where you need to feel comfortable spending a few hours pretending to be a gnome among people who aren't going to make fun of you for it, with a GM who isn't going to decide it would be fun if your character had to fight off a sexual assault, or had a magical pregnancy inflicted on them, or one of the many other nightmare scenarios that fill conversations like the Creepiest Person You Ever Gamed With topic on RPGNet.

That topic eventually reached 3,000 posts and was split into six separate subthreads if you want to understand how many gross dudes are out there. But anyone saying "You're not as good at GMing as Matt Mercer" probably isn't doing it because their first GM's an absolute creep. They're doing it because of a problem that's even more prevalent if less fun to vent about online—a simple mismatch of expectations.

A clash between expectation and reality is inevitable, whether those expectations come from watching an actual-play show or just imagining what it's going to be like. People who want more roleplaying being let down to discover the game they've joined is just another dungeon crawl is not a new phenomenon. Disappointment has been a common reaction to your first time roleplaying for decades. It was my reaction too, and all I had to build up my expectations were ads in comics and the adventures of Arthur and Samantha. Poor old blameless Matt Mercer had nothing to do with it.

Steam Next Fest is back and bigger than ever, but I'm not so sure that's a good thing as I struggle to sift through its thousands of demos in search of my next second-screen idler. If anything, I kind of hate the current structure: we've gone from browsing a bespoke, quality selection of gems to navigating the world's busiest Costco where every aisle has a dozen free samples to shove in your mouth.

The free food is nice, but sometimes I take a bite and instantly regret it. Sifting through today's Steam Next Fest feels a lot like that, and with nearly 500 idlers in the showcase, filters aren't that helpful either. I don't have time to even read that many store descriptions, let alone play them, so I did what any sane, totally normal person in this situation would do:

I downloaded 45 demos, launched them all at once, and started narrowing my selection down by closing the ones that didn't entertain me for more than a few seconds.

Well, I say all at once, but what I really did was flood my second screen with as many idlers as I could fit before culling them to just my favorites. The results were a hellish mixture of lo-fi beats to get overstimulated to, cats meowing, and every farm noise imaginable. It took about two or three rounds to go through them all, but the strategy worked, and I have a nice little list of desktop idle games to wishlist.

Coincidentally, I also have the worst video I've ever recorded.

As you can imagine, my PC wasn't particularly thrilled to have a billion chirping idle games all sounding off at the same time, but ol' faithful handled it like a champ. And out of the 45 idlers I downloaded, I only have 11 desktop distractions to recommend.

The surviving Steam Next Fest idler demos

• Black Cat Book Club - Improve feline literacy, decorate a magical tower
• Cozy Mining - Dig a hole, find treasures in the hole, then keep digging
• DeskFarm - Manage a teensy tiny farm grid
• Duelist: Idle Expedition - A surprisingly robust auto battler
• Grandpa's Bee Haven - Bee-keeping sim, kind of like Rusty's Retirement
• Idle Bookstore - Decorate and manage a little bookstore
• Idyll Isle - Adorable, pastel farming sim
• LootBorne - Simple auto-battler with PvP
• PawMart Tiny Market - Manage and restock an animal-run grocery store
• Succulent Break - Make cute and simple succulent arrangements
• Tiny Farmie - Another farm sim with a cute art style

I've got the attention span of an overcaffeinated toddler, so I love the brief yet satisfying distraction found in a good idler. I don't need something that takes me away for long, so I go for the desktop companion-style games that fit nicely in the corner of my screen. They give me something to do for a minute or two before it's back to work, and I like seeing my finished collections or completely decorated spaces when I'm done with them.

My Steam Next Fest list is a mixed bundle of idle farm sims and passive shop management, but I tossed a couple of auto-battlers in there for fun. I'm not interested in AI slop or idlers filled with microtransactions either, so you (hopefully) won't find any of that included. It's all just games made by people. People who understand that some of us just need to pause for a little brain treat sometimes, and that we're only going to finish a big task if we have several smaller tasks to serve a bit of serotonin on the side. Just don't open them all at once—it has the opposite effect.

If you want to see the full list of idlers featured in Steam Next Fest, you can check out the filtered results from now until Monday, June 22. And if you find any idler gems I missed, let me know.

Idols of Ash looks like another of the droves of low-poly first-person horror games oozing from the 21st century collective consciousness, but it's actually more of a climbing game. I meet the nameless protagonist at the mouth of a mysterious, fathomless pit. For some reason it's my objective to reach the bottom of it.

At first I start to drop down from one platform or outcrop to the next like I would in any other first-person game, or like I would down a well, or the inside of a giant tree, in a Dark Souls game. Idols of Ash reminds me a lot of FromSoft's games, especially of the recurring Miyazaki motif of dropping carefully into an abyss that seems to widen and contort the further I go. The atmosphere here is pure melancholy murk until, with the flip of a dime, it turns skin crawling.

Crucially, I have a grappling hook. This is the trick that Idols of Ash's two hour runtime orbits around. If I hook into where I'm standing I can descend safely into the pit to my rope's full extent. Or, more daringly, I can drop without an anchor and hook onto a surface during my fall. I can also swing with this grappling hook, gaining enough momentum to allow me to make leaps of faith towards distant platforms.

I do this extremely slowly at first, all the better to get a handle on a movement system that becomes more flexible and expressive the more I interact with it. Ain't this nice, I thought: a slowburn exploration game for nyctophiles!

But then a ginormous freaking centipede appeared from the gloom above, snapping me in half with its trunk-sized mandibles. Game over.

The tonal whiplash made me rage quit, if I'm honest, but the promise of that grappling hook and the eerily cylindrical subterranea brought me sulking back. I learned to go fast. The further downward I charted the less I could dare rely on hooking and descending: I had to jump and catch, swing and leap. A growing understanding of the expanse was useful, yes, but so was better knowledge of what kind of surfaces the grappling hook can grapple to, and how much slack I need to make quick scurrying leaps. Sometimes I'd just have to hope for the best.

I reckon that giant centipede had my arse at least a dozen times. Dealing with it became easier when I realised that it doesn't really move much faster than I do, at least on the game's normal difficulty. The centipede forced me to use my instinct and be dextrous. From a design perspective it's basically a manifesto: Leafy Games doesn't want you to descend this hellscape methodically, stopping to take in the depressing sights now and then: It wants you to play this like an arena shooter without a gun.

Like I said, it took me about two hours to complete Idols of Ash, though some people in the Steam forums reckon it took them 20 minutes. Once you've finished it you unlock Nightmare mode which removes checkpoints and speeds up the centipede. A lot of people seem to think this is the right way to play it, but I'm not going anywhere near it, thanks. Much more my speed is the sandbox mode, also unlocked post-completion, which lets me explore without the centipede and play around with a bunch of modifiers, like shorter and lengthier ropes, heightened or reduced fall damage, etcetera.

There is a cryptic story threaded through Idols of Ash. The game's climax is oddly impactful despite the determined vagueness of the exposition up until that moment. I think I'll need to play it again to make sense of it, but overall I think that climactic moment landed because I genuinely felt like I'd escaped a horrible, high stress scenario. Idols of Ash feels like a feverish nightmare. But don't worry too much: it's also an extraordinarily fun first-person platformer. It's on Steam and Itch.

I went into the immersive horror sim, Thanks for the Soup, with few expectations—I certainly didn't think it would hurl me into the complex world of organic broccoli farming, but I wouldn't have had it any other way.

The premise of Thanks for the Soup is simple: you deliver soup from 5pm to 1am to patrons who are stuck inside by some vague lockdown or just because their work is too hectic for them to make a trip to the store and turn the oven on. The more orders you fill, the more money you get, which can go towards a few different things: food, fishing, or farming.

I decided my wages would best be spent on setting the foundations for an organic broccoli farm. What started out as a simple bid to grow enough food to keep me peddling soup orders sprouted into my dream job—the soup delivery became a side hustle.

Yes, the town in which I find myself delivering soup is more than slightly unnerving. The occupants are kind of weird, the neighbourhood gets super dark, flashes of light and thick white fog descends on the town at random, and occasionally you experience a heavenly vision. But a job's a job, and I find cycling around on my bike surprisingly peaceful. All I have to do is think of my broccoli, oh, and eat a mushroom or two—did I mention there's a wide variety of mushrooms found across town?

On my travels across town I found five different types of mushrooms, and because of my dedication to science and—recently—farming, I decided to eat all of them. From what I found, Zuzu mushroom takes a hammer to my depth perception, the Tolid Mushroom makes me super fast, the Folor mushroom makes everything wavy, and as for the Ulod and Cranim mushrooms, I'm not sure yet—I ate a ton of both of them and nothing seemed to happen.

These mushrooms are a big help, especially when things get a bit spooky—it's hard to be scared of whatever may be lurking in the shadows when I'm fighting the mushroom waves trying to stay on my bike. Although I do have to admit that I likely haven't reached peak horror yet as I haven't entered the kitchen.

On my first day as a soup delivery person I was told by my manager not to go into the kitchen. Apparently, if I did I would disturb the chefs and they also don't want their secret recipe getting out. I've watched enough SpongeBob SquarePants to suspect that they're probably using humans as the secret ingredient, but that's honestly none of my business. They can keep on cooking humans as long as I can keep farming organic broccoli. Because if I can farm broccoli, then what's this all been about? What have I been working toward?

I usually expect blank stares when I wax nostalgic about The Guild 2, a rough diamond that's part management game, part life sim, part RPG. It's the kind of game that does well in central Europe but not remotely as well elsewhere. Your classic eurojank romp: big on ambition, not so much on optimisation or clarity. This is the Stalker of life sims.

For the uninitiated, imagine Anno—or any other detailed economic sim—but instead of playing some omnipresent administrator, you're just some guy. Some guy, though, who can climb the ranks of medieval society, forging a lasting dynasty with the power to change history. Or you could just open a successful tavern or become nothing more than a moderately successful gravedigger.

So many life sims fall into the cosy game category, and while I like Animal Crossing and Pokopia, it's sometimes hard to shake the feeling that these games aren't for me—a middle-aged man who loves boring things like historical accounts of terrible monarchs or the rise of the industrial revolution. I was not yet a middle-aged man when The Guild 2 came out in 2006, but I was still a bore, and this game felt made for me.

I craved more, and the monkey paw curled. In 2017, The Guild 3 was released in early access. It largely seemed to be more of the same thing, but fancier. I was thrilled, right up until after I had to play it. Back then I ran Rock, Paper, Shotgun's Premature Evaluation column, exploring new early access games. Here's what I wrote at the time:

Disappointment has hounded me at every turn. Nothing I do feels like it matters, and the simulation that ostensibly drives the game is very, very slight. Relationships, jobs, the economy that’s meant to lie at the heart of the game—all of them are half-baked at best, and I’ve seen little evidence of any dynamism.

Things didn't improve much throughout early access. The release date kept getting pushed back, promised features never materialised, and the initial developer, GolemLabs, was given the boot, to be replaced by Purple Lamp. The Guild 3 eventually left early access in 2022. But it never actually got finished. Updates continued for a year, but not ones that could salvage it.

But now a new Guild is on the horizon! Except it's not really new. It's The Guild: Europa 1410, inspired by the first game in the series. Unfortunately, this was before it became a life sim/RPG. This is disappointing, but I still love economic sims, so I was willing to give it the benefit of the doubt.

I shouldn't have bothered.

The Guild: Europa 1410 is, in its current incarnation, just a bunch of flavourless menus and repetitive notifications. It's a little bit less abstract than a lot of economic sims, in that you are technically playing a person, as well as the head of a dynasty, and they technically exist within the world. However, you exclusively control them through menus, and how they interact with the world is extremely limited. You also can't name them, any of their family members, or their business. The game does that for you. And while you do have RPG-like stats, there's no character creation.

So! I guess I'm Jan Hirschfeld, the owner of The Fat Goose, the only tavern in all of Kuttenberg—which, if you're not from the Czech Republic, you might remember from Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2. And for 17 days—where each day is also a season—I am tasked with diligently moving ingredients from one menu to another menu. Such is the life of an innkeep.

Occasionally I move some sliders, attempting to stop my employees from hating me by increasing their wages and treating them with more kindness. And when I start to get annoyed with how few items I can sell at once, I upgrade my bar and storage facilities. More exciting upgrades are available, like a stage for shows and a dark corner for spying on customers, but I don't have the relevant skills to construct them.

Every day is the same. My workers keep inexplicably injuring themselves, no matter how much training I provide—an event that is always accompanied by a voiceover letting me know how rubbish my employees are. And when they aren't just falling over, they make beer and gruel, which another employee sells. I can actually make more money selling beer at the market, though, so I usually send the cart out with any beer I've not already sold.

I guess folk really like a frothy beverage while they're doing their groceries.

During the 17-day demo, a few events occur that sort of break up the monotony of running an inn. At one point, I'm reminded that it would be handy to have an heir. I click on the first woman I find in the courtship menu. I flirt with her four times and a day later we are married. And a day after that we have our first child.

Now, I'm not really a fan of children. They're pretty useless. So when Satan shows up at my house and asks me to sacrifice my first-born child, with the promise that this will strengthen my bloodline, I go ahead and murder Jan Junior. Nobody seems to mind, and a day later I have another kid anyway. God, parenting is so easy.

Yes, making a deal with the Devil sounds pretty neat—but again, this is all happening in menus and text popups, and the result is just that I have slightly better kids, I guess? This is not Crusader Kings 3, where you've got playful text accompanied by striking art and characters with actual personalities. It's the bare minimum.

One afternoon, I agree to hold onto a sacred relic for a pilgrim. He says he's being hunted for it, and that I should deliver it to the church. I now have an artefact in my possession, and the game tells me I could sell it for 800 gold—I'm calling it gold just for convenience, but it's actually referred to as "local currency". I need the money, but there's a problem. Items from your personal inventory can be gifted, but not sold—which makes me wonder why it even has a price in the first place.

Since there's no objective listed, and no obvious way to deliver it to the church, I instead gift it to the local archbishop. He takes it, nothing happens. Thrilling quest!

The life of an innkeeper is clearly not for me, and I start dreaming of an exciting career in politics. Unfortunately, I'm not even considered a citizen yet. That will cost me 1,000 gold—which is actually not too much. Except I need to have 20,000 gold in my bank account first.

No politics for me, then. Instead, I just watch as increasingly bizarre laws are passed. Theft becomes legal. Then beating people up. And witchcraft. It sure sounds like someone powerful in Kuttenberg is a magical thief. Not that anything going on in the city really seems to affect me. Though it might be affecting how much I can sell my beer for. The price keeps fluctuating, and the economy is dynamic, but it's not clear how external factors affect my business.

17 days isn't much time to get to grips with the game. Even at the default speed, a day goes by in minutes. But even with this meagre offering, I duck out early. It's all just so gruelling—a joyless grind, one day to the next.

The Guild: Europa 1410 has the appearance of a deep, complex, systems-driven sim, but playing it is a shallow, repetitive experience that fails to capture any of the series' former magic. It's due to hit early access on July 16, but I'd give this one a miss, folks.

I don't know exactly when it changed—when I changed—but over the last half decade, I realized I really like horror movies. Before that I thought I mostly liked movies that leaned harder on suspense than jumpscares, or horror comedies that poked fun at the dumb slashers of the '80s. But it turned out my love of Scream and Cabin in the Woods was just a gateway drug to unabashed enthusiasm for the camp, costuming, and incredible practical effects of a Nightmare on Elm Street or Scanners or Exorcist. I now think Possession is right up there with The Thing as one of the best films ever made and oh my god, why did I wait so long to watch The Blob? Every October I put a few more cult classics on my watch list and find a new horror favorite I never thought I would love but absolutely do.

