I introduced Overcooked to two of my friends one day back in 2016. One day being the key phrase here. The Overcooked games are on our list of the best co-op games, but the series has a reputation for ruining relationships—in China it's apparently known as "The Divorce Kitchen". I don't recall actually fighting with my friends, but the tension was thick enough that we quickly went back to playing Jackbox instead.

That makes Stage Fright, which is being published by No Man's Sky developer Hello Games, kind of an interesting pivot for Ghost Town Games. It's the next co-op adventure from the makers of Overcooked, but it's aimed at building relationships with your play partner instead of leaving you irked at them.

Here's what Stage Fright's developers have to say about the tonal shift a decade later.

"Overcooked broke you apart and Stage Fright is there to put you back together," said co-director Oliver De-Vine, when we spoke over Zoom in September.

"I think there's a sense of us trying to be constructive with co-op, and trying to be a constructive and positive force in the world," De-Vine said. "Not that there's anything negative, necessarily, about having a fun argument with your friends! But we're trying to foster community in our games. [They're] about communication between people, and less about being very good with the fidelity of a controller."

"It's exciting to us, the idea that the people who are good at our games are the ones who are good at communicating," said games designer Phil Duncan. "Certainly with Overcooked, one of the things we found with [demoing it at] conventions is that you would find a bunch of teenage boys would come and play it, and play in complete silence, and they'd fail the level horribly.

"And then you'd get two people, we had a little girl come up, and she was like eight years old, playing with her friend, and they're chatting the whole time. And they smashed through it, and they played absolutely effortlessly."

Couch co-op, even without a couch

To make the co-op vibe of Stage Fright even more chummy, Ghost Town Games wants its players to feel like they're sitting on the couch with their friend—even when they're playing over the internet.

"I think it's a unique experience, local co-op particularly, versus playing games online," De-Vine said. "Even though our game is both local and online, we are trying to make the experience of online as similar to the local experience as possible. So the game is splitscreen online as well, because it does depend on being able to see what the other player is doing and communicate about what they're seeing in the environment."

"The ideal situation is that you're sat next to someone and you're nudging them and you point at the same thing. So it's as close as we can get to that online," Duncan said.

In Stage Fright, two players will guide a pair of kids through a Luigi's Mansion-style adventure where they'll have to tackle puzzles, avoid threats, and solve a mystery, with nothing to rely on but their partners. While there's more complexity in the adventure than in their chaotic kitchens, the devs didn't want to lose the accessibility of Overcooked's single-button action.

"Imagine family-friendly Silent Hill"

"When we talk about puzzle aspects or escape room aspects, we're trying to avoid having a game where you have to get a notepad out and write things down," De-Vine said.

"Everything is communicated between the players verbally. It's got adventure game elements, but without an inventory. There's no inventory management. Everything is physical items you're carrying around in a similar way to Overcooked, sort of quite large, obvious, chunky items, and that is again trying to make sure that everything is out loud in communication."

I asked if it was a linear type of game, where players need to solve puzzles in order, or if they'll be able to try a different puzzle and come back later when they get stuck.

"Similar to how you would find an escape room experience, where you'll find a clue, and it won't necessarily be linked to the thing [you're solving], you'll have to remember that for later," De-Vine said.

"It's linear in the way that Silent Hill is linear. Which is a weird comparison because it's not much like it," he said, laughing. "But you know, imagine family-friendly Silent Hill."

2018's Leisure Suit Larry: Wet Dreams Don't Dry was a genuinely pleasant surprise, in that it's actually good—quite a contrast to the preceding games in the series, Magna Cum Laude and Box Office Bust, which were decidedly not good. A sequel followed, Wet Dreams Dry Twice, and once again it was pretty good stuff—not hugely innovative or high art, but a genuine Leisure Suit Larry experience that manages to avoid embarrassing itself (though it embarrasses Larry himself plenty).

Both of them, sadly, are soon going away for good. An announcement on Steam from publisher Assemble Entertainment says both games are being removed from the store on October 23. Ahead of that, they're being offered seriously cheap: 95% off the regular price, dropping them to less than $2 each.

The removal of the Wet Dreams duo effectively puts a pin in a process than began in 2025, when the OG Larry games were removed from sale:

• Leisure Suit Larry – Magna Cum Laude Uncut and Uncensored
• Leisure Suit Larry 1 – In the Land of the Lounge Lizards
• Leisure Suit Larry 2 – Looking For Love (In Several Wrong Places)
• Leisure Suit Larry 3 – Passionate Patti in Pursuit of the Pulsating Pectorals
• Leisure Suit Larry 5 – Passionate Patti Does a Little Undercover Work
• Leisure Suit Larry 6 – Shape Up Or Slip Out
• Leisure Suit Larry 7 – Love for Sail

Leisure Suit Larry 4 managed to avoid the executioner's axe by not existing in the first place.

A reason for this new round of delistings wasn't provided, nor did Assemble comment on the possibility of an eventual return. Expiring licenses rights are a common culprit for this sort of thing, and that seems to be a good bet here: Leisure Suit Larry was originally a Sierra game, which I assume means Assemble licensed the property from Activision for the Wet Dreams duo; given the timing (Wet Dreams Don't Dry was announced in 2018), we're coming up on roughly 10 years since that deal would've been done, which, as someone who's bad at math and thus likes nice round numbers, seems to me like a reasonably possible expiration date for such a deal.

But that's entirely speculation. What's certain is that Leisure Suit Larry: Wet Dreams Don't Dry and Wet Dreams Dry Twice are going away for good, and ahead of that they're both really cheap on both Steam and GOG—the delisting announcement makes no mention of their fate on GOG but it's a safe assumption they'll be disappeared there, too—until they're gone. Get 'em while they're wet.

• Leisure Suit Larry: Wet Dreams Don't Dry: Steam, GOG
• Leisure Suit Larry: Wet Dreams Dry Twice: Steam, GOG

I just made a noise like air being slowly released from a balloon.

It's been 17 years since the original Machinarium, a wordless tale of love in a crumbling city of robots. Amanita Design has put out some great games over that span—Botanicula, Chuchel, Creaks, Phonopolis—but hasn't breathed even a hint that more Machinarium might be on the way. So why now?

"We're not getting any younger, and the world seems to be ending, so if we were ever going to make Machinarium 2, now is the right time," Amanita CEO and designer Jakub Dvorský said—a bit dark, sure, but I can't find any factual fault in his reasoning. "We're also grateful to every player who waited patiently all these years. We couldn't have done it without them."

The new game picks up where Machinarium left off: Having escaped the city, Josef and Berta crash-land in a hidden valley populated by two robot tribes, one in the Elektrona monastery and the other in the city of Oilton—both of them facing a grim future as their power is slowly running out. While Machinarium 2 promises the same style of point-and-click puzzling as the original, Josef and Berta are both playable this time around, swappable at will, and will have to work together to solve the game's puzzles.

The distinctive visual style of Machinarium is back—perhaps a little sharper than the first game, although I think it still looks great—and importantly, so is Tomáš Dvořák, aka Floex, the composer whose soundtrack helped make Machinarium so distinctive and memorable.

As PC Gamer's Evan Lahti explained some years ago, music is one of the best parts of Amanita games, and Dvořák is responsible for much of it. Given his many years of collaborating with the studio on most of its games, it's not really surprising that he's back for Machinarium 2, but it is reassuring to have it confirmed.

"When I composed the first Machinarium soundtrack years ago, I never anticipated such a huge response," Dvořák told me. "I was simply trying to have fun and enjoy the creative process—and I believe that is the exact same approach I need for the sequel.

"Naturally, it’s a challenging task. It is easy to fall into the trap of comparing my new work to the original, and doubts occasionally creep in about whether it will be as engaging. However, I try to minimize those thoughts. Experience has taught me that the best way to create is to simply 'have fun'."

Interestingly, Dvořák said he didn't really think about Machinarium 2 as a sequel at all: Instead, it's more "a beautiful project [that] provides a great opportunity to create a specific kind of music ... the visuals have an incredible influence on the music universe I create. Machinarium is exactly the kind of environment where things grow very naturally for me."

The music in the Machinarium 2 trailer certainly has a familiar vibe, but Dvořák said he set a few specific goals for himself to differentiate it from the original: The soundtrack to be "more melodic and musical," something he aims to achieve with "more simplicity, which is actually the hardest part: Usually, unique organic details come from layering many sounds together."

And of course, the passage of time is a factor too: "I feel the new music is more mature," Dvořák said, "simply because I am older."

Aren't we all? Still great music, though.

As for the real reason Amanita Design opted to go back to Machinarium now, all these years later, it really was just a vibe situation. "I tend to make these kinds of decisions more intuitively than rationally. That’s just how I work," Dvorský, Amanita's CEO, told me in a separate chat.

"I guess I rely on some kind of instinct or feeling, so it’s actually quite hard for me to give you a clear, logical answer. I just had this feeling that the world of the robots was knocking on the door, asking to come out again. It seemed like a good idea, and little by little, I got really excited about it."

It's probably self-evident at this point, but I'm really excited about it too. Machinarium was Amanita Design's first full-length, standalone game, and it made me an immediate fan of the studio. Amanita's subsequent games have more than lived up to the high standard it set, but even so there's always been a very faint 'wish it was Machinarium' hanging in the background over every new release. Well, here we are—I guess now I can start quietly pining for Botanicula 2.

Machinarium 2 doesn't have a release date at this point, but it's up for wishlisting on Steam and GOG. For now, you can pick up Amanita's previous releases—including the original Machinarium—at some pretty sweet prices until October 15.

It took a while but there's finally an official way to hunt and kill some of Subnautica 2's most annoying sea creatures. The only catch is, you'll have to do it in Dave the Diver DLC—though as catches go, that's a pretty fun one.

The crossover was announced today at the Triple-I Initiative showcase. Coming in early 2027, the Dave the Diver X Subnautica 2 content pack will suck Dave into the alien waters of Unknown Worlds' survival game where he can mine resources, hunt fish, and—one would hope—discover some tasty new sushi recipes for Bancho to cook up. Here's the trailer:

What caught my eye even more than the glimpse of a massive and intimidating boss at the end of the trailer were those pesky Nibbler Mangos, which start biting you the second you dive into Subnautica 2 and never really stop. Players having no way to kill large enemies in Subnautica 2 has been a bit of a controversy, with some even resorting to mods so they can fight back.

It's nice that players can finally get a bit of revenge against those relentless fish, albeit in another game.

"We're thrilled to see Subnautica 2's creatures, including the Nibbler Mango, join Dave's world," Mintrocket told PC Gamer via email. "The team had a lot of fun bringing these creatures into our game, and players can expect the DLC to play just like the Dave the Diver they know and love."

As for those saddened to hear this is the final DLC for Dave the Diver, that doesn't necessarily mean it's the definitive end of his adventures.

"While this will be the final major DLC for Dave the Diver, there may still be smaller content updates or collaborations based on player feedback and our internal plans," Mintrocket told PC Gamer. "Since we're not moving straight into a sequel, we'll keep thinking about ways to make sure players don't forget Dave and his friends." Bancho the Chef, meanwhile, is getting his own game, a prequel, though a release date has yet to be announced.

Japan's NEC PC-98 series of personal computers, popular in the 1980s and 1990s, were home to hundreds of adventure games and visual novels with absolutely impeccable pixel art. It was a whole vibe—sometimes cute, sometimes incredibly detailed with a very limited color palette, and very (very) often pornographic. Very few of these games were ever officially released in English—the whole pornographic thing probably being a big reason why—but better late than never, right?

A fan translation group named WINE has released five English translations for PC-98 games in the last three years, including a pair of horror adventures called Dead of the Brain and Dead of the Brain 2. And the first one is now getting an official release on Steam juuuust in time for Halloween, with enhancements like autosaves and "optional quality-of-life improvements such as hover hints and hit boxes."

I've played a chunk of Dead of the Brain 2, and can't fully recommend them—they're pretty basic and a bit tedious as adventure games, and in schlocky horror B-movie fashion love to throw in some sexual violence—but damn do I love how these games look. There are some gnarly death scenes that aren't spoiled by this trailer.

I've got to share a few screenshots of Dead of the Brain 2, which doesn't have a Steam page yet but has even moodier art than the first game:

It's rare for fan translations to get an official stamp of approval, but this release of Dead of the Brain is part of a deal between one of the most prolific PC-98 studios of the '90s, FairyTale, and (*sigh*) Fakku, a US-based manga publisher I'll let you Google yourself.

Fakku seemingly bought the publishing rights to FairyTale's entire catalog, potentially meaning dozens of PC-98 games coming to Steam in the future. Hopefully they'll all be translated by people, not AI, but partnering with WINE for Dead of the Brain is a promising first move. I'm at least looking forward to more people getting to appreciate this era of pixel art without having to go through the complex process of getting a PC-98 emulator up and running.

Anyway, if you use Bluesky, follow PC-98 Bot for more good pixels.

Fun, thematic videogame recipes are not new. Suggesting dangerous and potentially lethal ingredients, however? Well, Love and Deepspace might just be the first game to make such a bold move.

Yes, Infold's hunky dating gacha recently posted to X with a handful of fun cocktails themed around the male suitors you can romance. Something worth noting here is that each one has a signature flower associated with them—childhood friend Caleb is the crabapple blossom, Xavier has the forget-me-not, and doctor Zayne is the jasmine. These are not the flowers that are the issue.

The problematic posies in question come from the game's other two romantic interests, Rafayel and Sylus—whose signature flowers are the fire lily and datura respectively. They are, erm, quite toxic. And potentially even deadly. In the datura's case, it's also a psychoactive plant. Which makes it even more surprising that Infold deigned to include them as garnishes in these fun and funky cocktail recipes.

It took the developer a whopping 36 hours to post a follow-up tweet which read: "Safety notice: All drinks shown are fictional and for in-game purposes only. Do not attempt to recreate or consume them in reality." Of course, by this point, the original post had already been community noted and flooded with fans asking the very important question: "Hey, what the hell?"

I'm not sure I've ever seen a developer create thematic food and drink recipes with real ingredients that weren't meant to be recreated, which makes this whole situation even more bizarre. You can certainly create interesting cocktails for your characters that don't rely on a potentially deadly flower, and providing recipes people aren't even meant to follow begs the question of why Infold would even bother in the first place?

Let's just hope nobody ever lets Infold create one of those fandangled videogame cookbooks.

ABOVE: A brief gameplay clip from Radiosol. You can't spend too long in the sunlight.

"A journey through a desolate world burned by a planetary cataclysm"

I related this experience in PC Gamer's work chat and multiple of us bought Radiosol, called by its developers "a journey through a desolate world burned by a planetary cataclysm," on the spot. It helps that it's only $9 on Steam, and that its jaggy megastructures look exceptionally cool.