Anyway, Hellraiser sucks.

Terrible movie! Amazing, flesh-tearing makeup and special effects. Those Cenobite designs? Immaculate nightmare stuff. But every scene in which characters talk is more painful than the kinky BDSM stuff the hell dimension creatures get up to. "This is a movie without wit, style or reason, and the true horror is that actors were made to portray, and technicians to realize, its bankruptcy of imagination," Roger Ebert wrote about it at the time in a withering review.

As a noted lover of videogames, I'm sure Ebert would agree with me that Saber's singleplayer Hellraiser: Revival is already better than the film the second it hands you a shotgun.

I had a great time playing about 40 minutes of Hellraiser: Revival, most of which I spent thinking "Oh this game is like, nasty nasty." The level I explored, set in a cult's fetish club, was littered with BDSM flyers and sex toys, bear traps (the metal kind), and cultists in kink suits that doubled as effective armor plating. I chopped one's arm off with a Jagged Messer, a giant machete the in-game tooltip notes is "a perfect weapon for disembowelment." Another kept knocking me off my feet with shotgun blasts until I used the magical capabilities of the Lament Configuration, Hellraiser's iconic puzzle box thingamajig, to suck the fire essence out of a lit brazier and blast it out like a flamethrower.

I don't want to exaggerate Hellraiser: Revival's complexity by calling it an immersive sim, but at a surface level it feels very BioShock. There are tight environments littered with details to look at, drawers to open for ammo and other scraps, audio diaries scattered about, light puzzles gate your progress from room to room, and the Lament Configuration's ability to temporarily take on certain powers doesn't feel too far off from BioShock's elemental plasmids. Unlike BioShock, however, Hellraiser is full of ball gags, vibrators, and what is definitely the first time I've seen the words "face fuck" written in a videogame.

It's absolutely not shying away from the horniness of Clive Barker's film. Thankfully, the game does not take place almost entirely in an attic: after shooting my way through the cultists I got teleported to the hell dimension, where I ran through spooky transforming corridors until I could use the Lament Configuration to rotate the walls and floors of an Escher-like room to arrange a walkway to a pedestal awaiting the cursed cube. What followed was one of the best button prompts I've seen in years: Press F to Increase Suffering.

Maximum Suffering Increased? I'm not sure what more you could hope for from a horror game, really.

Saber is calling Hellraiser: Revival "survival horror action," which feels apt: it fits somewhere in between the horror and action flavors of Resident Evil. I never had more than a magazine or two of spare ammo for my pistol and shotgun, encouraging me to use the Lament Configuration to kill enemies instead of bullets, or to sneak through a vent to get behind one and stick my machete in their skull. It's got some of the grunginess of a 2000s horror game like Condemned: Criminal Origins, though I think its over-the-top sex and drugs tone might prove so edgy that it's actually closer to The Darkness by the end.

It's not scary horror, at least to me, and I expect tropes more than breaking new ground. In one less fun bit, I played through a looping nightmare in my character's house, where I had to go looking for my missing girlfriend (now a captive of the Cenobites) again and again, repeatedly resetting the room until I found the right interactive bits to move the sequence forward. Not the most creative bit of horror game design—then again, Hellraiser: Revival is the first time I've ever seen ASCII dick and boobs drawn on an old Nokia phone, so I have to respect its commitment, even if it ends up lacking much of the original's queer themes. Games are never this horny.

If not outright scary, Hellraiser: Revival does deliver a constant supply of "well that's fucked up" and guns that kick hard, which is enough to put it on the level of a fun '80s slasher in game form. I'm not sure it's a B movie-style cult classic just yet, but I did chop a cultist's legs off with a bear trap after he yelled "I'm gonna nail him from cover!" so I'd say the odds are, at least, in its favor.

Following in the footsteps of our friends in Australia, the British government is getting ready to ban under-16s from accessing social media—specifically Snapchat, TikTok, YouTube, Instagram, X and Facebook. The ban is expected to be enforced by spring 2027.

"Social media is making children unhappy, it’s making it easier for bullies to harass and abuse them, and it could even be harming their mental health," Prime Minister Keir Starmer said during the announcement of the ban.

As extremely online former teenagers ourselves, some of whom are now parents, we've got some thoughts on the ban.

Fraser Brown, Online Editor

I stopped using social media several years ago. I kicked Facebook to the curb after the Cambridge Analytica scandal, and I got out of Twitter when it refused to take action against Trump's deployment of misinformation and fascist propaganda, before it was purchased by Musk. I will occasionally use Linkedin and YouTube for work, but that's it.

Social media is a curse. Rather than being a tool for sharing information and uniting disparate people across the globe, it's just found new ways to divide us, radicalising children and adults alike. Social media tramples on the truth and makes everyone using it dangerously stupid. I am not a fan.

But the British government's solution is not going to work. Children are among social media's most vulnerable, malleable users, but we keep seeing how it's used to indoctrinate adults just as effectively. During the Brexit campaign, it was adults being targeted by political lies, not children. Kids aren't to blame for the tragic state of affairs the country now finds itself in.

Instead of punishing children, the government needs to target the source. People like Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg. The rich assholes who think they are untouchable need to start paying for the damage they cause. These companies need to be bled dry. Social media will never improve unless they are forced to dramatically change how they work, and the only way to do that is by fining them into oblivion if they don't.

Harvey Randall, Staff Writer

"Think of the children!" one might cry in response to the idea that the UK's incoming social media ban for under-16s—or indeed the catastrophically boneheaded, hobby forum-snuffing, privacy-violating Online Safety Act—is ill-advised. The issue is, absolutely no-one involved is actually doing that.

Children are smarter than you give them credit for. They're more technologically literate than the adults in the room, too. All legislation like this does is push them to shadier sites where they're out of sight, out of mind, and far more vulnerable than a properly-moderated social media website or an actually-informed parent population would make them.

The issue is enforcement, something the UK government has given me absolutely zero faith it'll be able to do sensibly or with any actual understanding of how this shit works. Mark me: They will mess it up. It'll be easy to get around. They'll do embarrassing news interviews where they try to tether adults verifying their age with the safety of children, and it'll be exactly as condescending now as it was back then.

And look: I don't think social media's good for our brains, it's why I barely use it, but cutting under-16s off from a world they are right to be disenfranchised by doesn't smack me as a great way to make them feel more connected to it. We used to tell kids to be careful online, now we're asking everybody to open their mouth for the camera so Palantir can know what our teeth look like. For the children, of course. For the children.

The reason social media is rotten for kids is because it's rotten for everybody. We've sat idly by while tech giants have made a torment nexus of misinformation and division that's literally built to make you angry and scared and tired—and we could do something about that, sure, but we aren't. And we're shocked that under-16s are a little messed up? We're the example we're setting for them, and we're doing a terrible job of behaving ourselves.

Rory Norris, Guides Writer

You'd be naive to underestimate the potential negative effects of various social media on children and young adults—hell, even full adults, as Fraser rightly points out. Still, a full-on ban and curfews aren't a nuanced solution to a nuanced situation.

I'm not a regular user of most social media. I don't care for Facebook. I use Instagram to chat with friends. I mainly use X for work. But YouTube, which I don't necessarily consider a social media in the same vein, is a substantial part of my day.

I wouldn't be where I am or who I am without it. My interest in media, specifically games, was fuelled by watching let's plays years ago, and now video essays—how else am I supposed to learn how the rivers work in Skyrim? This can lead to careers, as it has for me, or (to name a few) creators like MrRolfWaffles (who has spoken on the topic) and Kane Parsons, who was 16 years old when he created The Backrooms for his YouTube channel, Kane Pixels. Now 20, Parsons has become the youngest director in history to get a number one film at the box office.

This touches on a very important aspect of the platform. YouTube is, in many ways, an educational tool. Sure, there are plenty of bad apples, but I'd argue this is something the platform should be pressured into controlling and providing people with more rigorous controls over their algorithms, rather than a government crackdown.

I grew up watching VSauce's science videos. I remember using YouTube to revise for my GCSE and A-level exams. For one reason or another, I don't think I'd have managed without it growing up. This generation will be forced to.

Dave James, Hardware Dad

Control and regulation has failed, so the UK government is attempting the last desperate thing left to it, an almost impossible-to-enforce ban on social media for the under-16s. And honestly I'm a little conflicted. I disengaged with social media a decade ago, and will be passing my feelings on to my kids as they grow up. Though I will need to prepare for the inevitable desire to rebel against me.

This proposed ban, alongside the Online Safety Act, relies heavily on third-party age verification outfits, and that means you are giving a whole bunch of different people the keys to your personal details. And that means a lot of points of failure and opportunities for bad actors to get in-between and make off with a ton of sensitive, and powerful information, such as your image and passport information.

There are better ways to do this age verification stuff, such as zero knowledge proofs (ZKP). As Jacob spoke about in his piece on age verification's privacy nightmare last year, ZKP is a cryptographic method of providing proof of something without actually handing over specific data in that transaction. The idea is that you hold onto all your data on your device, and then that generates a proof token for the places that need it.

Basically, I feel it needs to be implemented in a more considered way.

OK, but that's actually just how it will impact those trying to navigate the restrictions they will now need to bypass to access their social media accounts, but what about the children? I'm a dad of a couple of young boys, both inevitably very tech literate for their age given what I do, but also both kept very much at arm's length from anything actually online.

Is this ban really going to keep them from finding a place or platform online where their friends are all gathering? No, probably not. But it's my job as their dad to explain the dangers of both and hope I can raise them to be smart and sensitive enough to understand why there is a need to step up and take the social media companies to task. They will find other digital playgrounds, and they will need to be just as prepared for the dangers there, too. As there's no proposed restriction in place for Signal or Whatsapp there will still be easy access to cyberbullying for everyone.

So, I guess my take is that this ban doesn't really change anything at all. In my role as a father of young kids, it is still my responsibility to make sure they're given all the information they need to make sure they can stay safe online and can understand where the dangers lie in the different platforms they may or may not interact with. As it was when they could freely access social media without being asked to hand over valuable private information to potentially unregulated age verification outfits.

Elie Gould, Staff Writer

Bans like this don't work. Take the similar restriction levied in Australia for example: research states that over 60% of teenagers are still using social media. This should surprise no one, not when the workarounds are just so easy.

As someone who grew up in the early days of the internet I know all too well just how easy it is to bypass restrictions. I also know that when kids are backed into a corner, they'll go to any lengths to do whatever they want; this rebellion will often land them on sites which are considerably worse than those they would initially browse.

But again it shouldn't really come as a surprise to anyone that this ban likely won't make kids safer. It's just not what it's meant to do. The onus should be on the platform to regulate and restrict harmful content, and platforms should be heavily penalised for not policing themselves effectively, and the billionaires who profit off it should be forced to cough up some of the money they made from selling this addictive substance. But this ban shifts the responsibility. Now platforms can point their finger at children and parents who simply don't know better and blame them when their child inevitably encounters egregious content.

Let me be clear, I don't think children should be on social media; I don't think anyone should. Sure, those cat videos are funny, but not when it comes at the cost of rewiring the dopamine centre of your brain. But this ban is insincere in its aims, lets platforms off the hook, and will likely only make protecting children harder.

Basketball was one sport I loved playing as a kid—not only to compete or spectate, but just for fun. I was not good at it. So I stopped playing, partially because I hated feeling like my teammates were stuck with me. When I got benched, that bummed me out. But when I got put in, the responsibility to not let my friends down made my heart race, even if it supposedly didn't matter if we won. Now I realize I shouldn't have been so hard on myself.

NBA The Run saddled me with the same existential questions I had back in those days. It's a 3-on-3 throwback to arcadey classics like NBA Jam, Street, and my personal favorite, the one where you can play as a horse. These games trade the simmy mechanical depth of more buttoned-up ball 'em ups for easily executed moon jump dunks, gaudy tricks, turbo buttons, and commentary from guys yelling stuff like "Boom shaka-laka!" It’s basketball as only videogames could envision it.

In other words, if classic 2K was Ball Turismo, NBA Street was Midnight Dunk Club. Much chiller, just as killer. But just imagine if Midnight Club had no arcade modes, no offline play of note, and instead shot you right into competitive online races without so much as a tutorial. As much as I'm having fun with it, that's the rough start you get with The Run, which released on Steam last week.

I soured on that setup while playing the default mode, squads. Instead of one player controlling an entire trio, six players each control a different character on the court. The playable cast includes a mix of real pro players, each of whom are outfitted with different stats and some personalized animations, as well as unlockable "street legends" with wackier playstyles, like the 7'7 El Gigante.

This format works great when you're on the same couch as your teammates, or in a game like last year's Rematch where clearly defined roles nudge each player toward what they should be doing. In 3-on-3 basketball though, it's a mess of point-hungry buffoons rushing at the ball, shooting Hail Marys from half-court with every possession, and sprinting around aimlessly.

Squads might be great fun with a premade squad or in rare moments where you click with strangers, but an uncoordinated team is comically nonfunctional. I found myself longing for voice chat or a ping system, which just felt wrong. Shouldn’t digital street ball be an escape from the two-bit esports I endure in games like Overwatch?

That said, the core action still hooked me. It's not as pure as Jam or as expressive as the trick-centric Street, opting for a nice balance between the two: dunks, blocks, and steals are simple button presses, but you can swerve around defenders with stamina-guzzling ankle breakers and shove other players as you please (street rules—it’s legal!). Go for a dunk without the ball to give your teammate an opportunity for an alley-oop, and you can even pass using the backboard or an opponent's face with an off-the-heezay.

It’s all narrated by Bobbito Garcia (AKA DJ Cucumber Slice), who you might remember as the ultra-charismatic announcer from NBA Street Vol. 2. He furnishes the game with a fun-forward sensibility befitting its stylized look.

But because The Run gives you the tools to play stylishly without much fuss and celebrates you for doing it, the emphasis on matchmade online tournaments—the only way to play outside of private lobbies—feels at odds with everything on-screen.

The flair is there, but the competitive context emphasizes performance and mastery over expressive plays and all-in-good-fun antics. There’s nothing inherently wrong with that, but it made me wonder why it’s a street ball game and not a deeper simulation with a more involved metagame to explore. In real life, street ball is a rejection of stuffy structure, but The Run adds it right back. And taken as an esport, this will get old fast… there’s a reason goaltending and shoves are illegal in "real" basketball.

It does have one trick up its sleeve to keep things fresh, and it’s my favorite part of the game: the changing win conditions. Every match has different rules around points which cleverly upend go-to playstyles. In one game, every shot that wasn’t a three-pointer was only worth a single point. Funnily enough, this made dunks a lot easier to pull off, since defenders kept gravitating toward the 3-point line. In another match, dunks were worth three points, turning the game delightfully aggressive.

Still, I found myself wishing for even wackier gimmicks and tricks to toy with, but The Run's team format emphasizes playing to win. Sure, I can pass to a teammate in hopes they'll see my alley-oop and send it back to me in time, but nothing feels as reliable as rushing in for a dunk or pump faking to bait out a block and secure a 3-pointer. The game's "in the zone" meter tries to reward you for flashy maneuvers, but games are often over before it can make a real impact, and at least one of the random rulesets removes it from play entirely.

At that point, why risk losing the ball just to do something cool? A question like that feels counter to the spirit of The Run's predecessors, but in a game that's throwing rank points at you after every match and tracking your win rate percentage, it feels unavoidable.

This is less of a problem in the game's solos mode, which I'm liking a lot more than squads. It's a 1v1 where both players control their entire team, swapping between them with passes. Not only does this mean you don't have to rely on silent randos, but you can also choose a spread of pros that cover each other's weaknesses. I can keep a tall center like Victor Wembanyama in the paint, confidently block an opponent's shot, and dish the ball to Jaylen Brown for a reliable swish. All of a sudden, I'm actually playing basketball! And if I want to go for off-the-heezays and alley-oops, my successes and failures are mine alone.

Once you focus on the fundamental balling (which may take some losing at first as, again, the game has no tutorial at all), The Run reveals itself to be a revival worthy of its inspirations, for the most part. That said, I still wish it had a singleplayer campaign like NBA Street Vol. 2's Be a Legend mode, or at least something along the lines of NBA Hangtime's create-a-player, which let you create custom ballers and boost their stats with each win in offline matches. Instead, there's nothing meaty for a solo player, and the online modes don't lend themselves to casual enjoyment.

The unfortunate result is that there's not really a way to unwind while playing The Run, which feels absurd to say about a game which strips away basketball's depth so it can focus on the cool, flashy stuff. It's a bit of frantic fun, but the games it’s taking after and the riffs that arose in their absence, like the Jam-inspired fantasy Supergiant RPG Pyre, have proven that arcade basketball can be bigger and better.

Last year's explosion of 'friendslop' games inspired by Peak's phenomenal success may be a recession indicator, but I'm still here for it: I love seeing indie developers focusing on small, cheap, creative games built around the idea of hanging with the pals. But the game industry's tendency to pile onto a promising trend does mean that if you go looking for a new co-op game on Steam, the selection is likely to be dominated by what's been most successful in the last couple years. Lo-fi 3D games riffing on Peak; survival crafting; roguelike mechanics slapped onto anything from gambling to cowboys to Dark Souls.

I've got nothing against those games, but they don't get me gassed up the way finding a purer—and if I'm being totally honest, more old-fashioned—form of Discord hangout game does: the linear, 7/10 co-op first-person shooter.

That was exactly the description that crossed my mind when I played Turok: Origins at Summer Game Fest last week. It may sound like damning with faint praise, but I truly mean it as a compliment.

The prequel to the dino-shooting '90s FPS is a three-player co-op game that lets you switch between first- and third-person at will; I played two missions and shot a whole bunch of both dinosaurs and aliens, frequently popping off abilities that launched volleys of magic missiles or beam attacks at them instead of bullets. It wasn't until we fought the boss of the second mission that I figured out how the health system worked, because up to that point I'd mostly been mashing buttons, watching shit explode, and chatting with one of the game's developers over a headset mic that was trying valiantly to filter out a whole lot of background noise.

There's something reassuring in the confidence of a game that knows exactly what it is and executes on what it promises with workmanlike precision. Call it the opposite of eurojank, where you admire the ambition of a game reaching for more than it can really deliver on. Turok: Origins, at least from the bit I played, isn't attempting to tell a nuanced story (though there is one) or deliver the most amazing-feeling FPS guns you've ever used (though they feel pretty good!). It's also, crucially, not built around the lure of keeping you playing forever with procedurally generated guns or a roguelite progression system.

I think it might be my perfect Discord hangout game.

I should probably be clear about what exactly I mean by "Discord hangout game." The definition will naturally vary depending on the size of your Discord group, of course, and how much time you have to play games. To me, there are a few key characteristics:

• Co-op support for 3-5 players
• Story should be minimal, but it can still be valuable for creating structure and giving co-op sessions a sense of accomplishment
• A Discord hangout game should be playable while only half paying attention the majority of the time
• You should only have to really lock in 10-20% of the time; the rest of the play session should allow for idle chit chat
• One player being less engaged than the rest of the group, or more engaged than the rest of the group, will not spoil the experience for everyone

All of these factors are important, but I think the last one especially is. Overcooked, for example, is not a very good hangout game because one player can easily ruin the whole vibe by either taking it too seriously or not doing their part.

As PC Gamer's Morgan Park pointed out to me when we were discussing our shared love of co-op shooters, one of many reasons "friendslop" feels like a poor descriptor for games like Peak is that they're actually fairly demanding of the player. You can goof off in Peak and have fun without taking it seriously, but to succeed you do need to be pretty engaged. The climbing stamina system demands patience, caution and good timing; one or two falls and you're almost certainly dead. Peak's use of proximity voice chat is a fantastic design touch, but further pushes it out of casual hangout game territory for me. It's hard to chat with a friend about what they made for dinner or what's going on with their job when you wander out of earshot and have to break off the conversation.

This isn't a criticism of those types of games—it just means they're at their best with a degree of attention I don't think is always ideal for a casual Wednesday night Discord hangout when we're all kinda tired but want to play a game together. Similarly, I find roguelites and survival games often aren't the best fit for a small Discord server that has a busy-adults-with-many-important-things-to-do vibe: the promise of infinite possibility and hundreds of hours of game is often not that appealing.

A game like Turok, on the other hand, with set missions, just enough story to give each one a bit of flavor, and a class system where we can each specialize in a role and unlock more gear as we go? The promise that we can replay levels on harder difficulties with our souped-up gear if we want, but we could also just finish the game and be satisfied instead of just kinda trailing off when someone gets busy for a few days?

In a different context, I might have more gripes about Turok: Origins—that its moving or shooting could use a bit more friction, that objectives like "enter this arena and blow up these five glowing plants" aren't exactly the most engaging. But while playing it I was mostly having a good time, because nothing in the game got in the way of having a fun chat while the shooting lit up the "bad guys go boom" bit of my lizard brain.

It's flashy. It moves fast. A few times I threw down a shield to help my teammates; most of the time we were each just running around blastin'. You can do some cool finishing moves on the dinosaurs that are guaranteed to elicit some hooting and also hollering in the chat.

I don't particularly like the phrase "turn your brain off" as it's often applied to the dumbest big-budget games or Hollywood blockbusters, because the best examples of either form manage to be engaging or novel in some way that puts them a cut above the average. I haven't played enough of Turok: Origins to say exactly how it will land, but playing it made me appreciate the art required of making a game that demands precisely enough from its players. I mean, just imagine trying to hold a conversation while playing Doom Eternal. Ridiculous!

But between Space Marine 2's class-based mission system and what I've played at Turok: Origins, I think Saber Interactive has found a very welcome niche in making shooters that know when to make you focus on surviving for the next 30 seconds, and are otherwise content to let you blab about your latest sourdough success. I'm blessed that both a legendary line of dinosaur hunters and King Arthur have my back.

The latest entry in the wonderful genre of friendslop, Meccha Chameleon, launched onto the scene with an impressive 1,000,000 copies sold in just four days. The hype for this multiplayer game has been growing exponentially, and after watching countless videos of artistic skill I was eager to try it myself, even if I have zero skill with a paint brush.

But that's never stopped me before, so after a week away from my PC, I managed to get a few good games in with some of the PCG lot in which I discovered just how severe my lack of creativity is compared to my colleagues.

By and large, the games are just as fun as all the chaotic videos on social media make them out to be, with the only limit on fun being your own creativity. I disguised myself as a balloon (a classic), the floor of the Backrooms map, and an upside down parking sign, which was actually my best hiding attempt to date. Given more time and perhaps a drawing pad I reckon I could make some real masterpieces, but for now I think I'll have to stick to lying on floors or curling up inside a bin.

On the flip side, the most impressive disguise has to go to staff writer Harvey Randall who managed to seamlessly blend in with some plant pots, if you approached at a certain angle, that is. Unfortunately, we did not approach at the angle needed so that gave the game away pretty quickly, but still, massive props for the vision—they out did my sad attempt at becoming a balloon, for sure.

Other than my lack of artistic skill, I will admit that Meccha Chameleon is a little rough around the edges. My biggest gripe is with its dropper tool, which is meant to copy any selected colour. This was pretty temperamental for me, which certainly limited what things I could mimic in a limited amount of time.

But it's still an absolute blast. I've always used games as a medium to hang out with friends, so my Steam library is full of creative and goofy multiplayer games like REPO, Lethal Company, and Content Warning—Meccha Chameleon is the latest addition to this list.

For now it seems like there's endless possibilities for fun, which I always find is a good test of whether or not a game like this has legs. Combine the different modes, maps, and all the modding potential, and Meccha Chameleon has the potential to become one of the giants in this genre, and a game that people stick with and come back to for a good long while.

"We could not convince people to fund Baldur's Gate 3," says Trent Oster. It's a stunning statement to hear now, on the other side of Larian's smash hit bear sex extravaganza. But for two decades beforehand, other developers tried and failed to get Baldur's Gate 3 made.

The first was Black Isle, which slapped the title on a doomed D&D game in the early noughties, when the ailing RPG studio was slipping from one cancellation to another. Then, half a decade on, Obsidian took a shot at Baldur's Gate 3—starting work on a third-person, party-based RPG that in some ways would have resembled Mass Effect, only with a much more expansive style of exploration. Atari Europe's sale to Bandai Namco put paid to that plan, ending Obsidian's discussions with the publisher. But a third studio began its own push soon afterwards: Oster's own Beamdog.

If Oster was persistent in pursuing Baldur's Gate 3, it's because it was personal. As a co-founder of BioWare, he worked on the 1997 original, before directing Neverwinter Nights. Even now, he's best known as the de facto custodian of BioWare's early works. If you're playing those games today, you're probably running Beamdog's Enhanced Editions.

But Beamdog always intended to be more than museum curators. It was 2014 when Oster first told me he was hoping to make a Baldur's Gate sequel. And in 2016, Beamdog put out an expansion to the original game, Siege of Dragonspear. Unfortunately, the majority of the team behind it fell apart in the wake of targeted Gamergate attacks.

"We were sailing down the river and then all the cannons opened up so we just shut all the hatches," Oster told me a few years ago. "And you could hear cannonballs bang the hull, and everybody was just huddled down inside. It basically fractured that team. It drove some of them out of the industry."

Nevertheless, Beamdog regrouped, and recruited Dragon Age scribe David Gaider as creative director. During his two year stint at the company, Beamdog proposed a version of Baldur's Gate 3 to Wizards of the Coast.

"Our Baldur's Gate 3 wasn't as big picture as what Larian pitched," Oster says today. "Obviously, we were doing it at a much smaller scope. It wasn't going to be a $100 million game. I think we were pitching it in the $20 million range."

The game would have mimicked the original's isometric view, but in a 3D engine—Unreal, specifically. "It would have stayed pretty close to the formula," Oster says. "I think we were pretty tight with just carrying forward what worked."

Rather than adopt a turn-based system, as Larian later would, Beamdog intended to stick with Baldur's Gate's original combat style: real-time with pause. "At its heart, real-time with pause is a compromise," Oster admits. "It's allowing things to flow until the moment you get worried, and then you need to pause it. And the pausing allows you to take the time to make those decisions and execute at a higher tactical level. But because you can pause, the entire game has to be balanced around the fact that you could pause at any time. Which then forces you to pause all the time. So it's a sticky mess."

Still: a compromise is better than the alternative, according to Oster. "I have an Achilles heel, which is that the older I get, the less patience I have for slow-moving games," he says. "To me, real-time with pause walks a line that I kind of like. If you're rolling into a fight and it's just some goblins, you mow them down, it takes six seconds. Whereas in a turn-based game, you allocate 20 minutes to just beating up six goblins."

So why didn't Beamdog's Baldur's Gate 3 move forward? Wizards of the Coast wasn't up for footing the bill itself, and other publishers weren't biting. "It came down to funding," Oster says. "All the companies out there were like, 'It's a singleplayer RPG, it's not going to do that big in numbers, and Wizards owns the IP. So why are we spending our money to increase the value of their IP? Why don't we do our own IP?'"

As a result, Beamdog wound up pitching a different RPG named Cold West. "The idea was that all the fairies and monsters of Europe fled west to the New World as Europe continued to become overpopulated," Oster says. "The humans just came behind them, and they finally decided, 'Well, screw it, we're going to make a stand here'. And it was basically Wild West fairies, vampires and ghouls, against gunslingers and spellslingers."

Publishers remained reluctant, however, and Oster notes that the launch of Larian's Baldur's Gate 3 didn't necessarily help other developers get singleplayer RPGs greenlit. "Now everybody's like, 'Oh, well, sure, RPGs will sell a lot, but they have to be huge, and you've got to put a ton of money into them, and you've got to have seven romanceable characters and full fidelity conversations, and it's got to be all performance captured and super high-res.' You're like, 'Yeah, I'm not sure about that.'"

I suggest that, after so long spent chasing his own Baldur's Gate 3, Oster must have mixed feelings about Larian's new pop cultural dominance. "I don't really get jealous about things," he says. "I'm like, 'Hey, you guys had the same opportunities we had, but you just happened to have a bunch of capital behind you that allowed you to roll in on it. And then you had enough capital that you're able to execute at a very high scale, and you were able to pay the costs of chasing the vision that you had.'"

Today, much of Beamdog's staff are wrapped up in co-development with Obsidian, with whom they worked on Avowed and The Outer Worlds 2. There's something poetic about these two would-be Baldur's Gate 3 studios banding together to make singleplayer RPGs regardless. "It's kind of neat," Oster says. "It's like having a big brother, and you can peek in. Working with Obsidian, we've run across a lot of things that they did better than we ever did. And it's like, 'Oh wow, that's really smart, we're totally stealing that.'"

Meanwhile, a small team within Beamdog tinkers quietly with new experiments. Oster talks with enthusiasm about emergent design, and tabletop D&D campaigns that go sideways after the party burns the starting tavern down.

"I was waxing nostalgic the other day, and describing playing D&D as a kid to somebody," he says. "I liked it when it was weird and dangerous. You were talking about demon summoning and hell and the hierarchy of devils, and you didn't want to tell too many people because they might get freaked out by it. It felt like you were in this little subsection of society. It's just a little too mainstream and acceptable right now. I want to lean into something like that."

Android Who Dreams of Stars looks like the kind of visual novel that has appeared weekly on Steam for over a decade. Its trailer shows a series of static sci-fi anime images accompanied by simple plaintive music. It centres around "autonomous android" Eve Nova whose existence is cause for wonder and concern in a futuristic Tokyo governed by AI. In this future, "war and hunger [are] treated as relics of the past" thanks to the governing prowess of said AI.

Uh, did AI write this? Turns out, yes. Developed by JinCycle, who has released 11 games on Steam since 2020, Android Who Dreams of Stars uses AI generated content for its "artwork, sound, story, localization, and store assets". In other words: pretty much every element the user interacts with is made by AI. Amusingly, its low-effort trailer even includes an erroneous Steam screenshot chime.

My Summer Love Memories is an FMV romance game whose videos, images and music were created using generative AI. Even its dialogue was composed by LLM. Meanwhile, as Ted Litchfield pointed out yesterday, Kryonull is another visual novel whose "voices in the game, as well as on the store page" were generated using AI. The developer NovelkaGames is charging a cheeky $100 for it, leading some in the Steam discussion forum to speculate that it's a money-laundering exercise.

$100 AI-generated games aren't new, though. Typical NPC was developed by SmogGames, a fairly prolific slop vendor. That visual novel released on May 11 for $100, and according to its disclosure, "all images used in the game were AI-generated. All images on the story page were also AI-generated". SmogGames issued another $100 serving of churn on June 13 with After the Hero, though apparently only its images—and not its very many words—were AI generated. The wording of their disclosures is eerily similar.