As has become habitual when I see anything that looks mildly uncanny these days, I scrolled down to the generative AI disclosure on Steam: It was used for translations, the Moscow-based developer says, but not to generate any audio or art.

On X, developer TripletConcept also states that they used AI for "some coding and utility stuff like handling Git merges." The artist has been making art in this style since before the 2020s, as evidenced by their ArtStation profile.

I'm not far into Radiosol yet, so I'm still working out what I think—this is just my first impression, not a review. But so far, it's pretty sick.

You're a little wall-climbing spider-robot in the deserted ruins of megastructures, on your way to some kind of final battle for the fate of… it's unclear. Multiple subjects are broadcasting information to you as you work your way toward a pyramid for the big fight, leaping between shadows to stay out of direct sunlight.

So far, there's nothing in the way of combat. It's fun just being a spider-dude, executing big hops in the low-G environment—I have gotten the impression that this is not quite earth—to traverse unshaded stretches of desert. Currently, I'm seeking a "Megapol station" in the territory of the "Locus Group of Companies."

If you decided to check out Radiosol, my suggestions are A) prepare to have a lot of proper nouns thrown at you without context and B) commit the important parts of the menu layouts to memory, in the event that you can't help yourself from hitting the red button that turns off thinking.

Adventure games are full of people with problems that need solvin' and in Toem 2, just as in the original, the solution is usually a fresh photo with my slick vintage dynamic zoom camera. This time grandma is sending me to catch the bus to see the elusive blooming of the whirling birch tree. I can only get a ticket to the next town by completing quests at each stop along the way.

In each of the four towns I've got the freedom to explore, looking for locals who need whatever assistance I can provide with my surprisingly versatile multi-attachment camera. For my trouble, they'll stamp my journal, and my quest continues when I've got enough stamps to visit the next stop on the bus line.

What kinds of camera-based help do the people of Toem 2 need?

Some quests are more traditional adventure game tasks sans-camera

It's all a little too automatic

It was a whirlwind dalliance. I picked up Beyond Good and Evil's 20th anniversary edition on Friday and finished it—all pearls collected, all animals snapped—by Sunday. I can't escape the lure of nostalgia: BG&E Cool Original was an important game for me as a kid. I bought it on a whim for my 11th birthday and it's been lodged in my brain ever since.

Jade, forever

But it was an odd revisit. BG&E is still fun enough; it's a colourful and unique world that gives you a novel way to interact with it—down the barrel of your camera lens. But that's it. This game is sparse. There simply isn't that much to it.

Once you've drilled down past the questionably Rastafarian rhinoceroses and the exciting wildlife photography, what you have is a remarkably brief game with shonky combat, paper-thin characters, and stealth that manages to both be very easy and pretty tedious.

Do I still like it? Absolutely. Beyond Good and Evil was a colourful sweet-treat that hit me at just the right age—ephemeral by design, such that its flaws and soggy pockets never linger long enough to bother you. It's a videogame summer romance, but that's all it is.

So it's inexplicable that it has become the foundation of the most legendary 20-year development struggle in gaming. There's just not enough game here, not enough quality material to sink your teeth into, to ever warrant more than spending about two-three years on an equally pleasant-but-transient sequel. That's no insult to the original game, which does what it sets out to do and does it memorably and well. No, it's a baffled, guttural yawp: What are we doing here?

Perhaps one day we'll know. Maybe one day Beyond Good and Evil 2 will release, and we will look upon it, and we'll all just get it. "Oh," we'll say, collectively, "so that's what you were doing all this time."

But somehow I doubt it.

If you had to move to another planet in our solar system, which would you pick? Me, I'd go Neptune. I've always thought it's underrated, as our neighbours go, and it's a particularly pleasing shade of blue. I would die immediately due to cold and pressure, which I guess is a problem.

I guess that problem is why the stars of Young Suns, which just revealed a November 3 release date at the PC Gaming Show Tokyo Direct, have elected to set themselves up on Jupiter. They're having a pretty cosy time of it, too: the game is a 1-4 player life sim about building a home for yourself in space, setting up a comforting nook for yourself in a vessel drifting over the face of the newly liberated gas giant.

Jupiter, you see, is a free planet, and it has a whole future ahead of it. It's yours to explore—and your pals' too, if you want. Take your ship, head out to a station, ruin, or what-have-you, and plumb the depths on a hunt for stuff. Then use the stuff you find to help build tomorrow. It's an optimistic game for times that, dare I say it, sometimes feel a little less than optimistic. That's a noble goal, I think.

What we also got a good look at in the PCGS trailer, though, is the people rebuilding Jupiter with you. Whether you bring real-life pals with you or not, the planet's inhabited by a cast of characters who you can get to know in your career.

They'll hand out quests, follow routines and, most importantly, get very excited when you turn up for a chat. No cosy game is complete without a cast of NPCs to grow deeply attached to, and I'm eager to form a set of incredibly vivid and muscular opinions about the denizens of Jupiter.

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

Deep down, I know I want to abandon it all and live the life of a nomad. If I didn't have a family and friends to worry about, I'd pack some clothes into a van and drive off, moving from town to town and camping out in the woods. Unfortunately, I have responsibilities and no driver's license, so I can't head off just yet. I can, however, live out the fantasy in Hodka, a new game revealed at the PC Gaming Show Tokyo Direct.

Hodka is an upcoming game from developer Flazm. In the reveal trailer, we see a dilapidated van cresting a hill next to some stone ruins. The scene is set: this is about you and your trusty home-on-wheels venturing through what remains of this troubled world.

You'll have to scavenge for parts used to upgrade your van using a metal detector. There's some inventory management on display in the trailer, so it seems like those of us with hoarder tendencies will need to learn what loot is actually valuable.

Although the world of Hodka looks a bit past its best, you won't be alone in it. There are locals to meet along your travels who you'll need to help if you want to pass through the areas under their control. It won't all be scenic hills and moody vistas, you'll need to get around washed-out bridges and through collapsed tunnels.

If you're worried it all sounds a bit directionless, fear not; you're actually on the trail of your uncle. As you progress, you'll be collecting pieces of a puzzle, trying to figure out where he went. You'll have to keep your wits about you, though, because when night rolls in so does a dark fog hiding who knows what?

There's no release date for Hodka just yet, so make sure you wishlist it on Steam to stay up-to-date with development progress.

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

Videogames have been banned and censored for all manner of reasons, and at least one game was so notoriously terrible that it was buried in the desert. But I've never heard of a game being so repellent that it was physically destroyed before. I've played some rotten games in my time, but I've never felt a desire to eradicate any of them from existence.

Yet this is exactly what happened to Sex Vixens from Space, a lewd graphic adventure developed by Free Spirit Software and released in 1988. Initially launched in the US, Sex Vixens from Space was meant to arrive in the UK the following year. But it never did—at least, not officially, because the shipment was intercepted and destroyed by UK Customs.

Everything we know about Sex Vixens' destruction derives from a few brief news stories from a handful of computer magazines in the '80s. In January 1989, the US Commodore magazine .info reported that 75 copies of the game were seized and destroyed by UK customs. Apparently it was part of a larger shipment that included other games—meaning it was singled out for annihilation. Some publications from the time reported the game as being banned, but it's not clear whether it was formally prohibited by the UK government—even if the effect was one and the same.

That's about as much info we have on the actions of the British border force. But the game's director, Joe Hubbard, provided a colourful statement to The Australian Commodore and Amiga Review:

"While Sex Vixens from Space may be a bit racy, it is not pornographic. Apparently, the British authorities are either quite prudish or completely lacking a sense of humour. Regardless, freedom of artistic expression and the freedom to disseminate such are cornerstones of democracy. The act of seizing these game[s] is the act of a fascist government."

Strong words. But who's right? Is the British government a bunch of fascists? Or is Sex Vixens from Space sick filth worthy of obliteration? There's only one way for an intrepid journalist to find out. Time to ruin my search history!

It's easy to play Sex Vixens from Space as a Brit now—you can even play in your browser via certain websites that collate abandonware. You play as Brad Stallion, owner and operator of a spaceship named the Big Thruster. Naturally, the Big Thruster is shaped like a cock and balls, and if you die while playing, it cuts to a screen of the big thruster going limp—which is the game's one half-decent joke.

The premise is that, across Federated Government space, there are rumours of a colony of "beautiful, sex starved women" known as the Tribe, who raid "male dominated rural planetary systems with their sex-ray gun, leaving the men sexless eunuchs". You, as Stallion, have been tasked with finding and "neutralising" this fabled band of space Valkyries. Given this is a sex game, I assumed this meant I'd have to win them over with Stallion's raw sexual magnetism. Let's say for now that this turned out to be naive of me.

The first fifteen minutes or so of Sex Vixens from Space are spent getting familiar with the Big Thruster (as all boys do at some point), until we receive intel that a woman named Lila—who is rumoured to have connections with the Tribe—is working as a maid at the Pink Flamingo Hotel. Stallion makes the jump to the Pink Flamingo, where he is greeted at reception by a profoundly unsexy robot.

I should point out here that Sex Vixens from Space is never sexy. Not once. But what most surprised me about it is how little it tries to be in the first place. Given the stated objective of this game is to titillate, you'd expect scantily clad women to be crawling out of the vents. But many of the rooms you explore are empty, or populated by things that not only aren't sexy, but are also clearly not intended to be. It's also about as rudimentary a graphic adventure as it is possible to get. Stallion essentially has three abilities—walking, talking, and shagging. Unless the plot calls for a more specific action, the world itself does not facilitate much poking and prodding.

Anyway, once Stallion finds his hotel room, Lila enters. "I understand you're the man with the big thruster," she says. This apparently counts as courtship in Sex Vixens from Space, because Stallion can immediately kiss her, to which she responds by stripping off and collapsing on the bed. And when I say collapsing, I mean it looks like she fell on it from several storeys up. See for yourself:

It's a position that to me says less Karma Sutra and more The Exorcist. And look, I know this is pixel art from 1988 that was probably knocked out by some starving artist in a day, so I don't want to rag on it too much. But what on Earth is going on with her face?

Wait a minute, I've seen that expression before…

During her liaison with Stallion, Lila reveals that the Tribe resides on a planet named Mondo. But she doesn't know where Mondo is, so Stallion heads over to Space Station X to find out. Again, a sex game that takes you to Space Station X has certain connotations, but Space Station X turns out to be the least sexy place in the entire galaxy. Its only inhabitants are yet more robots and The Commander, who speaks to you with his back turned and wears the least alluring trousers in the cosmos.

Through his chat with the Commander, Stallion finally discovers the location to Mondo. Upon travelling to this world of warrior women, Stallion is immediately captured by a woman on horseback who, judging by her terrifying expression, must be some relation of Lila's.

Stallion is thrown into prison with a woman named She-La. It isn't clear what She-La's status is within the Tribe's society—she's referred to as a prisoner here, but later on the game describes her as a guard. But her purpose in the story is to leap on Stallion like a starving xenomorph and then reveal an escape hatch in the prison floor—implying she could have escaped at any point during her incarceration and was just hanging around in the hope of getting laid.

The hatch leads to a secret laboratory where the fabled sex-ray gun is kept. The sex-ray gun is by far my favourite thing in the entire game, as, well, just look at it:

There's so much to dissect here. The buttons for two types of herpes. The arrow keys for nipples up and nipples down. DRAIN/INSERT?!? I also like the fact that, despite the sex-ray gun's reputation for turning men into eunuchs, there is no button for castration or, indeed, emasculation of any kind.

Stallion presses the one button on the sex-ray gun that isn't marked, and leaves the laboratory, only to immediately encounter two guards. He's frogmarched to the bedchamber of Queen La-Lust, who either somehow anticipated Stallion's arrival or just hates clothes, because she's lying naked on a bed when he enters.

Stallion ignores her terrifying, skull-like grin and does his government-mandated duty, after which La-Lust cackles at his efforts, boasting that her sex-ray gun can "drain sex from a thousand men" and give her "the most powerful orgasm in the galaxy". I don't know how this works or where those thousand men are, but at least it explains the "drain" part of DRAIN/INSERT.

The second La-Lust hits the button, however, the palace begins to explode. Again, not sure why this happens, but I assume the un-labelled button Stallion pressed primed the sex-ray gun for self-destruct, somehow. Amid the chaos, Stallion makes a rush for the hangar and escapes. Safely aboard the Big Thruster, Stallion watches from the bridge as Mondo is engulfed by a fireball and "totally destroyed".

Yep, Sex Vixens from Space ends with genocide, famously the sexiest of war crimes.

It's pretty ironic that Hubbard accused the British government of fascism in destroying the shipment, because Sex Vixens from Space itself displays seriously fascist tendencies. The way it lusts after the Tribe while also being terrified of them, shooting straight for the eradication of their race as the solution to their incursions, is fascist mentality 101. This probably isn't deliberate—I don't think Free Spirit Software had much of a clue what it was doing across this entire project—but it is there.

So, should Sex Vixens from Space have been destroyed? Well, having looked over both sides of the case, I can confidently say everybody involved here was wrong. Destroying a game because it has some boobs in it both wrong and silly, especially when those boobs are as badly drawn as they are in Sex Vixens from Space.

At the same time, Free Spirit Software was wrong to make Sex Vixens from Space in the first place. Not ethically (accidentally advocating for genocide notwithstanding), just in terms of it being a bad idea appallingly executed. Sex Vixens from Space is ugly. It's simplistic. It fails as an adventure game and as a sex game. The actions of UK customs may have been misjudged, but ultimately, nothing of value was lost.

Special commentary on this classic PC Gamer review provided by:

From the archives: The review below appears as originally written, with only minor changes in formatting and screenshots. By Garry Whitta

Beneath a Steel Sky review – PC Gamer #1 (UK, December 1993)

It's here at last. After two years in development and more column inches of enthusiastic preview copy than is healthy, Revolution Software and Dave Gibbons' Beneath A Steel Sky, finally, arrives. And it couldn't be further removed from the Hull-based company's 1992 debut.

After the magic and mythology of Lure Of The Temptress comes an oppressive, futuristic techno-thriller that borrows heavily from the pioneering sci-fi works of Philip K Dick and William Gibson. Take one part of Blade Runner, add a generous helping of Gibbons' own Give Me Liberty graphic novel, season to taste with a little Total Recall, and you've got Beneath A Steel Sky in a nutshell.

Depending on how cynical you are, Beneath A Steel Sky's concept is either a brilliantly conceived piece of science fiction or just a plagiarised compilation of existing sci-fi ideas. Set in the near future, the world government has collapsed and corrupt corporations are now free to take control of the planet.

As the global ecology is ravaged by pollution, the upper-class nouveau riche retreat underground, while the less well-off are forced to live and work in claustrophobic towers high above the surface. Beyond all this is The Gap, a desert outland populated by those who refuse to live in the city—and also home to our hero, Robert Foster, a raincoat-clad hunk propelled into the story after the sinister police kidnap him from his home without explanation and a subsequent helicopter crash leaves him stranded, totally alone, in the higher reaches of the towering city.

But to give away any more of the story here would be to spoil one of the game's strongest aspects. Apart from a few clues delivered during the intro, Beneath A Steel Sky deliberately gives you hardly any information about why you've been kidnapped, what you have to do, or even where you are at the outset. Half the fun is to be had unravelling the mystery and watching the plot slowly unfold as you go.

To be honest, Beneath A Steel Sky is pretty conventional in its approach—despite what you may have heard. As an adventure game there's nothing radically original on offer. It is big though (around 100 locations), and features countless puzzles and a myriad of genuinely interesting characters. A particularly nice touch is your robotic companion, Joey, a decidedly wise-ass robot who, although starting the game as a lowly circuit board, can be plugged into all manner of cybernetic bodies to help you perform helpful tasks. The well-scripted love-hate relationship between the two characters really helps bring them both to life.

Progress in Beneath A Steel Sky is about getting to the bottom of things in more ways than one—starting near the top of the city, you'll have to get to the surface and ultimately underground in order to solve the mystery and crack the main conspiracy. Along the way, there are security forces to avoid, an all-powerful central computer to contend with and numerous sub-plots and red herrings to divert your attention. The game is still basically about using the right object in the right place at the right time, but it's compelling because it's so richly plotted and well thought out from beginning to end. Serious adventure hacks will be in hog heaven.

But the game's not without its faults. The main problem I have is that it doesn't seem to know quite what tone it should set. From what you've heard, and what you're shown during the introduction sequence, you'd have every right to expect a dark, gloomy and atmospheric vision of a sleazy, corrupt future. However, no matter how hard Gibbons' beautifully-realised background artwork and truly excellent accompanying mini-comic try to set the mood, there are too many distracting factors at work here that dilute the effect.

Maybe it's that I just can't take the little on-screen characters seriously enough to care for them or, in the case of the numerous baddies, feel threatened by them. Maybe it's because the music, which should have been as haunting and ominous as the powerful graphics, mostly consists of a series of inappropriate themes which at times sound more like jolly Radio One jingles.

In reality, probably all these things are to blame—the game simply spreads itself too thin, trying to be at once wildly atmospheric, comedic, menacing and tongue-in-cheek.

No matter how close it may come at times, Beneath A Steel Sky never quite manages to immerse you in a brooding, sinister world the way the designers obviously intended. But then again I'm probably just being a jaded bastard. The game may be very pretentious, but should we really take it that seriously? This isn't a movie or a high-brow novel, it's a computer game, for God's sake, and although it may have its failings as a piece of interactive fiction, as an adventure game in the classic LucasArts tradition it's difficult to find fault with.

In fact, it's at least as good—although not as funny—as anything that LucasArts has come up with in the last year. But as for the hyped claim that it's "The World's First Computer-Based Animated Comicbook Adventure," well, I'm still far from convinced. Just take Beneath A Steel Sky for what it is and not for what it may otherwise pretend to be and you'll have a whale of a time.

As I'm making my way through the beginning of two-player co-op adventure Age Twisters alongside the founders of developer Piccolo Studios, I'm told the goal was to create a game that evokes the same feelings as watching a Pixar movie with your child. Now I am admittedly sprogless, but it wasn't difficult to latch onto those similar fuzzy feelings of nostalgia and familial love even as I completed puzzles alongside a man I'd only met minutes prior.

Age Twisters is the studio's attempt at a game like It Takes Two or Split Fiction, albeit much lower on the toughness scale—something which the developer itself admits, instead going for a game that's constantly evolving and different rather than outright difficult. It takes a granddaughter-grandfather duo and slaps a couple of age-bending bracelets on them, allowing each one to age up or down all the way from a young child to a hobbling old bean.

It's a wonderfully novel mechanic—each age has its own portrait, voice acting, and dynamic dialogue that'll shift as you age up or down across the story. Each even comes with their own quirks. I attempted to jump over a gap as an old lady but was unable to, and similarly found myself stuck when trying to jump up and grab onto a ledge as a tiny tyke.

That stuff's mostly flavour, but each age does come with unique abilities that are used during puzzles. Kids can swap back and forth with each other and random objects, useful for traversing large gaps or teleporting through danger. Youths are given the full rowdy power of rock instruments, being able to blast out on drums or guitar to slow down incoming projectiles or enemies. Adults can put their strength into punches to clear paths, while elders have large magnets that can be used to push or pull objects.

I only got to toy around with the first two powers while playing the demo at Gamescom. And while the puzzles were mostly simple in nature, getting to zap around ages at will and coordinate was still lovely and charming. While most of the puzzles we completed required both of us to be the same age, I'm told that later puzzles will require each person using different ages and their respective powers to complete.

Piccolo Studios says it played into stereotypes of each generation somewhat when creating these abilities, all in the name of humour of course. While the story is ultimately one of loss—it's all about figuring out what happened to the granddaughter's mother—it's one about trying to bridge the gap between generations. As the developer puts it to me, it's about remembering being young while understanding what it means to get older.

It all sounds well and good, and while I wasn't completely sold on the story, dialogue, or characters in my brief time with the demo, I think the puzzles and being able to shoot the shit alongside a loved one for a few hours will do plenty of the heavy lifting in Age Twisters. Its approachability feels like a great one for families to try together, though I'd imagine I'll also have a lovely time journeying through the game alongside my partner or a good pal.

Age Twisters is set to release on Steam in 2027.

In case you were wondering what Kintsugiyama's upcoming open world survival multiplayer game was all about, Jeff Kaplan has sat down and gone through 213 rapid-fire questions via an interview with MinnMax and boy, do I know a lot about cowboys in California now.

For those who don't know The Legend of California is Kaplan's next big game, set in gold-rush-era California (1849-ish). It's an open world survival game (not really a sim, to be clear) which is also definitely "not an MMO" but is "definitely an FPS". So that should clear it up.

It's an open sandbox world where you can do whatever you think a cowboy should be doing, whether that be trading with fellow players, fishing, mining, riding around on your horse, becoming an unofficial sheriff, or just tinkering around with your ranch, which you can set up anywhere and then build on.

There'll also be private servers, and "yes you can customise your server to be PvE only," according to Kaplan. Which is helpful, because it sounds like anything goes on the 100-player public servers. Players can kill each other or their horses, so no one's safe. The only exception to the violence seems to be buildings: "Players cannot destroy each others' stuff, unfortunately." Kaplan says unfortunately because, as he keenly reminds everyone, "I'm a Rust player so I like destroying other people's stuff."

To keep things fresh "server resets are going to happen every month," Kaplan explains. "California retains its shape, but the points of interest that we call 'strongholds', they move around. Company and ranch progress resets, and your gear resets, but any unlocks are persistent."

As for things that Kaplan wishes were in The Legend of California, there's a long list. Apparently, holiday events, pets, and horse breeding are all on the table for future patches. Toys to life (think Spyro and friends) are even on the table, there's just one small hitch: "I would love that but we're cheap and poor, so not at launch."

It sounds like there'll be plenty of time for all these wonderful features to make their way into the game, as Kaplan believes "we could make this game to infinity, this is the dream game." But again there's a catch: "We will be supporting the game with live updates, but live service has a bad connotation so I'll act like it's not live service for now." It's not like any of this is pressing news, though. The Legend of California apparently has "at least two more alphas" until it's ready for early access, and there's no indication of exactly how long that'll take.

Crunch the incessant offness of Twin Peaks into a surprisingly beefy collection of point-and-click puzzle adventures and you've got Rusty Lake: Twisted tales of familial obligation and tradition unfolding in a backcountry idyll possessed by something better left unseen and unspoken. Imagine if ol' Eddie Allen P. had been born a couple centuries later and took up game development, and you'll have a pretty good idea of the vibe. I've been looking forward to the latest addition to the series, Servant of the Lake, for quite some time now, and now that it's out I'm happy to say that it is very good.

Servant of the Lake is something of a slow burn—I've been playing through it over the last four nights, and the first half of the game was suitably weird but more subdued than I expected. But once it starts rolling, the Vanderboom family at the center of the tale does not hold back.

If you're familiar with Rusty Lake, Servant of the Lake is 100% in keeping with that tradition. It feels a little less forcefully bizarre than some other games in the series, and with a greater emphasis on mystery than horror. One thing that struck me is the game's audio: The voice work is great but less disconnected from humanity than I remember from previous games, and the soundtrack is actually quite pleasant, particularly as the game progresses. It's all still unsettling, but I wonder if Rusty Lake (which is also the name of the development team) wanted to avoid distracting from the story too much, for… reasons.

Even so, weird is the Rusty Lake playbook and that's definitely still the case. Servant of the Lake is ostensibly about signing on for a three-day gig as a servant in support of a big family reunion, but the work involved is not your everyday household drudgery. I fed a man porridge infested with houseflies, then cut off a chunk of his ear while shaving him, both of which he seemed oddly okay with—and this was on my first morning.

Later on I tried to kill a guy, and then watched a lady swallow a soul. What a weekend!

Puzzles in Servant of the Lake are fairly lightweight, and if you do get hung up (as I did, once) there's plenty of help to be had from the community and the developers themselves, who have posted a full walkthrough. It's also very linear: There are moments where it seems like you have a choice in matters, but your fate is predetermined so you don't need to agonize over, say, the soup. (You'll figure it out.)

Like other Rusty Lake games, what Servant of the Lake offers in place of freedom is secrets: The game is filled with them, and while they're not essential to the experience, they do add to the ambiance, sometimes with references to previous games in the series. There's a lot to dig into, and fortunately all chapters are replayable in any order once the game is finished, so it's easy to go back and dig for what you missed.

I'm also happy to see that Servant of the Lake is making a good impression on other Rusty Lake fans. Less than a week after release, it holds an "overwhelmingly positive" rating on Steam across more than 4,500 reviews. Rusty Lake co-founder Robin Ras said it was "a great launch," on par with the release of 2022's The Past Within, the studio's most successful game to date.

"Steam is our biggest platform and had a big peak of 28,000 concurrent users on the first day," Ras told me. " It seems a lot of fans wanted to play the game immediately. We already have more than 4,000 reviews, with an average of 98%."

As for what comes next, Ras said the team has "plenty of ideas" for the future, and it's also currently helping with another dark adventure, Falling Apart, that it's publishing through the studio's Second Maze label. "But first, we will focus a bit more on Servant of the Lake, because there’s more to it than people might think. :)"

I assume the smile is at least partly meant to be ominous.

Servant of the Lake is available now on Steam with a 25% launch discount, putting it at $6/£6/6€ until August 27. If you'd like to get a taste before you take a big bite, there;'s also a free demo.

Have you ever said to yourself, 'If I was rich I'd get Looking Glass Studios back together and have them make a proper goddamn Thief sequel!'? Or, you know, whatever game gets you really wound up about such things. It's a pleasant fantasy, but not something that ever actually happens—except, apparently, in the case of the recently announced Thimbleweed Park 2.

In a new interview with Bloomberg, Thimbleweed Park creator Ron Gilbert said he didn't want to work with a conventional publisher because his experiences with them haven't been entirely great.

"I don’t mind the publisher earning back their money," Gilbert said. "It’s just that once they have earned back their money and become whole, they still want the majority of the money. Or there are really goofy terms, like you don’t make anything unless it’s a major hit. I always felt that was unfair."

That was the case when Gilbert first expressed interest in doing Thimbleweed Park 2: Publishers were interested but their terms weren't acceptable. Gilbert also didn't want to do another Kickstarter. That left the process kind of stuck, until a friend told Gilbert he knew "a wealthy outsider" who was a big fan of adventure games, and Thimbleweed Park in particular.

Gilbert was dubious, but eventually made contact with the purported wealthy benefactor, who turned out to be an actual wealthy benefactor. Gilbert put together a "very realistic" budget for Thimbleweed Park 2, higher than the cost of the original (which the report says cost just over $1 million), and the as-yet-anonymous rich guy threw the thumbs up on what Gilbert said is a far better deal than he'd get from any publisher: "This deal is a lot more fair in that he gets whole very quickly, and then it’s a reasonable split."

The audience for point-and-click adventures is relatively niche, but those who like them—as this story shows—tend to like them a lot. Adventures also tend to have a longer tail than some genres, at least in part because they're not dependent on cutting edge technology: Many of the best of them, Thimbleweed Park included, look (and, frankly, play) like they were made 20 or 30 years ago.

And Thimbleweed Park is still out there earning, too. "We’re almost 10 years from release and that game still sells," Gilbert said. "That tells me that there is an audience for that game and games like this."

Thimbleweed Park 2, neither a sequel nor a prequel, is currently expected to be out in early 2028.

Back in 2024, Immortality creator Sam Barlow teased a new thing codenamed Project C. During today's Kinetic Publishing Showcase, it was finally unveiled as Precognition, a sci-fi thriller being developed in a collaboration between Barlow's Half Mermaid Productions and horror director (and son of David) Brandon Cronenberg.

Precognition will set players off as Diana, a woman who receives an experimental brain implant that gives her visions of the future. But in the fine tradition of Cassandra and quantum mechanics, it's not all upside: By exploring her visions and committing them to present-day memory, Diana changes the future she's seen.

"We’ve really been trying to test the limits of non-linear storytelling, focusing on how the game feels to play, while encouraging player agency and freedom," Barlow said. "We’ve pushed ourselves even harder with Precognition by bringing the feel of investigation and mystery games into a world of cause-and-effect, with a story that spins out as a consequence of your choices."

Barlow opted to partner with Cronenberg on the new game because he wants it to be "a very authentic sci-fi horror experience," and Cronenberg—who's played Barlow's previous games Immortality and Her Story—understood the assignment.

"The films I make tend to be subjective and experiential, with the horror emerging as one person’s perspective of the world warps around them," Cronenberg said. "The games that Sam and the team have made over the years are subjective experiences by their very nature—no two people will have the same experience with them. So it’s the perfect place to explore these themes further."

Precognition "follows in the footsteps of Immortality," the announcement promises, with a blend of FMV cinematics, non-linear storytelling, and an emphasis on player freedom. That sets a very high bar to clear: Immortality earned a nearly unheard-of 95% score in our review as "Sam Barlow's best, most thought-provoking game yet." Score aside, that accolade itself is no small feat given that its predecessors, Telling Lies and Her Story, are genuine bangers themselves.