Joining SmogGames in this mysterious pricing exercise is KalendulaGames (notice a consistency in naming convention?) who released Velvet Emergency for $110, and in May, released Blood in the Ice and Signal Snow on the same day, both for $100, and all with heavy AI disclosures.

I clicked into every Steam listing for games released from June 9 here in Australia through to, well, about an hour or so ago. That's just under a full week. During that period 338 new games released, and 120 of those had an AI disclosure.

An AI disclosure doesn't mean a game is predominantly made with AI like those listed above. Many developers disclose AI use for store page assets, especially for capsule images. While that's a dubious creative and business decision—I can always immediately tell when a game's capsule image is AI generated, making it easy to skip—it may not affect the actual game it's advertising.

Sometimes AI disclosures don't really feel necessary. The developers of Underwater disclose that they use AI-generated images as art reference only, and not directly in the game itself, begging one to question whether they needed to make a "content" disclosure at all. According to Steam itself, the disclosure box is "concerned with the use of AI in creating content that ships with your game, and is consumed by players" (emphasis mine).

Some developers use the AI disclosure box to get a touch defensive, which I guess is understandable. The creators of Kamilia insist that "less than 1%" of their game contains "AI-assisted content", while the creator of Idlemoor uses the box to defend against using AI to make the game's logos. "The logo images on the store are AI generated," the developer writes. "This lets me focus on making the actual game, as I am not an artist. AI art will not appear in the game itself when you are playing."

Overall I was surprised by how many of these 120 games use generative AI for music and assets. I had assumed that the vast majority would be for translation and store page images. The former raises quality control questions and is obviously a disaster for actual humans who are employed to translate games, but it's arguably less egregious compared to machine-made music, textures and narrative.

One thing's for sure: the slopscape is broadening, and with it a new style of scammy, spammy game that doesn't seem designed—or priced—to even be played.

Top Steam games by revenue (June 2 - 9)

Steam releases its top sellers charts on Wednesdays, so the below chart doesn't factor in some late week releases that might have been big, though I don't think anything major released during last week's Summer Games Fest frenzy.

Gothic 1 Remake went gangbusters, which I'm glad to see. According to THQ Nordic it sold 500,000 copies in its first week and reached a peak concurrent players count of "almost" 78,000.

I spoke to a Polish developer last week who explained to me that Gothic is a massive phenomenon in Europe: basically a household name. It's certainly not that well-known here in Australia and it seems not much more than a niche concern among North Americans. Whatever the case, I'm going to blast some early '90s symphonic metal later this week and give it a go. I loved the Elex games and have wanted to jump into Gothic for years.

Steam Deck's appearance in the list has everything to do with stock replenishments, and the fact that it's much, much more expensive than your average Steam game.

Last week's Steam deep cuts

Steam review of the week

"This is the only game where I can rummage through trash and actually get paid for it. In real life, some old lady would probably call the police"

丨十卂匚卄丨, with a very relatable sentiment, on Where the F**k is my Bitcoin.

I often think of the times the mainstream dips its toe into our colourful corner of pop culture and tries to fit in—Beyoncé tapping away at a Nintendog, the multitude of weird Hollywooded videogame movies, real-life athletes turning up in the videogame version of their respective sport, WEED3.

But it is so rare to see the reverse. When the 2021 Tokyo Olympics paid homage to the industry with a fantastic videogame music-filled opening ceremony, it was newsworthy. It is still incredibly funny every time I think about the fact the Vatican was made privy to the existence of Undertale's Megalovania. Small pockets of nerd culture bleeding out to the masses.

I couldn't help but keep these sporadic moments in the back of my mind as I ventured into the large blue-and-red gazebo that sprawled across the Dogtooth Stage at Download Festival—the largest rock and metal festival in the UK—offering a pleasant respite from the sun beating down over Donington Park. It's a space I'm familiar with, grass I've trodden before. Dirt and dust I've washed out of my hair after too many days of the dreaded wet-wipe-shower.

But this time I wasn't here to live out my perpetual emo teen dreams of drinking in a field waiting for bands like Linkin Park or Limp Bizkit. I was here to see The Primals—Final Fantasy 14's official in-house band. One which has never done a live performance outside of a Fan Festival or Asia tour. A wonderful marriage of my two biggest interests coming together under one very sweaty tent.

With a surprisingly tasty timeslot of 5:50pm, The Primals' biggest competition being Electric Callboy at the nearby main stage, I was curious exactly what the crowd would look like, and how it would respond to something relatively niche. Festivals are always the perfect place to discover a band you've never heard of before, but a very specific videogame band? That can make popping over to a stage on a whim a harder sell.

I turned up approximately 20 minutes before the set was due to start and was met with a small but tightly packed crowd, a dense throng of bodies clustered close to the barriers. I took a spacious spot towards the back, feeling myself become increasingly closed in over the next 15 minutes. I took a quick look over my shoulder shortly before the timeslot and was pleasantly surprised to see how many more people had packed in.

The Primals weren't exactly drawing the crowds showing up for the more mainstream bands populating the larger stages. But as I scanned the area, spotting several folks wearing Final Fantasy 14 t-shirts chatting away about the game, the nerves I'd felt on behalf of the band began to settle.

They abated even further when the first few notes of Shadowbringers began to blare through the speakers, and composer-slash-guitarist-slash-vocalist Masayoshi Soken took to the stage, followed by Gunn Lee, Eikichi Iwai, Tetsuya Tachibana, and fellow Square Enix employee Michael-Christopher Koji Fox. The group riffed straight into the fantastic song Fiend—Sephirot's theme from Heavensward—and another brief scan showed an enthusiastic crowd peppered with eager lip-syncers and those who seemed to not be quite as clued into Final Fantasy 14's whole thing but having a great time nevertheless.

Primal instinct

As the band wrapped their first song, Fox took the mic to ask if the crowd has heard of the critically acclaimed MMORPG Final Fantasy 14. Knowing whoops and cheers erupted from those around me. "You might've heard its soundtrack… fucking ROCKS HARD," he declared to even louder, more agreeable whoops and cheers. I couldn't help but join in with the deep enthusiasm for what is, in reality, this group of middle-aged Dad rockers living their best lives as Fox continued: "This ain't no Super Mario… be afraid," using it as a segue to dive into the group's next song Not Afraid.

As The Primals welcomed longtime collaborator Jason Charles Miller to belt out the final three songs in the set—Absolute Tyranny, eScape, and Under the Weight—being squarely in this slice of nerdom was giving me a weird sense of… seclusion? Despite being surrounded by half a dozen other bands and tens of thousands of attendees.

The set may have been criminally short at just half an hour, but its curation of classic and new tracks was excellent. Those of us in the Final Fantasy tees heard our favorites, while others were more likely to catch the ears of passersby or future Warriors of Light. And such an enthusiastic crowd made one thing clear: this kind of thing can work! These weird and wonderful niche corners of music can intersect, transcend, and take up space outside the confines of videogame geekery.

It's a thing I would sincerely like to see more of in the future. Let Crush 40 play a Sonic set at Coachella! I dunno, get Lyn doing a full Persona 5 setlist at, like, Glastonbury or something. Finding these little ways to weave the two worlds together more would be lovely—peel off the "videogame music" label and The Primals playing at Download simply felt correct. A rock band, doing rock things at a rock festival.

If I hadn't known their origins (and, y'know, hadn't connected them to the Final Fantasy 14 branding slapped on advertising billboards across the whole festival site) I'd have taken them as a rather good and semi-zany Dad rock band from Japan. Finding more opportunities where these marriages of communities feel downright normal? That's a win for all of us.

Harry Krueger didn't get into PC gaming until early adulthood, but that all changed when he encountered the deathmatch thrills of Quake 3: Arena. "I went from zero to hero, basically. I went from never having a PC ever in my life to setting up a LAN and getting Quake 3: Arena and Tiberian Sun and Red Alert," he says. "We'd gather with friends over in Greece, and we'd play in my house with two teams, and had a friendly—and sometimes not so friendly—competition."

Krueger entered the games industry as a programmer for Finnish developer Housemarque, where he worked on the studio's early titles like Outland and Resogun. He assumed the role of Game Director for 2017's Nex Machina, serving in the same role for 2021's bullet-hell roguelike Returnal, which won four BAFTAs in 2022, including the award for best game.

Leaving Housemarque that same year, Krueger has now established his own studio—Cosmic Division, which is working on its first title. "We want to be a lean and mean studio that makes evocative gameplay-first experiences," he says. Krueger says CD's debut game will inherit the arcade action DNA of Housemarque's finest works. "I think players will also be pleasantly surprised," he adds.

Krueger hit pause on his latest game development run to show me around the bullet-riddled tower of his PC, a journey that took us from PC gaming's heartland to the lofty heights of the arcade shooter.

What game are you currently playing?

I do carve out time for games that are really important to me, and recently I managed to play Resident Evil: Requiem. I'm a huge Resident Evil fan, and I honestly had pretty high expectations for Requiem and it definitely delivered on all of them. I think it's a phenomenal mixture of action and horror, the power fantasy and the vulnerability. I think it's up there with the very best of the series.

The gunplay and the action, all the set pieces are incredibly satisfying, and I always love the exploration in Resident Evil games, the keys and secrets. I'm a bit of a completionist, so I do enjoy going through all the nooks and crannies, and the horror elements were masterfully designed and executed as well.

I've already finished the game once, but it's one of the few games that, once the credits rolled, I felt like I wanted to play this again. I haven't had time to jump back in yet—I started a little bit, and I predict that once I catch a breather, I'll be going in to complete another playthrough as much as I can.

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

I finally got around to playing Return to Monkey Island … I've always cherished the Monkey Island series, and I felt like the latest instalment was a true return to form.

I really enjoyed the puzzles. The characters were endearing. The humour was top-notch. I think it was a wonderful experience. I do enjoy getting stuck on puzzles and having those big breakthrough moments. To be honest, I did think it was a little bit easier on average than the first three in the series that I've enjoyed the most.

It's interesting—we were talking about horror before, that it's difficult to nail effectively. But I do feel that, in some ways, getting a consistently high calibre of humour is the hardest thing to nail across any media. Monkey Island is one of the very few series I feel has succeeded the most at that. Just getting that high quality, endearing, sweet spot of humour.

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

It's the original Deus Ex, which was released around 2000. So it was actually around the time I started playing PC games. Deus Ex is one of my favourite games of all time. I really appreciate the incredible mixture of exploration action, the meaningful decision making, and I still consider it maybe the best cyberpunk story ever told.

It's always one of the first games that, when I [get a new PC], I just instinctively reinstall it. It's been a few years since I've had a chance to play it, and I feel it's well overdue for a replay. I like having it there because I feel like I can jump in and give it another spin sometime soon. I may be a hopeless romantic. I do cherish these experiences that make us who we are, and I find it genuinely beneficial and inspiring to revisit some of these games that help shape us.

I like to play mostly stealth. I like to find all of the keypad codes. I try to play as a completionist and leave no stone unturned and no enemy unkilled. But that's what I enjoy about it. It's so rich with possibilities and you can just approach it any way you like, and the decision making as well. I always try to be a bit of a good guy or try to complete side quests. But I find the characters, the writing so endearing as well, that I always enjoy it, even though I've experienced it so many times. The music as well is just fantastic.

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

Apparently I have over 200 hours in Tetris Effect. I'm a huge Tetris fan. I used to play it religiously [on] my original black and white Game Boy. I used to carry it around everywhere with me, and I spent countless quarters at the arcade machine as well. And it's an interesting game, because there are hundreds of Tetris versions and clones out there. But I think it's a good example of a design that's super simple and easy to execute, but it takes a lot of finesse to execute well.

It's a good reference when it comes to game-feel because you know you can make it functional, but getting it to feel crunchy and satisfying and getting that satisfying impact loop, it takes a lot of effort for something to feel effortless. I think Tetris Effect is a great example of how to take a simple and timeless formula and give it a breath of fresh air and elevate it to new heights.

I finished all the singleplayer content, and nowadays I play the Zone mode. I play that almost exclusively nowadays. That's my go-to game when I want to just kick back and play something without really overthinking it and enter that instant flow state.

What game will you never, ever uninstall?

The best candidate for this, I'd say, is probably Ikaruga. I think this is a treasure at its very finest, and perhaps unsurprisingly—it's good that you're sitting down for this—but it's one of my favourite and most influential games of all time.

I adore everything about this. The gameplay. The music is phenomenal. The bullet patterns. The bosses. It's such a cohesive, beautiful package. And somehow, when I think of poetry-in-motion with games, Ikaruga is usually the first game that comes to mind.

It probably comes as no surprise that I often went back to this game and other shooters of that era for inspiration when working on games like Nex Machina and Returnal, Resogun before that and Outland, even. It's not only for the bullet-hell gameplay that it has, but also for the elegance and beauty of its formula, and how minimalistic but effective its narrative is.

There's something really special about it for me. Even though I'm not actively replaying it constantly, there's something comforting and soothing about just having it always installed. It's like having an old friend nearby who reminds you of who you are.

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

Just in terms of a tool that I use a lot, it's PureRef. It's basically an image collection and organising tool for mood boards. I'm a very visual person, and I enjoy collecting image references, organising spatially in groups. So when working on new game pitches like, for example, Returnal, I often lean heavily on PureRef for collecting a lot of the raw reference materials. You get a lot of different images and different ideas with texture and themes, and then you start seeing patterns, and then you start organising them and start bringing some structure and order into the chaos, so to speak.

I find it almost like a distillation process that you have all these raw materials in one large vat, and then you slowly, iteratively distil it down to the bare essentials.

How tidy is your desktop screen?

I think [it's] pretty tidy. Not obsessively so. But I mentioned PureRef and how I like to have things spatially organised, that just makes sense for me and my workflow. I have some project-related stuff in the top right corner. I have some music-related stuff in the top—I dabble with music on occasion as a hobbyist. My recycling is in the bottom right corner. The left, that's where usually some of the new random [files] live.

I do have those moments where I get a glimpse at my desktop [and] it bothers me a bit. When it piles up enough and it starts to bother me, I just clear those up. I might have a few folders that are 'Temp' on the desktop that might have been temp for like a decade.

I recently had the pleasure of speaking with Raph Koster about his upcoming MMO, Stars Reach, which is trying to recapture the oldschool sandbox magic of some of his prior games—namely Ultima Online, which he worked on, and Star Wars Galaxies, which he was the creative director for.

Needless to say with that sort of experience behind him, we also got into a chat about the industry writ large—namely about how it kinda sucks out there. Granted, there are several very good MMOs you can enjoy, but they're all typically over a decade old—and newer MMOs, whether recently released or still being developed, have been subject to a massacre.

The survivors have drifted towards the theme park, seasonal, encounter-based model, which Stars Reach is deliberately trying to get away from:

"I think ever since World of Warcraft, the genre kind of narrowed back into 'Kill 10 Rats', with classes and levels and raids, and that gameplay style is actually from 1991. It predates sandbox MMOs. It was a text MUD staple. "

"EverQuest was very much that game with graphics, and then World of Warcraft was very much EverQuest with usability, and a lot of quests—because WoW came along and spent more money than every other MMO combined in history to that point, right, and was able to build that quest-led game."