Whether Precognition will up the ante as Immorality did remains to be seen, and this is the bad news for fans of Barlow's games: It's currently expected to be out in spring 2028. For now, you can throw it on your wishlist pile on Steam.

Big Walk is a new co-op-only adventure from the creators of Untitled Goose Game. Chris Livingston has been playing it and he's having an absolute gas. It's a loosely structured open world affair starring quaint pointy-nosed folk that you simply have to play with friends.

And I mean that literally: it's impossible to get very far in Big Walk alone. You can load into the open world on your own, but since all puzzles require a modicum of collaboration, it's pointless to do so. Unless you just want to take in the scenery.

But does Big Walk have matchmaking that will pair you up with a gaggle of strangers? The answer is no. Big Walk doesn't have matchmaking. To play Big Walk, you'll need to make sure in advance that you have friends who want to play it.

To play Big Walk you'll need to either host a game or join someone else's game. The latter can be done via a session code shared with you by the host. This is the only way to join up with friends on PS5 and Nintendo Switch 2.

Alternatively, you can join a session via your in-game friends list, which draws from your Steam friends. This will let you jump right in without a code, providing there's space in the session.

If you've been looking forward to Big Walk but none of your friends are interested, that puts you in a rough position. But remember: the internet exists, and for the most part it's still populated by real breathing people. It could be worth hitting up the Big Walk subreddit where there's already a dedicated thread for matching up, or the PC Gamer forums.

Released in 2017, Thimbleweed Park is a LucasArts-style point-and-click adventure about murder in a small town, headed up by LucasArts veterans Ron Gilbert and Gary Winnick. All that LucasArts pedigree added up to an 84% score in our review, on the strength of "challenging puzzles, oddball characters, and an intriguing, mystery-laden plot"—and of course the familiar visual style that immediately conjures thoughts of Monkey Island, Day of the Tentacle, and Zak McCracken.

It's taken a decade (almost a decade, anyway, and it will be more than that when it happens) but a sequel is finally happening. Gilbert revealed on his Grumpy Gamer blog that Thimbleweed Park 2 is now in early development, and it's set to launch in early 2028. People from the original Thimbleweed Park dev team including Mark Ferrari, Gary Winnick, David Fox, Octavi Navarro, and Robert Megone are returning to the new project, and it will be available for Windows, Mac, and Linux, on both Steam and GOG.

Agents Ray and Reyes, the leads of the original game, are also back for the new game—and so is murder. Thimbleweed Park 2 as a "spoof of a classic whodunit" inside the Edmund Mansion, where everyone's a suspect except the butler, who for once did not do it.

Also, interestingly, it's not really a sequel or a prequel: "It's more Thimbleweed Park and just as weird." And, again, the dead body is the least of your problems.

This is a pretty big deal, especially for fans of adventure games. Gilbert and Winnick headed up development of a slew of LucasArts point-and-clickers in the late 1980s and early '90s that made the company one of the foremost studios of the era, and more of that is always welcome. Ironically, Gilbert's own enthusiasm for the genre seemed to have faded in recent years: He said in 2025 that he wasn't really interested in making more 2D adventure games, describing them as "one of those things that when we're all dead, it probably won't be the kind of thing that survives."

I'm inclined to disagree: I would never challenge Gilbert's understanding of the genre he helped popularize, but Wadjet Eye has been making memorable adventures for years, most recently the outstanding Old Skies, and games like Scarlet Deer Inn and The Drifter have also been well received.

Another notable example is the Gilbert-led Return to Monkey Island, released in 2022, which earned a whopping 92% review score—and you better believe we don't hand out numbers like that every day. There's no way of knowing how much of that influenced Gilbert's decision to return to Thimbleweed Park, if at all, but regardless I'm glad it's happening.

There's not much to see yet, but as he did with the original game, Gilbert is going to start a Thimbleweed Park 2 dev blog to keep everyone up to date on how it's going. It's also up for wishlisting now on Steam.

Myst was a massive success: Not only was it the best-selling PC videogame of all time for years, it helped usher in the CD-ROM era, opening the door to expansive new technologies and previously unseen levels of fidelity in gaming. In 1993, Myst was nothing short of a revelation.

The fortunes of Myst, and developer Cyan Worlds, have waned since then. The most recent game in the series, Myst 5: End of Ages, came out in 2005 and was reasonably well received but not a big seller; Cyan, after years of financial struggles, has moved onto Myst-like games including Firmament and Obduction, both of them reliant on crowdfunding.

The studio laid off "roughly half" its staff in 2025, leading PC Gamer's Justin Wagner to write that "it's galling to see a historic indie like Cyan Worlds hit so hard" by the brutal, ongoing contraction of the game industry. Justin sure wasn't wrong about that, but some folks are finding this even more galling: Over the weekend Cyan released a teaser for a new Myst game, codenamed Project Anglerfish, which looks really good—and then said it's not in development because apparently publishers aren't interested.

Cyan said it spent about four months developing a prototype for the game in 2025, which was "purpose-built for publisher-eyes only," as was the teaser video. "For a variety of reasons, this project couldn’t move forward at the time, BUT we’re still proud of the work the team did—so we’re sharing the teaser for the prototype with you all now."

That's definitely a Myst game alright, although I don't recall ol' Atrus being quite as high-strung and shouty as the agitated longhair here. As a lapsed fan of the series, I think it looks great, and it's disappointing that this video doesn't herald the coming of a new game, but is instead just a look at what might have been.

Judging by reactions on Bluesky, I'm far from the only one who thinks so.

i'm heartbroken. this looks so good. this industry, man

— @robohipster.bsky.social (@robohipster.bsky.social.bsky.social) 2026-07-27T19:26:42.257Z

I am now really sad that I have seen this, because this prototype looks like it would have been damn awesome if it was picked up and made into a full game.

— @chrisfratz.bsky.social (@chrisfratz.bsky.social.bsky.social) 2026-07-27T19:26:42.079Z

This is where a buttload of people lose their shit and demand/request/beg you to finish development coz it looks baller af :3

— @thatpandayouknow.bsky.social (@thatpandayouknow.bsky.social.bsky.social) 2026-07-27T19:26:41.977Z

It hurts my soul that this never saw the light of day.Actually looks incredible.

— @magindoe.bsky.social (@magindoe.bsky.social.bsky.social) 2026-07-27T19:26:42.175Z

At the same time, it's not hard to understand why publishers might be reluctant to back the money truck up to a new Myst game. Myst faded away for a reason, and there's a looming gulf between a strong hit of nostalgia delivered by a three-minute video and the reality of playing old school adventure games with deliberately obtuse puzzles—and, more to the point, paying for the privilege. Is there really a big demand for Myst's brand of storytelling these days?

What really vexes me, though, is that there might be. The audience for a new Myst game might be small (at least compared to, say, Fortnite or Roblox) but it's also very dedicated and willing to chuck money at what it wants. In other words, it seems like an ideal candidate for a crowdfunding campaign—yet Cyan isn't pursuing one. I have to wonder why that is, because the studio's previous games, Obduction and Firmament, were both Kickstarter successes, drawing in well over $1 million each.

A new Myst game would almost certainly do even bigger numbers on the weight of the name alone: In 2018, Cyan ran a Kickstarter for the Myst 25th Anniversary Collection and pulled in more than $2.8 million. People like their Myst, and people want their Myst.

And who knows? Maybe, eventually, they'll get their Myst. It might be cynical but I find myself wondering if this little showcase is perhaps another way to gauge interest ahead of a possible campaign for a new Myst game—a non-teaser that's actually a real teaser for a game that's not in active development right now but who's to say what happens in a month? It's a bit conspiratorial, sure, but I like to think of it more as hopeful: You just gotta believe, even if it takes some convoluted thinking to get there.

H. R. Giger's biomechanical nightmares have inspired plenty of videogames. If we go way back, his work was repurposed for baffling puzzle adventure Dark Seed, and more recently there was the fleshy horror of Scorn. Tormentum: Dark Sorrow was more in the vein of the former than the latter, a point-and-click adventure that took Giger's stylings (and those of Zdzisław Beksiński too) as inspiration for its hand-painted horrors.

A full 11 years after its release, and after eight years of development, Tormentum finally has a sequel. Tormentum 2 is a standalone game though, just one in a similar style, which is to say that it's full of bones and alien faces and naked people who are embedded in walls.

In Tormentum 2 you're trapped inside a simulated world that's got out of hand, the supposedly digital characters within suddenly out of control and talking about gods from distant places. You have to cross the islands that make up this world, solving puzzles as you go, and working your way toward one of multiple endings.

Tormentum 2 is currently available for 15% off on Steam, where there's also a demo if you want to give it a try before you buy. The original, Tormentum: Dark Sorrow, is also on sale for 67% off.

GOG's Summer Sale is winding down, but there's one more freebie you can grab before it's over. Silence, the 2016 point-and-click adventure from Daedalic, is yours for the taking until Friday.

I'll be blunt: I did not care for Silence. I quite like Daedalic adventures in general, and Silence certainly looked the part, with lush hand-drawn graphics and the promise of a story worth paying attention to.

But the pieces just didn't come together for me: I found the main character extremely unlikable, the supporting cast irrelevant and empty, and the story disjointed and utterly forgettable. Compared to, say, The Night of the Rabbit, Harvey's New Eyes, Memoria, and even the original Deponia, which I maintain is a very funny game, Silence felt particularly weak.

I'm kind of an outlier on that, though. Silence was generally well-reviewed by sites I didn't work for at the time, and holds a very respectable 75/100 aggregate rating on Metacritic. GOG users come in around the same mark, awarding a 3.9/5 overall score, but even that's not bad, really—just not especially great.

The big but, though, which I do like, is a point I've already covered: It's free. Just pop around to GOG, click the button, and have a nice day. If you don't like it, well hey, it cost you nothing. And if you do like it? Still zero cost, and you got a good game out of it. That's a win in my books.

The Silence giveaway, as noted, is part of GOG's Summer Sale, which is also offering the Silence soundtrack for just 29 cents, 90% off the regular price. The music by composer Tilo Alpermann is actually quite good, so consider that a recommendation from me.

And since we're on the topic, you can also score deep discounts on most of Daedalic's other stuff in the sale, including The Night of the Rabbit, Memoria, Harvey's New Eyes, Chains of Satinav, Deponia, and the Silence predecessor The Whispered World (Silence was initially subtitled The Whispered World 2, although that was dropped prior to release for some reason) for $2 each, 90% off the regular price. The GOG Summer Sale is on until July 9.

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.

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've said it before and I'll say it again: cutscenes are the worst. There I am, sitting down to play a game, ready to tap some keys and wiggle some thumbsticks and click my mouse—when suddenly the game I'm playing decides it's actually a movie and all I can do for the next few minutes is watch.

You might think I'm too fidgety, too impatient, or that I simply don't have the attention span to sit there doing nothing while a cutscene plays. But you'd be wrong! It's the cutscenes that are the problem. They simply suck.

Except when they don't suck, of course, like in Dave the Diver, which is the only game I can remember playing where I was left wishing there were more cutscenes instead of zero cutscenes. Dave the Diver's cutscenes were so energetic, so fantastically animated, so surprising and funny and occasionally kinda horny that I loved every one of them and wished there were more.

Well, I got my wish. For the past week or so I've been playing Dave the Diver's new DLC, In the Jungle, which is not only completely rad but has some amazing cutscenes that are somehow even more wild, and more horny, than the cutscenes in the base game.

Rather than watching them, I'd urge you to actually play the DLC and discover them for yourself—but I'm not your boss, so sure, go and have a look below a few cutscenes I've selected from Dave's new adventure. First up, check out what a skeptical villager thought of the alligator tail meal Bancho cooked up for her:

I mean… Wow. That lady definitely had a massive orgasm while tasting that dish, right? It's not subtle, it's not subtext, that food was so good she straight-up nutted. That's not the only horny cutscene in Dave the Diver: In the Jungle, but it's definitely the horniest. It also made me realize I haven't really had a great meal in a long time. Maybe I need to try some new restaurants.

Aside from people climaxing while eating, there's a new character, Muna, sort of a gadget-maker who enjoys her work to an extremely high degree. From time to time Dave will have to approach her about upgrading his "jungle gun," which he uses to assassinate fish. Muna really dives into her work and her scenes are all incredibly animated and fun. Here's just one of several weapon upgrade scenes:

Dave's little shiver at the end. Do you think he… nah.

There are lots more excellent cutscenes in the DLC, which is surprisingly hefty for just a $10 price tag. There are naturally several scenes of Bancho dramatically enhancing recipes, there's a lovely boat ride scene at the start, a great car chase scene in the middle, and a rather dramatic cutscene near the end—but I won't show you any of those. I don't want to spoil any more than I have to!

OK, fine, here's one more of my favorites. I won't give you the context, all I'll say is you won't be able to guess what it signifies without playing the DLC, yet it makes perfect sense in the game itself. Enjoy!

Before I explain to you why Scarlet Deer Inn is one of my most anticipated games of this year, I urge you to download the demo on Steam and play it for yourself. It's hard to describe why I'm so excited by it without spoiling the very specific moment I realised it had serious juice, so I highly recommend you take 20 minutes to give it a try.

Alright, you've been warned. Scarlet Deer Inn is a side-scrolling adventure platformer created by Czech husband-and-wife team Attu games, distinguished from all the other games of its ilk by having an "embroidered" art style. This description is not entirely accurate. The backgrounds are actually hand-painted. But the characters—and every frame of their animation—have been created with a sewing machine rather than drawn, then scanned into the digital realm.

This is neat. But it also conjures images of a specific kind of experience. We're in the domain of cosy games, something that's warm, gentle, funny, maybe a little bit twee. Scarlet Deer Inn sounds like the kind of game you might show to your nanna in an attempt to convince her that you're growing up right.

And there are elements of that to it. The introduction to protagonist Elise presents you with an idyllic portrayal of medieval life. Rolling fields, sun-dappled woodlands, villagers chewing over the local gossip. It's a pleasant space to roam around. It's a surprisingly funny game, too. Not in a Monkey Island way, squeezing jokes into every possible crevice, but in a way that emerges naturally from the characters and their situations.

I enjoyed all of this in isolation. But then, eventually, comes the turn. At a certain point, it becomes clear that Scarlet Deer Inn is a game with teeth. And bones, and…other things. It's one of the more effective dramatic twists I've encountered in a game for a while, and it happens very early on, which makes me very curious about what else the game might have in store.

As you can probably tell, I was impressed by it, and have been looking forward to getting my hands on the full game for a while. Naturally, then, I was thrilled to see Attu announce a release date that's fairly imminent—July 17.