And while the MUD staple of knocking a dozen vermin upside the head, rinsing, and repeating is old hat, Koster says that sandbox MMOs were actually responsible for more innovation—which proliferated across videogames writ large:

"Despite that dominance—they did a great job, I'm not knocking that—if we look at what sandboxes brought to the table, you craft in video games because of sandbox MMOs, you decorate houses before the Sims, thanks to Sandbox MMOs. You raise a pet in a game because of Sandbox MMOs.

"I apologize for crafting, actually," Koster jokes, "Because now it's everywhere, and you can't avoid it, and it seems to be largely my fault."

'We hit the wall'

It's actually through discussing the role of sandbox MMOs as the breeding ground for videogame mechanics that Koster gets into the spectre plaguing the genre writ large: Games are expensive, and MMOs are the canary in the coalmine for costs ballooning out of control.

"Making static content is something that the industry has figured out how to assembly line, and they figured out how to monetize it very well, and so the business calculus there is: 'It'll cost us millions of dollars to go make this static zone.

"The zone will be obsolete in three months, players will consume all of it, it takes us nine months to make it, but it will be obsolete in three, but along the way we will spit out the following cosmetics, or the following things, and because we are not a sandbox, we will prevent people from trading them'."

Koster goes on a bit of a tangent here that I'm including because I nonetheless agree with him: "Honestly, most things in these games now. They aren't actually items, they get soulbound to you immediately—[which makes them] stat mods. They're skinned as items, but they aren't actually, they're not even things. They're character perks."

Anyway, monetisation: "The influence of the monetization model, the development costs, all of that tends to lead companies into this, because they see it as a lower risk than trying to solve problems like 'how do we make a dynamic world with emergence'."

But the math stops working in the face of ballooning videogame development costs, as Koster explains: "I think the story of the current industry troubles is the story of being wedded to that model and having costs run away. I did the math right before Covid. The cost of games goes up 10x every decade. That's not sustainable. It was predictable, and we hit the wall."

"1997, Ultima Online, $2 million dollars. Star Wars Galaxies, 2003, $10-$12 million dollars. World of Warcraft, 2004, $63 million. Star Wars: The Old Republic, which embraced all of the things I said more than any other MMO? Over $200 million.

"So, those models, they're not working anymore, and that's why we get fewer and fewer MMOs too, because MMOs are at the bleeding edge of that problem … It's a recipe for making static worlds with ballooning costs, with lower returns, which quickly become not-viable as a business."

Which means if you're a big studio, you won't "make anything fresh, and if you do make something, probably go make something else, right?" Alas, staring at the shot-out-back corpse of Project Blackbird, I feel as though Koster's bang on the money, here.

'They are bored'

This unhappy marriage—MMOs being tied to a business model that's becoming more unfeasible as time goes on—impacts playerbases, too, says Koster:

"There's no question—and hopefully nobody gets mad at me for saying this—the biggest change in the MMO community is that they have grown bored. They are bored, frustrated, they feel like their hobby is no longer getting supported by the industry, and they've grown very jaded as a result. Right?"

Koster adds, laughing: "I don't know if I can fix that—that's a tall order. I hope what we're doing is a breath of fresh air and opens new doors ... People are still people, right, but they do react based on what they're offered and what's available, and for a very long time the scope of what's available has narrowed down.

"The MMO audience feels underserved and over-monetized, that's how they feel about what's going on."

As far as Stars Reach goes, I found myself curious, but cautious—Koster's enthusiasm for the game is infectious, but also filled with a lot of very optimistic big-swing goals I'll need to see before I believe. For Koster, the hope is that "what we are doing is offering them something that is fresh, as something that's novel, that they haven't seen before, that makes them go, 'Oh, games can do that?'"

Star's Reach plans to go into early access sometime this summer.

If you've been on this planet as long as I have, you might remember the sentiment that your eyes can't see above 60 fps. At least, that's what console gamers seemed to tell themselves once the PC gaming scene moved on. But actually using 120 Hz or 144 Hz quickly put an end to that myth.

Something about it must have sunk into my subconscious, though, because until recently, I stuck to 144 Hz monitors ever since I got my hands on one around 2014. It's as if I'd accepted that while 60 Hz isn't the limit, perhaps 144 Hz is—or, more realistically, it's as if I'd assumed that diminishing returns might kick in soon thereafter.

I've since discovered that's incorrect. It might be true if you're kicking back in a third-person RPG, and it's certainly true if you're not hitting north of 144 fps in-game. But as I've discovered recently, for competitive FPS gaming, ultra-high refresh rates are genuinely fantastic and much better than sticking at 144 Hz or 165 Hz.

There is truth to the idea that there are diminishing returns to upping your refresh rate, but they don't diminish as drastically or as quickly as a lot of people seem to think they do. I'd say 360 Hz is the sweet spot before real diminishing returns start to kick in, but it's also a little more complicated than that.

I first discovered this when testing the Zowie XL2586X+. Zowie monitors are the most popular for tactical FPS esports pros, for a few main reasons. First, there's the fact that big tournaments often use them across the board, so it makes sense to practice with them—that's one reason for sticking to a 24/25-inch 1080p monitor, too, by the way.

Apart from that very pragmatic reason, though, there's the fact that these monitors have ultra-high refresh rates, panels and colour profiles that are tailored to popular esports titles, and DyAc 2 anti-blur tech.

Of all of these factors, though, I've found that having a high refresh rate is the most important, in my opinion. Which is good news because it opens the field to a whole load more monitors than just Zowie ones with DyAc 2.

I've recently been impressed, for instance, by the $250 Alienware AW2525HM, which has a 320 Hz refresh rate. DyAc 2 and better-tailored panels do give Zowie monitors the edge, but for my money, as long as a panel is generally accurate and clear, I'd take a cheaper one with a similarly high refresh rate.

The question then is: What refresh rate do you need?

One answer to this is, 'As high of a refresh rate as you can afford.' Another answer is 240 Hz, because most pros use either 240 Hz or 360 Hz Zowie monitors. Both of these answers are true in their own way, but neither is fully informative.

With both the 600 Hz Zowie and 320 Hz Alienware, I spent lots of time swapping between different refresh rates and testing things out in Counter-Strike. I came out the other end of this realising these main things:

• The jump from 144 Hz to 240 Hz gives a very noticeable improvement in the gameplay experience and how well I play.
• The jump from 240 Hz to 320/360 Hz gives a big enough improvement to gameplay experience that I think it would be worth paying extra for, but this improvement doesn't translate to making me play any better.
• Beyond 320/360 Hz, increasing to (say) 600 Hz does feel better, but the difference isn't as big as from 240–360 and is nowhere near as big as from 144–240, and it doesn't make me play any better.

In addition to just seeing how different refresh rates actually feel in practice while playing CS2, I also used an Nvidia Latency and Display Analysis Tool (LDAT) to test real-world response times—ie, the end-to-end latency between clicking and having your gun's muzzle flash appear on-screen. The muzzle flash is lower down on the screen, which means (given how monitors refresh from top to bottom) latency will be measured higher than towards the top, but what's important here is the comparison between the numbers.

End-to-end latency (ms)

144 Hz

7.5

240 Hz

7

360 Hz

7.38

600 Hz

6.81

02468

End-to-end latency (ms) Data

Product	Value
144 Hz	7.5
240 Hz	7
360 Hz	7.38
600 Hz	6.81

Tested on a Zowie XL2586X+.

As you can see, when you're using a really good monitor, there's very little in it. These sub-millisecond differences are all within a margin of error, as is made clear by the actual, non-averaged test results. I did 150+ tests at each refresh rate, and there was often variation of a few ms between different ones at the same refresh rate.

In practice, this means that sometimes clicking at 600 Hz will cause the corresponding on-screen effect slower than it will at 144 Hz, though more often than not the opposite will be true, but not by much.

What made more of a difference was whether the frame rate was kept capped or uncapped. I tested this on the Alienware monitor, comparing 144 Hz and 320 Hz, and found that this had a more definite effect on end-to-end latency, though again the difference was small and probably imperceptible in practice.

End-to-end latency

Latency, VRR on, capped (ms)

Latency, VRR off, capped (ms)

Latency, VRR off, uncapped (ms)

144 Hz

11.97

11.35

8.32

320 Hz

7.62

7.81

6.2

03.757.511.2515

End-to-end latency Data

Product	Value
144 Hz	11.97 Latency, VRR on, capped (ms), 11.35 Latency, VRR off, capped (ms), 8.32 Latency, VRR off, uncapped (ms)
320 Hz	7.62 Latency, VRR on, capped (ms), 7.81 Latency, VRR off, capped (ms), 6.2 Latency, VRR off, uncapped (ms)

Tested on an Alienware AW2525HM.

Note that the results are the same whether VRR (FreeSync Premium) was enabled or disabled. VRR only kicks in when frame rates are below your refresh rate, but even with frame rates capped so it could take effect, it didn't change latency.

Here are the two main takeaways from this:

1. It's better to have your frame rate uncapped if your system can churn out frames higher than your refresh rate, as this can lower your response time.
2. If your system can't produce a frame rate higher than your refresh rate, you might as well cap it just below and enable VRR to have the benefit of zero screen tears.

There are, of course, caveats to all of the above. For one, you shouldn't ignore differences between panels: if it's an OLED, it will have an ultra-low response time, if it's a VA, it will likely have a higher one, and if it's an IPS, it will very much depend on the panel.

You also shouldn't ignore differences between people. A younger pro gamer might, for instance, be able to derive more of an actual benefit to how well they play by stepping up from 240 Hz to 360 Hz, where I, as a 31-year-old non-pro, cannot.

And probably the biggest caveat is that all of the above is redundant if your system can't pump out enough frames to keep up with your refresh rate. It's also irrelevant if you mainly play casual games and don't care so much about having the snappiest response time and clearest view of enemies in motion. I don't particularly care for much above 144 Hz if I'm sitting back with a controller in a third-person shooter, for instance.

Ultimately, though, I think most people who are into competitive shooters will be similar to me in how they are likely to perceive differences between high refresh rates. For my money, I think 360 Hz is the sweet spot before diminishing returns kick in, not only in terms of how much it helps you play well but also how pleasant it feels to experience. 240 Hz isn't much worse, though, and if I were on a strict budget, that would be what I'd opt for—but no lower. 144 Hz and 165 Hz are certainly far from the limit before significant diminishing returns kick in.

A photo-real art style rarely sells me on a game. That said, over the last few months, a tech delivering low-cost, photorealistic graphics has become something of a singular obsession of mine: Gaussian splatting.

Previously, I lost myself in this very basic FPS laying its scene inside a Gaussian splat of a real-world abandoned space. I caught up with the browser-based demo's artist, Christoph Schindelar, for an introduction into what Gaussian Splatting is and how it works. But today, I'd like to take a deeper dive into how it's done and what it can be used for—so I pestered Christoph Schindelar for his insight once again.

Schindelar is a scan artist who has previously worked for Quixel, an Epic-owned company with a world-renowned library of 3D scanned assets. He has been Gaussian splatting (or GS) since at least 2024. By way of a brief recap, Schindelar describes Gaussian Splatting as "a modern capture-and-rendering method that turns photos or video into a real-time 3D representation." It's very similar to photogrammetry but is arguably much less resource-intensive.

"A simple way to imagine it is like a very advanced point-cloud or particle/sprite-based rendering system," Schindelar says, "The scene is not built from polygons, but from millions of small semitransparent 3D Gaussians, often called 'splats.' Each splat has a 3D position, size, orientation and opacity, [plus] view-dependent behaviour called 'spherical harmonics.' When rendered, the approach projects to an elliptical footprint on screen."

In the past, I broke down this technical explanation of what GS is by likening each 'splat' to dandelion seeds. One little puffball doesn't look like much, but you collect a whole fistful of them and a soft shape begins to form. Well, imagine the vindication I felt when Schindelar showed me the below close-up of a cephalopodic statue splat—just look at all those little 3D Gaussians blowing in the wind.

Gaussian splatting is exciting in part because it's far less resource-intensive than other rendering techniques used to create photorealistic graphics. Rather than streaming, say, high-quality textures, Schindelar explains, "the GPU mostly has only to project and blend these splats, [so] playback can be very fast."

Even better, it can be an accessible route to photorealistic presentation for smaller projects. When I ask Schindelar what's one thing he'd like more people to know about Gaussian splatting, he answers that the tech is "implemented in nearly every major engine (standalone or via plugin)."

"What is especially exciting to me at this point in time is that GS opens doors for independent creators," He goes on to say, "While the big budget game industry seems pretty slow with implementing new technologies, small studios are not! The most interesting practical experiments are currently happening with indie developers and independent creators. We are the ones pushing forward right now."

So, how is the splat sausage made? First comes the scan. For "high-end work, [where] color fidelity, dynamic range and overall image quality are crucial," Schindelar spends several hours snapping images using either a DSLR camera or a camera-RIG solution.

Schindelar elaborates, "For example, I scanned and processed this abandoned former lead and goods factory, including [the entire] interior and exterior within two weeks [using] a single Sony A7R4."

As for the required resolution of these images, this can vary depending on "the size of the environment, the capture distance, the field of view, the desired level of detail and the use case." While working with a lower resolution camera will generally require snapping more pictures to capture all the details, Schindelar also says it's not always a case of "more megapixels is always better."

"It's about having enough visual information from the right viewpoints," he says.

In other words, you could probably get away with a lower resolution data set for the squiddy statue above, or a narrow physical space, so long as you take close-up coverage to capture the details. Larger scenes, on the other hand, will usually require more high-res coverage.

Schindelar explains, "For example, in a forest environment, I would usually work with high-resolution cameras, because I don’t want the visuals to break at the first line of trees—otherwise I need to walk all the way to get every tree with close-up captures."

As such, data sets resulting from these capture sessions can vary massively in size. "In some high-end projects, I have reached raw capture datasets close to 1.5 TB. But that is definitely not what most indie developers should expect in everyday production. In many practical cases, the raw data is more in the double-digit gigabyte range," Schindelar says.

Post-processing can then take between one and three days. "The really interesting part that shines here is the reconstruction pipeline," Schindelar begins. "Starting from captured reference images, usually with pre-aligned camera positions and a sparse point cloud estimated through [structure from motion, i.e. photogrammetry], the Gaussian Splatting optimization process adjusts splats until the rendered views match the original photos as closely as possible. This is what we call 'splat training.'"

He later adds, "At the start of the training, you see a chaotic cloud of splats, scattered across the scene and not yet properly aligned. During optimization, this cloud gradually converges into a coherent representation, until the rendered result closely matches the original source images. That’s then our FINAL result."

When it comes to hardware, apparently Nvidia GPUs are preferred for this part of the process. Schindelar uses an RTX 5090 for splat training on most projects, but also stresses that a monster workstation is far from necessary, having seen some splat artists achieve good results with relatively lightweight laptops.

"The most important hardware factor is VRAM since all the data must be cached on the card," he explains, "GPU power matters, of course, but in production I would say VRAM is the thing you always want more."

That said, there are cloud-based options for processing too. "Varjo Teleport, for example, is positioned as a cloud platform for real-world 3D and explicitly mentions elastic GPU clusters for scaling Gaussian Splatting workflows," Schindelar tells me, "KIRI Engine also offers app/cloud-style Gaussian Splatting processing and also XGRIDS have their own cloud-based processing service."

Schindelar explains that "after reconstruction, training and export," most GS scenes are a much smaller file size than the data set used to create them. He says, "For many of my environments, the exported data may end up in the range of a few gigabytes—often around 2 to 4 GB—and this is still not the optimized/compressed version. My largest current continuous scene is around 130 million splats with about 16 GB uncompressed, and it’s not even [a large space], but complex and highly detailed."

The largest splat in question is Schindelar's Urbex: Greenhouse demo, in which I was surprised to find myself spending so much time marvelling over upended plant pots. Shifting from the biggest to the smallest, Shindelar highlights a PlayCanvas demo using 'Self-Organizing Gaussians' compression; "We pushed a church scene from about 1 GB down to only 55 MB without significant visible losses," he says.

The interior of the Kefermarkt Church is a thing to behold from your desk. 'Standing' between the pews, the 15th century carved wood altarpiece will take your breath away…though moving in close betrays the many Gaussians that make up this representation. Schindelar notes that seeing splats up close can look odd as people simply aren't as used to seeing them as, say, the pixels that dominate our screens.

"But honestly, is this a real issue? Idk," he ponders.

The 'Pfarrkirche Kefermarkt' scene won 'Splat of the Year' at the 2025 Polys Immersive Awards. Schindelar reflects, "There was very little comparable Gaussian Splatting content out there [at the time], and I think the result opened many people’s eyes to what this technology could do, not only for cultural heritage, but also for gamified real-world environments and interactive experiences."

Besides this tech's accessibility, or the fact that—if you play your compression cards right—large real-world scenes could be fully explorable on a mobile or handheld device, Gaussian splatting has a number of other strengths.

The tech is especially well suited to "thin structures like hair, wires and foliage that can hardly be reconstructed via traditional mesh-based solutions when scanned." I know Faye's hair looks incredible in that God of War: Laufey reveal, but I break out in a cold sweat thinking about what the technical art department had to do with potentially mesh-based techniques to get those luscious locks looking so realistic.

Schindelar continues, saying that "through [Gaussian splatting's] spherical harmonics, it can even capture and render reflections, translucency, semi-transparency and other visual effects." But before we start cracking 'DLSS 5, who?' jokes, it's important to remember that Gaussian splatting has its fair share of limitations. For instance, because splat scenes are based on still images, lighting is often baked in and not dynamic.

Schindelar argues these lighting limitations can be addressed with "practical production layers" such as using "a hidden mesh for dynamic light sources" or a shadow catcher "for collisions and interactive elements." He adds, "Decals and stuff like bullet holes can also increasingly be handled with solutions like parametric splat generation and splat painter."

The scan artist has experimented with dynamic lighting in a Gaussian splat scene, using Octane by Otoy. "I think combining technologies is great. Still, I wouldn't necessarily use GS for dynamic objects [such as animated props or assets that need to be editable inside a traditional pipeline], but it already works pretty well with static environments."

Though he admits Gaussian splatting still requires a lot of work before it can truly become just another tool in the game developer's toolkit, Schindelar remains excited about the tech's potential.

"When I'm testing some of my splat-based game experiments on my Steam Deck, this puts a huge smile on my face, and I can clearly see the potential," He tells me. "This level of visual quality on the small device is absolutely stunning. We are not quite there performance-wise, but really, really close—some more optimizations down the line and this is a game changer!!"

I became a racing game aficionado at age five playing Lego Racers on my great grandfather's Windows 95 Gateway PC. And I've been a car enthusiast since my days careening the Subaru Impreza Rally Car '99 into walls on the dirt stages of Gran Turismo 2. But sim racing never quite did it for me, and that's become a problem, because sims have largely supplanted mainstream racing games.

Bored during the pandemic and flush with cash after being laid off from my food service job, I bought a Thrustmaster T150 RS—an entry-level rig with a wheel, three-pedal box, and manual shifter (the third pedal and gearbox were extra). I drove my favorite tuner cars in Forza Horizon 4 and tried to make "realistic" driving videos like those viral guys on YouTube do with their thousand-dollar rigs. In sim racing, the sky's the limit; the logical conclusion of the genre is a hardware setup that reproduces every microscopic vibration of your in-game car via high-tech hardware like force-feedback steering wheels and haptic seating.

It was fun, but it never quite stuck. Why? Maybe because my setup, despite being $300—a lot of money for a "casual" gamer to spend on what is, at the end of the day, a controller—provided an at best middling facsimile of the real experience of driving. The T150 RS actually has decent force feedback, but without spending another $2,000 at least on a basic FFB/haptic feedback sim seat setup, the rest of the experience felt about as akin to real-world driving as playing Gran Turismo on a DualShock gamepad.

But as sim racing player counts have grown by over 1000% in the last 10 years, the mainstream racing genre has slowly whittled down to a single, albeit highly successful, franchise. The number of releases in the sim space versus the arcade one suggest that sims have basically replaced the historically prolific arcade/simcade genre.

As Reddit user mido_sama mused in response to an article highlighting Forza Horizon 6's massive sales figures, "It has no competition".

Redditor fvgh12345 responded, "the state of racing and driving games is kinda sad. There was so much variety in the PS2 era, some of my all time favorite games. Would be cool if games or successors of games like Midnight Club, Flat Out, Twisted Metal, Driver, and Vigilante made a return."

Recently, PC Gamer's Wes Fenlon previewed the upcoming simcade racer Clutch, and found it just a bit too sim-focused for what otherwise could have been solid open-world-racing competition to Forza Horizon.

Is sim racing a one-to-one substitute for the old Need for Speed and Burnout blockbusters? Sure, true simulation racers like iRacing and rFactor have sold pretty well for non-mainstream entries. But even the bestselling sim franchise Assetto Corsa has barely beat out sales of Midnight Club—a series that existed for fewer than 10 years in the 2000s, before gaming even hit the mainstream—and has shipped an order of magnitude fewer copies than the Need For Speed catalogue.

My point is: sims may be on the up-and-up, but their rise has accompanied a loss of hundreds of millions of gamers who once flocked to the many now-dead arcade racing franchises. The racing genre writ large has, for whatever reason, simply become more inaccessible and less popular to the everyman.

Meanwhile, real-world racing as a motorsport has become more accessible than ever. In a market where traditional sports executives seem hellbent on hiding their broadcasts behind as many byzantine subscription services as possible, motorsport has gone against the grain. A non-car-enthusiast friend of mine recently told me that he's gotten into F1 and Indycar primarily because it's the only major sport with live events he can follow without jumping through a bunch of expensive hoops.

Remember the good old days when you could afford rent catch a ball game with your mates on the cheap? Or, for a gaming analogy, the halcyon years when you, a casual player, could pick up one of 10 mainstream racers on the market and hop on the couch to lay down some laps on a $10 MadCatz controller you found in the bargain bin at GameCrazy?

But the expensive simulation hobby has quickly exploded from a niche one for the sweatiest among us to a cool yuppie nightclub activity in cities from Las Vegas to Madrid. Now, the world's largest sim racing trade fair has landed on US shores for the first time, as I covered in the article linked above. I had a theory about why that is.

I talked to Mark Puc—representative of the "OG of sim racing" (his words, but it's true) company Fanatec at SimRacing Expo 2026—about his industry insights. As did everyone at the Expo I interviewed, Puc chalked up the growth in part to Netflix's Formula 1 documentary Drive to Survive. And as motorsport grows more popular, sim racing becomes a cheaper way own a racecar—rather than a more expensive way to play a videogame.

Puc noted, "the correlation between sim racing and real racing is very analog, so one supports the other. And right now, there's a lot of people starting sim racing that are going to end up racing real cars".

Puc also highlighted Jimmy Broadbent and my own personal favorite sim racing YouTuber Steve Alvarez Brown, alias Super GT—both of whom are sponsored by Fanatec and both of whom went from sim racing on at-home rigs to professional motorsports. Broadbent, who has over 1 million YouTube subscribers, started off vlogging from a shed and now races in the Nürburgring Langstrecken-Serie sponsored by the motorsports suspension component manufacturer Bilstein. Alvarez Brown, also a driver for Bilstein, now drives GT4 race cars on the 'Ring.

For many, games are a pipeline to future passions. As a child, I spent interminable hours in historical strategy games like Age of Empires, and I now have three degrees in imperial and international history. However, while arcade driving games like Need for Speed, Burnout, and the inimitable Rush 2: Extreme Racing USA prepped me for car enthusiasm as an adult, they did not land me in actual motorsports.

Maybe that's okay. Maybe old-fashioned car games are dying not because of the sim industry, but because real-world car enthusiasm is in free-fall. Maybe sim racers are not less accessible videogames but rather more accessible motorsports, in a world where professional racing has somehow taken off among young people even while their driver's license possession has cratered and, as mentioned above, the rest of car culture is struggling. Maybe a $1,000 sim rig isn't displacing a $10 Play Station controller, but rather a substitute for a $10,000 track-modified Mazda Miata or a $15 million Formula 1 car.

It could be a good thing that enthusiast car culture is slowly dying. But meanwhile, motorsport thrives. I, for one, can always go back to 20-year-old Gran Turismo games and simply accept that sim racing isn't for me. But maybe one day on a lark, I'll download Assetto Corsa, plug in my Thrustmaster T150 RS, and be grateful that the virtual world has kept alive my dream of cruising the Tokyo Expressway in a Dodge Durango SRT Hellcat.

As you've probably heard multiple times by now, Marathon is a thoroughly excellent game. Bungie brings all its FPS experience to bear on the inexplicably popular extraction shooter genre, delivering a game that lures you in with its unique aesthetic and then socks you in the jaw with nuanced class-based combat. It has fantastic shooting, an intriguing story and, as you delve deeper into the game, some outstanding map designs.

In short, I like Marathon a lot. But I would trade it instantly for another game about grouchy dwarves blowing up zombies with Molotov cocktails.

I am, of course, referring to Myth, Bungie's series of low-fantasy strategy games developed between the original Marathon trilogy and Halo: Combat Evolved. It's a curious island in Bungie's FPS-focussed history, one you'd be forgiven for not having visited or even knowing about in the terrifyingly futuristic year of 2026.

Halo is something of a false floor in Bungie's past anyway, tending to obscure everything its success was built upon. But it doesn't help that you can't buy the Myth games online anywhere, while getting them to run on modern machines requires you to jump through a bunch of hoops.

This is particularly wild when you consider what a big deal the Myth games were when they arrived, a shot in the arm for a genre that had quickly become bogged down in Command & Conquer clones. The irony here is that Bungie had not initially intended to get into strategy game development.

Following Marathon Infinity, released in 1996, Bungie had planned to develop another FPS, this one in true 3D. But at some point, Bungie's Jason Jones decided the project was too similar to Quake, and responded by pivoting to a completely different genre.

Myth's design was a direct response to the trajectory of strategy games post-C&C, streamlining the base-building, army-rushing loop of C&C and its brethren into pure, tactical squad management.

Thrusting players into a grisly low-fantasy world terrorised by hordes of undead, Myth sees players assume control of small forces of warriors, archers and dwarven artillerymen (plus a few other units later in the game). Each mission assigns you specific objectives, like defending a bridge or escorting a village leader through the wilderness. Inevitably, the wretched minions of the Fallen Lords will attack your party, usually in numbers greater than your own.

This means you need to use your wits to emerge triumphant. And more than most strategy games of this era, Myth really is a game about wits. Barring scripted reinforcements, the units you start a mission with are what you get to complete it, so you really need to maximise enemy casualties by minimising your own.

You'll want to position your archers so they can thin out advancing enemies before they clash with your melee units like warriors and berserkers, and you'll want those melee units in the right formation so that they can slice through enemy health bars as quickly as possible. Most of all, though, you'll want your dwarves to bomb the un-living shit out of enemies before they have a chance to set a rotting finger on your other units.

It would be unfair to say that Myth's greatness resides wholly in its Molotov-chucking dwarves. But they are what first grabs your attention, the special sauce that gives Myth a different flavour from other strategy games of the time. As I've mentioned about three times at this point, these growling, grouchy warriors attack enemies by lobbing Molotov cocktails at them. But these incendiary bottles act more like grenades in Myth. Rather than setting enemies aflame, they blow them apart in a spectacular shower of blood and limbs.

The effect was massively ahead of its time, made possible by Myth's ridiculously advanced physics engine. All those zombie giblets bounce and roll in a way that wouldn't become standard in games for several more years. The result is an interaction that simply never gets tiring, as elementally satisfying as blasting an imp with the shotgun in Doom.

Myth's dwarves comfortably reside among gaming's greatest strategy units. Yet while they seem ridiculously powerful, they're not overpowered. Or rather, they are overpowered, but in such a way that counterintuitively balances the whole game.

See, while dwarves can take out huge clusters of enemies, they can also take out huge clusters of your own units. And Bungie is very good at building scenarios in a way that makes this a frequent possibility, pulling and stretching your forces so that one poorly timed throw could obliterate your entire front line. Molotovs also occasionally fizzle out due to rain or just bad luck, and since dwarves are all but useless in melee combat, you need to keep them protected.

The downside of Myth's design is that things can go very wrong very quickly, and you can easily put yourself in a situation where completing a mission becomes impossible. Indeed, the original Myth was criticised for its harsh difficulty upon its release. But there is something very appealing about the puzzle-like nature of its mission designs today, and bringing your forces through a mission unscathed is tremendously satisfying if you can pull it off.

Despite gaming being inundated with fantasy games over the last 30 years, there still isn't another one really like Myth (apart from its two sequels, of course). Which makes it more of a shame that you can't buy them, anywhere. While Myth and its sequel were developed by Bungie, the rights are held by Take Two Interactive and I suppose fantasy strategy games are a low priority when you have Grand Theft Auto 6 in your stable (though I'd love to see a Myth reboot developed by Firaxis).

There are ways to play Myth today, however, and in pretty robust form too. If you have a copy or ISO for Myth 2: Soulblighter, you can download the excellent Twice Born Edition, a thorough fan remaster of the 1998 sequel that makes Bungie's RTS run beautifully on modern machines. There's also a separate remake of the first game's campaign available for Twice Born, as well as a full port of The Fallen Lords that reverts the changes made for Myth 2 into their original form. All of them are great ways to experience this weird tangent in Bungie's history, and enjoy two of the most distinctive fantasy strategy games ever made.

When Bungie announced the final update for Destiny 2, I felt relieved. It surprised me as well. As someone who's spent the past six years (and over 3,000 hours) battling humanity's enemies across the solar system, you'd think that news of my favorite MMO's end would fill me with sadness. But no, just a bittersweet sense of relief as I considered we were finally moving on (as we should've after The Final Shape's year) to whatever the future may hold.

Whether Destiny 3 gets made or not, I genuinely think this is the best thing that could've happened. For fans of the series, it gives us time to reassess our relationship with the games and remember what made them special in the first place, something that definitely felt impossible for me while I was still strapped into endless Portal power climb and the ever grinding gears of the live service machine.

And this is what makes Destiny 2's final update, ironically, a good place to start. It adds numerous quality of life features we've been requesting for years, loot refreshes, exotic reworks, and even attempts to revitalise stale old destinations with the new Distortions activity. The narrative conclusion might be lackluster, but 71 pages of patch notes stand testament to just how much this final update has added to the game.

It's a patch about revitalising and reliving what it was, versus what it became in its final year or so.