There's also a new trailer for the game that you can watch above, though again, I'd recommend downloading and playing the demo instead, as the trailer gives a fair amount away. I know there's an absolute avalanche of games headed our way in the next couple of months, but I'm confident that Scarlet Deer Inn will prove worthy of your attention.

Thanks to the Steam Release Bot on Bluesky, I am now aware of Kryonull, a game that bums me the hell out. Not only were a majority of its assets AI-generated, but the visual novel is being sold on Steam for a ludicrous $100 US, or £90 in the UK.

Kryonull is a particular bummer because its core idea is actually quite interesting, and the one thing about it that isn't AI generated⁠—at least if you take its disclosure at face value⁠—is the script. The visual novel's plot sounds like a bit of hard sci-fi goodness: A small, manned mission to Europa has to make snap decisions with major consequences as it makes first contact with something under the ice.

That's rad. Unfortunately, it all falls apart from there. Under the AI-Generated Content Disclosure section of the store page, developer NovelkaGames offers the following whammy: "All images and voices in the game, as well as on the store page, were generated using AI." AI slop and wasted potential⁠—often in the same project⁠—are far from unique on Steam. What makes Kryonull particularly repulsive is that price tag.

Kryonull is translated in English and Russian, perhaps providing an indication to its country of origin. But according to SteamDB, its price in rubles still converts to $53 US. I don't think I'd want to exchange any money for an AI-generated game, but 50 bucks is well into "I'm insulted by the suggestion" territory⁠. There's no benefit of the doubt to make Kryonull make sense.

As it stands, Kryonull gets to be an unfortunate example of the river of effluence coming out of Steam, the price of it being an open platform where anyone can share their game. Increasingly more open-ish, given Valve's compromises with payment processors and occasional unforced, confounding prudishness.

Kryonull did remind me of two, much better games you should check out instead: South Scrimshaw Part One, and Water Womb World. Both are experimental, short, sci-fi games like what Kryonull promises, but with actual effort and craft put into them.

South Scrimshaw is a Planet Earth-style nature documentary about whales on an alien planet, and I've always let myself overlook its AI-generated voiceovers on account of its brilliant writing, hand-drawn visuals, and the fact that its solo developer made it while working a day job as a dishwasher.

Water Womb World is a surreal horror game about a religious fanatic looking for proof of God at the bottom of the ocean. I haven't played it yet, but MandaloreGaming's review on YouTube got me to buy it. The former game is completely free, while the latter is just two bucks.

The Wolf Among Us 2 has been in the oven for a while. Either seven years—if you trace its start back to its announcement in 2019—or 12, if you go by the cliffhanger ending of The Wolf Among Us 1's final episode, which released in 2014.

Fans have been hanging on the telephone for news for a long, long time whichever way you slice it, so this year's Summer Game Fest announcement that we'd finally get the new chapter in Bigby Wolf's adventures next year was a pretty big deal. But a question remains: will The Wolf Among Us 2 hew to the original series' episodic release format? One last series of little waits after our years-long big wait?

A new interview with Telltale CEO Jamie Ottilie and PM Studio (The Wolf Among Us 2's co-publisher) CEO Michael Yum by GamesIndustry.biz gives us our best hint yet, and it sure sounds to me like we're gonna get all of the game at once.

"Publishing-wise, defending multiple release dates... We would probably approach it like the modern streaming model, where you drop all the episodes at the same time," said Ottilie. Though he does admit that Telltale likes the episodic model "philosophically".

Yum is more circumspect, but only very slightly: "We live in a Netflix era. People can't wait. We should probably give the people what they want all in one go." It sounds like something would have to come up for Telltale not to drop The Wolf Among Us 2 all at once—"It's whatever makes sense at the time. If there's a time crunch and we can't wait, we can pivot. I wouldn't say there's a definitive answer to this, but we'll try something that gives everyone something right off the bat."

After such a long wait, it's probably best not to make fans endure another, arbitrary series of waits right at the final stretch, but I do wonder just how terrible it'd be to get the long-awaited sequel in dribs and drabs. Dispatch's episodic structure (which had much shorter waits between episodes than the Telltale of old) went down a treat, and while Yum and Ottilie gesture at modern streaming's 'drop it all at once' model, it's not like there aren't well-loved exceptions to that rule.

When is a game about fishing not about fishing? When it's About Fishing, of course. The unsettling angling sim was revealed during 2025's PC Gaming Show: Most Wanted (hey, that's us!) and I absolutely loved it.

During tonight's PC Gaming Show, we got a closer look at how About Fishing's fishing mechanics actually work, and also peeked below the surface into the murky waters that hide many secrets—like mermaids.

Different lures and baits can be used to help your hook skim across the surface of the water or delve deep into lakes, rivers, and the ocean. It looks like you play as the hook itself, which is a pretty nifty mechanic. I love the way it lets you get up close and personal with the fish you're about to rip from their world. But, as I wrote above, there's more to this experience than fishing.

About Fishing strips away the whimsy of rod and bait and offers up a deeply unsettling PS1-looking (complimentary) tale. It's got a similar vibe to the Lovecraftian Dredge, only here you play as a woman in a bright yellow raincoat instead of a boat. A man, perhaps her father or mentor, is incarcerated, his orange jumpsuit and her coat contrasting with the otherworldly greens of the rest of the environment.

We also get a glimpse of people in a deliciously blue church, talking about how "I don't think she'll stop fishing," and we get some shots of our protagonist wandering about the town, popping to the shops to buy supplies or looking in her desk, fishing rod slung over her shoulder the whole time. There's a mystery to uncover here, one cast of the line at a time.

If you want to know more, you can download the About Fishing demo on Steam, out now.

Check out everything revealed at the PC Gaming Show.

"Issy, I love the PC Gaming Show, but I get so excited about all the games that I want to play them right now! I don't want to wait months for them to come out." I hear you, dear reader. I hear you. I have the same problem, and I see the games even before you do. As a show of good faith, we bring you a new live-action trailer for Dave the Diver's In the Jungle DLC, which launches in just 11 days. Don't say we never treat you.

I'm a big fan of mixed media. I adored Immortality, and I've even got a soft spot for those cut scenes in the older Need For Speed games. So, it'll be no surprise to anyone that I love this new trailer for the In the Jungle DLC, launching June 18.

It's got the signature humour of Dave the Diver, and in it, we see Dave and the gang beating the hell out of a giant crocodile (alligator? I never could tell the difference) that's been terrorizing a tropical village nestled deep in the jungle. For some reason, the wildlife in the area has been going berserk.

But enough with the whimsy, you're here for games and by golly we give you games. There's a new look at what you'll actually be getting up to in the wilderness. Firstly, the new Utara Lake, with mangrove trees and loads of tropical fish. There are also areas with sunken ruins and nasty monsters to best. One has bigger jaws than that crocogator, and another is a viscous-looking fish that does a devastating spin attack. You don't want to get caught by that.

We also see more of the activities we'll be doing on land. There's photography, and a little green critter that looks a lot like Om Nom from Cut the Rope (remember the good old days when mobile games could be bought with a one-off payment?), a drumming rhythm game, and you'll also have to flee from a massive boar. There's even some time management and relationship building à la Stardew Valley.

You can wishlist the In the Jungle DLC on Steam, and if you've not played the base game, you should really give it a go—we gave it 91/100 in our review.

Check out everything revealed at the PC Gaming Show.

Getting a lot of questions about ghosts already answered by the name There Are No Ghosts at the Grand. The musical decorating game set in a haunted English seaside town (which is all of them, really) just unveiled a new trailer and character at the PC Gaming Show. I bet no one had a reggae-singing cop on their bingo card. We knew about the talking cat already, though, so I guess this isn't surprising.

Meet Adam, a very Gen-Z police officer whose view of the force has been shaped by Hollywood movies rather than reality, so he seems pretty happy that you've come along to uncover the mysteries of the sleepy Kingswood on Sea. Too bad he's going to die in 30 days, I wonder if there's anything you can do about that? He's voiced by Josh Waters Rudge of reggae-punk band The Skints, and his song in the game is pretty catchy.

I played a demo a few months ago and it seems every character likes to burst into song which, in my humble opinion, more NPCs should do. The decorating mechanic is fun enough, but it's the exploration and mystery that really piqued my interest. This new trailer reveals far more than I got hands on with, too.

There's a whole investigative process that involves you gathering clues and working on Adam's crime board to help figure out how and why your father, the previous owner of the Grand hotel, disappeared. You'll take a boat out to sea, exploring nearby islands and bunkers—I spent a very spooky night in one reliving fragments of the past. You'll also be fighting weird spider-like creatures—gross—and blasting old signs off the pier. There's a lot more action than I saw in the demo, so expect a mix of genres when the full game comes out later this year.

If you want to dip your toes into this weird musical adventure, there's a Steam demo out now that you can try—wishlist There Are No Ghosts at the Grand while you're there.

Check out everything revealed at the PC Gaming Show.

The next class coming to Warhammer 40,000: Darktide is none other than the cog boys: the Skitarii, members of the Adeptus Machanicus. It'll be available for players to check out pretty soon on June 23, but until then we've got a fresh trailer for you to gaze at courtesy of the PC Gaming Show.

The trailer is exactly what you'd expect to see, a bunch of Skitarii blasting and beating their way through grunts and looking sick as hell doing so. One of our resident 40k enjoyers Sean Martin already discussed what makes this class so special: "you can literally construct this class, choosing material types, augment patterns, and even apparently tweaking voice modulation—we'll no longer have to buy helmets just to achieve that electronic vox quality."

You'll also get a unique range of armaments including, arc weapons, phosphor blasters, galvanic rifles, and transonic blades. Its deluxe edition will also give you instant access to a deluxe class outfit, unique deluxe servo skull skin, six deluxe weapon skins, and a deluxe portrait frame.

When asked before, "Why Skitarii?" Fatshark has explained: "We have known from the start that we wanted to add some form of playable Adeptus Mechanicus presence to the game. We also know that players really resonate with Adeptus Mechanicus, our Tech-Priest Hadron Omega-7-7 being a good example.

"Many of you might ask why Skitarii, and not the more recognisable Tech-Priest? For us this really came down to two things. The first being that Tech-Priests don’t really operate on the strike team level of Darktide’s warband. The Skitarii are a better fit. They are the frontline warriors of the Adeptus Mechanicus, and we knew we could weave them into the scope and narrative of the game way better."

Fatshark goes on to explain how the Skitarii are also not widely explored in videogames and so the devs saw this as an opportunity to "delve deeper" into this lore. "The Skitarii that you will play in the game are called 'Alpha Primus', and they are a bit different from the standard Skitarii that you see go to war under the banner of the Adeptus Mechanicus in bigger battles. These specialist warriors can operate with more autonomy, and are more suited to the gameplay experience of Darktide."

If all of this sounds like it's up your street then you can wishlist this class right now on Steam in preparation for its launch in a few weeks.

Check out everything revealed at the PC Gaming Show.

I guess Sea of Thieves is a pirate sim all about amassing treasure, griefing, and getting griefed, but I've always treated it like a hangout tool where I can play the hurdy-gurdy, get smashed, and stumble into a shark's mouth. As was announced at today's Xbox Games Showcase, developer Rare is catering to those sorts of casual sensibilities with a suite of new tools that might call to mind Fortnite, Warcraft 3, or even Roblox.

A new trailer announced "Custom Seas," a free update which lets players make their own modes, spawn in objects, and more. Examples of modes made in the new creator included Rowboat Royale, a cannoneering deathmatch mode played on the back of small rowboats, and Skeleton Snipe Hunt, a competitive sharpshooting minigame. It's hard to say how in-depth the tools will be, but it sounds like an interesting way to inject more gaminess into the decidedly freeform nautical sandbox.

The trailer also noted you can make a dedicated space to "hang out," presumably free from the dangers of monster attacks and PvP, though it's hard to say how different that will feel from the Safer Seas update which already provided a PvE-only mode. If nothing else, this continues a trend of Rare adding more and more customizability to the game—that's very in right now!

To that end, this update will also bring what sounds like a suite of machinima creation features. Inviting players to "create a cinematic masterpiece," the trailer showed some snippets of "new camera tools" which seemed ripe for making home movies on the high seas.

If this all intrigues you, you won't be waiting long; custom seas are slated to release June 18.

The Wolf Among Us was one of Telltale's most loved games, and when the studio returned to life under new management in 2019, one of the first things it did was announce that The Wolf Among Us 2 is happening.

And then we waited, and waited, and waited some more: A 2024 promise that yes, the game is still in development, was the most recent update on the situation—until now.

A new trailer for The Wolf Among Us 2 appeared at today's Summer Game Fest showcase, giving us a slight but pleasantly fresh look at Bigby's upcoming adventure, and some of the characters (and headaches) he'll face as he investigates a new mystery: "Homicide. Six total so far. Each case husband and wife found shredded. People are dying. Some monster is out there. Word around the precinct is you're the guy to call."

The wait for The Wolf Among Us 2 has been unexpectedly long. and occasionally peppered with rumors that the whole thing had been cancelled. As PC Gamer's Harvey Randall noted in 2024, "to say that The Wolf Among Us 2 has had a troubled development would be like saying that a highway pile up has had a mild impact on traffic." It was actually meant to be out in 2018, a full eight years ago, but Telltale's closure later that same year obviously had an impact on that.

Telltale has also finally committed to a release target, albeit one that's not very specific: 2027! Yeah, that's it. The good news for fans is that there's something closer to the moment: The Wolf Among Us Remastered is also in the pipe, and it's set to come out for the 2026 holiday season.

As up and down as I can be with Remedy games, I maintain that it's a studio to be treasured. Nobody is taking creative swings at its scale outside of Kojima, and Control Resonant may be its hardest swing ever. It takes guts to ditch the one throughline that all Remedy games shared—prominet primary pistols—and telekinetically chuck it out the window.

Resonant is, indeed, a character action game. It's got hot-swappable weapons, combos, air juggles, and a dizzying collection of skill trees. Dylan Faden's melee moveset—powered by a shapeshifting weapon called the Abberant—falls somewhere on the Devil May Cry or Platinum spectrum. It plays nothing like the first Control, a fact that somewhat worried me going into a hands-on demo in Los Angeles earlier this week. The new direction is fun, but will it still feel like Control?

For a while, not so much.

The 2-hour demo opened in the first act, with Dylan waking up to an unmitigated disaster—the Oldest House lockdown has broken and chaos has spilled onto the streets of Manhattan. He meets an FBC contact, Zoe, who initially wants to put him in cuffs and haul him back to his cell. But he proves his worth, and soon Zoe is directing Dylan to problems that need solving. There's a nice symmetry to Dylan's point of view compared to his sister Jesse (who is a larger part of this game than I anticipated): The first Control is all about Jesse leaving our world behind to accept her place in the Oldest House, while Dylan is venturing out into a world he hasn't seen since childhood. To him, the FBC is his captor—one that he's willing to form an alliance with if it means saving New York.

It's a great setup, but that first hour is bland to actually play. It's a lot of slicing through basic Hiss grunts, dead simple platforming, and getting acquainted with upgrade currencies, but not a lot of intrigue. It's a tutorial, so that's to be expected, but Resonant picks up a pulse once its larger, actually dangerous enemies show up. Encounters are set up almost like Doom 2016—grunts won't ever stop spawning until the big guys are gone, so it's about prioritizing the biggest threats and avoiding the little guys until you need an HP piñata to smash.

Dylan's weapon forms are excellent. I started with a combo of:

• A scythe that can cleave through everything in a 90-degree radius
• And drill that deals pointed, single-target damage in bursts

The Aberrant is Remedy tech indulgence reaching new heights—with every attack, the staff transforms and extends into the chosen weapon before snapping off at the hilt and flinging a dozen physics objects in every direction. There's a Sekiro-like stagger mechanic that plays a huge role in weapon choice, too. Some weapons, like the drill, put up weak damage but high stagger.

I wandered around an open Manhattan area checking off little side tasks. Getting around is cool—Dylan's double jump, air lift, and generous glide reminded me a bit of Infamous—but the activities present in the demo were mostly grindy combat arenas. Remedy emphasized that this won't be the case in the final game, as it removed most of the stuff that fills these open areas for the demo.

Still, it gave me an impression that Resonant's focus on larger areas and busier action might leave less room for aspects of the first game I loved, like combing over the notes of FBC scientists or learning new skills from a fiberglass merry-go-round horse recovered from an amusement park in 1998.

I finally got what I asked for with the Sinkhole, a story mission from later in the game that filled the last 40 minutes of my demo. We weren't given much context for why Dylan had to jump down a hole into a dimension of endless bedrooms not unlike the ending of Interstellar, but I think I was there to scan some weird stuff at the bottom. This whole episode was fantastic—I rode down a research probe approximately one billion miles underground, fighting off waves of Hiss while gaining the ability to shift gravity to any plane.

At the bottom was the second boss fight of the demo—a flying, spectral Hiss bastard with chest lasers that killed me twice. The difficulty jumped pretty dramatically here, though I think my weapon choice of axe and hammer were just a bad fit for fighting something airborne. Still, I eventually figured out a simple game plan: meet it in the air, blast it with my fire ability to boost stagger damage, then hit it with a heavy hammer slam.

Notably, Resonant doesn't have a deep combo or scoring system that I noticed. It's more about chaining abilities and cooldowns into stagger opportunities than memorizing dextrous button sequences. For that reason, I have a hunch that Resonant's combat will feel pedestrian to those who actually know ball with this genre, but I'm not one of them, so I appreciate the approachability.

The mission concluded with a sequence that gave me hope that Control's quieter moments will have a place in Resonant. With the beast slain and Dylan stranded at the bottom of the Sinkhole, he began a futile climb through a dizzying maze of living rooms, kitchens, and bedrooms. Dylan was presumed dead by the FBC, but Zoe hadn't given up yet. She began playing music, lighting a trail of TVs for Dylan to follow. Remedy's mastery of seamless geometry loading became the main character of the moment as the new rooms appeared and disappeared impossibility fast between camera pans.

As the distant music got further away, the gravity shift ability returned, allowing Dylan to turn walls into platforms and finally climb high enough to reach Zoe on the radio. "Let's never do that again," she said.

It was the longest stretch of the demo where I didn't kill anything, and it turned out to be the highlight. Control Resonant is out September 24.

It's a well-established tradition at this point and so it's maybe not the newsiest of news, but it's also one you may not have heard of previously and hey, a free game is a free game—and for the sixth year in a row, Dontnod's award-winning narrative adventure Tell Me Why is free for Pride Month.

Superficially, Tell Me Why sounds like what you'd expect from the creators of Life is Strange: "Reunited twins Tyler and Alyson Ronan use their supernatural bond to unravel the mysteries of their loving but troubled childhood. Set in beautiful small-town Alaska, Tell Me Why features true-to-life characters, mature themes and gripping choices."

And, like Life is Strange, Tell Me Why doesn't shy away from LGBTQ+ themes: One of the twins, Tyler, is trans, and his struggles with his identity and the prejudices he faces form an integral part of the story.

It's not great—we gave it a 69% score in our 2020 review, which for the record is still quite good on our scale—but "while there are missteps" in Tyler's character, reviewer Sam Greer wrote, "they're at least well meaning, and the game goes to great lengths to respect Tyler's identity like few games of this scope ever have—even if it de-fangs some of the realities you might expect him to be dealing with."

In what has become a much shittier Pride Month tradition, fuelled by (I'm just guessing here, but I'd put real money on it) ignorance, insecurity, and performative heterosexuality, it's also time for the annual Tell Me Why review bombing: It's an undersized thing, really, and happily dwarfed in comparison by the corresponding influx of positive reviews, but nonetheless a bit dismaying that some people still feel the need to do this.

As far as I can tell, Dontnod hasn't made a public announcement of the freebie just yet—maybe they don't reckon it's news at this point either—so we'll refer back to the studio's 2025 request: "As in past years, we ask that you give your money and support to trans creators, trans-inclusive charities in your community, and trans people in need."

Tell Me Why is free on Steam until June 30, and If you prefer, you can also pick it up on Xbox.

I'm a little bit behind on this one—it launched last week—but Phonopolis, the new game from Amanita Design, is out, and as a longtime fan of the studio I am very pleased to say that so far, it's pretty great.

I say "so far" because I haven't yet finished Phonopolis, and it's always possible that things will go seriously wrong in the second half. I doubt very much that's going to happen, but best to be clear about these things.

So far, though, Phonopolis shaping up to be another brilliant Amanta adventure, telling the tale of a hapless lad named Felix who, quite by accident, ends up on the wrong side of a totalitarian regime that's one step away from enslaving the minds of the people by stripping them of their humanity entirely through the power of the Absolute Tone.

It's silly and slapstick, as Amanita games generally are: The regime enforcers are more Keystone Kops than KGB, and there's no real fail state for any of the puzzles: During a prison break sequence, for instance (and yes, I went to prison), running afoul of a roaming spotlight triggers a klaxon and sends Felix scurrying for cover, but otherwise there's no real penalty—puzzle progress doesn't even reset.

The puzzles in Phonopolis (again, so far) are pretty straightforward, and often feel more like interactive toys than adventure game-style brain teasers. In another segment aboard a big float in a parade for The Leader, I escaped the cops (and yes, I was running from the cops) by dicking around with various switches and buttons. But while escape was the goal, the fun—much like Amanita's extremely funny comedy romp Chuchel—was mostly in just seeing what everything did.

Amanita says Phonopolis is "loosely inspired by the works of Karel Čapek and George Orwell," and the game is not exactly subtle in that regard. Class is strictly enforced in the world of Phonopolis, the population is kept docile (and relentlessly monitored) by telescreens, wrongthink is ruthlessly punished, and the whole thing is shot through with the presence of The Leader, a near-mythical Big Brother figure to whom everyone owes everything.

It's reflected in the game's visual style, too:

Music plays a central role in Phonopolis, as it does in pretty much all Amanita games. But it's of particular significance in this one, a game in which music is all but forgotten, and all thought is drowned out by blaring loudspeakers. The soundtrack, by longtime Amanita Design composer Tomáš Dvořák (aka Floex), is another banger (yes, so far): A gentle, dreamy lullaby that stands in sharp contrast to the ugly cacophony of the game world itself.

The one thing that puts me off Phonopolis just a little bit is that it's kind of on the nose right now. Machinarium is set in a pretty rough town and Botanicula is literally about finding a new home after the old one is annihilated, but neither of those games feel as grim or unhappy as Phonopolis. That's more a reflection of the times in which we live than anything inherent in the game itself, and could even be taken as a tribute to Amanita's success in engendering the sort of world it aims to depict. But it also leaves Phonopolis ever so slightly less joyous than many of its predecessors. (Yes, again, and for the last time, so far. Maybe a happy ending will turn me around on that.)

Phonopolis is available now on Steam, Epic, and GOG for $22.49/£18/€19.79, or slightly more for a collector's edition that includes a digital art book and soundtrack. (You do you, but when it comes to Amanita Design games, I always recommend going for the soundtrack.) If you'd like to sample the goods first, a Phonopolis demo is also available on Steam.

The studios behind Peak, Aggro Crab and Landfall Games, originally threw the game together at a breakneck pace during a 4-week game jam. In a recent interview at GDC, Aggro Crab studio head Nick Kamant told PC Gamer editor Ted Litchfield it didn't just help them switch gears to smaller projects—it also helped them realize co-op was "very much our thing now."

"We worked on this game with another dev studio, which is pretty uncommon, right," said Kaman. "This is way more in their wheelhouse. They made a game the previous year called Content Warning that also did super well, and was kind of one of the first friendslops out there."

When the two teams decided to collaborate on a follow-up, Aggro Crab did so with the assumption that it'd be a one-off learning experience. "It was just kind of a side hustle to see where it goes and learn from them," Kaman explained. "I consider [Peak] very much our thing now, whereas before, it wasn't our thing at all. We thought we were a character action studio."

Aggro Crab's previous game, a soulslike/3D platformer mashup called Another Crab's Treasure, was well-received but left the team burned out after three years of development. After Peak, on the other hand, Kaman felt energized: "There's so much that hasn't been explored yet, and there's so many interesting things you can do in the context of social games."

That feeling led to an expanded scope for the upcoming Crashout Crew, which releases later this week. Kaman says it's more Overcooked-inspired than friendslop, but there are some aspects carried over from that style: examples he gave include proximity voice chat, an unorthodox choice for a top-down game, and mouth animations that trigger when players use their mics. "It's kind of an experiment. Can we push it a little more toward friendslop, and does that enhance the experience?"

Kaman said he understands that not everyone will prefer the studio's new style. "If people miss Another Crab's Treasure and are like, 'Why are you guys a friendslop studio now?' I'm sorry, I get it, you guys want that side of us. But right now for us, this is just more exciting."

2025 was the year of friendslop: bite-sized, inexpensive games that center co-op and proximity voice chat as vehicles for silliness, scares, and slapstick. One of the genre's biggest smash hits, Peak, is a poster child for the slightly maligned, kind of derogatory label. But in an interview at GDC, Aggro Crab studio head Nick Kaman told PC Gamer associate editor Ted Litchfield he had a question for players and developers who are sour on the term. "Why not?"

"It's fun. It's technically derogatory. But why not lean into that? Because that's what people are saying," Kaman said. "Even if it is kind of mean, I can take it."

He said it's useful as a developer to have a term that serves as a lightning rod for discourse, even if some of the talk is negative. He brought up examples like metroidvania, souls, boomer shooter, and wholesome, all of which are the subject of debate online. (I'd also submit "bullet heaven," which has really got people in a tizzy lately.)

Whether the term is particularly respectful comes second to the fact that "we didn't have a label for this type of game before," Kaman said—and even if it is used in a pejorative way, Kaman said that he "[gets] where those people are coming from."

"The original tweet said, 'friendfarming,' right? It's less of an experience on its own and more of a scaffold for you to hang out with your friends. But what's more beautiful than that," he said. "Why not make a game where the point is to hang out with your friends? Isn't that kind of what a lot of games are about? These are games that just focus on that and make mechanical choices that encourage that behavior."

He went on to argue that Peak succeeds, in part, because of its social aspect and that was no mistake. "When you get to the peak, and you only got there because your friends helped. That's a pretty good feeling. A lot of people just tell me this: that they've rekindled relationships, friendships through playing this game. I think that's exciting."

Kaman also said the "vibe shift" that led to friendslop's dominance "probably started with COVID." Isolated people who may not have monster rigs at the ready wanted a way to socialize with their friends via gaming, so they all got hooked on Among Us and things took off from there with games like Lethal Company and Peak. But he's not sure the genre's heyday is over just yet.

"I think there's a lot of design space in friendslop that hasn't been explored. And I want to see other developers' takes on it, and have them see success with that." If the sizable sales numbers put up by Gamble With Your Friends earlier this month are any indication, it's certainly true that friendslop ain't dead just yet.

I played a demo of My Arms Are Longer Now at PAX Australia and it was a real good time. It's a stealth-comedy game, though not in the sense that you're surprised to find out it's funny. It's funny from the first second you twist your upsettingly wiggly arm across the floor of a train carriage then get caught trying to steal someone's bike right in front of them.

But it is a stealth-comedy game in the sense that it's a stealth game as well as a comedy one, with a detective who apparently learns of your bizarre wiggly crimes, and witnesses who will notice when you try to, say, pinch their bike right in front of them.

My Arms Are Longer Now is being published by Jackbox Games. Yes, the people who make the Jackbox games are called Jackbox Games, and this is their first step into publishing a game developed by other people. Those other people are Toot Games, a studio founded by Matthew Jackson and Millie Holten, who you may know from the Aunty Donna-adjacent actual-play series Trope RPG and the reality-adjacent web animation Long Head.

I love stealth games because I played Thief: The Dark Project at a young and impressionable age and it made me long for a life of crimes I could experience from behind a computer screen, but without having to commit identity fraud or trick people into downloading malware. Stealth games are a bit of a cursed genre though, because decades later most games about leaning around corners in the dark still aren't as good as the ones from the '90s.

Which is why I'm looking forward to a game that does something more drastic with the idea of thievery than "adding multiplayer" or "what if you were also really good at just killing people and then stealing from them." Which is exactly what My Arms Are Longer Now promises to do when it comes out this year. You can wishlist it now on Steam.

Adventure game royalty Broken Sword is the latest videogame to get a movie adaptation, with a film being co-developed by series creators Revolution Software and producer Story Kitchen, which has worked on numerous videogame adaptations for screen, including the (generally liked) Sonic the Hedgehog films and Amazon's upcoming Life is Strange TV show.

Reported by Variety, details about the film are currently thin on the ground, but we do know that the script is being penned by Evan Spiliotopolos, whose writing credits include the live action Beauty and the Beast adaptation, The Huntsman: Winter's War, and The Pope's Exorcist. I have not seen any of those films, so I can't tell you how good the scripts were. But the RottenTomatoes scores aren't exactly spectacular, with Beauty and the Beast ranking highest at 71%.

Alongside this one specific detail is a lot of vague assertions about remaining faithful to the series. "Very few franchises of this era have stayed relevant, premium and loyal to the intelligence of their audience. Broken Sword has done all three," said Story Kitchen founders Dmitri M. Johnson and Michael Lawrence in a statement. "Our work isn't to adapt a game into a film. It's to move a world that has been building for three decades into the next medium it deserves, working hand-in-hand with the people who built it." I don't know what it means for a franchise to stay premium, but the part about respecting the audience's intelligence is fair.