What exactly does the new update bring, then? 17,000 words of changes detail the exact tweaks being made, but to summarize briefly:

• Sparrow Racing returns from Destiny 1
• A new Pantheon raid boss gauntlet brings back vaulted bosses
• Restored destination director and simplified Portal
• Lots of new guns, perk, and loot refreshes
• The ability to upgrade gear tier for weapons (making the tier system mostly redundant, thank god)
• Catalysts for all exotic weapons that didn't have them
• Reworked anti-champion mods so they're linked to weapon frames and the ability to choose between seven artifacts (seasonal buff sets)
• New aspects, grenades, and abilities
• More attunement options so you can target farm easily
• 300 more vault space slots and eight more loadout slots

Even Gambit got some love. As Destiny players do, our clan has had numerous QoL complaints over the years, one of the foremost being the inability to link seasonal artifact perks to loadouts—but Bungie even tweaked that. It's such a strange situation to suddenly have all of these amazing quality of life additions only for it to coincide with the end.

Couldn't it have been this way all along? *sigh* well, at least if you're starting now you can benefit from all of these lovely inclusions. And to clarify, Destiny 2 is still a very good game. I think the reason why anyone on the outside noticed players frequently getting so frustrated with it during its lifespan is frankly (despite Bungie's bungling) because there's no other game quite like it—sure, you can go play something else, but there are few other places you can go for a true Destiny-like experience.

Even though I fell off shortly after the release of Renegades and Edge of Fate's dire Portal grind, I wouldn't trade my 3,000 hours in Destiny 2 for any other game. When it's good, it's really good, especially its raids, dungeons, and high-level activities. There's a reason I've gilded the Conqueror title seven times, because in pure PvE buildcrafting and gameplay terms, Destiny 2 is still at the top of its game.

Obviously, there's an elephant in the room, though—what about the Red War? What about the original Destiny 2 campaign that sets the narrative foundation for every expansion after? I would've liked to replay the campaigns, and it would've gone a long way to repairing relations with players who are still smarting about that content vaulting years after the fact.

Sadly, though, Bungie wasn't able to bring it back out of the vault for whatever reason, presumably because it would fundamentally break the newer version of the game, which I think Destiny players are well aware is held together by string and duct tape. It did, however, finally create a collection bundle where you can grab all of the available expansions in a straightforward way. It's massively discounted right now, and I assume will be for a while yet.

The final update announcement actually made me more excited to play the game than I have been in a long time—finally, I thought, I can enjoy Destiny separate from the live service structure that came to dominate it, sometimes to its detriment. No more escalating power gains or pointless grinds, and all with the backdrop of the current QoL changes like tons of loadout slots so I don't have to think about Guardian Rank, and wide-ranging attunement so I can farm more easily for what I want.

It's like Bungie has unlocked Destiny 2 with this update, and it'll be the most liberating iteration of the game's new player experience ever. And for those of us who've done almost everything, there are new exotics to grab, new builds to make, and time still to tackle those challenges you've always pondered, like ticking off solo dungeons or trying the Pantheon.

Life sim player tradition (or stubborness?) dictates I often attempt to build a real house—my childhood home or one I drove past last week—and yet in The Sims, I always wind up frustrated that the series' grid-based building has never been able to quite replicate actual floor plans. I've become totally enamored with building in Paralives because its gridless, real world measurements make so many designs possible, even going so far as just slapping a real life blueprint into the game and tracing it.

In the week after Paralives launched, lots of players were sharing the possibilities of importing custom images. One trick, which just requires a small mod, is uploading an image of a real blueprint and putting it onto a rug which you can use like a guide to draw all your walls in Build Mode. Incredibly it just… works?

How to use a custom rug floor plan in Paralives

1. Download Bunny's Customizable Rug in the Steam Workshop
2. Save an image on your PC of a floor plan you want to replicate (one that shows measurements, ideally)
3. Use the search function (magnifying glass) in the Build Mode menu to find Bunny's Custom Rug
4. Click the "change image" picture icon and scroll down to find the custom image "+" button
5. Import your blueprint image and resize the rug to the correct scale
6. Make sure to toggle the grid off when building walls and verify you're using the matching measurement type (metric or imperial) in your game settings
7. Trace your walls!

To get the scale of your image correct, check the measurements of a room in your blueprint and build two perpendicular walls in the lengths specified. Use the resizing arrows on the rug to line those walls up on your blueprint. With your measurements aligned, you're free to trace away.

In The Sims games, which I've always loved building in, you've got to treat the dimensions of real houses more as inspiration. Tiny rooms like hall closets or half baths are a bit too big even when you make them a single wall tile wide, and bedrooms always have to be a bit bigger than seems realistic just to fit a tiny twin bed.

It was so fun to see a blueprint just translate nearly perfectly into Paralives. The moment of truth was when I finished its small but realistic 8'x11' bedrooms and went to see if a standard size bed would fit and, miracle of miracles, it does. Even my linen closets in the hall just work.

The one bit of scale that I've struggled with in Paralives are the showers. Even those miniscule rounded corner showers measure 4sqft in game. I've been in one of those things in real life and can assure you they are not four feet wide. Since showers are one of the few structural bits in Paralives that can't be resized, because of the animations for showering I assume, it means a few of the realistically cramped bathrooms I've attempted haven't worked out. Alas, I haven't spotted a workshop mod with smaller showers yet.

Otherwise, building true to real life scale has been such a treat after spending 20+ years finagling uncanny replications of the homes in my neighborhood. I wish I could tell my ten-year-old self about this.

Playing Final Fantasy 11 after all these years is a lot like returning to your hometown only to find it desolate and different. All the old buildings are still there, but the faces aren’t the same. And that feeling I had—that indescribable sense of belonging—is gone too. It’s a bit alienating and tragic, to be honest, but really what else should I expect from an MMO that’s almost 20 years old and clearly nearing the end of its days?

Though I was never as obsessed with Final Fantasy 11 as I was other MMOs like World of Warcraft, I can still vividly remember the summer months I spent playing it. My love for Final Fantasy 11 is the definition of a summer romance. All I wanted to do was spend my time adventuring across the lush fields of Vana’diel, but my parents decided that wasting my break playing videogames was a bad idea, so they regulated my playtime to a few precious hours each day. But I wasn’t going to give up that easily.

I found an old 11-inch TV-VCR combo set buried in our storage closet and hid it in my room. After everyone had gone to bed, I’d quietly grab my PlayStation 2 and bring it to my bed, plug it in, and play Final Fantasy 12 until the sun came up—until the day my mom’s mischief detector finally got her attention and she busted me and refused to keep paying the monthly subscription fee.

Maybe that’s what’s missing now, I think as I walk the streets of Windhurst trying to reacquaint myself. But I know that’s not entirely true. Final Fantasy 11 wasn’t great because playing it was against the rules, it was great because it was an MMO built from the ground up to encourage cooperation and friendship. A relic of an era before World of Warcraft ruined the entire genre by being too popular.

Old relics

Unearthing what makes Final Fantasy 11 great doesn’t just require a shovel, you need a damn excavator. Before I could even log in, I had to wrestle with the infamously complicated PlayOnline service, an esoteric artefact in itself. Back when Final Fantasy 11 launched on the PlayStation 2 online services were beyond rudimentary, especially on a console that wasn’t really designed with internet multiplayer in mind. That’s why Final Fantasy 11 came bundled with a 40GB hard drive and a network adapter.

PlayOnline was an ambitious push to normalise online console gaming. Square Enix designed it to be a kind of platform for all of their multiplayer games and it included ambitious social features for the time, like personal email accounts. It was Steam for the PlayStation 2.

Today, though, PlayOnline is an enormous burden. Even the simple act of registering an account feels like an arcane ritual. PlayOnline ID, PlayOnline member name, PlayOnline password, Square Enix ID, Square Enix password—you probably need them all at one point or another just to get access to Final Fantasy 11. Menus and prompts are so confusingly arranged that more than once I found myself in some weird dead-end corner of PlayOnline with absolutely no real clue how to get where I was going.

And that’s just the tip of the iceberg. Like many older MMOs, Final Fantasy 11 is virtually unplayable in its original state. Its graphics engine can’t count pixels higher than 800 and the client will crash if you so much as even glance at another program.

Fortunately, modders have come to the rescue with a tool called Windower that allows for modern resolutions and graphics options as well as a host of addons and mods to make in-game tasks easier. It’s an incredible godsend.

Takin' it slow

I spent more than two hours that first night just getting everything set up, reading guides, and installing addons before I actually started playing. But even when I was ready for some adventuring, Final Fantasy 11 likes to start slow. A beginner’s guide I found first had me tour around the major districts of Windhurst clicking on teleportation points and joining various crafting guilds for an initial boost of experience points and currency that I could use to buy some decent armour.

Everything in Final Fantasy 11 takes an enormous amount of time, but that’s actually something I like about it. Modern MMOs are too eager to please, too afraid you might play something else so they try to make everything as frictionless as possible. But Final Fantasy 11 doesn’t give a damn. It’ll make you spend two minutes walking back and forth between a pair of quest givers half a dozen times. It’ll make every interaction, like simply trading items with another player, require twice as many button presses than is reasonable. It’s almost cruel.

But I also know that this was an enormously complicated game that Square Enix admirably tried to make playable with just a controller, so I’m willing to forgive it. And it’s not like Final Fantasy 11 doesn’t have its charms either. Beneath that thick crust of absolute bullshit is a genuinely innovative MMO. And when I finally got out into the field and started killing monsters, I began feeling that familiar pull. That feeling of being sucked into the world and excited by its mysteries.

The job system, for example, remains one of Final Fantasy 11’s greatest triumphs. Instead of needing to make a new character for each job (the equivalent of a class), I can just switch on the fly and level a different job instead. Final Fantasy 14 iterated on the idea, but Final Fantasy 11’s execution of it is still unrivalled. There’s 22 jobs to unlock and level, each one offering a distinct playstyle. And after reaching a certain level you can take on a secondary job, giving you access to even more abilities to augment your primary ones. It’s MMO theory-crafting at its finest.

At a crossroads

In the few hours I spent exploring Vana’diel, I started to feel myself acclimate to the slower pace. The lack of modern conveniences, like fast travel, and the awful control scheme are jarring at first. But there is a distinct appeal to playing a game that forces me to adapt to it instead of the other way around.

It’s like selling all your belongings and living out in the woods, off the grid. At first the change seems hellish, but then you start to settle in and appreciate the little things—the catchy music, the subtle rhythm of combat, the rush of levelling up.

The only thing that’s missing is other people. Though much of Final Fantasy 11 remains unchanged, one major new feature is that players can now summon their own party of NPCs to help them in combat. Unlike other MMOs, Final Fantasy 11 was designed so combat almost always required a party of players.

It’s one of the reasons Final Fantasy 11 was such a social experience. But as its popularity has waned and almost everyone has moved on, Square Enix has had to make concessions to give newcomers like me a chance.

Each level used to be a hard-fought achievement, but now I can just summon my party of NPCs and quickly grind through a dozen levels in a few hours. Alone.

Though I understand why it had to happen, it’s a reality that makes me uncomfortable. So much of what I loved about Final Fantasy 11 was the social dynamics, but now the only evidence I have that I’m not alone is the constant barrage of messages from people trying to sell items.

I’m not sure whether I’ll continue playing. A part of me is already invested in the journey to reach max level for the first time and do things that childhood me only dreamed of. But if those achievements are earned alone—if I’m the only one fighting and celebrating—is it worth it?

Destiny 2's Monuments of Triumph is here, the final update for the game and potentially the last Destiny anything. Even This Week In Destiny, my weekly ritual for over a decade now, is coming to an end. To that end, Bungie has crammed in as much of a conclusion as possible, given we're actually at the start of a brand-new saga.

After the conclusion of the decade-long Light and Darkness saga in The Final Shape, Bungie kicked off the Fate saga, beginning with The Edge of Fate. It's all about the mysterious god-like entities affiliated with the planets of the Sol system who have been pulling the strings this entire time. They control time, setting up key events like dominoes.

Say what you will about The Edge of Fate, but its story was the most fascinating aspect. New character Lodi (one of the best in the series, no less), a pre-Golden Age guy working at Destiny's version of the Federal Bureau of Control, was ripped out of the space age and brought to space in the far future. Turns out he was a co-worker of Ikora's, though Guardians don't tend to remember their past.

Unfortunately, this promising new saga was cut short, ending just as it was ramping up. And the new secret cutscenes in Monuments of Triumph are a bittersweet teaser of what was to come, and an obituary for a universe we might never get to explore again.

There's a bunch of great dialogue and story developments between its new quests, but I want to focus on its two vital hidden cutscenes. Obviously, spoilers ahead for 'the end of Destiny', so to speak.

Me and you, Big Blue

The first cutscene sees our commander-in-chief for a decade reflecting on the journey and the weight he's had to carry. It tugs at the heartstrings of any long-time Destiny fan, not least because of the passing of his previous voice actor, Lance Reddick. Rightfully, Zavala's ready to hang up the hat, with no Ghost and only one life left. Zavala's story fittingly ends with him retiring and passing the baton to Ikora, the last vanguard of the old Vanguard.

And then your Ghost drops one of the most on-the-nose, poignant lines: "Nothing ever stays the same, does it? What do you think is in our future?" You know what, Ghost? I don't know, but I hope it's a continuation of this world.

What's most impressive about this cutscene is the directing, which is a shocking step up from just about anything we've seen in the series. I adore the transition between scenes using Zavala's shoulder pad.

Cinematic director John Ebenger explained that the team "pulled out some new tricks for the transitions between in-engine and pre-rendered and tried to put in the work to make this one special in a short time frame."

A meeting in the Dark Forest

This cutscene is the most important one for the future of the saga, and the one that hurts the most. Lodi's in the Dark Forest, possessed and contorted by an unknown being and speaking cryptic gibberish. He speaks of "A showdown at the end of time, between champions of Dark and Light," and that's why the egotistical Nine have been courting us this whole time.

This entity is presumably the Winnower, an extradimensional god, lover of the 'flower game', and the Darkness equivalent of the Traveler so to speak, directly interacting with us for the first time. And it's told you to take a breather and enjoy some slaughter for the time being. In other words, the story ends here, but with just enough of a thread to pick back up on should Bungie ever get the opportunity.

That's one hell of a cliffhanger, and only makes the realisation that a showdown with the Winnower is unlikely feel like a punch to the face.

I suppose that was the plan with this update, really? Pull out all the stops, set up a new story in the most intriguing way possible, but also try to tie as neat a bow as possible just in case. You win, Bungie. I'm sad, I'm angry, and now I want Destiny 3 even more.

Geoff Keighley is back together with Hideo Kojima, and that can only mean one thing—Summer Game Fest has come and gone. With it, nearly 20 showcases and spotlights—including our very own PC Gaming Show and the Future Game Show by our pals over at GamesRadar—and hundreds of games to gorge upon. Ones that will inevitably flood our Steam wishlists.

Now that all of the chaos and trailer soup is finally abating, it's a good time to think about which games have really got us all giddy with excitement. We're an eclectic bunch here at PC Gamer, from FPS fanatics to JRPG junkies, and Summer Game Fest really felt like it had a little something for all of us.

So here's the stuff we're feeling particularly stoked about. And if you reckon we've made a glaring omission—or simply want to share in our enthusiasm—feel free to drop a comment letting us know which Summer Game Fest showings have you all amped up.

Persona 6

Mollie Taylor, Features Producer: As much as I love Persona, I've been feeling a bit of Phantom Thief fatigue in the last… half-decade or so. Which makes it all the more exciting that we finally have confirmation a new Persona game is on the way.

It's looking a whole lot darker than the last couple entries based on the very brief teaser—almost SMT-adjacent, which I am totally here for. It's all graveyards and dark vibes with flashes of green, and I can't help but think maybe we're veering into the occult with this one. Whatever it might be, I'm already eager to learn more—and, y'know, finally let Joker have some much-needed rest for how much Atlus has milked the poor bloke.