Broken Sword creator Charles Cecil, meanwhile, said that Story Kitchen approached him with a "deep passion for the IP" and that "the creative conversations have been about translating what Broken Sword is rather than what it can be made to look like."

It's an interesting one. On the one hand, Broken Sword seems like a natural fit for a film adaptation, given how it borrows from the adventure serial heritage in a similar manner to Indiana Jones. On the other hand, Hollywood has very recently proved it can absolutely biff it in adapting this type of story, with the dreadful Uncharted movie miraculously spinning gold into shit.

Either way, there's a decent chance of this actually happening, given how Hollywood has eyes for videogames at the moment. Both A Minecraft Movie and the two Mario flicks were massive box office hits despite their varying quality (A Minecraft Movie was alright, actually, certainly more interesting than either of the Mario films). I don't see Broken Sword breaking a billion dollars, personally, but it definitely has a better chance of being a decent film.

Ever since a study theorized that around 87 percent of videogames are not playable without finding a physical copy or nabbing a digital one via piracy or an archive, I stopped feigning shock when a game gets delisted. Games with licensed characters or music have an especially rough time staying on digital storefronts: Star Trek: Resurgence and 29 Disney games have been vaporized since the year began.

If you've been worried that Mixtape, the narrative adventure game which launched earlier this month and has become the target of every possible opinion, will suffer a similar fate due to all the licensed songs in its soundtrack—they thought of that. In an interview with Kotaku, the game's creative director Johnny Galvatron said developer Beethoven and Dinosaur paid extra "to keep Mixtape's licenses up in perpetuity."

Publisher Annapurna reiterated the point on X, saying in a post: "We heard some people say Mixtape would be delisted due to music licenses expiring. That was a lie. Have a great weekend, everyone."

Granted, games get delisted for all sorts of reasons—this doesn't protect the game from all of those reasons forever—but at the very least, it shouldn't be down to Stan Bush's legal team refusing to renew rights for The Touch. It's an impressive feat considering that Mixtape has over two dozen licensed songs, some of which are big hits like Iggy Pop's "Candy" and DEVO's "That's Good."

Regardless of what you think of the game (PC Gamer staff writer Harvey Randall scored it a respectable 74% in his review, calling it "lovely, beautiful, [and] heartwarming," but also noting it was "unable to convince me it needed my input as a player at all"), confidence in long-term preservation seems like a win for everyone.

Black Mirror's Bandersnatch was an ambitious and slickly produced experiment in interactive TV, presenting an episode of the series in the form of a choose-your-own adventure with multiple possible storylines and endings.

Aunty Donna's Bandersketch is… well, a lot sillier. The popular Australian comedy group's parody version invites you to help them write a new sketch under a looming deadline, without getting distracted by lunch, Gangnam Style, or sudden unexpected death.

It's not quite as elaborate as I was hoping, but it's still well worth playing through to see how many bizarre game overs you can get. One of the choices you can make just sends you off on a 40-minute unskippable walk around Melbourne and you've got respect the sheer stupidity of that.

If you're not familiar with Aunty Donna, they do great work—not only producing their own sketch comedy, but also running Grouse House, a platform for other comedians in the Australian alternative comedy scene. I'm particularly fond of their excruciatingly impossible guessing game MUGG, which mines laughs out of what is essentially a series of mental breakdowns.

It's clear as well that games are a big inspiration for them—a previous video saw them playing through a live-action videogame that somehow turned into an excuse to drink an inadvisable amount of milkshakes.

Bandersketch seems to have been made to help promote their new Grouse House TV subscription service—very much following in the footsteps of Dropout in attempting to fund comedy videos away from YouTube. If you enjoy it, maybe check out what they've got on offer. If not… well, frankly, I hope YouTube sends an evil entity to steal your soul and add it to their collection of the damned.

All Will Rise is the only deck-builder I know of that can run on vibes alone.

It has complex rules—so many that it can feel overwhelming—but during its three-hour demo I simply played whichever card felt right. I pointed out an Oil Spill then Spoke For The River, asserted my Right To Sue, argued that the Media Is Biased (naturally), cleared my Crystalline Mind to make my cards more powerful, and ended up dancing with a god on hot coals as a frenzied crowd swayed as one.

It's interactive fiction at heart. Half the game is card "battles" spiked with reactive dialogue, the other is choice-based conversations set to lavish illustrations. It's written by Meghna Jayanth, of 80 Days, Sable and Thirsty Suitors, whose direct, lyrical style—"Oil-slicked birds and pearl-spot fish swing amongst the horrified crows, mangrove trees wrench their roots up to escape the flames"—splatters every screen.

It flickers with rage. Your ultimate goal is to build a strong enough deck to put an exec on trial for murdering a river, but alongside ecocide it confronts corporate greed, inequality, poverty, and corruption, sometimes all at once. It reflects the views and the real-world anger of its creators at "powerful people behaving with absolute ugliness and impunity", says Jayanth, who is narrative director on the project.

"The rage is the fuel in a way," says design director Hugo Bille, of Fe, Ultros, and Stick it to the Man. "And it's inescapable, and we expect a lot of our audience to feel it already. The game is not there to boost that, but more to address it, or to play with it."

It's also deliberately silly. It pokes fun at itself, at the left, at the climate activists and lawyers it venerates.

Between battles and missions that reward you with new cards, your group of three Indian volunteers banter and self-deprecate the absurdity of their "non-hierarchical workplace based on mutual co-operation and affinity". An NPC you meet tells you that "normal people don't find suing others very interesting", and one of the characters must periodically visit dad or face a guilt trip.

It's about finding joy and humour in the horror and corruption, Jayanth says. "Making something that is leftist, that is progressive in this way, you can just get put into the woke, liberal bucket. We really want to make sure that no, we're doing something a bit more interesting here."

The full game is expected later this year, but the Steam demo starts you in court, convincing a judge that a river should be treated like a person. Soon that river is dying and on fire, and you plot your murder case.

Each day you assign your volunteers to tasks throughout the Keralan city of Muziris, named after a real-world ancient port—you might cultivate a source in the local government, help locals clear up after an oil spill, or put on a play with local children. These tasks net you cards that Kuyili, a lawyer and the main character, can deploy during card battles.

And those battles are unlike anything else I've played before.

You share the board with your opponent—although that's a misnomer. Encounters can be combative, such as when you face the exec you intend to put on trial, but you're also playing with potential allies and friends. Together, you place cards to create a backwater of arguments, each claim flowing into the next.

"We break a couple of taboos in card games," says Bille. "You can only play cards next to other cards that make sense narratively, and those links are not printed on the cards in any way. It's in large part an intuitive thing, which is in a way anathema to the sort of extreme transparency that the card genre expects. But since we're also doing a narrative game, I think it meshes a lot better."

"The thing we really wanted to preserve," Jayanth says, "was that sense of back and forth conversation, and that you're building a shared narrative together."

My battle with Kottavai, a ritually-painted folk performer possessed by the river god, shows how loudly it can sing. Kottavai is mystical and unpredictable, dancing with abandon and unfocused eyes; we agree then argue, egging each other on before denying each other's key points. She laughs then ridicules me, declaring that strategic violence is the right path. I limp away having failed to gain her backing.

As well as forming narratives that might help your overarching goal, each card adds or subtracts from the three emotional energies of both you and your opponent: guts, hearts and minds. Drain one and you enter a "crisis", fill one and you go "on fire", and both states grant access to new cards. They can also change the story. For example, Jayanth says that if you can light the conspiracy-filled fisherman Shabeer's guts on fire he'll run for mayor, presumably with narrative implications.

And the strength of your cards, or claims, can be upgraded as supporting evidence arises, taking them from mere speculation to proven fact.

It's already a lot to hold in your head before you consider that the success of your arguments, and even who will talk to you, depends on a trust mechanic. You can earn trust by completing missions and delivering specific arguments in battles—you can also boost trust with powerful and unique rhetoric cards that have a range of effects.

And if you need to, denial cards wipe an opponent's card off the board, reversing its effects.

When I tell Bille I felt a little overwhelmed playing it, he doesn't seem concerned. The final game will ease players in gentler, he says, but the complexity is necessary because of the constant overlapping of mechanics and narrative.

"It's kind of the bare minimum that we need to convey the story. It is complex and it definitely threatens to be daunting, especially to the more narrative-minded audience. So we're aiming for something kind of like Baldur's Gate 3, where there are a lot of complex systems, but you don't necessarily need to interact deeply with all of them," he says.

"If you play it on vibes, it's still kind of narratively interesting," Jayanth says. "You will accidentally make some arguments and move forward. But there's a lot of richness … the more strategic you are at the game, the more complex the game becomes and the more of the game you see. I think it works really well."

The systems start to click as I near the end of my demo and, sure enough, when it's over I immediately feel compelled to start another so that I can revisit Kottavai and win her over using tactics I've learned. The full game will last around eight hours, Bille says, but I can imagine its branching narrative and mechanical complexity will reward multiple runs.

I'm intrigued to learn where the story goes. Jayanth hints that you'll be able to charm, persuade, or suborn Rishabh, the exec on trial, or remain his nemesis throughout. From talking to the developers I can't foresee many clean, unambiguous endings: while the game's roots are firmly in climate activism—most of its development team have been activists in one form or another—it is not trying to prescribe a specific message, Bille says.

Instead its goal, he says, is to "instil a sense of, other futures are possible and there are pathways to them", and perhaps even convince players that they can make a difference in the real world.

"Climate is often thought of as a crisis of imagination: it's easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism," he says. "Games are so well positioned to address that and to help open up people's imaginations about other potential futures and worlds."

It feels like a lofty goal, but Jayanth agrees: "It can open people up to the idea that the world doesn't have to be as it is," she says. "And actually that's one of the early lines of the game: 'Reality is more malleable than you think.' Your actions can make an impact."

She says that whenever she has dark days in the industry, she thinks about a player who told her that they were usually too shy to speak to strangers while on holiday, but that 80 Days inspired them to approach somebody in Istanbul and have a conversation.

"And that's a really small real-world change to take from the game. And it's not necessarily something that we prescribed for you, but it felt really beautiful," she says.

"It's the same here, we want to model a type of agency, or a way of looking at or being in the world more than anything else. The world is interesting and it's worth getting amongst it and trying to be in it."

So, Mixtape. In case you've been wisely keeping out of the loop, Mixtape released last week to a series of rave reviews online. I went ahead and played it, giving it a 74 in our Mixtape review (which I would like to take a moment to remind people is a good score) but it didn't connect with me in the same way as other reviewers.

Just rattling down the list, IGN gave it a 10 alongside VGC's five-star review. GameSpot gave it a nine, Nintendo Life gave it a nine—it's been critically well-received, is what I'm saying. Others, like our friends at GamesRadar+, gave it four stars. A little more in-line with the mixed bag I'd denoted it as.

Rather than a game simply being allowed to release and be somewhat divisive, however, Mixtape has found itself in the unenviable position of being wrapped up in another one of those tedious culture war things.

Rewind, repeat

Now, some critiques levelled are somewhat rooted in reasonable stances. Annapurna Interactive (which published the game, rather than developed it) was founded by Megan Ellison, the daughter of billionaire and Oracle CEO Larry Ellison—who, among other things (he is a billionaire) has been vocally and financially supportive of the Israeli Defense Forces.

If you don't want to put money towards Annapurna on those grounds then, hey—fair enough. I wouldn't resent anybody for doing that any more than I would, say, boycotting Microsoft over its business relationship with the Israeli government. Everyone has a right to decide where their money does and doesn't go.

What doesn't make sense to me are the accusations that this is evidence that Mixtape has somehow been astroturfed for positive reviews (Annapurna's listed as a publisher on the store page, this is all publicly available information), or, more bafflingly, that developer Beethoven & Dinosaur is somehow trying to be a "fake indie."

Speaking bluntly, I don't think that a game developer making zero effort to hide the fact they've got a publisher, in a game with a huge amount of expensive licensed music, can be reasonably accused of any sort of duplicity. Sometimes coming-of-age stories come from expensive places.

And, as ever, the "it's too woke!" Angles are also tedious. Particularly because Mixtape isn't even that socially progressive, and I'm saying that as someone with more pronouns than productive follicles on my head. Stacy Rockford is clearly bi-curious (there's even a compelling argument that she's just gay, given the disaster of her first and only kiss with a boy) though her sexuality is never "explicitly" confirmed.

The closest Mixtape comes to making a point on social issues is in Morino's relationship with her dad—he's a strict cop and, the game implies, a second-generation immigrant who grew up in 1950s America. This is something the story nudges at, but Morino's resolution with her dad happens almost entirely off-screen aside from her initial blow-up moment, and it's less of a focal point than Rockford's parting with Slater.

No, I don't think Mixtape's been astroturfed, or that the praise for it is insincere. What I think is occurring has more to do with the kind of game that Mixtape is. It's what makes it interesting, but it's also what means I might give it a 74 while IGN calls it a "Masterpiece".

Mixtape's a game about nostalgia. That's it. That's as complicated as it gets.

Good old days

I'm not saying it's "nostalgia bait" or "nostalgiaslop" or whatever nuance-stripping label someone might hypothetically slap on it. I mean to say that it is a story about nostalgia, and stories about nostalgia are, to state the obvious, allowed to exist.

Mixtape is a videogame that'll either speak directly to your heart, or it'll clash with your lived experiences. There's an argument to be made that it's deliberately saccharine—a representation of a fantastical '90s suburban America so idealistic that it borders on, and could even be read as, a heartfelt parody.

I, for one, am from the UK, but I also had a much less wild and wonderful teenage experience. My late teens were characterised by cosy house parties with cider our parents bought us just so they knew where we'd be chundering (told you I was from the UK). As a result, Mixtape only charmed me insofar as I think it's a beautiful, lovely little character drama. One that pulled some laughs and "awws" out of me.

Other reviewers might think differently, and that's kind of the point. I'm not sitting here secretly grinding my teeth because I don't think it's a masterpiece and IGN's Simon Cardy does. Just as I'm not letting my blood pressure rise at scathing criticism of the thing—some of it's even very fun to read.

In other words, some disparity between what you think of a game and what a reviewer might say about it, or a disagreement between outlets, is not the sign of some broader conspiracy.

I think the spread of reviews for Mixtape are exactly a consequence of the kind of game it is, of the nostalgia it's trying to capture—that some people think it's an all-time great, and that some (like me) think it's just okay? That's about as shocking as finding a fork in a kitchen.