Tenebris Somnia

Joshua Wolens, News Writer: Tenebris Somnia is a 2D survival horror game hot out of Argentina, and it asks players a question no one else dares to: "Hey, remember Resident Evil 1 for the PlayStation?"

I do! I do remember Resident Evil 1 for the PlayStation, and TS' mix of puzzle-solving, zombie blasting, and some incredibly high-commitment FMV cutscenes bring back a lot of very warm memories of the Spencer Mansion in its original incarnation. The studio looks like it's gone hard on practical effects for those FMV sequences—there's some truly messed up stuff in the Steam screenshots that I am very eager to get more context for when the game hits this October.

Alien: Isolation 2

Sean Martin, Senior Guides Writer: One of the reasons Alien: Isolation feels like such an authentic Alien game is that it's made by diehard fans of the films. I remember speaking to Al Hope, Creative Director on the first (and now the second), years back, and it immediately became clear just how much of an alien nerd he and the rest of their team at Creative Assembly were. It's no wonder that the game's 1970s sci-fi vibes are so utterly impeccable, even to the point that Alien Romulus easter-egged one of its save stations.

It's sad that it took over a decade for it to happen, but I'm excited a sequel finally has. Though the trailer didn't give much away, our very own Wes Fenlon managed to interview Al Hope and James Green at SGF. It's early doors, but it sounds like the main difference is that we'll be evading the alien in outdoor spaces now too, though I'm sure there'll still be plenty of claustrophobic areas we'll have to fearfully inch our way around.

Thief: The Dark Project Remastered

Ted Litchfield, Associate Editor: Thief: The Dark Project is one of my very favorite videogames, so a remaster from the wiz kids at Nightdive? You better believe I'm excited for it. The remaster has a planned launch window of this winter, so we don't even have that long to wait. If you want an idea of what to expect, you can read my review of Nightdive's System Shock 2 remaster, a game that was originally built on Thief's Dark Engine.

Andy Chalk, NA News Lead: Ted started early today so he got to Thief before I did but you know what? I'm so excited for this we're doing it twice. Thief (specifically Thief Gold, in my case) was a truly foundational game for me, up there with Doom and Baldur's Gate, and I basically haven't touched it for a quarter century. So the remaster maestros at Nightdive doing their thing with it—and Stephen Russell is back, and Terri Brosius is back, and baby we are back!—makes this the one must-play game to come out of SGF for me.

Mythologous

Joshua Wolens, News Writer: It is the year 2026 and someone is making a MUD. This is not a drill. This is not a jape. The text RPG is back and it's being made by a guy called Grant Medlyn, whose fantasy game Mythologous is getting a little bit Bethesda with its NPCs that have "jobs, needs, personal lives, and problems," and whose world continues to shift and change whether you're online or not.

A systems-driven MUD is basically all I've ever wanted out of, well, life, so consider me very interested. The only thing that gives me pause is this disclaimer on the game's Steam page: "The game uses some AI-generated text to enhance immersion through short form responsive NPC dialogue and procedurally described events… Generative AI is NOT used for world narrative writing, lore, game logic, audio, images, or calculating outcomes of any kind." That feature is described as "experimental" and not part of the core game. I'm willing to cut a one-man dev team working on a goddamn MUD of all things some slack, but let's be real: it's the non-AI emergent possibilities that really excite me here.

genAtlas

Jess Kinghorn, Hardware Writer:

Even after having spent a sizeable chunk of my career writing about all things PlayStation, I never thought I'd see gunplay in a game directed by Fumito Ueda. I've loved his games ever since first taking the hand of a ghostly girl I found in a cage on PS2 (to say nothing of all the poor creatures that have fallen by my blade throughout Ueda's dark fairytale oeuvre). The shift to scifi is a notable one—and I can't wait to see what the team at genDesign does with it.

So far, GenAtlas has its fair share of desolate landscapes, filling them with architecture as arcane as it is ancient—that already gets a big tick from me. The twist is that the 'architecture' in question is the discarded husks of giant robots that you can bring back to life with your ship, a disembodied robo-noggin. It's definitely a fresh twist on the theme of collaboration that runs through all of Ueda's games. The most obvious, pithiest comparison is probably something like, "Think Shadow of the Colossus, but scifi and also with giant robots that you can pilot." Now, that I can't wait to play.

Spyro: A Realm Beyond

Harvey Randall, Staff Writer: Little-known fact about Harvey—Spyro was one of my first ever videogames. My family had a PS1, and one of my earliest memories was being absolutely terrible at the OG Spyro the Dragon games, spending altogether too much time doing the skateboarding minigame in Spyro 3. So to see Toys for Bob—whose Reignited Trilogy I very much enjoyed—unleashed to make a fully-fledged proper Spyro game? It's hitting me right in my nostalgia bone, and I cannot wait.

Guild Wars 3

Phil Savage, Global Editor-in-Chief: What a treat to have a new MMO to look forward to. I've played Guild Wars 2 for over 4,500 hours, so of course I'm looking forward to the sequel. But more than just my familiarity with the series, what ArenaNet is teasing for this one sounds fascinating. A more action focus, the seeming return of GW1's skill collection, and, most importantly, a focus on traversal. "Run, slide, leap, and bound across Orr with a one-of-a-kind movement system that transfers your momentum between modes of travel," touts the Steam page, "providing a free-form joy of movement through a world alive with adventure."

This is my kind of shit, and it makes sense as the direction of travel for the series. Over the years, thanks to the addition of gliding, mounts, and masteries that enhance all three, Guild Wars 2 has built up a solid collection of movement options—joyous little combinations that make traversing a map feel fun. A game built with that at its fore? It could be something special. More than anything, though, I appreciate ArenaNet's continued commitment to Guild Wars 2. If the sequel came at the expense of a game I'd spent so many hours playing, I might be feeling quite different. That both will coexist? Well now I'm just along for the ride.

The Wolf Among Us 2

James Bentley, Hardware Writer: The Wolf Among Us has long remained my favourite Telltale Games work, and if I thought about it for another 10 minutes, I think there's a good chance I'd say it's one of the best episodic games ever. The original game blends folklore with a dark, gritty city and manages to not feel so edgy that it throws out the stakes of the story. It feels both fantastical and grounded, with narrative threads just daring you to tug on. So, on the face of it, more The Wolf Among Us is an exciting prospect. But what makes The Wolf Among Us 2 just so special is the story around the game itself.

Telltale and the second game have had a 'Will they, won't they' relationship for a while, in the wake of the studio, well, briefly not existing, then promptly re-existing again. And as such, it's a game that has been in the works for over a decade, sort of. Its on-and-off relationship is one that may serve to enunciate some strife at the core of the title, and AdHoc Studio stepping away from development certainly suggests the project was a tough task, but it's finally almost here, and that feels like a light miracle. A game destined to be video game folklore was actually seen again, and I can't wait to wolf the whole thing down in a single night, as Sheriff Bigby Wolf would want.

What I've learned since setting up a NAS at home: I should've done this sooner. What started out as a plan to store a copy of my most precious data at home has evolved as I've found out what a NAS is actually capable of. I went in expecting accessible local storage, I've ended up with a personalised server with heaps of possibilities.

I've been wanting to ditch Google for a while. I've done the easy things: switching to Proton and using DuckDuckGo. But I don't want to feed the beast anymore—Google is huge, powerful, rich beyond compare, and, in my opinion, wears it horribly. If I can avoid paying a monthly subscription into its already incomprehensibly large coffers, I should try to, even if it means paying a larger sum than I'd ever pay for cloud storage on NAS drives.

So, that's what I've done. A couple of months ago, I purchased two Seagate IronWolf Pro 8 TB HDDs for a princely sum of £240 each. That's one reason I wish I'd done this project sooner. These were available for £170 just a few years ago. They're £300/$300 as I write this, however, so I guess I did alright. HDDs at 12 TB and above are even more ludicrously expensive. That's really what I'd have preferred, but I couldn't spare the cash.

There are slightly cheaper drives available—I'm just a sucker. I recently spoke to someone at Corsair who designs 3D printable cages for HDDs for the company's cases, and stood next to their ample collection of hard drives, they told me the Ironwolf Pro was serious business and I made a good choice. This compliment alone justifies my frivolous spending in my mind. And, of course, the idea that these drives will last me many years to come without failure.

I just had to be sure to buy a proper NAS drive. One designed for the demands of an always-on box. A CMR (Conventional Magnetic Recording) drive, to be exact. These work exactly how you might expect a HDD to work—hence the conventional bit. Data is written to tracks laid side-by-side on the platter. It's a big disc of very neatly arranged data.

Though not all drives work like this. Many consumer drives use what's called SMR (Shingled Magnetic Recording), which uses overlapping tracks on the platter. That complicates things: Data is written to one track, but in doing so, necessitates rewriting the neighbouring tracks, too. SMR is not as reliable in this context and write speeds suffer. So, more expensive CMR drives it is.

Then I needed something to install these drives into. That's where the Ugreen NASync DXP4800 Pro comes in, currently on sale for $676/£586.

It's a four-bay NAS with a pretty powerful CPU in it (by NAS standards): Intel's Core i5 13 1315U. It won't beat any Cinebench records with only two P-cores, but its four E-cores help make up for that. It's rated to 15 W base power and 55 W turbo power. It's a chip with plenty of grunt for the easygoing software I'm running here. A step up over a Pentium or Arm chip, anyways.

From my power measurements for the entire NAS at the outlet, it draws around 49 W with the HDDs in motion, up to a maximum of 76 W, if only briefly, during boot. It draws around 30 W once idle.

The DX4800 Pro comes with 10 gigabit and 2.5 gigabit ethernet ports in the rear, which I've hooked up to a Ugreen 2.5 Gbps network switch via an extremely long ethernet cable routed around my office. The DXP4800 Pro also offers USB 2.0, 3.2 Gen1, and USB 3.2 Gen2 ports, alongside an HDMI out and even an SD card slot.

It's a handy box. It fits snugly on my shelf at 257 x 178 x 178 mm without imposing. Those IronWolf Pro drives are a bit loud when they're spinning up, but I don't notice the drives or NAS itself whirring (the NAS has two fans) during the day—and I sit just a couple metres away from it.

As someone that regularly builds PCs, I am aware that I'm cheating a little by grabbing a ready-made unit. But it's compact and convenient. It doesn't draw much power and the set-up took no time at all. I'm not as precious about these things since I've had time to tinker and learn about the NAS, but I was when I started this journey.

Though I did make a couple of adjustments to the DXP4800 Pro upon receiving it. I upgraded the memory, for starters. The unit comes with just 8 GB DDR5-5600 on a single stick. A Samsung DIMM. That didn't feel like enough for my soon-to-be-realised home server aspirations, so I ordered another stick on eBay, which someone was selling from their own Ugreen NAS unit after upgrading. We're in the midst of a memory crisis, so I spent more money than I'd care to admit on one single stick of slow DDR5—oh, fine, it was £50—but I felt this was an important upgrade. So I've got 16 GB of the stuff now.

But it really wasn't that important. I'm running more on the NAS than I ever thought I would and I'm yet to see the system use more than 6 GB. Though at least I know I could run a lot more if I ever want to—and I almost certainly will.

Alongside the two 8 TB drives in RAID 1—ensuring I always have a backup of my most important data—I also added two NVMe SSDs, at 1 TB each, to the DXP4800 Pro. They're older drives, nothing special or speedy, but they're a damn sight quicker than a hard drive all the same. I had planned to use these as a read/write cache, but I did some research and few in the know recommend doing so. Instead I put them into their own volume, preferable for running containers and system applications from. This way, the HDDs don't have to spin up as much. And often they're completely idle.

I also swapped out the 140 mm fan that cools the entire NAS, located behind the drive bays, with a Noctua NF-A14x25 G2. It makes little meaningful difference, as I couldn't hear nor had any complaints regarding the pre-existing fan, but I had the Noctua as a spare, so why the heck not?

Data migration is straightforward. Drag the files, drop the files. I mostly use the Ugreen NAS application via Windows, which lets me access the UGOS Pro operating system as its own easy-to-use GUI. Though it's just as easy to set-up access via Windows Explorer or even my Ubuntu system, though I haven't bothered with all that just yet.

I add all my photos, important documents, and high-quality music from my CD collection. This isn't a bit to prevent the FBI, or whoever, knocking at my door over piracy claims. I recently started buying my favourite albums as CDs and making copies, just in case streaming services implode or undersea cables implode or the internet as a whole explodes. I'm certain I'll need a copy of The XX's I See You should anything bad happen.

The built-in photos app operates much like Google Photos, with facial recognition and duplicate photo recognition, but instead uses local AI models. There's also a video player that offers something akin to Netflix. So my fear of missing out on important features for going local are put to rest, and by stuffing all my files onto the NAS, I feel more in control of my data than ever. All these applications are accessible via the home screen, which runs on my phone, iPad, PC—whatever.

With my images, videos, and documents now on the NAS and out from under Google's enormous shadow, I consider most of my work done here. This NAS box is a handy thing, alright, I think to myself. A good investment. Then I hit a snag. How do I get my videos to play on my Samsung TV? To do that, it turns out, I need an application called Jellyfin. And this is when I start to realise the potential that a NAS truly offers.

Jellyfin is volunteer-built media server software that's easy to run on a range of devices, such as my Samsung TV, and keeps track of what's been watched like Netflix. To install Jellyfin, I have to run Docker. And Docker is serious business. An open platform for running containers, said containers can contain all sorts of self-contained software. From media servers like Jellyfin to an RSS feed management service like FreshRSS, or even a version of Firefox.

When I'm setting up Jellyfin, I start to wonder if I could access my NAS while I'm out of my house—ya know, not on the local network. Ugreen has a simple solution for that called Ugreenlink. This simply lets one access their NAS over a remote connection. But the deeper I go in my research, the more I'm tempted by another solution: Tailscale. Tailscale turns out to be an excellent solution with full end-to-end encryption.

So I turn again to Docker to install and run Tailscale on the NAS. That's easily done, as there are a number of tutorials on the web for this exact job.

Tailscale is a networking service that acts like a digital tunnel between devices. It's a VPN, but rather than hiding my locality, it connects my devices over a private network, as if they were local, and even when they're not. For my purposes, it means I can access my NAS securely from anywhere—even streaming video from my home in the UK to Taiwan, as I tested just last week. It's incredibly capable, and when it works pretty much out of the box with very little fiddling, I'm super impressed.

I'm also offered some advice by PC Gamer's own Wes Fenlon, who is a dab hand with this sort of thing, running Unraid on a box himself. That's one thing I've yet to experiment with myself: trying an altogether different OS on the NAS.

Though one useful tool I've taken up on Wes' advice is FreshRSS. As someone that relies on RSS feeds for work and has used various web scraping tools in the past, FreshRSS seems like a dream. It combines the best bits of both, and makes easy work of tracking my interests across the web—and across locales and devices with Tailscale. It even works with cleaner, smarter frontend readers, but I'm yet to land on any one recommendation.

There's a lot more for me to tinker with here, but from a relatively small amount of time with a NAS, I've begun to see the vision. Digital sovereignty—controlling my own data in how it's used and processed— may be a difficult thing to fully achieve, but getting somewhere closer with a NAS feels to me like well worth the price of admission. Though I wouldn't mind if HDDs came back down in cost—I could still do with a bit more storage space.