"Mixtape is a good movie." That's the only thought I had rattling around in my head as I—and this is part of the problem—played Mixtape.

This isn't an issue for me because I'm some understimulated capital-g gamer that needs a constant feed of dopamine to feel something, but because I think our medium can, broadly speaking, do more interesting things with itself.

Published by Annapurna Interactive and developed by Beethoven & Dinosaur, Mixtape is a '90s nostalgia trip that sees you playing music enthusiast and imminent high school graduate Stacy Rockford, who is friends with the emotionally centered chill dude Van Slater and Cassandra Morino, who herself languishes under the thumb of a deeply strict cop dad.

It's a coming-of-age teen drama set to a superb soundtrack that's delivered diegetically via Stacy, who'll look to the camera and dispense charming Anderson-esque dialogues looping us into the tracks themselves. Stacy curated this mixtape for a perfect last day—she's going to New York to pursue her dreams, leaving Slater and Cass in the lurch because they had a roadtrip planned. Bummer.

I'm only harsh on Mixtape, because what it does well is deeply distracted by its need to make me push buttons sometimes. Removed from its context as a videogame, Mixtape is an absolutely gorgeous, darling passion project. It's sharply-written, and by the end of its swift three-hour runtime, I found myself deeply charmed by Stacy and her trio of misfits.

Tuning in

Mixtape dodges the "Life is Strange" issue of trying to make them all sound appropriately youth-like with effusive slang. Like most teenagers, Stacy and her crew are far smarter than the adults around them give them credit for—they have deep conversations about the existential horrors of entering the big, bad world. They're good kids, about as messy and as reckless as you're meant to be.

Meet the cast of Mixtape

This vision of a '90s nostalgia bath really takes off in segments where the fabric of reality frays, and we see the world through a teenager's imagination. A betrayal from a friend sends you into a drifting fugue state where you float lazily through a monochrome world until you're curled up in your bed; a romp around an abandoned theme park comes to life as you talk nonsense on the back of a stegosaurus witnessing the end of the dinosaurs; a sports stadium erupts with phantom crowds as you find out the girl you've got a crush on is really good at softball.

The onset of nostalgia is a great touch, too. Young Rockford is constantly drifting off into charming vignette flashbacks, pre-empting the post high school malaise that's normally meant to hit in your mid 20s. You can tell that Mixtape was made with an enduring and burning love of the '90s, of the messiness of adolescence, of the impermanence of youth.

But I need to stick to my guns here and say that I don't think it's a particularly notable videogame—not because there wasn't enough action to keep my little thumbs sore and my number-go-up brain motivated, but because Mixtape only occasionally uses the medium itself to its advantage.

Unharmonized

Disconnected from any nostalgia for the 90s, Mixtape is a gorgeous coming-of-age story that's interrupted by a series of minigames and walkabout sections.

There are a few stand-outs that I think work perfectly to sell a feeling—like a disgusting tongue-slathering session that properly reflects the biological awkwardness of teenage kissing—but most of the time you're either skating with rudimentary controls that drag on just a little too long, or walking around and interacting with stuff.

My problem isn't that these mechanical interludes aren't exciting enough, rather, I think Mixtape is only passingly interested in the power that interactivity can bring to stories. I didn't need this game to give me a high score and a skill tree, or even to offer me multiple choices—I needed its interactivity to draw me in as much as the writing, direction, and soundtrack did.

In a three-hour runtime, I can think of exactly two moments in which I felt like the inclusion of my hands had actually pulled me deeper into the story. One of them was that kissing scene, the other happens right at the end as Rockford starts a new chapter of her life.

That's not a very good batting average, and (speaking of), sometimes these mandatory minigames yanked me right out of the narrative. I kept messing up the softball minigame, which was meant to drive home how good Cass is at a sport she doesn't even really care about—a key establishing beat of her character, completely spoiled by my fumbling.

And while it's enjoyable to, say, see just how many parade floats you can bump into during Rockford's heartbreak scene, or stumble through entire racks of movies in a drunken fugue state as Slater, the impulse to do so isn't really an indication that I'm being absorbed by the narrative as much as it is a chance for me to muck around with a physics engine.

Sometimes, Mixtape gets it right, but repeats the same trick enough times that it horseshoes back around to getting it wrong: There are a few teen spirit flying sessions that are absolutely gorgeous and capture the feeling of liberation at first glance, but by the second time you're put in one, you realise it's on rails which… isn't how freedom works.

See you tomorrow

I point this out not as a blithe little gotcha, but because it's indicative of Mixtape's entire issue: Mixtape fights with its existence as a videogame more than it benefits from it. I kept thinking to myself 'Man, I would probably be more invested in this if I could just sit back and take it all in.'

Instead, Mixtape interrupts itself to invite you to see how much destruction you can wreak while moving a sofa, or to skim a rock, or to meticulously sweep leaves out of a painted video-gamey circle on the ground.

Rockford is obsessed with perfectly matching music to the moment, and for Mixtape to be an all-timer, it needed to do the same with its mechanical interludes—to be as clever as its script or visual direction is at a design level. A few standout moments isn't gonna cut it, you need to play hit after hit.

I am by no means rallying against the concept of a "walking simulator", or even a game where interactivity is minimal—What Remains of Edith Finch is a good counter-example. The cannery uses the monotony of repeatedly beheading fish, juxtaposes it with an increasingly-detailed adventure that bleeds into the foreground. You're forced to do both, right up until the fantasy world completely consumes the real.

It justifies the inclusion of those game mechanics by using them to drive home a story. But there's no cannery moment in Mixtape, no masterstroke that suddenly makes the fact I'm pushing buttons feel contributive.

If you want a dose of liquid '90s nostalgia with excellent character writing, sharp direction, a killer soundtrack, and a charming sense of wonder? Mixtape is three hours of exactly that. But it's not going to change the way you think about videogames, and it hasn't left me feeling like my input served any real purpose or helped reel me into the (otherwise very lovely) story it was telling.

In another b-side universe, there's a version of Mixtape where every moment of interactivity is built to pull you into a specific feeling, not just a scant handful. Maybe tomorrow someone'll nail it, just not today.

Mina the Hollower was announced in 2022 and originally slated to launch the following year. It's a top-down adventure in the style of older Zelda games, and as far as I can tell there's no grand twist: it's a very orthodox take on the genre, just as Shovel Knight was for the NES-era platformer. The same developer, Yacht Club Games, is responsible for both.

The star attraction is the pixel art, which wends very closely to 8-bit orthodoxy, but does so with modern smoothness and fluency. When it hit Kickstarter in 2022, Bloodborne was mentioned as an inspiration, and it's definitely true that Mina the Hollower looks more Castlevania than it does Link's Awakening. Whatever the case, I'm excited to play it.

And it won't be long before I do: Mina the Hollower, after a storied history of last-minute delays, is finally hitting Steam on May 29.

Yacht Club Games confirmed as much on X with a brief vertical video showing Mina—the mousy protagonist—in a series of volatile situations: elevated by a column of rushing water, nearly stomped by a giant brain, and shooting electrical currents at various baddies.

"Prepare yourself for one of the greatest top-down adventures ever to be delivered directly to your soul for less than 20 bucks," the post reads, confirming the price.

Development of Mina the Hollower hasn't been smooth sailing: it's been in development since 2020, but the Covid-19 pandemic proved problematic, as did the ensuing post-Covid industry crash. It really needs to be a hit. "It’s make-or-break for sure," Velasco said. "If we sold 500,000 copies, then we would be golden," studio founder Cris Velsaco said late last year. "If we sold even 200,000, that would be really, really great. If we sold, like, 100,000, that’s not so good."

It's a pretty safe time to release an indie: the second half of May is very quiet save for 007 First Light.

If you're a vampire, you know the two most beautiful words in the English language: free blood. And if you caught the recent Assassin's Creed: Black Flag Resynced reveal and were left uneasy by the lack of cherry syrup, you'll be extra pleased to know that blood is coming, and it will be free.

Producer at Ubisoft Singapore Justin Ng took to X to get in front of fan concerns that the game's violence had been toned down. In a post Thursday, he said "A few things to quickly address I guess (without getting into trouble hopefully). There WILL be blood in the final game, and it will not be a paid DLC. We hear the feedback on the VFX and audio cues on fights. It's being toned down."

If you're wondering where this is coming from, players have voiced concerns on social media this past week, worrying that the new game's combat might have a squeaky-clean sheen. Reddit user decimus_87 said of the reveal, "I hope they get rid of or at least change the cartoony sparks during fighting." In a reply on the same thread, Minute_Tomorrow_7935 commented "I hope they add blood. Shadows has quite satisfying blood animations so it seems odd if they've fully removed that from this game."

While it's impossible to appraise the full game from some brief footage, it seems natural that people are scrutinizing the fights. An overhaul to combat is one of the remake's big selling points, so without a multiplayer revival to round things out (yes, I'm bitter about it, can't you tell?), it's hard to say how appealing Resynced will be without some top shelf sword-swinging.

Ng assured fans further down in the aforementioned X thread that non-combat systems should feel familiar, too. When asked if social stealth would be back, Ng simply said "It's still there. #Faithful." It should be welcome news to any fans of AC's swashbucklingest entry.

And while it might sound ridiculous to even suggest that blood might come in the form of a paid DLC, there is certainly precedent.

In The Simpsons: Treehouse of Horror X segment 'Life's a Glitch, Then you Die', Homer fails to fix the Y2K problem in the computers of Springfield's Nuclear Power Plant, triggering the apocalypse. The segment features some of my favourite Simpsons gags, like Krusty's pacemaker getting stuck on hummingbird mode, and Homer's plaintive cry of "Oh no, Rosie O'Donnell!" inside the rocket ship full of B-listers as it cruises toward immolation in the sun.

Incredibly, Life's a Glitch is not the only work of fiction in which Homer's voice actor Dan Castellenetta grapples with the Y2K problem. There is another, and some might say more culturally significant, artwork featuring both the world's most famous voice actor and narrowly averted digital Armageddon. Ladies and gentlemen, let me introduce Y2K: The Game, the greatest and, indeed, only game specifically about the Millennium Bug ever made.

Why am I digging up this PC gaming fossil? Well, I've been thinking a lot about the Millennium bug lately. This is partly because I am 38 years old, and the idea of being 13 years old again grows more appealing with every passing day. But it's also because the Y2K problem represents a time when computer experts worked to save the world, rather than going out of their way to make it worse as today's tech magnates seem hellbent on doing.

Anyway, I was curious whether the tech anxieties of the late nineties had been addressed directly in video game form. Turns out the answer is "not really", but Y2K: The Game wins by default.

Y2K: The Game sees you play as Buster, a sentient white pudding squeezed into a university lecturer's jacket who, prior to the game's commencement, just so happens to have won the lottery. With his winnings, he buys a mansion which just so happens to have been owned by a recently deceased robotics genius, who just so happens to have filled his mansion with all manner of computer gizmos and talking automata. Oh, and Buster just so happens to move into his new digs on New Year's Eve, 1999.

Any story premise that involves this many layers of happenstance probably needs a rework, by which I mean setting fire to the script and starting again. But developer Runecraft sallies boldly forth with this bizarre jumble of nonsense. As Buster collapses onto his bed in a stupor induced by a $100 bottle of wine, the clock strikes midnight. Immediately, Buster's freshly acquired smart house loses 500 IQ points and turns evil. The game represents this through the computer's voice switching from a cool, detached HAL 9000 intonation to an aggressive caricature of a Noo Yoik dialect.

Your sole objective in Y2K is to patch out the Millennium Bug from the supercomputer that runs the house. The challenge in achieving this derives from the fact that Buster's house makes no sense whatsoever. Imagine if the island from Myst was lifted out of the ocean by a gigantic tsunami, then driven into the Spencer Mansion from Resident Evil at a speed so fast the two instantly fused together.

If you think I'm exaggerating, here's a brief rundown of spaces you can explore in Y2K: The Game.

• A room filled with ancient relics
• An elevator with the score for three blind mice etched into the wall, and elevator music that is not three-blind mice
• A dining room with three AI-powered stuffed animal heads who speak in British accents (including a rhinoceros referred to as 'The Colonel')
• A basement housing a recycling robot that gets so angry at Buster for not bringing trash for it to recycle that it tries to kill him (this robot also has a New York accent)
• A dungeon prowled by a murderous robotic executioner, which is somehow less aggressive than the recycling robot (accent not specified)

I will say that the pre-rendered backgrounds and robot animations are quite detailed for 1999, even if it is all wholly incoherent. Unfortunately, the thing you look at the most—Buster—is also the least visually appealing part in the game, a slouching, shuffling blob so offputtingly pasty he looks like he stepped out of a Softmints advert.

In fact, calling it "shuffling" is probably generous. Even if everything else about Y2K: The Game was brilliant, it would still be interminable simply because Buster is so. Goddamn. Slow. He's such a tortoise that, if a solution to a puzzle suddenly clicks into place for you, you should write it down, because there is a non-zero chance you will have forgotten it by the time Buster arrives at his destination.

There are two things I like about Y2K: The Game, the first is, obviously, the voice acting. Castellaneta puts the effort in, and he isn't the only heavy-hitting voice actor in Y2K either. Candace is played by Grey DeLisle—only a year into her career at this point—with other actors including Danny Mann and John Mariano. Unfortunately, they are all let down by a weak script riddled with non-liners such as "I'm glad I'm smart enough to use the extension cord" and "Like Candace says, you'll never know when you'll need some batteries!"

Comfortably the best thing in the game, though, is the music. Every room has its own specific theme, each of which is so much more artistically accomplished than anything contained in the room itself. The antiques room, for example, is accompanied by a sitar-led melody that's quintessentially adventure game. One corridor theme wouldn't be out of place on a Pure Moods CD, while Corridor 3 starts like Laura Palmer's theme and slides into some Tangerine Dream. And then there's the music for the dining room, which could happily accompany a boss fight in a Souls game. I repeat, this is for a dining room.

Even the elevator music sucks in exactly the way elevator music is supposed to suck. I was going to suggest that composers Craig Beattie and Matt Sugden deserve more credit for their work here. But to be honest, what they really deserve is for Y2K: The Game to be much better than it actually is.

At the same time, it's hard to get mad at Y2K. It completely wastes its premise, but it's so absurd and goofy that it stumbles inadvertently into being oddly charming. It's also short enough that even Buster's ponderous gait doesn't extend the running time that much.

It also makes me wonder what the developers of today would do with the Y2K premise if it was in any way marketable. I imagine we'd end up with some kind of Sam Barlow-esque detective game where you're chasing the bug through a labyrinth of computer files, stumbling upon narratively enlightening notes and documents as you go. It's either that or a hero shooter. This is the games industry, after all.